Kristi McKim is the Charles S. Jeffrey Geiger and R. Rutsky New York: W. Norton, , Thereafter, every pleasant thing that happened in my life I owed to him.
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, , xix. Let me steal a typewriter from my dad's office and assemble my thoughts. That's like being thrown out of a comedy club for heckling one weekend, then winning the open-mic competition the next. Upon its release in the United States a few months later, the New York Times ' Bosley Crowther said it "brilliantly and strikingly reveals the explosion of a fresh creative talent in the directorial field" and called it "a small masterpiece.
It's the kind of movie that other filmmakers name as one of their favorites, and it appears regularly on "best foreign films" lists including 29 on Empire Magazine 's countdown. We cannot change the past. Actually, Jules and Jim is a better representation of many of the New Wave's stylistic touches: freeze-frames, zooms, jump cuts, breaking the fourth wall, and so forth.
The Blows doesn't have much of that. What makes it New Wave-y is that it's so deeply personal. Annette Insdorf writes :. Like the protagonist of his film, Truffaut was born to an unwed mother, adopted but never particularly loved by his stepfather, and generally neglected throughout his youth.
He regularly skipped school and found comfort in the cinema. As a teen, he found a mentor in the critic Andre Bazin, and later dedicated The Blows to him.
Together, Bazin and Truffaut originated the "auteur theory," which held that, while dozens of people are involved in producing a film, it is ultimately the director and the director alone whose creative vision is reflected in it. This boy actor improvised much of the famous scene where Antoine, now locked in a reformatory, is grilled by a child psychiatrist. The camera is focused constantly on Antoine in a series of time-lapses — with no reaction shots or questions in voiceover.
Allegedly, an actress signed to play the psychiatrist but failed to show up on the day. Antoine reveals how his mother first planned to abort him and relented only when his grandmother intervened. As Richard Neupert describes it,. Yet, soon afterward he mentions that he robbed his grandmother occasionally since she was old and did not need much money. Suddenly, the audience is faced with recalibrating their opinion of this thankless little boy who robs the older woman to whom he owes his life.
Allowing a victimised child to be less than wholly sympathetic — in ways that only a real-life child could ever be — Truffaut consolidates The Blows as an act of rebellion. It is not just Antoine who is a rebel, or Truffaut on whose early life the film is based. It is a crime, perpetrated according to certain rules… [and] set to images by a man who lacks the intelligence to be a cynic, who is too corrupt to be sincere, too pretentious and solemn to be simple, Jean Delannoy.
Never a man to grovel or eat his words, Truffaut further ridiculed the film in his short Les Mistons The Brats. His mother Claire Maurier , who gave birth to Antoine after an unwanted pregnancy, spends as much time away from home as she can.
When she's with her son, she has difficulty controlling her impatience with him. Neither parent seems to care much about what happens to Antoine. To them, he's an inconvenience who cannot be ignored. When something goes wrong at school, they immediately adopt the teachers' position without listening to Antoine's perspective. One day when he gets in trouble, he deduces that it would be better to run away than go home.
By the end of The Blows , Antoine is a juvenile delinquent. He has stolen a typewriter from his father's office he is caught not when he steals it but when he foolishly tries to return it , been arrested by the police, and escaped from reform school.
Antoine's life could have taken a turn for the better at any time had someone shown an interest in him - his mother, his father, or a teacher. But he is a victim of his circumstances, which are framed by neglect. Antoine gains no respite at home or in school. In fact, the only time he seems to be at peace is when he's in a movie theater, free to escape to another world for a finite period of time. The Blows is a portrait of innocence lost, as Truffaut is careful to point out.
One scene in particular highlights this. We are treated to an extended series of shots of dozens of children gleefully watching a puppet show. Many of their faces are alight with innocent excitement.
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