A Film Canon

Despite it's criminal and homosocial overtones, this astonishing film departs from both American and Italian forbears in presenting the emergent adolescent as a disembodied, abstracted gaze, and that disembodiment as a defence mechanism against the abortion of the hierarchical nuclear family, itself condensed into the traumatic bodily conjunctions that it's conventions and traditions regulate, contain and, ultimately, repress. These conventions are poetically connected to the written word, which Truffaut repeatedly devalues as a mode of resistance, whether in the form of young Antoine's (Jean-Pierre Leaud) mantra that "I deface the classroom walls", his shelter in a collapsed printing factory and subsequent theft of a typewriter from his father's office, or his attempt to plagiarise Balzac for a school assignment. That said, the latter simultaneously gestures towards a new mode of resistance, as Antoine's choice of a passage emphasising the sublimity of a "piercing look" places Balzac's realism in a proto-cinematic lineage, and reconfigures plagiarism as cinematic embodiment, producing a fusion of sight and action that lubricates Paris, allowing Antoine to wheel through it as rapidly as the eye - and camera - can track him, and condensing institutionalision into an over-compensatory 'Observation Centre' - as well as the high-angle aesthetic of surveillance that anticipates it - whose impact is nevertheless counter-productive, insofar as the the restriction of Antoine's body simply sharpens his eyesight to the preternatural pitch required for his final escape. This counts as one of the greatest conclusions in all cinema, commencing with a running sequence and tracking-shot sufficiently extended to reconfigure the world around Antoine's immobile gaze, and concluding with the debilitating flipside of this conflation of sight and sound - an image that is sufficiently plastic and autonomous to prevent further physical movement, leaving nothing but an isolated, alienated, frozen gaze, imploring the viewer for a body to assist it.