Before 1959, the directors who could really be called "authors", Orson Wells, Hitchcock, and Akira Kurosawa, were few and far between.
Because the film is in the hands of the studio. In order to achieve better box office, big-name stars, specific plot arrangements, and exquisite set props are the basic elements that make up a work.
Without qualified directors, the vast majority can only be reduced to the cogs in the entire industrial system.
A French film critic named André Bazin, unhappy with the fact that films had become money-making tools, founded the Film Handbook magazine, with a group of young people, writing articles about fierce film criticism.
But it is difficult to convince people without practicing.
So his subordinates decided to shoot it themselves!
François Truffaut was one of the fastest to emerge, and he competed in the 12th Cannes Film Festival in 1959 with a film called "Four Hundred Blows", which won the Cannes Best Director Trophy at the age of 27.
At the beginning of filming, Andre Bazin died of illness, so "Four Hundred Blows" is also a special commemoration of Bazin.
He was Bazin's right-hand man and was well received for his writings in the mid-1950s. One of them, "A Certain Tendency of French Cinema", became a "10W+" explosive article at the time, which caused an uproar in the film circle. Some people think that he is purely trying to lead the war, and some people support his views.
After watching about 3,000 films, he has his own unique insight into filmmaking.
One of the important theories is authorship.
If a movie has an author, it can only be a director.
The director decides the story, decides the casting, decides the cinematography, determines the style.
The emotions of the author need to be integrated into it.
Real movies, as they should be.
"Four Hundred Blows" is based on Truffaut's own childhood experiences and tells the story of how a 13-year-old boy goes down the road to crime.
He hand-picked the actors and unearthed the talented actor Jean-Pierre Lyod. The latter won the Berlin Film Emperor in 1966.
Albert Remy, the actor who plays the stepfather, looks very similar to Truffaut's real-life stepfather.
Because the film has a tendency to criticize his parents' improper education, some people say that he smears his family.
It is said that after the release of the movie, the stressed stepfather and mother divorced.
In order to distinguish himself from commercial films in general, Truffaut also practiced another important theory, bringing the camera to real life.
One of the French New Wave's criticisms of traditional cinema is that photography is always very clumsy and weak.
In the prologue to "Four Hundred Blows", following the theme soundtrack, the camera drifts through the streets of Paris, agile and free. Moving images began in this film and were widely used.
What the viewer sees through the camera is a real and natural set.
If everything is an artificial illusion, then the movie is only an illusory dream after all.
Truffaut's goal is clear: he wants to bring the film back to real life.
Let the film connect with human life and emotions, and let the film become a mirror of reality, rather than an anesthetic or stimulant.
To achieve the goal, it is not enough to "save" the camera from the studio, Truffaut also needs a touching script.
With the influence of Four Hundred Blows spreading from France to the United States, and along with Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries and Hitchcock's North by Northwest, nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 32nd Oscars in 1960, Truffaut proved himself more than just on paper.
One of his most successful places is that the audience sees not only the various encounters of the protagonist Antoine, but also the inner world of a 13-year-old boy.
One of the reasons why Antoine is a portrayal of Truffaut's childhood is that Truffaut said that a director whose films are all his life chronicles are. And the protagonists in his films are often called Antoine.
"Antoine" in "Four Hundred Blows" Jean-Pierre Lyod has starred in many works after Truffaut, and the two have cooperated in a "Antoine Universe".
It was clear that Antoine was a microcosm of himself.
It's just that for Four Hundred Blows, Truffaut didn't say it was entirely his autobiography of his personal film.
He incorporated the experiences of his friends, the news he read in the newspapers, and even some fictional plots. Probably this is what is called "from life, higher than life".
Therefore, later generations did not call this film genre "autobiographical films", but "semi-autobiographical films".
Truffaut's success not only kicked off the first shot of the new wave of French cinema, but also opened up a shortcut for cutting-edge directors to quickly rise to power.
That is, feature film debut, make a semi-autobiographical movie!
Take China, for example, Jiang Wen's "Sunny Day", Jia Zhangke's "Xiao Wu", and Jiang Wenli's "We See You in Heaven" are all high-level imitations of "Four Hundred Blows".
