7
Paris Underground: Les 400 coups
One of the first great maps of the Paris Métro is the “Nouveau Paris monumental: Itinéraire pratique de l’étranger dans Paris [New Monumental Paris: Practical Itinerary for the Foreigner in Paris].” An edition of 1903, published three years after the inauguration of the subway, offers in the same field a bird’s-eye view of the city—set in verdant environs that lead to an undulating horizon under a blue sky that seems to stretch into Normandy and to the English channel on the horizon—and an ichnographic perspective of the streets and boulevards on which are traced, in red ink, bold and dashed lines of the network as it was either recently completed or under construction. The orientation resembles what is given on thousands of practical city-maps that have followed: the north, at the top, is capped by the Sacré-Coeur; the station at the Porte d’Orléans marks a southern limit; to the west the maze of alleys in the Bois de Boulogne offers fantasy of infinite promenades under leafy trees; to the east, at the Place de la Triomphe de la République, is found a sculpture celebrating secular France, that is protected by the moat-like circle of a subway line. A railway inside of a circular, crenelated wall of medieval aspect surrounds much of the city. Blocks of pink, denoting the inner space in the city, are cut by a broad swath of white lines indicating the width and length of Baron Haussmann’s creation of boulevards. The Seine, colored in blue, bends its way through Paris, dividing the Right Bank (above) from a lesser mass of the Left Bank (below). The major monuments of the city are finely drawn and situated at their proper places. Yet their scale, of far greater proportion than that of the map itself, makes clear that the city is an assemblage of enduring monuments. Especially striking is the Eiffel Tower, seen in a bird’s-eye perspective that towers over the city’s churches, its Hôtel de Ville, and even the Arc de Triomphe.
The map has been shown figuring in the iconography that accompanies René Clair’s Paris qui dort, where it bears graphic testimony to the strategies deployed in touristic literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Monuments everywhere in the air and flesh of the city are a stone’s throw or a few blocks from any of the new or projected stations. The effects of Haussmann’s arteries of boulevards are shown in an ideal state, white and clean, without any congestion of traffic. Following the vision of the engineer Fulgence Bienvenuë, the layout also shows the viewer that subway riders exiting their stations are likely to be no more than 400 meters from a memorable site (or another subway station) in proximity. The treasures of Paris above the ground are linked to a mycelium of rails below. But above all, the subway map is made to correlate the new mode of public transport to the Eiffel Tower. The Tower had been a main attraction of the Exposition of 1889 and now, more recently, after the Exposition of 1900, the monument and the metro share the same measure.1 The former, reaching into the sky, is countered by the latter, which burrows safely through the sewers and lower depths.
The “Quarrel”
This map serves as epigraph for a treatment of François Truffaut’s first feature film, and not only because it presents the subway and the antiquities of Paris as myth, history, or ideology, but also, more immediately, because avatars of the same map are visible almost everywhere, it seems, in the travels of Antoine Doinel in and about Paris in Les 400 coups. Few cities and few films are riddled with maps as much as Paris in Truffaut’s first full-length feature. Map and monuments appear wherever the pedestrian and the viewer happen to take stock of where they are. Their ubiquity at once seems to betray and confirm the design of the feature. From the opening shots Truffaut reaches back to the memories of 1889 and 1900 in which city-planners constructed the blueprint of a new, modern Paris, a city that would literally turn its past, its urban “tradition of quality” into the sublime ruins of history.
The ideal of a city Enlightened, of a city illuminated in eternal day belonged to the dreams of the Revolution and to the “moderns.”2 As René Clair made clear in Paris qui dort, the Eiffel Tower was a photogenic maze of girders buttressing a metallic illusion of infinite progress. In 1924 the director showed how much the monument delivered on its promise to be a beacon of the future in the everyday life of the present. When he shot images of humans scurrying through the maze or perching in the hard folds of the I-beams, we have seen that the Tower bore the trappings of a society of controlled incarceration. It had become at once a map on or from which any number of subjects could be located and, like the city at large, a prison in which they could be confined.
