Jean-Pierre Léaud
Henri Decaë, photo
François Truffaut
1959
Antoine Doinel boosted a machine
à écrire from his adoptive father's
office, the only one there was, and
sped with it, hunched over in strides
that burst like goblets on the stony
stair to the lunchtime street, his
classmate waiting anxiously: to shock
a flock of pigeons still exploding from
a gutter as he comes to us in flight.
Until its final frame, for which the
shot above is a preparation - like
David Lean's speck in the desert dis-
tance for Omar Sharif - the dominant
signature of this film is that of the
hurry. Yet beneath this pace a dialectic
struggle between expulsion and retention,
effacement and treasuring is continuous
and elegantly momentous, on the wearing
and bearing of time. Now, in moments,
the rhetorical machine will stop, and
there it will be.
Les Quatre Cents Coups
Les Films du Carrosse©
But the machine will start up again.
ReplyDelete(Nice link.)
In the old Grove Press edition of the original screenplay (noting the recent passing of Grove's very generous publisher), the "theft" scene is beautifully phased in still photographs, which ring out with great clarity in the DVD from USA's "Criterion." I don't believe the extraordinary eruption we see here is the least bit artificial; it feels more explosive, more eloquent than the notorious bomb squad sequence in the recent American movie of some note, "The Hurt Locker." And, to think so much of this was done, hand-held before steadi-cam, and in cinemascope, is to put one in mind of Ginger Rodgers' confession that she didn't really do anything better than Fred Astaire, but that she did it in high heels and backwards.
ReplyDeleteIn the matter of François Truffaut, it simply feels to me that critical appreciation flows from an original awe, time and again, at the sympathy of the original vision.