The 400 Blows (1959)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Ionita
Keyword(s):  
Family Life ◽  
School Discipline ◽  
New Wave ◽  
French Society ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Black And White ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Poetic Realism

The 400 Blows (Les 400 Coups), a black-and-white French feature film directed by François Truffaut, is one of the most influential works of the French New Wave. Strongly autobiographical, it tells the story of Antoine Doinel, a troubled Parisian boy struggling with an indifferent family life and stultifying school discipline, who is placed in a reform school after he commits a series of petty crimes. Truffaut chose the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud to play Doinel’s character in not just 400 Blows, but in four subsequent films. Influenced by Jean Vigo’s 1933 short Zero for Conduct, the film is notable for its simple, poetic realism and its unsentimental look at childhood, which is a radical departure from the edulcorated symbolism of films like Albert Lamorisse’s 1953 White Mane. Its use of innovative camera techniques, such as long tracking shots, jump cuts, and dissolves reflects Truffaut’s preoccupation with auteurism, in particular with Alexandre Astruc’s notion of the "camera pen" (camera-stylo) as the main expressive tool in the director’s arsenal. The film’s social commentary, though oblique, is unmistakable: Truffaut critiques the conformism, rigidity, and traditionalism of not only French society, but also of French cinema. The 400 Blows is rebellious but hardly optimistic and its iconic final image, of a freeze-frame of Doinel looking directly into the camera places some of the responsibility of his struggle on the viewers.

François Truffaut

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Steven Spielberg ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
History Of ◽  
Auteur Cinema ◽  
Iconic Figure

François Truffaut (b. 1932–d. 1984) is renowned both for the originality and the enduring popularity of his films, being considered an iconic figure of the French New Wave, a movement for which he was an aggressive and controversial spokesman. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Truffaut was a critic and film theorist, contributing to the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Notorious for his ferocious attack on traditional French “quality cinema,” he also asserted that the director is the true author of a film, on the grounds that a director’s stylistic and thematic choices reveal his identity as surely as fingerprints. Having turned to filmmaking, Truffaut achieved instant success with his first feature film, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups), which gained a prize at the Cannes Festival in 1959 and was universally acclaimed. Thereafter, he regularly produced a film every two years, accumulating an oeuvre of twenty-five films, a number of which, such as Day for Night (La Nuit américaine, 1973) and The Last Metro (Le Dernier Métro, 1980), were highly successful both in France and abroad. Subsequently, Truffaut’s reputation suffered a decline as his popularity grew with the incorporation of elements of genre cinema into his films, which caused certain of his fellow filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, to see him as betraying the ideals of the New Wave for the sake of achieving commercial success. In recent years, however, there has been a revival of interest in Truffaut, reflected in several retrospectives of his films, and the discovery of complexities in his work that have modified earlier appraisals of him as a sentimental, lightweight filmmaker. Indisputably, Truffaut has exerted an enormous influence on subsequent filmmaking in France and elsewhere, his influence being most evident in the auteur cinema of le Jeune Cinéma Français (Young French Cinema) of the 1990s and 2000s, the New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s, recent American “indie” movies, and various “New Waves” in a number of national cinemas such as those of Germany, Denmark, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand. Prominent contemporary filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Arnaud Desplechin, and Tsai Ming Liang have freely confessed their debt to Truffaut, leaving little doubt that Truffaut is emerging as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. Tragically, Truffaut’s career was cut short by his death from a brain tumor in 1984, leaving a number of foreshadowed projects unrealized.

scholarly journals The Colour of Social Realism

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Street
Keyword(s):  
Social Realism ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Family ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Wave Cycle ◽  
The 1960S

During the 1960s Eastmancolor, a relatively cheap, widely available film stock, revolutionised the British film industry's approach to colour. This article discusses the consequences of this major representational and aesthetic shift on social realism, a sub-genre of British cinema primarily associated with black and white cinematography. While colour provided an opportunity for greater realism, critics argued that it distracted audiences with hues considered inappropriate for social commentary. The article examines how a number of notable 1950s and 1960s British colour films navigated entrenched critical positions while deploying colour in distinctive, often innovative ways to reflect their social realist environments and themes. Films examined include A Kid for Two Farthings (1955), Miracle in Soho (1957), Sapphire (1959), Flame in the Streets (1961), Some People (1962), The Family Way (1966) and Poor Cow (1967). It is argued that critics' preoccupation with the New Wave cycle of films, 1959–63, has been at the expense of colour films that extended the range of representation, both aesthetically and thematically. Bringing colour more centrally into scholarship about British cinema contributes to revisionist research on social realism that privileges the foregrounding of style and textual aesthetics. In addition, the article shows how analysing films from the perspective of colour encourages relating them to broader chromatic tastes and trends. By the mid-1960s, as culture was generally becoming more chromatically vibrant, film-makers were able to take greater advantage of the colour stocks that enabled them to experiment with realist conventions.

Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Significant Phenomenon ◽  
The Impact ◽  
New Zealanders

This book investigates the coming-of-age genre as a significant phenomenon in New Zealand’s national cinema, tracing its development from the 1970s to the present day. A preliminary chapter identifies the characteristics of the coming-of-age film as a genre, tracing its evolution and the influence of the French New Wave and European Art Cinema, and speculating on the role of the genre in the output of national cinemas. Through case studies of fifteen significant films, including The God Boy, Sleeping Dogs, The Scarecrow, Vigil, Mauri, An Angel at My Table, Heavenly Creatures, Once Were Warriors, Rain, Whale Rider, In My Father’s Den, 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous, Boy, Mahana, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, subsequent chapters examine thematic preoccupations of filmmakers such as the impact of repressive belief systems and social codes, the experience of cultural dislocation, the expression of a Māori perspective through an indigenous “Fourth Cinema,” bicultural relationships, and issues of sexual identity, arguing that these films provide a unique insight into the cultural formation of New Zealanders. Given that the majority of films are adaptations of literary sources, the book also explores the dialogue each film conducts with the nation’s literature, showing how the time frame of each film is updated in a way that allows these films to be considered as a register of important cultural shifts that have occurred as New Zealanders have sought to discover their emerging national identity.

Duration, Compression, Extension and Distortion of Time in Contemporary Transgender Cinema

Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-83
Author(s):  
Akkadia Ford
Keyword(s):  
Life Experiences ◽  
Private Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
Short Film ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Privileged Access ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Film Change

Cinema provides ‘privileged access’ ( Zubrycki 2011 ) into trans lives, recording and revealing private life experiences and moments that might never be seen, nor heard and after the time had passed, only present in memory and body for the individuals involved. Film, a temporal medium, creates theoretical issues, both in the presentation and representation of the trans body and for audiences in viewing the images. Specific narrative, stylistic and editing techniques including temporal disjunctions, may also give audiences a distorted view of trans bodily narratives that encompass a lifetime. Twenty first century cinema is simultaneously creating and erasing the somatechnical potentialities of trans. This article will explore temporal techniques in relation to recent trans cinema, comparing how three different filmmakers handle trans narratives. Drawing upon recent films including the Trans New Wave ( Ford 2014 , 2016a , 2016b ), such as the experimental animated autoethnographic short film Change Over Time (Ewan Duarte, United States, 2013), in tandem with the feature film 52 Tuesdays (Sophia Hyde, Australia, 2013), I will analyse the films as texts which show how filmmakers utilise temporality as a narrative and stylistic technique in cinematic trans narratives. These are texts where cinematic technologies converge with trans embodiment in ways that are constitutive of participants and audiences' understanding of trans lives. This analysis will be contrasted with the use of temporal displacement as a cinematic trope of negative affect, disembodiment and societal disjunction in the feature film Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, Australia, 2014), providing a further basis for scholarly critique of cinematic somatechnics in relation to the trans body.

THE RIGHT TIME AND PLACE

2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-47
Author(s):  
B. Ruby Rich
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Right

Paradigmatic American filmmaker Richard Linklater’s Boyhood has been much praised from the moment of its release (2014). The scope of this twelve-year project is more than a stunt, and the making of the film has become a birthright. This article weighs in on the film and its reception, considers Linklater’s French New Wave influences, and addresses how gender has been so muted, rendered illegible, if not irrelevant in the film’s reception.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Marion Schmid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film History ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Purity And Impurity

The introduction contextualises the French New Wave's ambivalent relationship to the older arts with regard to cinema's wider struggle for recognition in the course of the twentieth century. Surveying the debates around medium specificity, cinematic 'purity' and 'impurity' from the classical avant-garde to the Nouvelle Vague, it addresses the French New Wave's complex discursive construction in relation to the more established arts. Reframing traditional studies of the French New Wave, it argues for an intermedial approach to illuminate this seminal movement of film history. The corpus, rationale and approach of the book are also introduced and clarified.

Riding with Bonnie and Clyde

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
Thomas Goldsmith
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
Slow Start ◽  
Dark Humor ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Movie Script ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Arthur Penn

The banjo tune “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” took a roundabout path to become the voice of the genre-changing film Bonnie and Clyde, first released in 1967. The movie’s eventual star, Warren Beatty, was behind the scoring and several stories are presented about his decision. The movie script, by Esquire staffers Robert Benton and David Newman, also passed through a succession of hands—including those of French New Wave auteurs François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard—before Beatty, its champion, succeeded in getting the services of American director Arthur Penn. The resulting movie, a fictionalization of criminals Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker’s murderous episodes, had a slow start but eventually galvanized audiences with its dark humor and raucous score. NYT critic Bosley Crowther saw his career at the paper end after fervently dissing the film.

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