THE FRENCH NEW WAVE: THE 400 BLOWS

18.30 = CAFÉ OPENS

19.30 = “400 BLOWS”

Directed by Francois Truffaut, 1959, 99 minutes

François Truffaut's semi-autobiographical 1959 debut is one of the French new wave's most accessible and best-loved films, but also an elaboration of what the French New Wave directors would embrace as the caméra-stylo (camera-as-pen) whose écriture (writing style) could express the filmmaker as personally as a novelist’s pen. It is one of the supreme examples of “cinema in the first-person singular.” In telling the story of the young outcast Antoine Doinel, Truffaut was moving both backward and forward in time—recalling his own experience while forging a filmic language that would grow more sophisticated throughout the ‘60s.