The 400 Blows: Cultivating Empathy and Whitewashing History
François Truffaut’s tribute to the films of Imperial France
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In the introduction to his collected essays on the world’s great movies, Roger Ebert claims that of all the arts, “movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people” (11). On that basis, we should truly feel each other’s pain; our society is immersed in film like few others.
Curious then, that hatefulness and spite seem everywhere to prevail; social media, the national press, and elected officials are daily upping the ante for inflammatory speech.
It is a troubling state of affairs, and our broad cultural investment in film has apparently done little to mitigate the public bile. It seems that, contrary to Ebert, watching movies and thereby suspending your sense of self and investing your consciousness in the experiences of others is no great recipe for empathy. In fact, it seems entirely possible that no such balm exists.
Maybe Roger Ebert is wrong about the connection between empathy and film simply because it is impossible to really experience what someone else is feeling. Perhaps his reviews tell us more about him than they do about movies or human community.
Maybe, at bottom, we are all truly alone.
As it happens, overcoming loneliness is the principle theme of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.
Synopsis
The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups 1959) is a largely autobiographical account of the childhood of its director — François Truffaut. Antoine Doinel, the film’s protagonist and Truffaut’s avatar, is a young adolescent living in Paris. He is bright but misunderstood; in the film’s first scene, a classmate hands him a pin-up during lecture, and Antoine pays the price. He is made to stand in a corner, where he defaces the classroom wall with a bit of French verse adapted to reflect the injustice of his punishment. Once more, he catches the ire of his teacher and is given an extra writing assignment to do at home.
That writing entails trouble is a recurring theme in The 400 Blows. After playing hooky, Antoine fails to forge an adequate parental excuse to give to his teacher. His authorial failure lands him in hot-water both at home and at school, and he briefly runs away, spending the night in a local factory.
Additionally, Antoine adores Balzac, and, after reconciling with his parents, he paraphrases the great novelist for a school assignment. He is so pleased with his work that he lights a candle for Balzac behind a curtained cubby-hole above his bed and nearly burns down his family’s cramped walk-up.
The fire foreshadows more trouble for Antoine; his essay is not received as homage but as plagiarism, which results in his expulsion from school. He then runs away once more, and is ultimately expelled from his own family after stealing his father’s prized typewriter to pawn. For Truffaut, who not only directed but also co-wrote The 400 Blows, writing and its implements are clearly both intoxicating and dangerous.
Antoine’s truancy and repeated flights reflect his chaotic home life. His mother is absorbed in an affair with a coworker and has little time for Antoine. She has, in the past, sent him away to live with his grandparents, and one night he overhears her complaining about his presence in the house.
His step-father is also neglectful; he is friendly enough with the boy, but has little patience for the inconveniences of raising him. Antoine’s parents, however, are not wholly cruel. Instead, they show him just enough warmth to make him feel that their pervasive neglect is his own fault. The goodbye note he writes them the first time he runs away promises his eventual return, after he has made a living for himself . Antoine, we learn, does not wish to burden them further. It is not a cry for pity, but an honest estimation of his own failures as a son. It is a devastating moment, and yet another example of how writing is shrouded in danger in The 400 Blows.
Needless to say, Antoine has little connection with either of his parents, and his alienation at home conditions him to feel alienated everywhere.
His loneliness is not just felt, either. Following his theft of the typewriter, his parents surrender their rights to him and send him to a juvenile detention camp, where he faces a future as either a laborer or a soldier. After writing his step-father to expose his mother’s affair (and therefore once more wielding the volatile magic of writing), Antoine’s mother visits him one last time to finally disown him.
At 14, Antoine’s future appears bleak, indeed.
In the film’s closing moments, however, he steals away through a hole in the camp’s fence and escapes to the sea, which he has always wanted to see. A freeze-frame of Antoine staring directly into the camera closes the movie — it is one of the most influential shots in the history of motion pictures.
Ebert’s Review: Escaping Loneliness at the Movies
Ebert noticed something that didn’t register fully with me as I watched The 400 Blows: Antoine, Truffaut’s alter-ego, spends a lot of time at the movies.
On three occasions we see Antoine absorbed in film — the last time with his parents, following his misfortune with the candle. He is closer with them during this outing than at any other time in the movie; that they clearly enjoy his company at the movies more than at home is the source of their fleeting bond.