Even if it is not a debut work, Hou Xiaoxian's "Childhood Past", Luo Qirui's "Thief of Years", Zhou Xingchi's "King of Comedy", as long as the basic skills of the film are solid, invest in their own true feelings, high-reputation works are simply handy.
There are more examples abroad, in short, after 1959, with this shortcut, the author and director began to explode.
Back to Four Hundred Strikes.
To be honest, this is not a particularly "good-looking" movie.
If you are not particularly interested in the art of cinema, there is no need to find a special worshipper.
Just like a subject that is not required, looking for its textbooks, it is really boring to find it.
If you want to take film as a profession, it will be a must-read textbook.
As spiritual food, this can be a song that leads you to break free from the shackles of your original family and society and awaken the innocence of youth.
The meaning of the title is quite clear, meaning that a bear child has to hit 400 times to become a good child.
To many, Antoine is a bear child.
He uploaded pictures of beautiful women in class, wrote bad words about the teacher on the wall, faked leave slips of absence, and lied that his mother was critically ill in order not to let the teacher punish him...
Since Truffaut chose to follow Antoine's perspective, it is easy for the viewer to discover that Antoine is not so hateful.
Beauty Picture has been handled by many classmates, and he is just a scapegoat;
Unhappy at school, always blamed by the teacher, then he naturally does not want to go to school, only in the streets of Paris, he can have freedom and happiness;
His mother had always been very bad for him, not even clean and self-loving, and out of helplessness and hatred, he said things that he should not have said.
Antoine did make mistakes, but the so-called fairy tales are unscrupulous, and as long as they are properly educated, he can definitely realize his mistakes.
Who knows that his stepfather believes in the "four hundred blows" education method, and a word is two heavy slaps.
Whoever makes a slightly more serious mistake is always filled with terrible insults.
"Raise you so big, didn't do something decent!"
This line should be familiar to many people.
In school, the teacher uses himself to establish his majesty, the parents at home are the punching bag, and the stubborn Antoine is not willing to be bullied by these adults, he wants to rely on his own strength to establish his own life.
He was desperate to become an adult so that he could make mistakes with impunity.
The good friend Table René was like-minded with him, and the two discussed various "misdeeds" plans.
Tablerone's house became a revolutionary base for the two, but it cost money for the two to go out to play, and it was not a way to steal their parents all the time.
In order to make a huge profit, they decided to steal the typewriter in Antoine's stepfather's unit.
Truffaut did not render the anger that strengthened Antoine's heart, but only showed his way of dealing with violence.
If the film fell into the hands of the studio, the director would probably be asked to further intensify the contradictions between Antoine and his teachers and parents, and write Antoine more miserably in exchange for the sympathy of the audience.
Stealing a typewriter section adopts the mode of stealing films, adding a tense soundtrack to set off the atmosphere and create a strong sense of suspense.
Doing so can make the film more "good-looking", but it is also easy to lose its calm and objectivity, resulting in the audience losing their due judgment.
Truffaut did not want the audience to become a fooled printing press, he wanted to use documentary-style images to restore the hidden reality, so that the audience could discover and think.
Running away from home, stealing a typewriter, going into a juvenile detention center, annote these encounters, all come from his real experience.
He only needs to distill these fragmentary memories, without more embellishment, to remind the audience that some things that are not valued in daily life may be the shadow of a person's life.
"Four Hundred Blows" tells the story of antoine's lingering haze on the road to growth, and some occasional sunshine that protrudes out of his head, and it is also the past of many people, buried deeply.
Seeing the tragedies of Antoine's childhood, those that once flashed by, perhaps some mistakes, could be avoided in the future.
Or tell yourself that you give each child more kindness, less than one blow, less smog;
Or like Antoine, at the end of the film, he escapes from the juvenile detention center, escapes from his family, escapes from society, and runs to the sea of freedom.
Although Truffaut himself did not think it was a masterpiece, time had defined Four Hundred Blows as an epoch-making work.
After the film was released in June 1959, the New Wave of French cinema officially began.
The act of making movies and watching movies has changed fundamentally since then.