OK. Now, take a look at this quote from Truffaut in a 1966 interview:
"Before I met Rossellini, I wanted to make films of course, but it seemed impossible. A dream. He made it all seem easy. He has a powerful gift for simplification. He told me, it isn't hard to write a screenplay, you only have to look at the reality around you...The 400 Blows owes a great deal to Rossellini...[H]e showed me that things must be close to life."
Think about this quote and respond to it, using at least one scene from The 400 Blows. Feel free to include evidence from Rome Open City to back up any statements you make regarding Rossellini's filmmaking style. Write at least 3 meaty paragraphs (be sure to write cinematically) and use at least one quote from the Marilyn Fabe essay. Also, tell me your favorite scene and why (cinematically).
Due Wednesday, May 2.
This quote is very true and takes a lot of the pressure away from filmmaking and screenwriting. Basically, write what’s around you, write based off your experiences, and write what you feel. All movies are based off reality to a certain extent. You just need to know how to take life and manipulate it to become a movie. This is very evident in The 400 Blows and Rome Open City. The 400 Blows is almost an autobiography of his life and he took direct examples from his childhood and made it a film. Rome Open City is inspired by the Nazi occupation of Italy and the hardships everyone faced. These movies just took real events and turned them into movies. The neorealism and French New Wave movements also apply to this quote. Both Truffaut and Rossellini were sick of ‘typical’ movies and their shallow surface and unrealistic characters and situations. Movies like The Awful Truth are an example. Everything was polished and it looked like a dream world where everything turns out happy in the end. The neorealism and French New Wave movements changed this. They were personal films that were usually written by the director and reflected their own personal styles and themes, not templates like in Hollywood. These films were made to be artistic and meaningful; the Marilyn Fabe essay states that ‘cinema too was a language, “a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in a contemporary essay or novel.”’ These films used more handheld camera and were shot on location and more experimental and it was not trying to hid the fact that the audience was watching a film (wipe in effect and quick pans are examples). This gave the movies a more authentic and real look and feel to them. The quote says that “…things must be close to life” and they were.
ReplyDeleteThe 400 Blows successfully manage to portray the hardships that Truffaut went through in real life and Antoine in the movie. In the Marilyn Fabe essay, it mentions how “Antoine Doinel, the protagonist of The 400 Blows (played by Truffaut look-alike Jean Pierre Leaud), has the same life history as Truffaut.” Truffaut made this film highly personal and it shows. I am using the scene when Antoine is shown sleeping in the hallway shortly after discovering his mother’s affair. The hallway is very dark, he sleeps in a sleeping bag, shot at a high angle, but the shot is balanced. The darkness represents how he feels ignored and neglected by his parents. They usually ignore him and focus on themselves primarily and the mother is only nice to him so he doesn’t tell his step-dad about her affair. The high angle represents his lack of power when dealing with his parents, they can do what they want with him and he has no control. The fact that he sleeps in a sleeping bag, not a real bed or in a real room implies how much he means to his parents. He is put away in a metaphorical closet with the coats and shoes and brought out when needed or wanted. The shot is balanced despite all this and it shows how Antoine is at peace in the hallway. He doesn’t seem to mind it. It is his safe zone almost and he is left alone by his parents when in it. When the dad opens the door, light floods over him and he pretends to be asleep. This represents how he deceives his parents, because he lies about his mother dying and he doesn’t tell his step-dad about his mother’s affair. This doesn’t make him the bad guy, but he’s helpless to do otherwise. The teachers don’t like him so he lied to get away with playing hooky, he doesn’t want to ruin his parents’ marriage, and he seems to get in trouble no matter what he does. The darkness of the hallway represents his loneliness. His loneliness and innocence is emphasized when his mother comes home late and the camera moves closer to Antoine. He is quite large on screen and has this innocent and helpless expression on his face. His parents argue, focus on themselves, and leave him in the metaphorical closet.
Rome Open City is just as effective in portraying hardships, but not of Truffaut, but of the Italian people. One scene that comes to mind when supporting this claim is the scene when the Nazis and Fascists search the apartment building. When Don Pietro is in the building, he is shot with a handheld camera and it is very shaky and unstable and this represents the chaos surrounding him and Italy as a country. The Fascists and Nazis, at one point in the scene, were conversing in a dark hallway and this represents the chaos and evil they are causing Italy and its’ people. There is a shot of Romoletto standing in a ruined part of the building with bricks around him. This is a broken place and it represents the broken hopes of Italians due to the Nazi and Fascist take over. The building was once new and grand, just like Italy, but this take over is taking a mental and emotional toll as well as a physical toll on it and its’ people. This seems to portray this time in history accurately and is very close to life.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite scene in The 400 Blows is the scene when Antoine is in prison when he tries to return the typewriter he stole and is put in a cage/ cell with an older man who did something. I like this scene because it reveals a lot about Antoine. He is shot from outside the cage/ cell and this shows not just his physical entrapment but his mental and emotional entrapment. The neglect he received from his parents obviously shaped him and he is going to deal with self-esteem issues and not going to value himself very much. He is small on screen as well and this represents his lack of self-worth and power. He doesn’t like himself that much because he doesn’t feel loved by his parents. He can’t make them love him and they eventually give him up to the government. What I liked most about this scene were the shots from his POV and everyone else seemed to be behind bars, especially the shot when he views Paris and it appears behind bars. Paris (and France) and entrapped by war and the threat of Nazi Germany during this time and it was still recovering from WW2 as well. This scene makes me happy in the sense that Antoine’s life is based off Truffaut’s life and Truffaut eventually makes a good life for himself and becomes a great director (auteur).
