400 Blows

400 Blows Literature Review

Overall I found the film, 400 Blows by François Truffaut, to be so-so. It had some very interesting qualities, such as the general overview of Antoine’s life, but it also had some aspects which were not my favorite, such as the last scene and how every little thing was blown out of proportion. However, I do think the film is fairly good at getting the point across. You can tell that the director specifically choose to do each scene a certain way so as to express the ideas behind them. So on the whole the film did what it was made to do but wasn’t necessarily my forte.

In the film we follow a few months in the life of a small boy called Antoine Doinel. He starts off seemingly innocent. Then things go bad for him when he is caught with a picture in class. Then they go worse over and over and over again; until his parents wind up sending him to a Delinquent Center. It ends with him standing on beach after having run away from the Center. Nearly the entire film is from Antoine’s point of view and the viewer really gets a feel of what his life was like as a child living in Paris during the 1940s. The movie seems to revolve the idea that your environment shapes who you become and how you act as much as your personality does. This is made more apparent when Antoine is in a psychology session at the Juvenile Delinquent Observation Center and is talking about his life prior to what the viewer sees during the film.

For this work the lighting played a huge role in giving more depth to the film. It was quite obvious which places Antoine enjoyed being and which places he loathed based on how much light was in each scene. This lighting really added to the actors’ portrayal of the characters. All of the actors really did a good job performing their parts. I thought that Jean-Pierre Léaud, who played Antoine Doinel, looked very much like a boy who was rebellious and a troublemaker. While Clair Maurier, who played Gilberte Doinel (the mother), gave off the feeling of being selfish and gaudy. René, played by Patrick Auffay, also was well portrayed as childish and fun-loving. Each of these actors or actresses played their parts very well and really seemed to capture the essence of the character they were posing as.

The cinematic element to this film was interesting. It was clearly done very purposefully; however, it didn’t seem to be anything extraordinary. The music was pretty much the same or very similar throughout the entire film. In fact it sounded exactly the same during the opening scene as it did for the last scene. The camera movement was mostly either looking down on something, straight at something, or rolling. Thought the camera was used in a creative way the basics of the filming weren’t anything too grand. The thing that varied most seemed to be the duration of shots. Some shots were quite long, actually most of them were long, but some were fairly short or some middle between the two. This didn’t automatically line up with the importance of the scene. There were quite a few unimportant scenes that lasted for a long time while there were others which were fairly important didn’t last long at all. It apparent that the director had an image in his mind of how things would work and what others thought wasn’t crucial to how things were going to work out.

Personally, I found the 400 Blows to be very different from Black Boy. Though they were both memoirs about a suppressed childhood in which the child was rebellious and not really controlled by the adults in his life, the way the two works were delivered was quite dissimilar. Black Boy was written with a kind of objectiveness to it. The author was looking back on his childhood and reflecting upon his actions. Throughout the work it always felt as though the older Richard was re-experiencing the moments, not experiencing them for the first time. On the other hand, 400 Blows left the impression that you were experiencing the events with Antoine as they were happening to him. Part of this difference may be due to the media chosen to describe the events but I also think that part of it is how the author wanted his audience to view his childhood.

If you are a person who enjoys films which are psychological and have deeper meanings that never see the light, you might enjoy 400 Blows. There are numerous scenes throughout the film that can be interpreted many different ways depending on the viewer. However, if you prefer works which are logical or don’t really make you think, you would probably not like this film. Though one could watch it with merely the entertainment factor in mind there isn’t really enough stuff on the surface to hold onto one’s interest for very long. 400 Blows truly is a film that may be loved or hated depending on the viewer’s very mood at the time.




Works Cited
400 Blows. Dir. François Truffaut. Perf. Jean-Pierre Léaud, Clair Maurier, Albert Rémy, Guy Decomble, Georges Flamant, and Patrick Auffay. Fox Lorber, 1999.