It’s autumn in New York, which means that I am inevitably, thinking about school. I haven’t taken classes in years, and I haven’t taught in years, but I attended one formal school or another in one capacity or another for every year of my life, from pre-school through the end of my PhD last year, pausing only for one year to go teach at a school instead. Since I was three, this is the first autumn I have not prepared for a class or a course or a colloquium, have not set foot on a campus or in a classroom or an administrative office. It’s strange. I don’t miss it, but I have been thinking about it a lot.
I had wondered if I would feel, this semester, as if I were skipping school. And I don’t, I’m surprised to say. The sensation of completing my degree and playing hooky from it are totally distinct. For one thing, I feel happier than I know I would if I cut class. I’d be worrying the whole time, and I’m not now. Whenever I think about this, I remember my favorite “school-skipping” scene in cinema, from François Truffaut’s 1959 film The 400 Blows (Les 400 Coups in French).
You’ve probably scene it, but just in case… it’s Truffaut’s semi-autobiographical film about a young boy’s lonely and bleak adolescence in late 50s Paris, and a meditation on the oppression of youth in both public and private spheres of everyday life. The film concludes that while it is necessary for our hero Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) to escape a nuclear family structure that has deteriorated into an unloving, vaguely abusive situation, true freedom cannot be experienced by physically abandoning society altogether; although society is oppressive, it still allows for intellectual and emotional releases such as through fun and art (and, of course, through the institution and craft of cinema). This message is articulated in one scene in which Antoine and his friend René skip school and wander around Paris, seeing a movie in a theater, playing pinball at an arcade, and riding a carnival centrifuge.
This isn’t the only scene in which Antoine will run away from school. In the film’s famous conclusion, Antoine runs away from the reform school he has been forced to attend. In a long tracking shot, he runs from the school, through the woods, all the way to the beach, at the edge of the shoreline. When he arrives by the water, the camera freezes on a close-up of his face. In this shot, his face is a cypher, blank and endlessly interpretable, a real-life Kuleshov experiment.
Antoine is totally bondless and alone in nature, as he was on the day he skipped school in Paris. But here, the effect is different. He is almost forced into stillness by this abandonment of the public and private worlds. This freeze frame serves a valuable contrast to the happy, public school-skipping scene—in which the camera both spins on its own axis and stands still to capture the spinning of the centrifuge ride. Antoine spins uncontrollably in the centrifuge and laughs as a result (one of only several scenes in the movie where he laughs or even smiles), and the hyperkinetics captured by the mobile camera indicate that the public sphere provides physical stimulation that leads to emotional betterment. Furthermore, the alternating point-of-view shots in this scene reinforce that happiness is not a solitary emotion—the riders are enjoying the experience as much as the onlookers (a group which, meta-cinematically, includes the film’s audience).
When Antoine and René go to the cinema and visit the park, they do not encounter any authoritative figures. In fact, the only adults caught on camera are fellow passengers on the centrifuge ride—and, giddily standing side by side with Antoine (the only youths), they are quite literally on the same level, looked down at in a mass by the undiscriminating camera above them. Moreover, not only is the public space bearable when children are not put down by adults, but it is also bearable when children are treated the same as adults (or even allowed to be adults, themselves)—earlier, when Antoine and René cross the street, the cars and trucks at their crosswalk stop. The boys, behaving maturely, function seamlessly with everyone else.
However, while it is important for children to be acknowledged as equal to adults on many levels, it is also important to enjoy childhood. In the ride, when the floor of the rotor disappears, the camera tilts down Antoine’s body, from his suddenly grinning face to his airborne feet, emphasizing the phenomenon he is experiencing. Then, pressed up against the wall of the mechanism, caught in a medium shot, Antoine bends his body into all sorts of (often horizontal positions). He looks as if he is flying; in a kind of Peter Pan moment, Antoine is free because he possesses childlike sensibilities instead of adult concerns or inhibitions.
When the rotor is whirring in a long shot a few moments later, it is nearly impossible to tell the figures apart—everyone is a blur, except Antoine, who has previously stretched himself out laterally. His behavior on the rotor is the most immature, but none of the adults attempt to suppress it; another passenger even attempts to wiggle the same way, himself. Therefore, freedom is found in the public sphere when adults understand or emulate it for its enthusiasm. The flying motions of the characters also add notes of surrealism—as of the public sphere’s yielding such a carefree moment is magical or beyond reality.
The twirling of the rotor (with its whizzing, clicking sound—which is audible because the detached, merry music playing when Antoine and René have their jaunt stops suddenly, as if a projector is being turned on) is also reminiscent of film reels turning… and makes Truffaut’s larger point about the rejection of oppression in domestic and social spaces one about the redemptive power of cinema.
Antoine and René begin this fun day with a movie, and, later in the film, Antoine’s parents take him to the cinema, in the only scene where all three enjoy each other’s company. Therefore, cinema has the power not only to provide a worthwhile escape, but also to confront situations by reducing interpersonal tension—temporarily repairing the fractures of a crumbling private life. The private sphere should be filled with happiness, but it is not so in Antoine’s home. Thus, in The 400 Blows, the only way to ensure happiness is to escape the constraints that exist both in society and at home, and to pursue a life of enjoyment, fun, and art.