Perhaps because Paris qui dort sets forward much of what is inferred about the city, Truffaut makes no immediate reference to the early masterpiece. Yet the Tower is the first monument seen in the film. A series of eight tracking shots, each from the perspective of a different street on which the car rolls with its camera, displays what seems to be a cinematic cubism that rivals Robert Delaunay’s many paintings of the structure. Because Truffaut had been known for his polemical pen before he began his directing career, the allusion to painting seems more immediate than to querulous literature and poetry. Apollinaire wrote at the beginning of “Zone” (in Alcools, 1913),
A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
After all you’re tired of this old world
The incipit is an awakening, an admission of fatigue lingering from the nocturne of an earlier age and the onset of a new century, new expression, and new artistic experiment. Apollinaire turns the Tower into an emblem of a present instant anticipating an uncertain future or even, as the reader notes at the end, bodily dismemberment at the end of the day and of human time.3 He inserts it into the tradition of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes in such a way that an allusion to Louis Blériot’s feat of flying over the English Channel (in 1909) in a monoplane, taken to be an X drawn by the crossing of a wing and a fuselage, is made to resemble the Tower’s chiastic design of crisscrossed beams. With Pope Pius X (the most Christian of Christians who had recently blessed the building), Blériot and Eiffel count among “moderns” who look forward and ahead. “Zone,” Truffaut had no doubt intuited, mapped out some of the poetics that would inform his own cinema. It declared that poetry was everywhere, but especially in the street, in posters, newsprint, advertising, and paper ephemera of every kind. In paratactic lines without punctuation marks,
Tu lis les prospectus les catalogues les affiches qui chantent tout haut
Voilà la poésie ce matin et pour la prose il y a les journaux
You read ads catalogues posters that sing on a highest line
That’s poetry this morning for prose the newspaper is fine
Poetry is born of writing seen in the texture of everyday life, of streams of impressions taken in the haptics of walking and ambulating in the world at large:
Les inscriptions des enseignes et des murailles
Les plaques les avis à la façon des perroquets criaillent
Inscriptions of signboards and on every wall
Posters plaques like parrots peck and call4
It may be that Truffaut plots his relation with the “moderns” in the ongoing Querelle through Apollinaire all the while the Tower serves as an icon or a memoryimage of a style that puts writing into motion and exploits retinal suspension of graphic material in fields of images. The Tower also belongs to an adolescent geography very much related to what Truffaut had initiated in Les Mistons when he developed a style of filming landscapes and monuments in the province that in Les 400 coups he now exploits in an urban way.
Credits
Seen independently of the credits written over it, the initial shots of the Tower suggest that what follows may be a “monument” on a miniature scale that rivals with the one it records; that the iconic weight of the Tower sustains, like Atlas, the politics and polemics of Truffaut as critic and auteur; that, too, it belongs to a tradition of tourism, in which “seeing and visiting” a sacred building are comparable to that of movie-going. The Tower might also be taken to be, in the same glance, a figure on a literal and metaphorical map, at once a plan of Paris and that of the director’s cinematic and quasi-autobiographical Bildungsroman and a “writing instrument” drawing and plotting the maps in and of the movie itself. It is arched skyward, its tip inking the sky in the way that, in the first shots of the narrative that follows the credits, the children in the classroom write the words of a dictée in paper pamphlets. In Les Mistons we saw that the children’s confusion about their world—their attractions and hostilities—had been expressed through scenes of writing locating where they were in their own pubescence. Much of the same prevails in Les 400 Coups, but with the difference that the feature produces more and other maps that the director finds wherever writing becomes a function of its ambient social space.