It is evident from the style of the 400 Blows that Truffaut was inspired by Rossellini's style. With his Neorealistic Trilogy Rossellini helped invent and define the neorealist style, which rejected conventional cinematic storytelling in pursuit of brutal, beautiful honesty. Rome Open City and the others in the Neorealistic Trilogy depicted life free of the phony grandeur and sappiness of conventional cinema of the time. The characters were honest and flawed, the settings were real, the actors were unprofessional, and the tones were natural. Rossellini did not force morals, personal opinions or happy endings on viewers; he instead left his films open-ended and ambiguous to reflect life's peculiarity.
ReplyDeleteWith this in mind, it is immediately evident that Rossellini's style influenced Truffaut's. The 400 Blows is characterized by many of these qualities - the actors are unprofessional, the characters are all flawed, and the tone is ambiguous in its portrayal of troubled youth. As Rossellini instructed Truffaut, the 400 Blows is Truffaut "[looking] at the reality" around him - specifically, his upbringing. The ending of the 400 Blows in particular is clearly influenced by Rome Open City - both are ambiguous in the tone of the ending scene. In the final scene of the 400 Blows, Antoine has escaped reform school and has finally made it to the sea. The film ends with a frozen close up of Antoine's face. The ending can be read in two ways - it can be seen in a positive light as the beginning of Antoine's newfound freedom or in a negative light as Antoine in the face of the dangers of the world.
My favorite scene in the 400 Blows is the scene in which Antoine fully discloses the events of his life to the psychiatrist. I find myself profoundly affected by the loss of innocence, as a cinematic trope as well as real life, and that scene broke my heart. I was in love with Antoine as a character, finding his youthful tomfoolery to be incredibly charming and relatable (I myself liked to stir trouble as a kid). When Antoine finally opened up, however, I was reminded of the heartbreaking approach children have to perversion. Antoine detailing a story of a near-intimate encounter with a prostitute reminded me of the intense pressure children have to grow up. The 400 Blows established Antoine as a profoundly believable character, and his psychiatric exam crystallized his realness.
The 400 Blows absolutely reflects the Italian Neo-realist style that Rossellini helped to create. It does this by using some of the style's most recognizable techniques -- non-professional actors (all of the child actors in the film), filming on location in Paris, and most of the character are of the working class. As well, the film resembles Neo-realist films in that it "is filled with long passages in which images rather than words tell us everything we need to know." (Marilyn Fabe)
ReplyDeleteOne scene that I felt reflected Rossellini's Neo-realist style in The 400 Blows appears at 1:33:00. In this scene, Antoine is being asked questions by an unseen psychiatrist at the juvenile detention center that he's held at during the final act of the film. Although this isn't made explicit in the film, this exchange was completely improvised, and this was only the second film of Jean-Pierre Léaud, the actor playing Antoine. The improvisational nature of the scene and the use of fairly nonprofessional actors reinforces the use of the Neo-realist style.
My favorite scene in the film is when Antoine is in the spinning carnival ride. I love the alternating shots between Antoine joyfully lying back and trying to move upwards on the ride, and of the people outside of the ride looking onto the people on the ride that flashes by the viewer at increasingly rapid speeds. I thought this scene presented a poignant moment of childlike happiness and wonder (as do many other scenes in the film), as well as providing a strangely surreal and hallucinatory moment to a film that was otherwise grounded in realism.
Truffaut was influenced by Rossellini’s ideals of realism and personal experience being presented in a film as well as the manner of this presentation. Much like Rossellini’s Rome Open City, 400 Blows was a rejection of popular cinema, a film produced independently and according to the vision of the auteur. Because of this, both films had a very low production budget and were forced to make concessions that would allow them to be more cheaply made. This included the use of amateur actors, the use of black-and-white film, the use of the handheld camera, shooting on scene, etc. However, this independent production would also allow for the subversion of some established cinematic conventions.
ReplyDeleteRome Open City and 400 Blows are elegies to events in the lives of the their directors, tales of rebels fighting against the cruel indifference of some greater power, simultaneously mournful and hopeful. They begin in the crowded tenements of Italy/France, a sense of realism lent by the on-scene shooting. Throughout each film , the directors make use of closed and open space to show their characters to be imprisoned by the force against which they are fighting. The mis-en-scene of the apartments is claustrophobic, undermining any sense of hominess. Later on, both protagonists are captured. The priest is kept in a room whose dimensions are rarely defined by the camera, making the area feel even more enclosed than it really is. Antoine’s imprisonment is famously defined by shots from the other side of a gate, the wires imitating a restrictive noose around his neck. Both film end with a break from this closed frame, as the priest is executed in an open field and Antoine runs to a vastly empty beach. This open frame, though bittersweet in what is presents, is a break from the claustrophobia previously established and ends the films with hopeful notes.
My favorite part of the film is the paddy wagon scene. It takes place after Antoine’s carefree fun comes to an abrupt end when he’s caught returning a typewriter. In the absence of any sort of real parental figures he’s allowed to do as pleases and in a way the viewer is led to envy him. However, this scene seems to express how utterly forlorn he feels with the absence of anyone to care for him. The scene is at night, and lights of the stores shine through the dark. A shaky camera destabilizes the viewer and makes us empathize with Antoine’s plight. He’s silhouetted against the wagon in a way that brings the tear running down his cheek in and out of sight in a way that’s profoundly moving.