400 li closer to recognizing the principal contradiction within oppressor nations generally:

"The 400 Blows"

The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups)
Directed by François Truffaut
NR / Argentina:13
1959

Reviewed by a contributor

The first and most popular of Truffaut's five movies forming "The Adventures of Antoine Doinel," François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" is considered by many critics to be a landmark in French film history and imperialist-country film history in general. The emphasis here is on imperialist-country film history. Just in terms of advanced politics and notwithstanding Godard's "La Chinoise" (1967) and "Week-End" (1967), the French New Wave(1) overall is nothing especially progressive when compared to the revolutionary movies that had been coming out in the Soviet Union since the early '20s and in China since the early '30s, and the anti-fascist movies made in imperialist countries before World War II(2), and in fact, "400 Blows" doesn't even pretend to be revolutionary. Nonetheless, the movie's politics are correct up to (but not including) the ending of the movie, and for Maoists, "400 Blows" is a landmark in that we can use it to see how far relationships between old and young people have come since 1959. Unfortunately, it turns out that not much has changed since then.

Antoine's own conditions

"400 Blows" is set in post-World War II Paris. The main character, Antoine, lives with his married, heterosexual petty-bourgeois parents and attends a boys' secular state school, where junior high-age children study "subjunctives" and other fine points of grammar, and copy down French passages depicting romantic intimate relationships. Antoine's teacher is paranoically always on the look out for disruptive behavior, which typically reflects his useless and boring teaching. He decries the state of his students, asking, "What'll France be like in ten years?" (Coincidentally, ten years after the movie's debut is close to May, 1968.) Without inviting the other students to criticize an offending student's disruptive behavior, and without bothering to explain in any detail why classroom discipline is supposedly necessary, the teacher takes the approach of kicking disruptive students out of the classroom, manhandling them, denying them educational so-called opportunities, and treating wrong or inadequate answers to classroom questions as signs of persynality defects.

At home, Antoine's parents treat him as if he was an annoyance and also as a servant. The movie spends an inordinate amount of time showing Antoine doing such mundane things as setting up the dining table and taking out the garbage. Evidently, society expects nothing else from Antoine but domestic work, unconditional and often unreciprocated affection for his parents, and compliance with the educational system.

Antoine's parents are both office workers. Regularly demeaned by her husband, Antoine's mother is having an affair with her boss, and Antoine's stepfather seems to be more interested in automobile racing than paying attention to Antoine's own persynal interests. The stepfather thinks that he has already done good by just naming Antoine when he was born. This lack of attention is to the point where Antoine's mother prefers, against his wishes, that he eat at the dinner table instead of going to his room and continuing to do his homework.

Expectedly, Antoine decides that it would be better to just skip school. After quietly taking the fall for a pornographic picture that was being passed around in the classroom (and which Antoine took too long to deface with a drawing of a mustache or a pipe when it got to him), Antoine plays hookey with his friend, René, the next day.

One of the things that they do is go to a theater playing an anti-Asian movie. This is when Viet Nam is still under the rule of French imperialism. Antoine and René also enjoy going to watch newsreels, although Antoine blows and pops bubble gum as if he is bored or to distract the other viewers. This may be a subtle commentary on the relationship between the oppression of children under patriarchy, and indoctrination and the inculcation of national chauvinism. French Marxist Louis Althusser would elaborate on this topic ten years later in his essay "Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses."

After Antoine is found out the following day, he overhears his parents complaining about him to each other and making hateful remarks. His mother suggests that they put him in an orphanage. Earlier, she suggests sending him to summer camp after calling another family's many children "rabbits...disgusting." Once again, the solution to "problem children" is flat-out, physical exclusion. Scared by what he hears, Antoine runs away from home with the help of René. He keeps going to school by himself, but his parents track him down at school and take him back home.

Things progress to the point where Antoine turns to petty theft and pawning off stolen goods to support his independence, and he eventually ends up in a juvenile delinquency center, where adults continue to disparage him and hit him in the head.

The depiction of children's oppression

"Progress" suggests the possibility of outlining the events in Antoine's story in chronological order, but it is difficult to discern a continuous plot in the movie in the conventional sense. For the most part, the things that happen to Antoine on each day are just shit as usual for most children, things that happen on a daily basis.

One night, Antoine politely says goodnight to his parents, but they ignore him; this lack of reciprocity in affection is a recurring theme with Antoine's parents. Antoine correctly criticizes his teacher by writing on the classroom wall, but is violently put down. Antoine's teacher violently drags him around, but has the nerve to say, compassionately, that Antoine should have confided in him about Antoine's mother's "death," which Antoine desperately makes up as an excuse for being absent the other day. Antoine's stepfather slaps him in the face and later lies about it to the police in order to represent himself as a good parent. At the police station, a photographer forcefully turns Antoine's face to take a picture of his side profile. At the reform school for delinquents, where the girls are "protected" during the boys' outdoor drills by being put in a cage, an instructor berates and strikes Antoine for biting into his bread too early. To add insult to injury, he is patronized: "Left or right" (hand)? At the same school, an anonymous, pleasant-sounding psychologist, not shown on the camera, asks leading questions about Antoine being a liar, not loving his mother, and having sex with girls.