Nine tracking shots of the Tower (in 158 seconds) include in the words of the first Anglo-American edition of the screenplay, “a variety of Parisian architecture” that “appears in the foreground” as the chords of strings and violins of the musical theme “continue throughout the sequence.”5 A straight cut separates the shots that bear, respectively, the title, leads, the secondary players (including many children), and the crew. The title is drawn in bold characters across the first shot that approaches the tower from a street (possibly the Rue Saint-Dominique) in the seventh arrondissement while the name of the director appears, also in white characters, in the groins of the four great metallic legs, below the dark underside of the first floor of the Tower when the car mounted with the camera drives along the Avenue Eiffel. The fifth shot, following a long track in which only the top of the Tower is glimpsed over warehouses and industrial buildings, catches the spire from the western shore of the Seine. The car moves from the Rue Franklin and by the Place du Trocadéro en route to the Avenue du Président-Wilson.
The smooth stone mass of the western wall of the new Trocadéro Palace momentarily eclipses the view of the Tower: the camera virtually caresses the site occupied by the Cinémathèque française since its inauguration (by Henri Langlois) in 1954. Suddenly the Tower is glimpsed through a network of branches of trees in the grey setting of winter. The median shot in the credit-sequence thus becomes a palimpsest of various “maps”: those of Paris from all sides of the Tower, the perspectives on the Tower itself, the names of players known (Jean-Claude Brialy and Jeanne Moreau) and unknown (Jean-Pierre Léaud in his first film and bevies of children in their first and last) or of secret valence who might be known to cinephiles (Georges Flamand and Guy Decomble).6 Other than in the pointed reference to the Cinémathèque, the city and the monument of the credits seem suspended in a timeless space. Even with the final intertitle dedicating the film to the memory of André Bazin, no narrative or historical tag (such as that of a car parked along an avenue) is tendered to indicate where the film is coming from or what exactly might follow.
Class Room and Map Room
The first interior shot, a tour-de-force of 56 seconds, moves from a medium closeup of a boy writing in a notebook on the wooden surface of a pupil’s desk (with a sunken inkwell and a groove to hold pencils and pens) to a medium-long shot of the front of a classroom where a stern and dutiful teacher (Guy Decomble)— a modern Gradgrind—presides. The shot begins by recording the tracing of letters on paper. After the child lifts the cover of the desk to extract a Vargas-style pinup on a calendar, the camera follows the object as it passes surreptitiously (forward and right to left) through the hands of four boys before it reaches the future protagonist, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who turns it about in order to draw black marks on the woman’s face. A voice-off (of the teacher) summons (or interpellates) Doinel. The voice, now in, associated with the austere face of the teacher who has just been turning one sheet of paper over another, his glasses resting on the desk in front of him, demands that the boy come forward. In a swish the camera follows his movement forward as he surrenders the pinup to the teacher.
Suddenly the shot becomes a maze of maps. Above and behind the teacher (whom the children will call “Petite-Feuille” or “Little-Sheet”) is the lower edge of a large topological map of the Mediterranean coast of France, the island of Corsica piercing the bottom of the frame near the right hand corner. In front of the left-hand corner is posed a globe whose visible surface displays the Indian Ocean below the Middle East and lower Asia, and between them is a faintly drawn map, possibly of the Cotentin and the western coast of Normandy. To the right of the desk stands a blackboard set on a wall where patches of paint and plaster have flaked away, suggesting that they are islands of an archipelago of decay and decrepitude. Doinel’s head fills the screen before he moves forward and hands over his dubious treasure. Petite-Feuille exclaims, “Ah, c’est joli! [Oh! That’s pretty!].” Then he tells the boy to go (to the right) to a corner. The camera tracks movement as Doinel disappears behind a blackboard set on an easel posed in front of the corner of the classroom. To the upper left is an anatomical “map” of a man’s torso, revealing the muscles of the back and the buttocks. On the wall to the right is the lower portion of a large map of France with cities framed in a lower border and toponyms listed along the right side. Doinel peeks out from behind the blackboard and winks at the students (whom we assume are both students and a viewing public). The camera swish-pans to the left, back to the teacher, who demands silence after the children begin to howl.
The shot ends: a straight cut follows and, abruptly, a diametrically opposed perspective of the classroom is given as Petite-Feuille had seen it, except now he marches down the central aisle before the camera pans left to register his movement toward the door at the back of the room. On the upper wall in the back of the room stands the lower edge of another map. When the camera pans left it almost disappears before another map of France is seen (from an oblique angle, suggesting a play of anamorphosis) on the wall to the left. Petite-Feuille goes forward toward the camera, having strutted from one end of the classroom to the other in the space of thirty-four seconds.
