Two scenes in The 400 Blows stand out for their use of the jump cut, although jump cutting is used throughout the film. The jump cut was brought into the mainstream by the films of the New Wave. It warns viewers that they are watching a film and to beware of being manipulated. They have accepted the notion that discontinuity can be used to portray a less stable view of society or personality or that it can be accepted as a warning. Since the New Wave, the jump cut has simply become another editing device accepted by the viewing audience. In the past, it was thought that the jump cut would destroy the experience. This disruption can help the film experience or harm it. The jump cut asks viewers to tolerate the admission that we are watching a film or to temporarily suspend belief in the film. In both cases, the jump cut requires the viewer to broaden the band of acceptance to enter the screen time being presented or the sense of dramatic time portrayed. This result can be used to suggest instability or lack of importance. Not only does the jump cut remind viewers that they are watching a film, it is also jarring. Whether the two shots recognize a change in direction, focus on an unexpected action, or simply don't show the action in one shot that prepares the viewer for the content of the next shot, the result of the jump cut is to focus on discontinuity. The jump cut itself is nothing more than the joining of two noncontinu-ous shots. In addition, the jump cut was used to challenge continuity editing and all that it implied. How did the stylistic equivalents of the personal story translate into editing choices? As already mentioned, the moving camera was used to avoid editing. The film is a tribute to the spirit and hope of being young, an entirely appropriate theme for the first film of the New Wave. Truffaut illustrated a life of spirit and suggested that challenging authority is not only moral, but it is also necessary for avoiding tragedy. Antoine does end up in a juvenile detention center, but when he runs away, it is as rebellious as all of his other actions. The story may sound like a tragedy that inevitably will lead to a bad end, but it is not. The adult world is very unappealing to Antoine, and his clashes at home and at school lead him to reject authority and his parents. The rebellious child is unable to stay out of trouble at home or in school. The 400 Blows is the story of Antoine Doinel, a young boy in search of a childhood he never had. It was the nature of the story, though, that gave Truffaut the opportunity to make a personal statement. The synchronous sound recorded on location gives the film an intimacy and immediateness only available in cinema verite. In his first film, The 400 Blows, Truffaut set out to respect Bazin's idea that moving the camera rather than fragmenting a scene was the essence of discovery and the source of art in film.2 The opening and the closing of the film are both made up of a series of moving shots, featuring the beginning of Paris, the Eiffel Tower,3 and later the lead character running away from a juvenile detention center. What they proposed in their own work was a personal style and personal stories-characteristics that became the hallmarks of the New Wave. Although he admired Renoir enormously, Truffaut and his young colleagues were critical of the French film establishment.1 They criticized Claude Autant-Lara and Rene Clement for being too literary in their screen stories and not descriptive enough in their style. These critics and future filmmakers wrote about Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, Anthony Mann, and Nicholas Ray-all Hollywood filmmakers. Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Rivette were all key figures, and it was Truffaut who wrote the important article "Les Politiques des Auteurs," which heralded the director as the key creative person in the making of a film. What developed in Paris in the post-war period was a film culture in which film critics and lovers of film moved toward becoming filmmakers themselves. The writing about film was cultural as well as theoretical, but the viewing of film was global, embracing film as part of popular culture as well as an artistic achievement. The New Wave began in 1959 with the consecutive releases of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, but in fact its seeds had developed ten years earlier in the writing of Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin and the film programming of Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque in Paris.
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