The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
François Truffaut · Les Quatre Cents Coups · a film in French · 1959 · about 99 minutes · dialogue by Marcel Moussy
Mode
Autobiographical first feature made on location; a chronicle of childhood that becomes a case history
Mythos
The unwanted child and the stepfather; the boy who goes into the world and is caught; the private altar that burns; the run to the edge of the land
Phase
A boy’s days in Paris, from the classroom and the flat through truancy, the police and the observation centre, to an escape and the shore
Presentation
Feature film, about 99 minutes, in French; black and white, anamorphic widescreen, mono sound much of it post-synchronised; real streets and flats, a boy unknown before it in the lead
Register
From classroom farce and the grumble of a small flat to a boy’s face in tears behind bars; one spare theme on the soundtrack
Scale
One boy, one family, a school, the police and a city
Governing Proposition
A boy is pushed, a little at a time, out of a family and a school that have no room for him and into the hands of the state, and at the end runs until there is no more land. The wager of the film is that a child is lost not through cruelty but through the ordinary selfishness of tired adults, that the institutions which receive him take a neglected boy for a delinquent one, and that a camera kept at his height and on his side can give the viewer his position rather than theirs.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in the streets. Under the credits the camera tracks through the streets of Paris toward the Eiffel Tower, and Jean Constantin’s theme plays over it, spare and grave. Before there is a boy there is the city he lives in, given a tenderness that the rest of the film will not always extend to the people in it.
Then the classroom: a pin-up calendar, ink, and lines that Antoine Doinel is set and never finishes. The schoolmaster, played by Guy Decomble, sees only disorder. Antoine is played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, a boy unknown before this film, and the camera keeps at his height and on his side. The comedy of the room is real, and it is the first notch of the descent.
François Truffaut was twenty-seven, and it is his first feature. He wrote it, with dialogue by Marcel Moussy, and produced it through his own company, Les Films du Carrosse, with SEDIF. Henri Decaë photographed it in black and white and anamorphic widescreen, in real streets and real flats; Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte cut it. It was shown in competition at Cannes in May 1959, where Truffaut won the prize for direction, and released in France in June. It is dedicated to André Bazin, who died as shooting began. The film judged here is that 1959 release, about 99 minutes; listings differ by a few minutes.
Movement II
Home is a small flat. Antoine sets the table, takes out the rubbish and sleeps in a sleeping bag by the door. His mother Gilberte, played by Claire Maurier, is young and had him unwanted; his stepfather Julien, played by Albert Rémy, is jokey, and then indifferent. Nobody is cruel. They are tired, there is not much money, and the boy is in the way. The film shows this almost wholly through what people do with their hands and their time, and lets the viewer draw the conclusion no adult in it draws.
Antoine skips school with his friend René, played by Patrick Auffay, and on a day of freedom in the city he sees his mother in the street, kissing a man who is not his stepfather. Later she is kind to him, the one time the film shows her so, and the kindness has a use: she needs his silence about her lover.
Back at school, his excuse to the schoolmaster is that his mother has died. It is the largest lie a child can tell, and it does not hold: his mother appears at the school, and the lie is exposed. His stepfather slaps him. Each step down is small and has a cause, and the cause is always that no adult has room for him.
Movement III
Antoine reads Balzac, and builds the writer a shrine with a candle burning before it. It is the one sacred thing in his life, and it is his own. The candle sets the shrine alight, and a boy’s reverence becomes one more offence. Elsewhere the family goes to the cinema together and drives home laughing in the car, and for a scene they are happy, which shows what was possible.
The middle of the film is a run of episodes, each fine. At the fair Antoine rides the rotor, a drum that spins until the riders are pressed flat against its wall, and he grins, held there by force and delighted. At a puppet show the camera turns from the stage to the children’s faces watching a fable. The gym master leads his class at a run through the streets, and the boys peel away behind him one by one, seen from high above.
These episodes bear on the theme, a child pinned by force, children watching a story, a column of boys escaping one by one, but none is a step the argument cannot do without, and they could be reordered without changing what the film says. The episodic form is honest to a child’s days, which go sideways as much as forward. It permits these scenes more than it requires them, and they are shot better than they are joined.
Movement IV
Antoine steals a typewriter to sell it, then tries to return it, and the return fails. It is the step from mischief to the police. The theft is clumsy and childish, and the state receives it as a crime.
At the police station he is held in a cell, behind bars like a cage. Then, at night, he is taken across the city in a police van. Paris goes by through the bars, the streets of the opening seen now from the other side, and the boy’s face is wet with tears. It is the first height of the film, and it is made of almost nothing: a moving vehicle, lights, and a child who does not speak.