By now it is clear that maps are on all four walls of the classroom. The impression is confirmed in the fourth shot when the teacher stands in front of the easel and the map in collecting the students’ written papers and then walks to the right (the camera panning to follow him), dismissing the class and then arresting Doinel. Doinel stops in his tracks next to the map on the right-hand wall; Petite-Feuille walks by and exits; the camera holds on Doinel next to the map of France. The camera is fixed on the boy, caught in bitter reflection, who stands by the map (bearing the topographical names of antique Gaul) for which he seems to be a personification. He then walks left, back to the easel, where the other maps—of France and of the male body—stand in the background as he tosses an eraser into the air, catches it, and moves behind the blackboard.
Figure 31. Les 400 coups (1959): Petite-Feuille surveys the classroom. Three maps are behind him: lower France and Corsica, a globe displaying Africa (two “recalcitrant” areas, Corsica and Africa), and what appears to be an antique map of Europe and North America. The peelings of paint on the wall to his left resemble a strange island map.
After a straight cut, a long shot of the playground (of four seconds)—where children romp in a modern version of Bruegel’s “Children’s Games”—records Petite-Feuille whispering words to “Monsieur le Directeur” about the sorry state of a mother and her child. A cigarette dangles from the lips of the interlocutor who wears a hat that identifies him not as a principal but an avatar of the intendent of Zéro de conduite who had championed the boys’ revolution. A medium shot of the kids playing, pushing, and shoving each other ensues before the next shot, a close-up (shot 8, of four seconds) records Doinel scratching on the wall, in a gesture recalling those of the children of Les Mistons exorcising the lovers they admired and hated, a commemorative graffito. As in the film of 1957, the scene of writing is composite: the left hand side of the greyish wall is the white surface on which the words, fitting for incision on a tombstone or a commemorative plague, are written; to the right are the corners of two maps, one the southwest coast of France that runs from the Bordelais to the northwest corner of Spain, the other an inset map of Charlemagne’s France at the time of the signing of the Strasbourg oaths, the official date of the “beginning of French literature.”7
The ironies in the shot are many. It rehearses what Truffaut had already exploited in Les Mistons, thus establishing a scene of citation promulgating the cause of citation in the name of an “author,” who here is Doinel writing for the second time in the film. He acts out the originary moment in the birth of all things French in the contrast of his inscription to the map-memory of the heritage of Charlemagne, known to children less as an emperor than as a name associated with the first written document in French. The sea, which will be the end-point of the film, is denoted by the shoreline on the map above. Doinel reads aloud what he writes, thus drawing attention to the autonomy of the sound in respect to the image-track. When the shot (of four seconds) cuts to the schoolyard where Petite-Feuille collars two children by their necks and pushes them forward, Doinel’s voice continues to utter the words he inscribes. The boy writes (in the preterit!) that he suffered for “un pin-up” fallen from the sky. It had circulated in the class in the first shot and is now virtually seen in the somewhat strange and borrowed word that might be as American as one of the “pinup girls” whose entomology André Bazin had recently studied in an article in Cahiers du cinema.8 And the shot anticipates and duplicates the “dictée” that Petite-Feuille will soon administer as collective punishment to the class in the wake of Doinel’s writing.
An inscription of an autobiographical tenor is countered by another belonging to the aura of classical French literature. Petite-Feuille chalks the innocuous Alexandrines of “Le Lièvre” on the easel as the children copy his speech (shots 18 to 35). As Petite-Feuille writes, Doinel erases. The teacher copying the “Lièvre” at the blackboard stands in front of the boy who is behind the easel, removing his graffiti from the wall with soap and water (shot 20). But before the opposition is made clear, a close-up (shot 16) shows Petite-Feuille behind his desk, barking to Doinel to copy in three tenses—but not the preterit—“je déface les murs de la classe et malmène la prosodie française [I deface the classroom walls and botch French prosody].” In speaking, and in repeating “française,” he stands next to the globe that in the first shot had displayed the Indian Ocean. Now it is turned to display the African continent when the adjective “French” is heard.
