When François Truffaut debuted with his function director with ”400 beats“In 1959 it quickly became an international sensation and French New Wave’s first smash hit. Together with Jean-Luc Godard‘S “Breathless”, the established many of the conventions that the French New Wave would be known: Documentary Style Shooting, Playful Experiment with Edit and film form, and most importantly, a direct link between the filmmaker’s personality and the action on the screen.
Many of the new wave directors strived for theoretic Alexandre Astruc’s dream of using the film camera so intimately and personally as a writer uses a pen (“Caméra-Stylo”, as Astruc dubbed it), but few realized that the dream and its possibilities with as much artistic success as Truffaut. Anyone with Even a Cursory Awareness of the Director’s Biography Can See The Direct Link Between Him and “The 400 BLOWS” HERO Antoine Doinel, A 14-Year Old Constantly at Odds With A World of Adults Was To Be Fur Of Movie Critic Andre Bazin and Introduced to the Cinephilia That would Consume Him Until His Premature Death at the Age of 52.
“The 400 BLOWS” is often given credit for kicking off the French new wave – that glorious your that saw exciting work by Godard, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Agnes Varda, and Others exploding in 1960s. Too: a unique experiment in world cinema in which truffaut found an onscreen surrogate and tracked his Journey from youth to adulthood for five films and 20 years.
This was not Truffaut’s original intention, and the fact that Antoine Doinel-Cykeln-which consists of “the 400 strokes”, “Antoine and Colette”, “The Kisses” chair “,” Bed and Board “and” Love on the run “-found virtually a testimony to the actor Truffaut as his changed ego. “The 400 Blows” was designed as a standalone feature, and it is still the only one of the five films that really stand on their own apart from the others; Its satisfaction requires no knowledge that cannot be acquired from the film itself, while the sequels only reason completely in relation to each other.
What TURNED Antoine Doinel Into a Recurring Character was an sacrifice for TRUFFAGE TO CONTRIBUTE TO AN OMNIBUS FILM CALLED “Love at 20” in 1962. Motivated primarily by a desire to work with léaud again, truffaut took the opportunity to check in with Character frozen in time after his escape from a juvenile detection facility. “Antoine and Colette”, the half-hour short truffaut contributed to “Love at 20”, presents a now 17-year-old Doinel as he develops his first intense crusher on a girl he meets at a concert.
While there are superficial reimbursements – Doinel works for a record label and music occupies the same place in his life that the cinema occupied for Truffaut – the basic course for “Antoine and Doinel” follows it in Truffaut’s real life, when he as a young man became obsessed with a beautiful young woman and moved into the building over the street from her family. Still, Antoine Doinel movies move away from straight autobiography and against what they would ultimately be: a fusion of truffaut and Léaud’s personalities, as the films become as much about capturing the actor at specific moments in time as they are about recreating the filmmaker’s youthful experiences.
Truffaut once said about Antoine Doinel that “something with that character refuses to grow old”, and here is the fascinating paradox in the heart of the series. Like Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”, the Antoine Doinel films serve as a kind of meditation at the passage of time and how well the cinema is to capture it; While we obviously look at many, many actors grow up on film, but there is something to see the actor return to the same character under an extended duration that notices more focused on the delicate emotional and physical shades of aging.
What makes the Antoine Doinel series interesting is that it uses such a static protagonist for its decades long projects to capture what Jimmy Stewart called “pieces of time.” Doinel Begins The Cycle as a teenager in 1959 and ends it as a divorced 34-years in 1979’s “Love on the run,” But for Most of His Story’s UNFolding He Changes Surprisingly Little-The World Around Him and Truffulma’s Filmmaking Style Evolve “Love on the run” feel like the work of an entire different director than the expansive widescreen resides of “the 400 strokes”), but Doinel does not. He is equally restless and irrevocable at the end of the story (despite becoming a novelist) as he was in the beginning.
This is where Doinel clearly resigns from his creator, one of the most self -conscious, self -reflecting filmmakers in their era; Where Truffaut’s life and work were intensely devoted to thinking about his own romantic neuroses and his role in maintaining them, Doinel never matures – only his director’s perspective on him does. Starts with 1968’s “Stolen Kisses”, Truffaut becomes more standalone from Doinel, his camera takes on an increasingly objective position and his perspective is expanding in addition to his solipsist protagonist (an evolution that would reach his peak in “love on the go Extension of time to one of “love on the go”, where for the first time Truffaut leaves Doinel behind for an extended time to time to an independent of his independent of its observation).