According to Ebert, Truffaut repeatedly claimed that the cinema saved his life (31). Accordingly, his movies, including The 400 Blows, reference the redeeming power of film frequently.
Truffaut was a young truant himself, born to neglectful parents, but he discovered something in film that connected him to others. He also found in director André Bazin a mentor and friend — someone who shared his enthusiasm for movies, someone who felt what he felt.
Truffaut related perfectly to Bazin and to the cinema that made that connection possible. It is a case where the medium itself, rather than the vicarious experiences that movies provide, forged understanding between people. The harmony of Truffaut and Bazin’s friendship reflects the power of film to awaken empathy, though not in the way that Ebert describes. Empathy is real, it seems, but is watching a movie enough to ignite it?
Truffaut: Writer, Director, Star
Truffaut was a pioneer of Auteur Theory — the notion that a film’s director is its true star and author. That mentality affected both how Truffaut approached his work and how audiences receive his films.
Throughout The 400 Blows, for example, Truffaut’s camera is always moving. Hardly a frame goes by without a visible reminder of the director’s presence; even as the opening credits roll, Truffaut’s camera travels down a Paris street, bouncing in rhythm with the vehicle it is mounted to, drawing ever closer to the Eiffel Tower. Because of this perpetual motion, we never quite suspend our disbelief; instead, we are constantly reminded that Antoine’s story is really Truffaut’s.
These reminders serve an important purpose. Ebert asserts that every moment in The 400 Blows contributes to “the impact of the final shot (28),” the famous freeze-frame of Antoine staring ambiguously into the camera. Since Truffaut continually insinuates that Antoine is his doppelgänger, it is plain that Antoine’s peek into the camera is Truffaut’s confrontation with himself.
Just as Dr. Bowman, in 2001, encounters his future self in preface to an evolutionary leap, Antoine encounters his future in the person of the film’s director, François Truffaut.
The distinction between autobiography and fiction dissolves here, and each point of identification we have made with fictional Antoine transfers to flesh and blood Truffaut. The shot demonstrates that despite the dangers of writing he experienced as a youth, Truffaut came to master that arcane art as a director.
It is perhaps the most persuasive case in the history of film for the power of movies to evoke empathy, for it quickens a sense of shared experience in viewers not just with a character, but with a real human being.
We have all felt lonely, we have all been hurt by those whom we love. We therefore see ourselves in Antoine, and are fully heartbroken when, in the final frame, Truffaut announces, “he was me all along.”
Can movies exercise your empathy? If you’re asking me, the answer is emphatically yes.
Criticism: The Fifth Republic
Ever heard of Frantz Fanon? He was a French psychiatrist, cultural critic, and veteran of WWII. He witnessed first-hand the brutality of the French-Vichy Navy’s occupation of his native Martinique, and was deeply wounded by the abuses suffered by his countrymen at the hands of the French.
After fleeing the island, Fanon joined de Gaulle’s Free French Forces and fought in the battles of Alsace. With Allied victory in hand and French troops set to cross the Rhine, Fanon’s regiment was purged of all non-white soldiers.
According to Fanon’s biographer, this command decision is “described in official documents as the ‘whitening’ (blanchiment) of the division” (Macey 98). Fanon and his comrades correctly interpreted their orders “as a ploy designed to deny them the military glory of crossing the Rhine” (Macey 97–98).
Essentially, Fanon was made to feel throughout the war like cannon fodder for a people who denied his humanity on the basis of race.
Following the war, Fanon came to see the “whitening” of his division as emblematic of French culture as a whole: “The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis,” he writes, “the whiter he will become” (181). Fanon felt that France, in attempting to annihilate the cultures of the conquered, had distorted its own identity, too. The result is that French identity is “constituted by contrast with black and brown skinned peoples” (Richter 1760), which therefore renders its entire culture and all its products racist.
So what does any of that have to do with The 400 Blows? Truffaut’s film was released in France in 1959, one year after the inauguration of the Fifth Republic, France’s current system of government. The new regime’s express mandate was to put down the Algerian Revolution and resume imperial control of the territory (Fanon once more sided with the victors, fighting this time against France alongside the Algerians).
