Introduction Given on the Night, Written by John Newland & Presented by Phil Ray

The 400 Blows, original French title, Les Quatre Cents Coups, is French film director Francois Truffaut’s first feature film. Truffaut is one of the major French and European Film Directors of the second half of the 20th Century and is one of that group of French film directors which emerged after the Second World War in what became known as the French New Wave. Amongst others in this group were Claude Chabrol, Jean Luc-Godard and Eric Rohmer.

These people had started off as Film Critics. There, in that role, they had argued the case for a personal cinema, that is, a cinema where the director is the creative driving force of a film, the one who gives it its artistic identity, rather than being merely a hired contractor working only with other peoples’ ideas and creations.

And by the end of the 1950s, these guys had moved on from writing about films to directing them. Truffaut’s first venture on to the big screen was in 1958 with his short film, Les Mistons. Made the next year, The 400 Blows was Truffaut’s first major film and was selected as an official French entry for that year’s Cannes Film Festival. There, it was very well received and Truffaut won the award for Best Director. The film became an enormous success all over the world and was the launching pad for his subsequent career. After The 400 Blows, Truffaut had a long and successful career for the next quarter-century. He made over 20 films and worked continuously as a director until his death in 1984.

In this film, The 400 Blows Truffaut zeroes in on the life of a 13 year-old, Antoine Doinel, played by a young Jean-Pierre Leaud. Antoine lives in a cramped apartment in Paris (not the fashionable bit) with his mother and stepfather. It’s not a happy relationship. His mother is resentful of a child she had not wanted, and is alternately loving and cruel. She is insensitive and uncaring of his needs. His stepfather will spend time with him but lacks patience. From this, it is not surprising that Antoine’s life is reasonably chaotic and dysfunctional and this is mirrored in his adventures and misadventures and in what happens to him.

This film was not just a single, one-off, focus into the territory of adolescence. Alongside and in addition to, the many other films he made, Truffaut continued to follow his protégé Antoine in the ups and downs of his life, for the next 20 years through 4 more films.

So, you might well say that not only is this film a beginning for the lead character on the screen, it’s also a beginning for the person behind the camera. Whatever nerve it touched in Truffaut – and clearly it did touch a nerve – it took him until 1979 to work it through – if indeed he ever did work it through.

Perhaps Film Directors are just like the rest of us, simply human.

Let’s watch the film and make our own judgement.

Thank you for listening so kindly.