Analysis Of The Film 'The 400 Blows' By François Trufflows

Technical Analysis Essay One: Narrative Life can be characterized as a series of cause and effect. From birth till death, and everything in between, we are in a perpetual state of motion. The film “The 400 Blows” Directed by François Truffaut depicts the life of Antoine Doinel, a young french schoolboy and his journey through adolescence. For Antoine, life has become rutted into a vicious cycle- one that perpetually revolves him around a series of mischievous habits and eventually leads him into jail, and a mental institution. Truffaut’s 1959 French drama film became a staple of the “French New Wave” movement, where film was used to detest many of the literary icons and traditions at the time. The French New Wave often covered topic matter

We see the city-scape of Paris from a low camera angle, seemingly like a child looking out a moving car window. Throughout the rest of the film we are subjected to many shots, long takes, tracking, jump cuts, mash cuts, and fades, all validating his apparent belief in “auteurism” which is defined as ”the belief that a movie should primarily reveal the director's feelings and beliefs as if he has written it himself.” ...thus placing the director as the primary author of the film and coincidentally, coincides with Truffaut's involvement in the French New Wave movement- which often broke traditional rules of literary

Several boys pass around a erotic picture of a woman through an all boys classroom, and Antoine is the one who gets caught with it. This is where Antoine’s descent into the vicious cycle begins, nothing more than a strike of bad luck. This is where cause and effect come into play. Because Antoine gets caught with the picture, he is punished by his teacher, because he is punished by his teacher, he skips school, since he skips school, he lies to get out of another punishment, when he is caught lying about his mother’s death, he runs away. In the entire film Antoine makes actions in attempts to dodge the consequences of previous actions, and it is because of his immature handling of responsibility that he lands himself into this vicious cycle of adolescence. Truffaut brilliantly weaves together this cause and effect relationship in Antoine’s life with a specific style of film-making. Each scene becomes its own episode every single one independent from the last. It is because of this cause and effect relationship that we can piece these individual scenes together to form a very linear