As you may remember, I’m watching one foreign film a month in 2010. Last month, I watched The Bicycle Thief and studied all about Italian Neo-realism.  This month’s film is Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.

TCM.com gives this synopsis:

A 12-year-old boy turns to crime to escape family problems.

Going back to my evaluation of films as being either vegetables, steak, or candy, The 400 Blows definitely falls into my ‘vegetables’ category.

As with The Bicycle Thief, I wasn’t exactly sure why this film was so important.  It was shot almost sloppily, the actors seemed to be non-professional, and the protagonist had no goal at all.  These aren’t usually the best ingredients for making a successful film.

I knew I was missing something.  So I went to my old film history and film theory books and spent two weeks researching and thinking about The 400 Blows.

What I found out is that The 400 Blows along with Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour and Godard’s Breathless jump-started the French New Wave.  I remembered hearing about the French New Wave in film school but mostly tuned out.  While most of my peers were watching Truffaut and Godard, I was obsessing over John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock.

What I didn’t realize was that these French filmmakers responsible for the New Wave were also obsessed with Ford, Hawks, and Hitchcock.

You can do your own research or just go to Wikipedia and find out the history of French New Wave but let me break it down for you to the absolute basics.

This is what I’d put in a children’s book on the French New Wave.  (I think of that because I’m writing this blog post with my 16 month old nephew sitting in my lap.  I’ve got to find some film history books for preschoolers.  Maybe that’s how I’ll make my millions.)

FRENCH NEW WAVE

French cinema had gotten stagnant in the late 50′s.  Generally the only films being made were literary adaptations.

Andre Bazin, a film critic and theorist created a journal called Cahiers du Cinema.  He mentored several young film critics including Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.  These young critics were cinephiles – they were obsessed with cinema, especially American cinema.  They wrote critically of the top studio filmmakers in France calling their work soulless and out of touch with the youth of their time.

These critics proposed two basic principles:

• Mise-En-Scene:  This literally means “placed on stage.”  It’s an old theater term.  It’s the work done by the director giving images to the words on the page.  It covers what is arranged on set before shooting – décor, costume, characters (look and performance), color, and lighting – plus camera angle and camera movement.

• Auteur Theory: The idea that a film should be a medium of personal artistic expression and that the best films are those that have the director’s signature conveying his or her personality and cardinal themes.

Up to this point, directors in France were merely considered the men who added pictures to the more important words being spoken.  The Cahiers critics’ learned from the films of Hitchcock and Hawks that a director could have way more control over a film.  It could be his personal expression.

These film critics began making their own films trying to break with the mold of the French studio films.  In doing so, they were able to validate their theories.

1959 was arguably the birth of the French New Wave when The 400 Blows was released.  It was made for $75,000 by an unknown film critic named Francois Truffaut.  It won the prize for Best Direction at the Cannes Film Festival.

Because these film critics turned filmmakers were cinephiles, when they finally began making films of their own, they knew more about the art form than the production process.  They made mistakes but this also freed them up to try new things.

French New Wave filmmakers developed several techniques mostly out of necessity.  Because they had very little money, they shot on location, used a small crew, used unknown actors, and shot with available light.  They couldn’t afford very much film so they’d shoot very few takes.  If an actor would mess up, they’d just cut the mess-up out of the take resulting in a jump cut.

The camera moves a lot, panning and tracking to follow characters.  The filmmakers had to run-and-gun and get their cameras into tight places so they used documentary cameras designed for just that.

All of these techniques are used today in one form or another which is one reason these films are so important.

There was also a change in subject matter.  French New Wave storylines were usually contemporary and smaller, typically exploring social issues.  (You can see the influence Italian Neo-realism had on these filmmakers.)  They would experiment with plot construction.  The protagonists lacked goals and the films would typically end ambiguously.

Psychologically, these filmmakers wanted the audience to be aware that they were watching a film.  The jump cuts and jagged editing certainly helped this.    Slow motion and fast motion, hand-held camera shots, and non-professional actors also worked to jolt the audience out of their traditional involvement in the film.  They did not want the audience to identify with their characters in the traditional way.

The French New Wave did a lot to advance Film as an art form and gave us filmmakers a whole new arsenal of useful tools in crafting our stories in this visual medium.

So yeah, I get it now.  Merci, guys.  Merci.

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That’s French New Wave in a nutshell.  Now for my thoughts:

1) I still prefer to be completely immersed into a film.  I prefer invisible editing.  I hate it when a filmmaker throws a cut or a shot in the film that reminds me I’m watching a movie.  Knowing what these filmmakers used to jar the audience into awareness of the film helps me to create escapist films because I know what to avoid.  (That is unless the story calls for self-aware cut.)

2) I still don’t get why someone would want to tell a story about a protagonist who does nothing and wants nothing.  But I think telling stories about active protagonists who have clear goals is part of my auteur signature.

3) It is interesting to note that handheld camera shots like in Saving Private Ryan actually draw me INTO the story rather than reminding me that I’m watching a film.  I suppose it’s all about context.

So what are your thoughts on The 400 Blows and French New Wave?  What other Truffaut films do you recommend?