Léo stood at the edge. The waves lapped his shoes. Behind him, he heard shouting. Men with flashlights. But for one long, impossible moment, he was neither good nor bad, neither son nor orphan, neither prisoner nor runaway.
The narrative of The 400 Blows is episodic rather than driven by a conventional Hollywood plot. It is a character study of a boy pushed to the margins of society by the institutions designed to protect him. the 400 blows
Before picking up the camera, Truffaut was a fierce critic for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma . He famously denounced the "Tradition of Quality"—the polished, studio-bound, literary adaptations that dominated French cinema in the 1940s and 50s. Truffaut argued that these films lacked vitality and authorship. Along with Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, he championed the Auteur Theory , which posits that a director should be the primary creative force of a film, "writing" with the camera just as a novelist writes with a pen. Léo stood at the edge