Introduces this special issue's theme of Boys and Cinema, discussing the emergence of a specific, international cinema of boyhood in the early 1960s, and five main themes established within it by the late 1960s. Keywords: CINEMA OF BOYHOOD, BOYS IN FILM In The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959), a thirteen-year old boy named Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is growing up in a cramped, squalid apartment in a working-class sector of Paris. His stepfather ignores him, and his mother, who is having an affair with a neighbor, treats him in turns with cool indifference and suspiciously eroticized smothering. At school, he is brutalized by the teacher and bullied by his classmates. Quite understandably, Antoine reacts with hostility and misdeeds: he skips school, tells his teacher that his mother has died, and steals a typewriter from his stepfather's office. These seem like minor offenses, especially when compared to the chicken races and knife fights common among juvenile delinquents in other movies of the period, but nevertheless the adult are horrified. Antoine is subjected to psychiatric evaluation, then sent to a juvenile detention center. Finally he ends up at a work camp near Le Havre, a few kilometers from the English Channel. Antoine has always wanted to see the ocean. Perhaps he wants to drown, or lose himself in its vastness, or perhaps he hopes to find peace in the one wild space left in France, the only place that has not been cut into cramped apartments and constrained by obsessive, neurotic, small-minded adults. Finally, in the last scene, he gets his chance. He escapes from the work camp and runs headlong for the coast. He arrives at a barren, rocky beach, with no sign of human life. It could be a million years before the human race evolved, or a million years after they have all gone extinct. He is alone in the universe. Most films would end there, optimistic or at least satisfied that the boy has found at least a moment of pleasure. But instead the camera shifts to a reaction shot. We see that Antoine is not gazing out at the ocean in ecstasy. He is staring at the audience, at the adult world that seems to lie on the other side of that vast, impassible expanse. But he is not merely judging the adults for their brutalities and viciousness, as many delinquents in film have done before; he is not merely bewildered by their nonsensical commands, trivial obsessions, and sexual neuroses; he is somber, realizing at last that there is no escape. No matter how squalid and sinister and crazy, the adult world will soon become his home. Francois Truff aut, film buff turned critic turned auteur, did not intend his first feature-length film to be a colloquy on boyhood; like many young writers and directors, he was transforming his own life into art, and Antoine' s boyhood just happened to come first (later films would continue the story seamlessly through Antoine's adolescence and adulthood). His fellow critics extolled Les Quatre Cents Coups for its contribution to the Nouvelle Vague school that was currently the darling of French cinema, art, and literature, not as an example of the overcrowded genre of the juvenile delinquency expose. Antoine's final gaze became one of the great moments of cinema history not because it represented a particularly profound coming-of-age epiphany, but because it illustrated the clash between cinematic representation and reality and forever changed the way filmmakers constructed the boundaries of their fictional worlds (F abe, 2004, eh. 7; Gillain, 2000). But nevertheless Les Quatre Cents Coups marked the beginning of a new genre, the cinema of boyhood. Preteen and adolescent boys had been a box-office mainstay since the days of the silents, of course, in films produced specifically for children and teenagers as well as for adults (Zornado, 2006), but they were usually portrayed from an adult point of view, as cases for professional or emotional intervention, goals for competition, accessories of adult worlds. …
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Jan 1, 2024
Tereza Stehlíková + 1
Open Access