The 400 Blows

François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (French: Les Quatre Cents Coups) opens the five-film Antoine Doinel cycle he would extend across two decades, through the short Antoine et Colette (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979). He shot it in Paris in late 1958, at twenty-six, and it won him the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival the following May.

Jean-Pierre Léaud was fourteen when he was cast. He went on to become one of the central faces of the French New Wave, working repeatedly with Truffaut, Godard, Eustache, Rivette and others, and he remained Truffaut's onscreen alter ego for the whole Doinel cycle. The screenplay is largely autobiographical, drawing directly on Truffaut's own difficult adolescence and the time he spent in a juvenile detention centre after running away from home. Henri Decaë, the New Wave's foundational cameraman, shot it in CinemaScope on early 35mm anamorphic stock.

Together with Godard's Breathless the following year, it launched the French New Wave, and it now belongs to the canon of postwar European cinema. Sight & Sound returned it to its Greatest Films of All Time list in 2022. Its use of the freeze-frame became one of the most imitated gestures of late-twentieth-century cinema, quoted directly in films as different as Stand by Me and Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida.