Running along with the anxiety and emptiness, the 12-year-old Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Lelaud) stares straightly at us. Much of the attention has been paid on the last complicated eyesight, emphasize its emotional abundance. However, I’m more interested in analyzing its cinematographic style and its contribution to social justification.
Inspired by Truffaut’s own childhood experience, the character Antoine plays a resourceful boy growing up in Paris and apparently dashing headlong into a life of crime. Truffaut's masterpiece embodies the contradictory combination of delicately poetic and harshly unsentimental. A special cruel poetic goes through the whole film. Antoine's harsh teacher, tattletale classmates, and selfish parents contribute to a poetic injustice that's oddly beautiful in its coherent narration. As Antoine is gradually deprived of his rights as a liberal, equal, and fraternal French citizen (how ironic!), the cinematography also echoes. In most of the shots except for their family travel for a movie, Antoine is positioned marginally on the screen. Besides, the shot will be taken from Antoine’s back, side, or cut a part of his body. On the screen, he is small, controlled and arranged by his parents and the institutional people, including the teachers, the guard, the police officers, and the prison guards. He lies in the sleeping bag, stands in the classroom corner behind the blackboard, and shelters in different corners of his friend’s house, and finally was sent to the juvenile detention home. Its character-marginalized cinematographic style definitely emphasized the isolation and loneliness of Antoine’s detachment character, and marks the absurd situation.
The opening scenes of the Paris towel from a moving viewpoints implies the atmosphere of moving and traveling. Combined with the final running out of the detention home, the film is structured as a whole search for identity and escape—culminating in the ending freeze-frame. But the journey doesn’t stop in the shot; instead, it expands the possibilities of a ridiculous “designed” trap or a new beginning. The actor Jean-Pierre Lelaud perfectly interprets the character, as if his heart had suffered obscure wounds long before the film began.
On the other hand, Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows (1959)" is one of the most intensely touching stories ever made about a young adolescent. Antoine’s looking directly into the camera insights the viewers a shock, making us review the whole “procedures” from the young character’s point of view. It awakens the possible injustice of every crime. "The 400 Blows" is socially provocative. Both parents are away from home a lot, and neither has the patience to pay close attention to the boy: They judge him by appearances, and by the reports of others who misunderstand him. The film's most poignant moments show him set adrift by his parents and left to the mercy of social services. His parents discuss him sadly with authorities (“If he came home, he would only run away again”). And so he is booked in a police station, placed in a holding cell and put in a police wagon with prostitutes and thieves, to be driven through the dark streets of Paris, his face peering out through the bars like a young Dickensian hero. He has a similar expression at other times in the film, which is shot in a chilly night; Antoine steals a bottle of milk and drank it so eagerly. His jacket collar is always turned up against the wind, like a mere protection from all the treatment. Like Vittorio De Sica’s "The Bicycle Thief," this film also provides an important social justification.
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