Groundbreaking Independent Film on Blu-ray

Low-budget, independent filmmaking has co-existed with studio-financed mass-market movies for over a century. But almost exactly 50 years ago, it suddenly gained international respectability after a group of film critics, theorists, and self-professed movie fanatics in France decided to start making their own films the way they wanted to make them and about the subjects they wanted to treat.

The result became labeled as the French New Wave, a movement that was not afraid to experiment with new cinematic techniques (as often as not due to budget limitations) and that considered the director as the primary author, or “auteur” of the finished film.

A few of these films debuted in 1957-58, but in 1959 a virtual explosion of them hit theatre screens, winning festival awards and critical acclaim, including films like “Breathless,” “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” “Black Orpheus,” and “The Four Hundred Blows,” from directors Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Marcel Camus, and François Truffaut, respectively. Many more followed throughout the next ten years.

All had a strong influence upon a new generation of Hollywood filmmakers who started their careers in the 1960s, such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola. Their impact continues to this day with yet another generation of independent-minded directors.

For decades these films were often seen in grainy 16 mm dupes or murky video copies with any widescreen productions having the sides of their images lopped off. Late last month the Criterion Collection released Truffaut’s “The Four Hundred Blows” on Blu-ray in a sparkling new high-definition transfer from a 35 mm master fine-grain print and with its original 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio intact.

“The Four Hundred Blows” was the first feature-length film by François Truffaut, yet won him “Best Director” at Cannes that year, “Best Foreign Film” from the New York Film Critics, and an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. The film’s title is a translation of a French idiom that means something to the effect of “raising hell” or “running wild.”

The story covers a few months in the life of Antoine (in an amazing performance by Jean-Pierre Léaud), a troubled 12- to 13-year-old boy who is an only child alienated from his loveless family, his authoritarian teachers, and all but one of his disinterested classmates. His one friend helps him skip school, sneak into movies, run away from home, steal a typewriter, and get into other trouble until Antoine is finally sent away to a reform school, from which he again tries to escape.

What in the hands of Hollywood producers might become either a scathing social commentary or a feel-good story of triumph over adversity, is instead presented by Truffaut as a matter-of-fact, unsentimental portrait of an average boy dealing with whatever life throws at him. The film focuses on details of daily life rather than carefully organizing cause-effect relationships into a typical and predictable self-contained plot. Many if not most of the incidents were thinly disguised episodes from Truffaut’s own childhood, and like a number of films by Steven Spielberg, it depicts the children’s point of view throughout.

Part of the film’s power comes from its documentary-like style, largely a by-product of its low budget that required the use of black and white film, actual locations, improvised dialogue, post-dubbed audio, and then-unknown actors. The gray skies and stone buildings, accentuated by the monochromatic image, contribute greatly to the feeling of the characters’ gray moral sense, yet the film never becomes morose.

In his first film, Truffaut also tried to follow the advice of his friend and mentor, film theorist André Bazin, who complained that excessive editing destroyed film’s potential for realism. Thus there are many long takes that allow the viewer to explore the mise en scene in the carefully composed widescreen images, so each cut tends to make a much stronger dramatic impact than films whose shots average only a few seconds each.

This style tends to make portions of the film drag in pacing, but it is a good fit for the story Truffaut is telling and helps intensify both the mood and the performances of the actors. The very long take at the end of the film, and especially its concluding freeze-frame and optical zoom into young Antoine’s ambiguous expression, became copied in countless films and TV commercials over the next twenty years.

Truffaut unfortunately died at age 52 in 1984 but managed to make about two dozen features, five of which starred Léaud in the continuing saga of Truffaut’s alter-ego Antoine over a period of twenty years.

Watching Criterion’s Blu-ray edition of “The Four Hundred Blows” is like taking a trip back in time. Dirt and scratches on the film were digitally removed and the audio was also digitally cleaned up for the uncompressed PCM soundtrack. Finally, American audiences have the chance to experience what the film looked and sounded like when it was new.

There are several interesting bonus features on the disc, although only in standard-definition and nothing new for this edition. They include screen tests by some of the child actors, newsreel footage of young Jean-Pierre Léaud attending the film’s Cannes showing, fascinating interviews with Truffaut from 1960s TV programs, the original trailer, plus two different audio commentaries and a printed flyer with program notes.

One of the commentaries is an informative combination of critical analysis and background history by a film professor, and the other is a charmingly nostalgic interview of Truffaut’s childhood friend Robert Lachenay.

Anyone interested in independent or foreign films needs to see “The Four Hundred Blows,” and many will probably want to own a copy.

“THE 400 BLOWS” Blu Ray Disc at a glance:
MOVIE: A-
VIDEO: A
AUDIO: A
EXTRAS: B+
OVERALL: A