Superficially, there is no immediate connection between any of these examples, but that is exactly the point: the oppression of children is systemic. It does not follow from individual children's persynal histories, or "risk factors," but from the system of gender oppression. Bourgeois critics praise "400 Blows" as a portrait of abuse, as a story of how the system abused and failed Antoine (who is a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Truffaut himself) as an individual, in other words, as a depiction of an exception to the rule of children being well-treated in imperialist countries. This is completely incorrect. Even if we ignore the physical violence that Antoine experiences(3), the movie goes to great lengths to establish a relationship between Antoine and children as a whole. Antoine moves in and out of the classroom, in which other children, notably his more wealthy friend René, experience the same threats of expulsion. Antoine and René go to a children's puppet theater. In the puppet theater scene, there is an inexplicably long series of shots of the child audience's faces, but which can be understood as trying to put Antoine and these much younger, less disillusioned children, including girls, in the same place theoretically speaking. (This movie is about socially constructed children, not college-age "youth" pining for gender-oppressor and exploiter privileges.) There is a scene where a P.E. coach takes the class for a jog around the neighborhood, and one by one, the students break off from the group to skip the class until only a couple of teacher's pets are left.

When Antoine is first put in jail, his adult cellmate asks what he's in for. Antoine replies that he ran away from home. In other words, his crime wasn't stealing a typewriter and getting caught trying to return it. His real crime was trying to emancipate himself, because the only way that individual children can leave their families today is by gaining some material resources, and even then, the law always tries to imprison them behind bars or behind school walls.

"400 Blows" emphasizes this point again and again. There can be no real freedom for Antoine until society stops writing off children, as a whole, as being intellectually inferior, incapable of criticizing adults and other children, and incapable of doing political and productive work that is valued by society. After Antoine's teacher discovers the "pin-up clad barely" at the beginning of the movie, he lets the class out for recess, but keeps Antoine inside. "Recess is a privilege, not an obligation," says the teacher. But the movie refutes the position that crumbs of freedom within the system represent lasting freedom. In the recess scene outside, there are not even any balls to play with, and children have the "privilege" of physically assaulting each other. Antoine has a margin of freedom as he runs around the city without supervision, but he is always under the threat of being caught. In the end, there is literally nowhere to escape the mind-numbing oppression and boredom.

For reasons having to do with both class and gender, education, in both "400 Blows" and the real world, figures prominently in the oppression of children, and not just oppressed-nation children or proletarian children. This reviewer was reminded of Dead Prez's "They Schools" and SticMan's last line: "Matter of fact my nigga / This whole school system can suck my dick." Like Dead Prez says, the problem is not just outwardly racist schools; maybe the problem is also the whole school system in capitalist society. Just looking at their curriculum, Antoine's mother herself admits that "school teaches lots of useless stuff." Of course, she says this from her occupational viewpoint: "Algebra and science don't...help many people. But French! You'll always need it for writing letters!" On the contrary, MIM would say that math and science help more people than the fine points of French grammar, or knowing what is an "alexandrine" in French poetry.

Contrary to the various practitioners of identity politics who criticize "400 Blows" for focusing too much on white petty-bourgeois or bourgeois (René) male children, the focus of "400 Blows" on what is today the principal contradiction within most oppressor nations, the contradiction in age between socially constructed children and gender-oppressors, helps to expose the same contradiction among groups with fewer or no privileges. If it is possible to see children's oppression depicted in "400 Blows," then it will be easier to dissect a movie such as, say, Craig Bolotin's "Light It Up" (1999). This is the case even if Antoine is conceivably part of a "child aristocracy" (or a larger gender aristocracy) due to being a net beneficiary of world patriarchy(4). Even if he wanted to, there is no way for Antoine to organize against, or opt out of, the system without breaking the law or coming into conflict with his parents' own standard of living.

No solution to gender oppression

Rarely do movies even depict children's oppression, or children's oppression as a whole. If "400 Blows" were mainly about wimmin's oppression, it would have to be strongly criticized for depicting oppression, but confusingly offering no way out. Since "400 Blows" focuses on children's oppression, which is a part of gender oppression, and the theme of children's oppression is rare in contemporary movie culture, "400 Blows" is at least adequate and deserves a neutral to positive rating. The latest "400 Blows" DVD was released in 2002 (Fox Lorber). " Although it originally debuted in 1959, "400 Blows" is currently competing on DVD with the Macaulay Culkin pseudo-youth lib "Home Alone" DVDs (think watered-down pseudo-feminism, but with and for children) and totally reactionary shit like the Frankie Muniz "Agent Cody Banks" movies. "400 Blows" must be upheld over these other movies despite its significant limitations.

