Nowhere to run: two marvellous endings
This is the famous finale of François Truffaut’s debut film The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959) one of the films which kickstarted the French New Wave. Telling an autobiographical story about a boy who is aware that he was meant to be aborted, Truffaut closely watches Antoine Doinel’s rudimentary non-conformism and the resultant series of reprimands he invites from a society of impatient elders (coincidence? it was the year when general De Gaulle became the president of France). Deserted from Paris streets where he felt so free, he ends up in a juvenile delinquent center near the sea (he wished to visit the sea, his mother requested the authorities). The boy who bunked classes and fled home finally runs again. Watch out for the classic long-take and keep in mind the intricacies of film-time.
Flashback: 10 years back. This is from an Italian Neorealist film ironically titled Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948), the ending again (MG says that I am an ending-spoiler!). Another boy, disturbingly delinquent again or more so, running and walking. This is Berlin in ruins at the end of WWII. A fascist and paedophilic teacher professes that unproductive and invalids should be eliminated from the society. Result: Edmund poisons his cranky invalid father. . Shocked into awareness after committing the most heinous crimes imaginable and suddenly poised between childhood and adulthood, he accuses the teacher of provoking him. When this man tries to grope him, he runs. Watch the rest.
“I’ll be back” – in Terminator-Arnie voice – and explicate a bit. Just think how and why are these endings similar and dissimilar too.
16/07/08 11:07 pm
The loneliness of a long-distance runner. Whenever one watches Antoine Doinel running, obviously after watching the preceding one-and-half hours or so, one feels that the run is endless. Cinema is obviously like music; the cumulative effect is important which a YouTube clip cannot convey. But let us consider a simple thing: the framing and its effect on the psychological impact of duration.
Of course, there is the obvious impact of the uncut long-take, it adds to the resultant ‘endlessness’. But the length of the take, i.e. the temporal ‘elasticity’ of the shot is probably ’structured’ by the spatiality too: the steady parallel frame centering the full length of the running boy.
Imagine. What would have happened if the camera was placed facing the boy, tracking back as he runs? The shot would have been akin to a chase-scene: the crest and fall of thrill as we would have seen the pursuer closing in or receding. If it was placed behind the boy? Apprehension and jubilation: we would have witnessed the destination sea much before we actually see it.
But instead the immortalised frame was chosen. The boy runs, the camera tracks in parallel. Perspective is flattened by the double-run of horizontal vectors. The whistle fades out within seconds of the beginning of the shot, magically within few seconds – yes, within few seconds – the dramatic necessity of the left off-screen space is evacuated. The boy steadfastly looks at the ground. He is running to nowhere, he is running in intransitive verb: he runs away, therefore he exists; never caring where he will run to (prefigured by another boy who was caught after he flew; he said that given another chance he will run away again though he might be again inevitably caught, he won’t miss even few hours of freedom which his inmates will never experience). Therefore the right off-screen space is evacuated too. Off-screen spaces cease to exist. The run drags, the landscape turns bland (the film is an willful inversion of the country-city binary connotating liberation-bondage; Antoine was free only in Paris streets, from where he is banished). In this l-o-n-g shot the only zone to watch, albeit in big-screen, is the boy’s face. A long-shot is effectively reduced to a close-up. 400 Blows is Francois Truffaut’s Breathless. We breath now; nothing is happening. Cinema, unlike the novel, cannot stop the narration to contemplate. It is condemned in present-continuous-tense. But when a shot is systematically evacuated of narration and only a face is left, we contemplate and feel the pressure of seconds piling up. It would have been impossible without the framing.
The second clip achieves something similar, the endless running-walking away in numerous fragmentary shots. The same cumulative pressure of time, just because of a peculiar circular effect: shots are followed by shots which anticipate, only to follow with shots which betray the anticipation.
Please also notice the use of space. Unlike the previous clip’s evacuation of meaning in space, here it is overwhelming. Anywhere else, in any other moment of history, Edmund would have been a screwed-up freak; but here the boy becomes the patricidal city, he is Berlin year zero, in the moment of the civilizational sin. Walking among the ruins time seems to be in a loop, back again and again to a metaphorical zero and therefore there are those loopy group of shots. You can never predict the next one; it is never linear, it is never causal. It just piles up moments leading to nowhere. While the lack of cuts increased the pressure of duration in the earlier clip; here something similar is achieved through numerous cuts, because they don’t lead us to anywhere logically. Redemption is promised and missed.
The loop. A limbo. Hung in the middle of nowhere. What I find more touching is Edmund’s to-and-fro movement between childhood and non-childhood. He is not welcome in the street-football fun (”ar ekbar jodi tomader daley nao khelay”), he tries to play a lonely game instead and immediately gives it up. His gestures are childish now, adult then and remember, suicide is an adult act. The suicide never appears plausible to me; but plausibility is not always an essential prerequisite for great art. By the moment, Edmund is Germany 1949, the cradleplace of the notion of Europe (like Rome, from where the neorealists hailed), it has passed through the glory of Enlightenment and has suddenly arrived at the concentration camps. One should remember, these were the moments of introspection for Europe: how come the age of Reason obviously leads to Fascism? One can encounter it if only one reaches the ‘year zero’. The leap is almost like a crush after moments pile to a drop heavy enough to hold itself in its shape.
Time. That is the stuff out of which these dreams are made of. Time freed of narration, time by itself, autonomous…pregnantly empty and therefore unbearable.
400 blows… uses time to portray the long road to freedom and the implications of achieving it ar second ta…seems to me…. uses time to focus more on the tension within an individual while achieving freedom and goes for the bigger freedom by committing suicide…
amar interpretation would simply be that HOPE is what differentiates the scenes… one lost with freedom but with a feeling of hope and the other lost in freedom and thereby succumbing to it…
Anindyo da kichu mone koro na… beshi jani na… might be compltely wrong..but amar eta money holo…that’s all..
Prithwish
July 16, 2008 at 10:28 pm
moreover open space aar dilpaidated and closed space tao amar thought process ke influence korechey bole amar ogula money holo
Anindya Sengupta: Prithwish, welcome! I was thinking of shutting this down, if unvisited. And please, I have some readers who don’t understand Bengali. Atoyeb jaboner bhasha byabohrito houk, kemon?
Prithwish
July 16, 2008 at 10:31 pm
the boy in 4oo blows had the sea to run to… what did Rossellini’s boy have?
u can feel the wind in ur hair from the beach, and i can smell the debris from after the War.
there fore, life, whether intended to be aborted or not, is more empowering than intended killing.
i mean war. (just in case…)
joanna
July 16, 2008 at 11:50 pm
mone poreche na….but surely i will come back with my facts…but another great piece……keep them coming……ami bishon inspired hoye porchi..amaro icche korche likhte….i think Joana is rite……..abortion..how does it feels when u come to know u r unwanted…..keu Javier Bardem er “The Sea Inside” dekhecho..deals with Euthanasia..diff topic….but hope Anindya da will also post something on that…
Abhishek"Tom Hanks"Bhattacharya
July 17, 2008 at 12:08 am
abhishek, i dont think i meant what u said i did.
i meant, life, when existing, leaves everything behind, even prior intentions to terminate it. if life is victorious,no matter how/where it came from,it means more than legalized, sanctioned killing.which in this case, is the WW.
joanna
July 17, 2008 at 12:45 am
eagle eye.
joanna
July 17, 2008 at 1:21 am
arre ami tarahuro teh porechi…so may be….puro pore abar comment debo….
Abhishek"Tom Hanks"Bhattacharyya
July 17, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Both the boys reminds me of the short story Red Horse(Lal ghora).Just like the red horse ran away in search of freedom or i would rather say moksha in the end of the story both the boys also went in search for a place where there will be no shackles….shackles of war….shackles of a ruthless dictator…may be in search of J.M.Barrie’s “Neverland”….in this way they tried to attain their MOKSHA…..it seems that after the bloody world war where mass was slaughtered..it was one way of achieving Moksha for all who was a part of that bloody history..as man was betrayed by its own clan….