Would a viewer be accused of overinterpretation if the uttered insistence on the national treasure—French, after its prosody—were compared to the continent of Africa seen on the map? The positions on the globe have turned. Where Petite-Feuille imposes the authority of French the globe suddenly makes visible a colonial heritage and a world of unspoken “others,” especially Algeria, the nation with which France was then at war. As in Les Mistons a politics bearing on the colonial heritage of the nation is folded into that of cineasts and auteurs. The globe offers a view of the continent where a majority of French colonies were still located. The suggestion of colonial tension is underscored in shot 18, a close-up of the teacher that pans right when he stands and moves to the blackboard, announcing “Le Lièvre,” once again displays Africa on the globe to the left and Corsica on the wall map behind him.
Figure 32. Les 400 coups: Next to a map illustrating the origins of France (to the lower right is the division of the Carolingian Empire at the time of the Strasbourg Oaths, the first document written in French), Doinel scribbles words expressing misery and defiance. (See chapter 5, Figure 28.)
In a coda to the sequence of the dictée and the pandemonium it causes, standing at the head of the class in the depth of a long shot, Petite-Feuille ironically— and prophetically—exclaims that he pities France in ten years (shot 39) before he goes to the desk and angrily tosses a book on the floor. The shot cuts to the full-frame of a sculpted lintel displaying an allegory of post-Revolutionary France (shot 40): a portly Mother France extends her arms to five children, three to her right, one between her legs, and one to the left. The older child to her left writes on a sheet of paper that he holds in his left hand. The camera tilts down from the subscriptive words Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, before it records a mother in flesh and blood seen from behind, her head hidden by a leopard scarf, who awaits her child among those who are exiting the gates of the school. Doinel has just smudged the walls of a room matched by the dirt and soot caked on the statue of the Mother country.
Mother and Mother France
The first forty shots determine much of the economy of space in the film. The classroom places maps everywhere in its visual field. Wall maps convey a silent authority of the country and a sanitized tableau of its history. They are crowned by the maternal figure of the “nation” sculpted in the style of the secular ideals of the Third Republic. Time and again the children leave the classroom and return to it. The images blend into broader configuration of hieroglyphic images in which textual inscriptions, maps, and other legible matter are confused with spoken words. The former cause the latter to be visualized and to figure, in turn, in a more extensive—but no less constricting—narrative space.
Figure 33. Les 400 coups: Petite-Feuille, prohibiting Doinel from recess, seems to indicate that the boy is a map of France.
In the celebrated sequence of the “English lesson” (shots 168–75) the stuttering teacher begins by asking René to repeat after him, “Where is the father?” (168). Where is he? Where, it is inferred, does he figure in a broader psychogeography? In the center of the shot is the familiar globe that displays Africa; to the right, behind René, is a list of words in English that includes the name of the father. René can’t find where he must put his tongue in order to get the lisp needed to pronounce the last syllable of the word (he utters “pha-zehr” and not “pha-there”). Instead of asking of the whereabouts of the mother (since Doinel had already spotted her with a lover in broad daylight), the instructor queries, “Where is the girl?” (shot 170). Where is she? The curly-haired boy who had made a mess of his notebook during the dictation answers in compressed words, “Zeegirlisatzeebeach” (shot 171). The viewer hears biche for beach, a familiar term designating a cute girl, but also the bitch, the English for “La chienne,” the title of Renoir’s first sound film, the feature in which Georges Flamand, René’s very father in Les 400 coups, had played the role of Dédé twenty-six years before. “Bitch” also has personal resonance insofar as it might be a name whispered to refer to Truffaut’s close friend, Charles Bitsch. To obviate the innuendo and immediate counter meaning the teacher diphthongizes the word (“bee-each,” shot 172), but the boy persists in speaking with a French accent.