Subjectively, there is something powerful about the deliberately vague ending of "400 Blows." It is similar in function to the movie's interesting backward-looking shots of the city that appear to be taken from the viewpoint of moving vehicles. But ultimately, the audience is left with a fatalistic feeling of helplessness or lack of control. Worse, if reformism is seen as an option between complacency or helplessness, on the one hand, and revolution, people may go for a particular reformism that ends up justifying all sorts of parasitism and obliging some children to support parasitic demands. Antoine recounts a daydream with René: "With a million, we'll find a beach...open a boat business and no one'll bother us!" Effectively, this is the type of thing that some Amerikan youth rights organizations, openly pandering to "conservatives," strive for when they pursue imperialist-country privileges this late in the game and apart from any consideration of other struggles, and even ignore child physical and sexual abuse, and queer sexuality (one of Antoine's fellow reform school inmates is "psychomotorally unstable with perverse tendencies"), as important youth rights issues. Their beef with age inequality is a Liberal one not interested in ending gender oppression forever and ignores the fact that only a cultural revolution organized by the dictatorship of the proletariat can end the centuries of thinking and tradition that still weigh down on children, wimmin, and other gender-oppressed people. Even if Antoine were legally free to do what he pleased, he would still be oppressed as a child because of the prevalence of patriarchy outside the legal system.

A man who was going to pawn off a typewriter for Antoine and René tries to scam them out of it. Antoine resists.

A theme in "400 Blows" is that Antoine is actually a "good kid" who is pressurized into the same situations as hardened delinquents and criminals, which lends the movie to the wishful bourgeois interpretation that it depicts a regrettably imperfect but still desirable capitalist society(5). Antoine's cellmate when he is in the local jail is an adult man, and Antoine's classmates in the reform school include children who have been accused of physically assaulting their parents. Today, children are still being put in the same cells as adults in imperialist countries, including the united $tates, and children are attacked by staff and other inmates in juvenile detention centers. These issues are often raised today outside the context of gender oppression. Again, while "400 Blows" can be praised for at least depicting children's oppression and instances of children's oppression, it is ambiguous on what should be done about these things, how gender oppression as a system can be ended, or if anything can be done at all. Is Antoine's resistance simply "glandular" (hormonal), as his English teacher puts it? Does the liberation of children oppressed under patriarchy end with juvenile justice reform?

In a version of "The 400 Blows" made in a socialist people's republic, Antoine finds René after leaving the reform school. René has been suspended for defending Antoine, and René's father has died of natural causes. René struggles with his mother and convinces her to let Antoine stay in her home. Mauricet, the tattle-tale with the goggles, leads the pigs to René's place, but René's mother misleads them. Years pass. Antoine now takes odd jobs for a living, but René is still a secondary school student. Later, René goes to university and joins the Union des E'tudiants Communistes (UEC) of the French Communist Party and then the budding Maoist elements within this group. Still friends with René, Antoine joins up with the same groups.

Even without any changes, "400 Blows" would be familiar to many children in European imperialist countries today and has the potential to make an impact if more people view it in the current context. The studios selling this movie deserve to make millions. However, as is, "400 Blows" also has the potential to stir up support for changing individual educational, parental and policing practices in order to make them more harmonious with imperialism's long-term survival. This tendency must be struggled against. Maoists do not seek to replace violent repression (corporal punishment, etc.) with indoctrination under the imperialist patriarchy, but an end to the whole imperialist patriarchy.

Notes
1. Stephen Nottingham, "The French new wave," http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Stephen_Nottingham/cintxt2.htm. "The characters in French New Wave films are often marginalized, young anti-heroes and loners, with no family ties, who behave spontaneously, often act immorally and are frequently seen as anti-authoritarian. There is a general cynicism concerning politics, often expressed as a disillusionment with foreign policy in Algeria or Indo-China." Jean-Luc Godard (http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/movies/godard.html) is also included among the French New Wave directors.
2. When MIM tries to tease out genuinely progressive content from movies made under reactionary rulers, readers should not forget that imperialist-country movies with advanced politics do not set the standard for what is possible or state-of-the-art as far as making progressive movies.
3. As far as schools in the united $tates today, "twenty-two states allow some form of corporal punishment while twenty-eight have banned the practice." Dennis Randall, "Corporal Punishment in School," http://www.familyeducation.com/article/0,1120,1-3980,00.html
4. "The oppression of children under patriarchy," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mt/mt9child.html
5. Disgustingly, "400 Blows" has even been advertised in the united $tates as some kind of B-horror flick about "angel faces hell-bent for violence," which completely misses the point. "Posters for Quatre cents coups, Les (1959)," http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053198/posters