The | 400 Blows

The discovery of Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel is one of the great miracles of casting. Truffaut saw an advertisement looking for a boy between 12 and 14. Léaud walked in, pale, with nervous eyes and a defiance that bordered on insolence. Truffaut saw himself. Léaud wasn't just acting; he was channeling the director's own miserable childhood. Truffaut had been a runaway, a delinquent, a child abandoned by his parents to the cruel institutions of postwar France. The 400 Blows is, essentially, a confession.

: The story captures the necessary, often painful "life cycle to maturity" and the act of "busting out" from others' expectations [8]. the 400 blows

This paper examines ( ), the seminal directorial debut of François Truffaut and a foundational work of the French New Wave ( Nouvellecap N o u v e l l e Vaguecap V a g u e Introduction: A New Cinematic Language The film's title, a transliteration of the French idiom fairef a i r e quatreq u a t r e centsc e n t s coupsc o u p s The discovery of Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel