The 400 Blows

The product of an unhappy, loveless home, Truffaut began using films to escape the exigencies of reality at age seven, virtually living in various Parisian movie houses. He left school to go to work at 14, and, one year later, founded a film club, which brought him to the attention of influential cinema critic Andre Bazin. Over the next few years, Bazin both financed and protected Truffaut. In 1953, Bazin hired Truffaut as a critic/essayist for Cahiers du Cinema. It was in the January 1954 edition that Truffaut published his landmark essay “A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema,” in which he attacked directors who merely ground out films without any personal cinematic vision; he also propounded the auteur theory, which opined that the only directors worth serious consideration were those who left their own individual signatures on each of their films. Truffaut noted that writing critiques enabled him to understand why he loved films and to rationalize his reasons for liking them.

In 1954, Truffaut decided to direct his first short, Une Visite and set up his own production company, Les Films du Carosse. He garnered critical acclaim for his 1957 short subject Les Mistons, and two years later he made his first feature, the intensely autobiographical The 400 Blows. Cast as Truffaut alter-ego Antoine Doinel was young Jean-Pierre Leaud, who went on to play Doinel at various later stages of his life in Truffaut’s four follow-ups to 400 Blows. In 1961, Truffaut directed what many consider his masterpiece: Jules et Jim, a hauntingly beautiful tale of a lingering romantic triangle. In developing a style of his own, Truffaut was heavily influenced by his idols Jean Vigo, Jacques Tati, and especially Renoir, whom Truffaut admired for his ability to simultaneously depict the realities of life and “improve” upon them. Like Renoir, Truffaut endeavored to make films that approximated real life, but were romanticized enough to be entertainment. Truffaut also admired such Hollywood directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles. Echoes of Hawks and Welles would persist throughout Truffaut’s career, while Hitchcock was imitated outright in 1967’s The Bride Wore Black. His love affair with Hollywood films was manifested in his frequent employment of Tinseltown stalwarts like novelist/screenwriters David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich, and composer Bernard Herrmann.

As he matured professionally, Truffaut’s previous attention-getting techniques grew less pronounced, and he began favoring the “invisible camera” à la John Ford. In addition to his directorial activities, Truffaut also produced, and occasionally dabbled in acting, first in his own films (The Wild Child, Day for Night, etc.) and later in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). At the time of his death from cancer at the age of 52, Truffaut was busily preparing a distaff variation of The 400 Blows: The Little Thief. The project would ultimately be completed by Truffaut’s protégé/collaborator Claude Miller. Truffaut’s extensive published works include Les Films De Ma Vie, Hitchcock, and various collections of his letters and magazine articles. In addition to his Oscar for Day for Night (which also earned citations from such groups as the New York Film Critics and the British Film Academy), Truffaut was honored with the Cannes Film Festival Best Director prize for The 400 Blows, a Best Director César for Le Dernier Metro (1980), and the Prix Louis Delluc and National Society of Film Critics Award for Stolen Kisses (1968).

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:114620~T1)