Abhishek"Sollozzo the Turk"Bhattacharyya
July 17, 2008 at 8:41 pm
wat gr888 observations…….anindyo da….plzzzzz…bondho koro naa…..
“the film is an willful inversion of the country-city binary connotating liberation-bondage; Antoine was free only in Paris streets, from where he is banished” – has made me think…and has brought to my memory La Strada….one of the most prominent films which depict this “country-city binary connotating liberation-bondage” to the brim…no surprise that Gelsomina(Giulietta Masina) started her journey to the ‘thralldom’ of city life (more of a town) from the shores of the sea…..exactly the place where Antonio Doniel’s road comes to an end…..kintu amr ekta katha jeta mone hochhe (it may be irrelevant, oboshyo “ADDA”-te kichhui irrelevant noy)…to the ‘mordern’,'enlightened’, ‘reasonable’ man, educated in the colonial pedagogical designs…does this “country-city” connotation hold itself???….to the young man from Nischindipur who carries a globe….country life was much more claustrophobic than the “dosh foot by dosh foot” room…who can forget the deportation of prisoners from the city of St.Petersburg to Siberia in Tolstoy’s Resurrection?? tomar kachhe ekta proshno rakhchhi…..Does Antonioni make a statement in Red Desert when he projects Guiliana’s(Monica Vitti) claustrophobia in the industrial world in the backdrop of lunacy???? (for Antonioni in his interview to Godard rues the fact that he is not aptly installed within the industrial world)
jak…khub baje boklam….hoyto bhulbhal…kintu shetukun liberty ami nitei pari karon shudhranor jonyo tumi achho…r Rosselini’r chhobita ami dekhini….tai ota niye kichhu bolte parbo naa….hope u’ll keep them coming…
Anindya Sengupta: Welcome Dhriti! And next time comments only in English please
Will answer your queries in a coming post
dhriti
July 19, 2008 at 1:06 pm
The annotations which we have cited in the discussion on “country-city” connotations correspond to the screenings that have been conducted in the class, i did it consciously…but then we can’t help adding a glaring omission…Ritwik Ghatak’s ‘Subarnarekha’…oh…this topic seems to get more and more interesting to me…
awaiting eagerly for ur response…
though in hindsight…..Ghatak’s context seem to call for a greater circumference…
Anindya Sengupta: Righto! This is an extremely complex issue. I can’t do much justice in a single post.
Dhriti
July 19, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Wow!! Anindya da is on the pick! I haven’t read this posts yet but couldn’t resist me to let you know that I am here.
The real and serious comment will be made tomorrow.
oops. felling drowsy! don’t accept these 2 comments!! thank you.
Anindya Sengupta: So? Two comments collated in one
Anamitra
July 20, 2008 at 12:26 am
NO, now here it is finally. I was feeling drowsy but couldn’t leave your article.
Remarkable blog! Nothing to say about what you have written on 400 blows. Nice observations!
And nothing to say about ‘Germania anno zero’ as I haven’t watched it. Can you arrange to show it on this Monday??
You were talking about the use of space, long shot and L-O-N-G takes. As we all know, these are called trade marks of Bela Tarr, the Hungarian director. I am waiting to hear from you on Damnation [1988, aka Karhozat] or Wreckmiester Harmonies [aka Wreckmiester Harmoniack]. He is one of my Favourites. What do you think about this guy?
Anindya Sengupta: Anamitra. I haven’t seen a single Bela Tarr…I am very underviewed…
more about that later.
Anamitra
July 20, 2008 at 1:04 am
this is not true, may be you haven’t seen Tarr’s film, but you can’t claim yourself to be under-viewed. You are mocking me. this is not fair either.
Anindya Sengupta: I am ‘underviewed’ pal! And that doesn’t lessen my dignity
I have seen fewer films and like ruminating over them, I just can’t overstuff myself. I am writing a post on it. It will appear by morning.
Anamitra
July 20, 2008 at 1:30 am