FRENCH NEW WAVE
Introduction
The 400 Blows, François Truffaut 1959
Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais 1959
Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard 1960
Cleo de 5 à 7, Agnes Varda 1961
Les Quatre cents coups
(The 400 Blows, François Truffaut 1959)
In Les Quatre cents coups Truffaut traces the portrait of Antoine Doinel, a 13-year-old Parisian. Truffaut drew heavily on aspects of his own personality as well as incidents of his life. Indeed, the resemblance between Antoine and Truffaut is so marked that the fictional character - who would figure in three more films by Truffaut - has often been described as Truffaut's 'alter ego'.
Perhaps to spare his parents pain and embarrassment at the way they were portrayed, Truffaut always insisted that the film was not autobiographical. But there is no mistaking the fact that detail after detail of his adolescence - from the quartier where he lived to his troubled relationship with his mother, from his love of Balzac to his friendship with René - is reflected in the film. Like Antoine, Truffaut never knew his father. Even Antoine's stay in the home for juvenile delinquents is based on a real incident. While Antoine lands in trouble for stealing a typewriter, Truffaut was sent to a similar institution for having misappropriated funds in connection with a ciné-club he tried to establish when he was barely 16.
Unlike Antoine, Truffaut did not escape from the institution where he was confined. Rather, the distinguished French film critic and scholar André Bazin - whom he had first met in connection with his abortive film club - assured his release by assuming parental responsibility for him. In a sad twist of fate, Bazin - to whom Truffaut dedicated his first feature - died just at the time when his young protégé began filming Les Quatre cents coups.
Truffaut's friendship with Bazin points to still another deeply autobiographical dimension of the film - one that takes us to the heart of the New Wave: Antoine, who plays truant to go to the local cinema, shares the fascination with cinema that marked Truffaut's childhood and adolescence. Looking back at the role that cinema played in his adolescence, Truffaut observed that it was much more than a passion or even a simple refuge. 'I hardly have the impression that I'm exaggerating', he remarked, 'when I say that cinema saved my life. I used to describe it as a "drug" before that word became so fashionable'.
Throughout the film, in fact, cinematic echoes - pointing to some of the director's favourite films and directors - bear witness to the love of film that may well have 'saved' Truffaut's life. For example, a scene where pupils slip away one by one in the course of an excursion recalls a similar scene in Jean Vigo's classic film about schoolboys, Zéro de conduite; the bizarre furnishings of a spare room in René's apartment suggest a similar room in Melville and Cocteau's Les enfants terribles (1950); a scene where Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Claude Brialy make a cameo appearance looking for a lost dog plays off the opening of Jean Renoir's 1932 classic, Boudu Saved From Drowning.
The film constantly conveys emotions and heightens dramatic intensity through visual motifs, mise-en-scne and camerawork. For example, the contrast between freedom and imprisonment that pervades the film is expressed both through contrasting visual spaces - the cramped apartment and the confined rooms of the school versus the freedom of the city and the outdoors - and through camerawork. 'At home or school', writes Anne Gillain, 'the narration is dominated by static shots and close-ups, while outside, long and mobile shots prevail. These alternations give the film its powerful rhythm of tension and release'.
In outdoor sequences Truffaut's mobile and often intrusive camera seems to swoop and fly; indoors, as if it shared the unease and claustrophobia felt by Antoine, it barely moves. Thus, in a celebrated sequence in which a psychologist at the home for juvenile delinquents interviews Antoine, the camera does not leave the boy's face. This means that the scene - which traditionally would have been filmed in shot/reverse-shot - becomes a compelling, almost cinema verité, interview broken only by dissolves. In contrast with the static nature of this sequence, when Antoine escapes from the institution, the camera follows him with a long and extremely mobile tracking shot, only to end with a fixed frame when Antoine's flight is finally halted by the sea.
Location shooting, digressions, improvisational techniques worked together to create a sense of lived reality rarely seen in French films since the 1930s. 'I would not be capable', observed Truffaut, 'of preparing a film with an exact shooting script, prepared in advance, shot by shot ... My imagination interacts with reality ... I believe in improvisation'. Thus, instead of writing dialogue for the young schoolboys who figure in Les Quatre cents coups, he encouraged them to use their own words. So too did he leave Antoine free to invent own responses in the critical interview scene with the psychologist.
The sense of spontaneity, of lived reality, created by these improvisational techniques is enhanced further by Truffaut's focus on the most ordinary details of life. Rejecting the plot complications and melodramatic confrontations that he had hated in the Tradition of Quality, Truffaut lingers on seemingly insignificant or extraneous details and actions that, ultimately, contribute not to the film's narrative but, rather, to its dense emotional texture. A good example of this comes towards the beginning of Les Quatre cents coups: in a long sequence that evokes the climate of fear and apprehension that reigns in the schoolroom, we witness the growing sense of frustration and desperation of a young pupil as he attempts to write a composition free of forbidden ink smudges. Creating an almost documentary feel - 'I wanted a film', said Truffaut, 'which would resemble a documentary without being one" - the sequence adds to the texture of the film rather than to any narrative flow.
Rejecting the artificial constraints of most narratives, Truffaut also avoids, of course, conventional closure. Concluding his film in the most open-ended and ambiguous manner, he leaves it to the audience to wonder about the shape of Antoine's future.
Introduction
The 400 Blows, François Truffaut 1959
Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais 1959
Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard 1960
Cleo de 5 à 7, Agnes Varda 1961
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