At the end of the film Doinel goes to the beach. He realizes a childhood dream—a dream he had avowed to his friend René (shot 228)—when he escapes from the detention center and runs tirelessly to the sandy bank at the edge of the sea (shots 390–92).9 The beach that could not be properly uttered becomes the vanishing point where the child is finally (or provisionally, at least in Truffaut’s greater narrative saga of Antoine Doinel that includes two sequel features) immobilized in a freeze-frame. The maps in the classroom configure coastlines and edges between land and sea. The dialogue shifts between a figure of a menacing mother—a mère who is a bitch—and a dream-object of oceanic proportion— la mer—that would be as boundless as the imagination of an infinitely smooth space of the greater world in which the child floats effortlessly.10
In the history of the reception of Les 400 coups the final sequence quickly became an emblem of the politics surrounding the “New Wave.” Doinel, every viewer recalls, dips his feet in the splashing waves of the cold sea. He seems to experience something new and other before he is frozen in the frame. The sequence was taken to mark a moment of liberation from the worlds of confinement, incarceration, punishment, and surveillance in which the child had been living. Doinel, noted one critic, had found himself in “classrooms, the queues, the locks and bars of prisons, all the apparat of social confinement” before he “runs away from the reform school and rushes to the sea he has always wanted to look upon.”11 For this critic and others who take the film at its token value narrative themes—the trials and apprenticeship of an unloved child—have precedence in their form and its laminations of life, contemporary space, and cinema. “In this last of a series of a long series of regressions from city to country to primeval amniotic sea, the picture turns into a still as though the camera itself had given up motion.” The film reaches its terminus and so is taken to be a case-history, an autobiography, not a work of art, but an “extreme of vagueness that even la nouvelle vague can scarcely tolerate” (1960, 249). Trying to rise to the level of Truffaut’s word-play, the critic labors a pun conflating English and French meanings of vague to show where Les 400 coups stands in the context of film history.
In Truffaut’s juvenile geography equally at stake is the presence of various films that displace and even fracture the thematic treatment that is so often made of them. Already Zéro de conduite had been alluded to at least three times. When Doinel contemplates his fate while in solitary confinement he may be thinking of the prisoner Fontaine in Bresson’s Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956). Certainly Doinel’s apartment is shot as Renoir had represented the exiguities of the Lestingois household in Boudu sauvé des eaux. Now, in this sequence, in the shot in which Doinel hides under a bridge to evade the police, there is reproduced a sequence in the Scottish highlands in Hitchcock’s 39 Steps (1935). But Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) is surely one of many intertexts that determines the shape of the film’s ending. When Captain Jean (Jean Dasté) and his mate Jules (Michel Simon), the two pilots of the barge, reach Le Havre, the end of the voyage, a short sequence records Jean, maddened and blinded by the loss of Juliette (Dita Parlo), his newlywed spouse, looking for salvation and calm in the image of the sea. He runs along a seawall, then descends (in an extreme countertilt that cameraman Boris Kaufman uses to slice the frame diagonally to contrast atmosphere and stone or pavement). A shot taken with a wide-angle lens begins with Jean running directly away from the camera, toward the line where air and sea meet on the distant horizon. A countershot, taken from a diametrically opposite angle (on an axis of 180 degrees), from a point toward which Jean is sprinting, records him moving toward the camera before it pans right and tilts downward to show his footsteps and bring into view an unshaven, distraught, and bedraggled face that sees only disillusion and despair.
The end of Les 400 coups is in a spatial and historical dialogue with this sequence of L’Atalante. For Vigo (as also, for Fritz Lang of the same period) the effect on the same axis of the shot and countershot of Jean running away from and toward the camera betrays a condition where space, the condition of possibility of life, is reduced almost to nothing. On the beach Truffaut does not copy Kaufman’s treatment of the nonescape of the protagonist in Vigo’s film; rather, he keeps it in a comparative context. Doinel also leaves footprints in the sand and turns about after having looked outward and down at the water. For Truffaut the freeze-frame executes in its own way what the shot-countershot had done in L’Atalante. Vigo’s unremitting political commentary, a caustic critique of the state of things in France during the Depression, is a backdrop to Truffaut’s autobiography or “case history” of a boy who was never weaned from his mother. Allusion to Vigo brings to the mother mer of the last sequence a taste that would be bitter, une douceur amère, a sequence bearing a trace of sweetness in the wit and invention that meld language and cinema.