From the classroom calendar to the van, every step has been small, and every one has been taken by the adults as much as by the boy. The film does not argue this. It shows the steps in order, at his height, and lets the viewer see what the school, the family and the police each see only in part: a neglected boy being made into a delinquent one.
Movement V
He is sent to an observation centre for young offenders. There he is interviewed by a psychologist who is never seen. The camera faces the boy, and the questions come from off the screen, about his mother, about sex, about his life, and he answers flatly. The facts come out without emphasis: that he was nearly not born, that he was raised by a grandmother. The viewer takes the questioner’s place, and the adults are reduced to a voice. It is the height of the film’s disclosure, and it has kept its force.
During a game of football he escapes, and runs. The camera tracks beside him in one long lateral movement, and he keeps running until he reaches the shore. He has never seen the sea. He goes down to it and takes a few steps into the water, as far as there is to go.
Then he turns and looks at the camera, and the image freezes on his face. Nothing is resolved: no capture, no rescue, no return. The freeze frame holds him at the edge of the land, with nowhere further to run and nothing decided for him, and the film ends there. It is the one built image of the film, the particular boy lifted into a figure, and it became one of the most imitated endings in cinema.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is necessary and simple: a boy pushed, a little at a time, from a family and a school that have no room for him into the hands of the state. Most scenes carry a step. The calendar and the lines he never finishes; the lie that his mother has died, which her arrival exposes and which licenses the stepfather’s slap; the candle that sets the Balzac shrine alight and turns reverence into an offence; the typewriter, stolen to sell and then returned, which is the step from mischief to the police. The subtractive test bites in the middle third. The rotor, the puppet show and the gym master’s run are fine and bear on the theme, but each could go without the argument failing. The episodic form permits them rather than requires them.
Score: 8.1 / 10
What the film brings into the open can be stated and holds: a child is lost not through cruelty but through the small, ordinary selfishness of adults who are tired, and the institutions that receive him treat a neglected boy as a delinquent one. The mother is no monster: young, she had him unwanted, and she is kind to him once, when she needs his silence about her lover. The stepfather is jokey and then indifferent; the school sees only disorder. The disclosure is made almost wholly through image and behaviour, the boy setting the table, taking out the rubbish, sleeping in a sleeping bag by the door. Its height is the interview at the observation centre. Held below the top because the parents’ own condition is seen from his height only.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is real and comes in a handful of places. The night ride in the police van, Paris going by through the bars and the boy’s face in tears, is the first height. The rotor at the fair, the drum spinning and the boy pressed flat against its wall and grinning, is pure physical exhilaration, and the camera shares it. The opening tracking shots of the streets and the Eiffel Tower under Constantin’s theme give the city a grave tenderness. The last run is the summit: the long lateral tracking shot, the arrival at the shore, a few steps into the water, the turn to the camera and the freeze. Between these the register is level by intention. Height is reached three or four times, and frequency counts.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The patterns are old and present: the unwanted child, a changeling with a stepfather and a mother who did not want him; the boy who goes into the world and is caught; the shrine to a writer as a private altar that burns; the run to the edge of the land, where there is nowhere further and a sea he has never seen. But the structure is evoked more than built. The film keeps everything particular and documentary, the actual Paris and the actual procedures of the reform institution, and the archetype lives mostly in the ending, where the sea and the freeze frame lift the particular boy into a figure. The fire and the cage carry symbolic weight without being made load-bearing. A well evoked myth, with one built image at the close.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the French studio cinema of the 1950s that Truffaut had attacked as a critic, the tradition of quality built on adapted novels and scripted dialogue, and behind it Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933) and Rossellini’s postwar films of children. The departure is real: a personal, autobiographical first feature shot in Paris streets and real flats with a small crew, an unknown boy in the lead, a loose episodic structure and an ending that refuses resolution. The stake was real too: a critic kept out of Cannes the year before staked his polemic, and money by way of his father-in-law’s company, on it. Held below the gate because its grammar is gentler than its claims; the larger formal swerve of that year is Breathless (9.3).