The 400 Blows is in some ways a piece of colonialist propaganda; it features a whitened Paris — there are no people of color captured on film anywhere in the city, just as no French soldiers of color were photographed crossing the Rhine. It also focuses exclusively on ‘white people’s problems’ in a moment when France was slaughtering Berbers in the name of unity.
One scene in particular illustrates the stark differences between continental France and its Algerian colony: while killing time during one of his school absences, Antoine attends a puppet show. Hundreds of happy white children appear in the scene, laughing and enthralled.
As that scene was being filmed, French soldiers were moving through Algerian neighborhoods, terrifying Berber children as they marched. It is a disturbing contrast, indeed.
While I doubt that revered French film director, Jean Renoir, would agree with these observations, he did say something telling: “The 400 Blows is really a portrait of France” (Neupert 182). That is true, and it is important that we remember to label Truffaut’s portrait ‘Imperial France.’
None of this should be construed to mean that there is no room for personal stories such as The 400 Blows. Truffaut’s filmography, however, consists of little else.
The normative impact of that fact cannot be overstated:
For Truffaut, the personal experiences of individual Frenchmen were the only things worth considering, even as French colonies waged war for freedom against the Fifth Republic.
Leftist critics in France at the time found Truffaut deplorable; many of them went so far as to label him a fascist. To be fair, Truffaut was a signatory of the Manifesto of the 121, which affirmed the cause of Algerian revolutionaries as “the cause of all free men.”
He failed however, to make that cause his own; he made four more “Antoine” films after The 400 Blows, but never dealt explicitly with France’s Imperial aspirations. Instead, he portrayed France as a place where dreams come true for lost children, so long as they’re white.
What’s more, if Fanon was right, then Imperial France was incapable of purging racism from its culture, and The 400 Blows therefore bears the taint of its nation.
To this day, race is a sore subject in France — in fact, France removed race as an identity marker from its constitution in 2018. Only the French exist in France now; whether or not this is merely France’s latest attempt to “whiten” its culture remains to be seen.
The Verdict
If we are judging the greatness of a film by the empathy it produces, then on some level The 400 Blows is great, because it can be viewed through a lens that produces a great deal of empathy.
Antoine blames himself for the neglect of his parents; he is lonely and desperate, and we feel the sting. He will one day triumph, but perhaps only Truffaut knows that in the end. The 400 Blows rattled my emotions throughout, and I stand by that experience.
Fanon’s criticism, however, weighs heavily on my conscience. I doubt that he would think The 400 Blows a great conduit of empathy, and there are certainly many people who would agree with him, for good reason.
What comes into question here is the notion of “greatness” that Ebert seems to advocate. For Ebert, “greatness” is an objective, universal marker or experience. He is not wholly wrong — Truffaut’s methods represent an objective advance in film craft, and The 400 Blows is objectively great for that reason.
It is too much to expect, however, that every filmgoer will be moved to empathy by Truffaut’s story, especially since we know how people mistreated by France — like Frantz Fanon — view French culture.
Fanon’s analysis pertains to America, too; our persistent national racism stains our culture and therefore our art, including our films.
German philosopher Theodor Adorno once said that “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.” It is barbaric because our poetry did nothing to stop Auschwitz, and here we are writing it again instead of confronting the next holocaust.
The 400 Blows is a moving experience, but it may also be “poetry after Auschwitz,” or more accurately, Algeria. The cinema saved Truffaut’s life, but he had little time for lives imperiled by the nation whose films delivered him.
The 400 Blows is therefore a complicated experience; it is emotionally stirring, but it is also emblematic of national transgression. It raises our empathy for impoverished and wayward children and for Truffaut, but its complicity in the “whitening” of France and its territories serves to verify Fanon’s assertions about the evils of western culture.
To my way of thinking, The 400 Blows is too complex an artifact for Ebert’s thumb reviews or 4 star evaluation system. That complexity should inspire critical thinking, discussion, and debate about the meaning of greatness and its possibility in societies like ours — societies plagued by original sin.
Perhaps the greatness of The 400 Blows is found just there, in its power to make us reconsider our assumptions about what makes for great films and, more importantly, great nations.
Sources:
Ebert, Roger. The Great Movies, Broadway Books, 2003.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, Grove Press Inc., 1967.
Neupert, Richard John. A History of the French New Wave Cinema, University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. Verso, 2012.
Richter, David H. “Postcolonialism and Ethnic Studies.” The Critical Tradition, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.