If the attractive but depressive maternal figure in the film is the mother (Claire Maurier) who fills the cinemascope frame with grouper-like lips that extend from one side to the other (shots 48, 180, 381, 383), then cinema, a “good” mother, is his likely counterpart. Like the “bad” mother in the narration, film—the benevolent figure who occupies the space of cinematic citation in the feature—is also not without contradiction. She is “France” insofar as she belongs to a tradition of French cinema, but a highly selective tradition that belongs to directors and films, such as those of Renoir and Vigo, that were banned or who expatriated themselves from the country. Throughout the film a war is waged between the nation and its “authors” who, by way of citation, expand the limits of the geographical space depicted in the film.
The initial sequence of the film stands in dialogue with the warring forces of maternity capped at the end by the wash of waves. In the faultline between the first and second shot Truffaut sets his camera on a sightline of 180 degrees, as had Vigo at the end of L’Atalante, to indicate, with an effect similar to the maps seen on all the walls of the classroom, that no symbolic space is available for anyone in French institutional systems. The sight of Africa on the globe points to a genealogy of France that is different from that of the pedigree of French that Petite-Feuille imposes on students of different social classes and geographical origins. Conflict in the space of the class matches that of recent French history.
A Child’s Map
From a standpoint of the ways that a history of cartography is inscribed throughout Les 400 coups greater and deeper contradictions come forward. A good deal of the film takes place in the classroom where the maps seem to make the surroundings shrink like the wild ass’s skin of Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin. When René and Antoine embark on their ventures in the streets of Paris they pass by subway maps that sempiternally tell viewers and pedestrians (shot 95 and others) “where they are.” In the sequence in which Antoine and René pilfer a typewriter—a writing instrument of a double inflection, that both liberates and incarcerates—from the office of a parent, the boys descend into the metro to go from the Champs-Elysées back to the Place Clichy. In shot 279, adjacent to the ticketbooth, in the depth of field are seen an older person and a child toying with an electronic metro-map that shows its user (who pushes on the button by the placename of the appropriate destination) the best itinerary available. Like an electronic toy, it allows the older man and the boy to take a virtual voyage by following the illuminated dots of a broken zigzag of lights. When Doinel is thrown into jail and meets an Algerian who has been incarcerated for no good reason (shot 312) he stares out and sees two cops who idly play a version of Parcheesi (shot 313) in front of a map of Paris tacked to the wall. Doinel’s father, who plots future solace on maps he studies in planning trips driving outside of the city (shot 111a), can never find his Guide Michelin.12 It is implied that in the last shot of the film, in its inherently free indirect discourse, the boy wonders about how he has been “mapped” and, from the standpoint of where he is, how he can ever get out of the world in which he has been born and raised.