Score: 8.2 / 10
The form is part of what the film knows. The episodic chain, one incident leading sideways into the next, is the shape of a child’s life seen from inside, where no adult explains how a lie at school becomes a cell at the police station. The camera at the boy’s height and on his side, in streets and stairwells too narrow for a crew, gives the viewer his position. The interview, shot frontally on the boy with the questioner unseen, makes the viewer the questioner and keeps the adults absent as voices. The freeze frame does the decisive work: substitute an ending that resolves, capture or reconciliation or rescue, and the film loses its knowledge that nothing is decided for him. Held lower because the middle third’s form is a container.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Sixty-seven years of return are evidence, and the literature is large. The film is taught in every survey of postwar cinema and is read as autobiography, Truffaut’s own childhood, reform school and rescue by André Bazin; as the auteur theory put into practice; as a document of Paris and of French child welfare in the 1950s; and as the first part of a cycle Truffaut and Léaud continued for twenty years. It yields on return, chiefly in the parents, who grow more pitiable and more human on later viewings, and in the interview, whose flatness keeps its force. What holds it in the low eights: its readings converge more than they quarrel, it does not hold incompatible interpretations, and its formal surface is quickly mastered.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1950s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: a first-time director with little money, real locations and a child actor made a personal film that stood with the best of its year, and a critic’s theory of the director as author was shown to be practicable. It is partly shared, since the New Wave’s force is spread across Breathless (9.3), Hiroshima mon amour and this film, and the formal break belongs more to the other two. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the prize at Cannes in 1959 made the New Wave public and exportable and opened French production to dozens of first features; the line runs through the Doinel cycle and Ken Loach’s Kes, and the closing freeze frame became one of the most imitated endings in film.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then surface, across sixty-seven years. The form survives whole, and the restorations on video repair the same film. Presence has been continuous since 1959, in exhibition, in schools and film courses, in repertory and on home video in restored editions, and the film has stood in the critics’ polls of Sight and Sound in every decade. That presence is wide but not the widest: it is a canonical film for those who study cinema rather than one every audience knows, as it knows Psycho (8.8) or Citizen Kane (8.8). The surface is 1950s Paris, its school and its reform institution, and the film is about them, so they age as record rather than as fashion; the condition it treats has not aged.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The command is real and in places load-bearing. Henri Decaë’s anamorphic photography in real interiors and streets, the long tracking shot of the run, the high view of the gym class dispersing through the streets and the night of the police van are made with economy and exactness. Jean-Pierre Léaud’s performance, guided rather than scripted in the interview, is among the great child performances. Jean Constantin’s theme is spare and right, and Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte’s cutting keeps the episodes light and moves at a child’s pace. The costs: the post-synchronised sound is thin and sometimes detached from the image; some adult performances, the schoolmaster above all, are broad; the middle third’s set pieces are shot better than they are joined.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the classroom farce of the pin-up calendar, the ink and the lines, and the face of the boy in tears in the police van. One law governs both. The world is seen from the boy’s height, adults are judged by what they do to him and not by what they intend, and the camera keeps the same sympathetic distance whether he is mischievous or wretched. The tender comedy, the rotor, the stolen milk, the family laughing in the car after the cinema, obeys the same physics as the punishment. The range is wide for so small a film, from comedy to the cell, and the transitions are never forced. The strain is in the adults: the schoolmaster’s caricature belongs to a broader comic law than the rest.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders held: the family, at the centre, with its marriage, its stepfather and its small money; the school as a first institution; the state, in the police and the observation centre, its procedures shown with documentary care; the city, Paris as both freedom and street; consciousness, in the boy’s reverence for Balzac and in the interview. They are held together through one child’s experience, and none is merely listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is missing or weak: labour is glimpsed, in the stepfather’s job and the mother’s office; history is absent except as the backdrop of the 1950s; the sacred is a shrine to a novelist; nature is the sea at the end, once. A short form centred on one boy, recorded honestly; the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.7, then The Unconcealment at 8.6. A first feature whose prize at Cannes made the New Wave public and opened French production to first features, with a long line through the cinema of childhood and a closing freeze frame among the most imitated endings in film; a film that survives whole and has been continuously present for sixty-seven years; and a disclosure that a child is lost through ordinary adult selfishness and processed by institutions as a delinquent.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: the family, the school, the state, the city and one consciousness are held through a single boy, but labour is glimpsed, history is backdrop, the sacred is a shrine to a novelist and nature is the sea once. Above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, a myth evoked and built only at the close, and The Inevitable and The Bottomless Well at 8.1: a middle third of fine episodes that could go, and readings that converge more than they quarrel.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: Pressure on Tradition at 8.7, The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls three tenths short and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 99.4, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) as released in 1959, shown in competition at Cannes in May and released in France in June, about 99 minutes, in French, black and white in anamorphic widescreen (Dyaliscope), from the tracking shots under the credits to the freeze frame: directed by François Truffaut from his screenplay, with dialogue by Marcel Moussy, produced by Les Films du Carrosse with SEDIF, photographed by Henri Decaë, edited by Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte, with music by Jean Constantin; with Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy, Patrick Auffay and Guy Decomble. Running times differ by a few minutes between listings; the complete 1959 release is the object. Restorations on video repair the same film and bear on The Imperishable only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the French film; English subtitles are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. No line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is described. Details that could not be verified, among them the shooting dates, the location of the beach, the number of shots, the length of any scene and the film’s ranks in critics’ polls, are not given.