The 400 blows = Les Quatre cents coups

Truffaut’s stunning first feature introduced his alter-ego Antoine Doinel. A chronicle of emotions and events the director experienced at first hand, the film is based, not on nostalgia, but on Truffaut’s painful memories of his childhood and adolescence. The camera is objective, the rhythms reflect the patterns and unpredictability of everyday life. However the apparently random series of episodes does have a cumulative effect encapsulated in the memorable final image. While a fierce critic of the state of French cinema in the fifties, Truffaut was not a revolutionary like Godard but sought to return in his first feature to what he saw as the best traditions of the French cinema represented by Vigo and Renoir (Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero and Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man were also important influences). The title refers to the French idiom, ‘to raise hell’. Cast includes: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Claire Maurier and Albert Remy.