I love François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. I am convinced it is one of the most affecting movies of all time, and it was influential to boot: along with Breathless, it helped usher in the French New Wave, which genuinely revolutionized cinema. One of the things I love about it is the superb CinemaScope photography by the legendary Raoul Coutard, who also shot Breathless.

Widescreen photography using anamorphic lenses (of which CinemaScope is only a brand-name) was barely 6 years old when The 400 Blows was released. First used commercially in Hollywood, it was part of a reaction to Cinerama and the advent of television. Hollywood generally refused to make films in anamorphic black-and-white, reserving the lenses for color. Thus, it fell to foreign-language filmmakers to use them in black-and-white. They included Truffaut, who also made Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim in CinemaScope; Akira Kurosawa, who made Yojimbo and Sanjuro, among others, in “Tohoscope;” and Federico Fellini, who made La Dolce Vita and Satyricon in anamorphic.

There’s something exquisite about black and white ‘Scope, and for my money the the best example is The 400 Blows. Paris was beloved of New Wave filmmakers, and Truffaut and Coutard lovingly frame and photographic so that its beauty is haunting and immediate. It is literally one of the most beautiful films ever made.

For all that, Truffaut had reservations about the extremely wide-screen process (most anamorphic films have an aspect ratio of 2.35:1). Always the critic, he wrote about the aesthetic and ethical differences between ’scope and the standard academy ratio:

. . . by shooting The 400 Blows in ‘Scope, I had the rather naive feeling that the film would look more professional, more stylized; it would not be completely naturalistic. CinemaScope has this strange peculiarity of being an oblong window that hides many details. When someone moves in a room, if you have a square frame [1.33:1], you have all the details–what is on the table, on the wall; you judge the decor at the same time. Whereas in a CinemaScope room, the character moves abstractly, almost like in an aquarium.

Whatever he thought about the 2.35:1 ratio, he made the most of it in his films. I for one am glad he was naive.

For all you techni-geeks out there, there’s a cool site that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about aspect ratios; it’s called the American Widescreen Museum, and it’s hosted by the genial Martin Hart.

The Truffaut quote is from an interview with Hélène LaRoche Davis in Shoot the Piano Player, ed. Peter Brunette, Rutgers University Press, 1980; reprinted in booklet accompanying Criterion edition of Shoot the Piano Player (the film).

Tags: , , ,