Unlike Truffaut, Doinel does not Seem Particularly Ambitious – in “The chair Kisses,” he stumbles through a series of Odd Jobs (Including, in a storyline that mixes whimsy and poignancy in a manner that Peter Bogdanovich Hise His His His His His His His His His His His His His His His His His. stint as a private detective), and getting married in “bed and board” (1970) does not make heym any more committal about a profession. It is not until the last “love on the run” that he does well on his goal of becoming a novelist, and it is difficult to get a sense of whether he is a particularly good or popular.
Truffaut, on the other hand, was an internationally renowned director with eight functions under his belt when he was Doinel’s age in “Love on the run”, so the one-to-one relationship between writers and character that marked “the 400 strokes” has clearly eroded over time. Which does not say that the autobiographical impulse was completely gone when Truffaut decided to end the series; In fact, the director brings his personal experience to the story in a way that beautifully connects the last movie to the first and gives Doinel a long delayed moment of epiphane, albeit a subtle.
While “stolen kisses” show Doinel’s developing relationship with the woman he will eventually get married, and “bed and board” shows his attempts to escape from that marriage – and further attempts to return to it – “Love on the run” forces his restless hero and the audience looking at him to slow down and take stock. It is filled with flashbacks to scenes from the other films, and it is in these that the subtle power of Truffaut’s experiment becomes most clear. When Doinel looks back on his life, his inability to appreciate what he has reveals to be the crucial problem in his adulthood – and an ongoing source of pain for the women he confesses to love.
The film’s most important flashback is urged by the return of a peripheral nature from “The 400 Blows”, the lover like a young Antoine witnesses who cables around Paris with his mother when he dives the school with a friend. This lover, Lucien, is only on the screen in “Stroke” for a few minutes, and we have long forgotten him when we come to his appearance in “Love on the run.” But when Lucien tells Doinel that his mother really loved him, it is the moment in the series where all the crystallizes effect that this revelation has on Doinel, which finally, after five films, slows down for self-reflection, it makes it clear that everything we have looked at has been linked to the character’s search for him.
The scene with the lover is clearly informed by Truffaut’s own discovery, after his mother’s death, of paper left that proved that she was more attached to her son than he ever perceived. In “Love on the run”, it serves as the catalyst for Doinel’s delayed awareness of his own limitations as an artist, a husband and a lover. Even in line with the series’ overall tone, this awareness is only incremental. “I would be lying if I said Antoine Doinel succeeded with his transformation into an adult,” said Truffaut about the film, and the bitter -sweet post that remains after the film’s conclusion comes from the open question of whether Doinel will really change his behavior at all.
For Truffaut, the character was steadily less a way of elaborating autobiographical impulses than an independent, organic creation that melted personal expression with a different set of wishes: the wishes Truffaut Jean-Pierre Léaud-fan must see Jean-Pierre Léaud to do certain things on the camera that may not have been related. The quality of the summary that defines “Love on the run” makes it clear that Truffaut believed that the series had gone its way, although one wonders if Doinel might have returned if a brain tumor did not claim that the director’s life in 1984.
“The Adventures of Antoine Doinel”, an indispensable new 4K UHD -boxed set from Criterioncontextualizes all five films in Truffaut’s filmography and reveals some surprising facts about the director’s relationship with the series – archive interviews show, for example, that he does not seem to have much cares about “love on the go”, which is shocking considering the emotional impact that the movie has when it is watched as part of a marathon with the other films. If there was ever proof that directors are the least reliable commentators on their own films (an observation made something ironic of Truffaut’s own past as critics), this is.
It has never been a better way to consume all five films together than Criterion Collection, which is improved on the label’s previous Doinel editions with new 4K restorations of the films taken from their original negative. The transmitters are delicious, the hours with supplements pure gold for Truffaut fans. And the films themselves both feel like time capsules that could not have existed in any other era and Like the timeless, lasting classics as they are. Doinel can be a disappointed identification figure – even Truffaut does not seem to have much cares about him when he became an adult – but as a means of truffs on love, art, freedom, containment, work and class he is always riveting.
“The Adventures of Antoine Doinel” will be released on 4K UHD through criterion on July 15.
