France
1959
99 minutes
2.35:1
French
5
François Truffaut’s first feature, The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), is also his most personal. Told through the eyes of Truffaut’s life-long cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows sensitively re-creates the trials of Truffaut’s own difficult childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, petty crime, and a friendship that would last a lifetime. The film marks Truffaut’s passage from leading critic of the French New Wave to his emergence as one of Europe’s most brilliant auteurs.
| Antoine Doinel | Jean-Pierre Léaud |
| Madame Doinel | Claire Maurier |
| Monsieur Doinel | Albert Remy |
| Teacher (“Little Quiz”) | Guy Decomble |
| Monsieur Bigey | Georges Flamant |
| René Bigey | Patrick Auffay |
| Director | François Truffaut |
| Screenplay | Marcel Moussy and François Truffaut |
| Cinematography | Henri Decaë |
| Producer | François Truffaut and Georges Charlot |
| Music | Jean Constantine |
| Editing | Marie Josèphe Yoyotte, Cécile Decugis and Michèle de Possel |
The British film magazine Sight & Sound dedicates its May issue to the fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave, which it dates to the first screening of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (on May 4, 1959, at the Cannes Film . . .
Fifty years ago today . . . Godard wrote this New Wave battle cry for the April 22, 1959, issue of the French journal Arts, on the news of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows being selected to represent France at the Cannes Film Festival (thanks to the machinations . . .
André Bazin has a curious status in intellectual life. He is everywhere admitted as the founding father of film criticism and theory in general. The magazine he created in the 1950s, Cahiers du cinéma, has good claim to be the most influential film magazine ever published. And yet at . . .
On January 19, 1950, the seventeen- (going on eighteen-) year-old François Truffaut attended a 4 P.M. screening at the Cinémathèque française. He met a girl named Liliane Litvin. Truffaut was so smitten that he quit his job in the suburbs and moved back to Paris. According to his biographers . . .
François Truffaut’s first feature, The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups), was more than a semi-autobiographical film; it was also an elaboration of what the French New Wave directors would embrace as the caméra-stylo (camera-as . . .
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