COMMENTS:

Les Quatres cents coups (THE 400 BLOWS) ends with what has since been canonized as the most famous freeze-frame in film history. It has also been taken up as a definitive moment of the French New Wave and thus finds itself endlessly re-examined and re-performed by myriad critics and practioners. And as a nineteen year-old in film school, it appeared to me as a revelation. The protagonist, Antoine Doinel, turns to the camera and both he and his story are abruptly suspended. In this moment, with the young Antoine's face frozen in place, starled by life's intrusion upon the remaining innocence of his troubled childhood, both an aesthetic and emotional principle are fermented, perfectly realized in this freeze-frame and an optical zoom that lives on as the central point of fascination for filmmakers. It is a beacon they search for, a signpost that guides them. It is personal, not political, and for that reason it is absolutely human. Style and emotional substance collapse upon a grainy, black and white celluloid frame as Truffaut shocks us into a moment of contemplation divorced from both the complexity of the moving image and the future of the young boy.

[ By Mike Baker • November 11, 2004 ]