A greater history of the genealogy of the nation that maps impose in the classroom is given in the first sequence. By a turn of irony Petite-Feuille has the children copy “Le Lièvre,” a poem in Alexandrines that begins, “Au temps où les buissons flambent de fleurs vermeilles ... [In the time when the bushes burn with vermilion flowers . . .]”: the flaming “bushes” would be a sylvan setting in autumn that promises an illusion of escape from the grime of the classroom and the soot of the city. The substantive also figures in Truffaut’s associative style where words and their referents perpetually ramify and where names scratched everywhere on the surface of the city sometimes reveal unforeseen secrets. It suffices to recall the celebrated episode of the “athletic lesson,” in which students flake away from a line that a whistle-blowing gym teacher leads in the streets of Paris, jogging and flexing his arms without heeding the children behind him (shots 195–97). The camera, set above an intersection, pans and catches for an instant the scribble on a wall of the unlikely name, “Giraudoux” (shot 196). Reference is, of course, to Truffaut’s avowed past master of la politique des auteurs, Jean Giraudoux, who reputedly stated that “there are no more works, but only authors.”13
In a similar way “buissons,” the word marking the hemistich of the Alexandrine, refers to a uncanny cartographic history informing the space of the classroom. In the heyday of the Third Republic, Ferdinand Buisson authored two ample studies that bore influence on the use of maps in French secondary schools. In two works (1878 and 1882) the architect of the secular classroom in the regime of Jules Ferry fashioned a form of “mute map” from waxed canvas on which students in the primary schools were asked to inscribe place-names and draw the lines of rivers. The surface on which they wrote was intended to be the analogue of that on which the mind’s memory would be shaped. He wished students to be able to draw maps from memory. “The map,” he said, “is to the teaching of geography what the collection of images is to the study of natural history.... It is not only a means of representing objects to be studied, it is also the only means of acquiring a basic notion about them, the condition without which one would forever have only words in one’s memory, and not ideas in one’s head.”14 Buisson had learned his lesson from the defeat of the French in the War of 1870. At the time of the mobilization, German students, he reported, had been more geographically informed than the French because educators had been putting large and very general mural maps in the classrooms of their secondary schools.
The mapped space in which Doinel is first seen in Les 400 coups bears the signs of pedagogical wars of the nineteenth century and their aftermath. Literature is papered over geography, and over geography circulate both pinup girls and “memory-maps” from pedagogical films of French heritage ranging from Zéro de conduite to Marie Epstein’s La Maternelle. In this sense, as in Les Mistons, the film attests not just to an autobiography or to a sentimental education by way of film (a sort of Bildungscinema) but, more tellingly, at once to a writing of history and to the writing of ways—scriptural, cinematic, cartographic—by which personal and national histories are written. In the sequences shot in and about the avenues of Paris are seen the city and its underground. The buildings, statues, and streets that mark the children’s passages are mute objects bearing names and titles that would be included in a gazetteer of events and their memories.15
On the walls of the classroom is defiled a history of pedagogy over which Doinel rehearses and repeats a scene of writing. The space seems to be diurnal, but it is bathed in a grey texture that could qualify it in the underground realm of memory, a time both timeless and a time dated and marked by the Parisian milieu. Les 400 coups is partially a chronicle of a child’s life in 1958. It is a film that, too, in the confusion of day and night and the ground above and below the city, alludes to the Second World War, less by direct account of the invasions (by Germany and by American and British troops) than through the evasions of a generation born in the immediate aftermath (children who fled to the cinema or into the subway in order to stay alive or retain a semblance of sanity). Truffaut recalled that during the Occupation the subway was a sanctuary and the schoolroom “a machine for the manufacture of lies.”16 That is precisely what constitutes a pedagogical map, a history of past time which an author writes in order to cope indirectly with unnamable issues in the present (Certeau 1975, 101–9). The maps in—and of—Truffaut’s film are a mute and eloquent testimony to broader relations with the machineries of film, the medium that it shows writing beautifully mendacious histories of itself and of its authors.
The wars refracted by the maps of Les 400 coups include Gaul and the gaulois in the time of the Roman Occupation, the struggles in the aftermath of the Carolingian dynasty, the Franco-Prussian War, and France in the years of the German occupation. They are set in counterpoint to the affective journey in a city that is the stage for the difficult labor of psychogenesis.17 It might be said that Truffaut films maps at once to counter (and to celebrate) the antiquities on the walls of the classroom and to summon inherited schemas, mostly of Freudian origin, of repression and castration. The new maps take the form of citations of literature and cinema, on the one hand and, on the other, they are displayed in the practice of writing, a writing that can be taken, as it had been for Gilles Deleuze in his study of Michel Foucault (1985b, 51), at once as becoming, struggling, and mapping. In an essay (1993, 81–88) on children and childhood that he places between two others on Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, the same critic praises the ways that the infant—who could be pubescent or adolescent—is always exploring places along dynamic paths of its own creation. Children make maps of their trials, errors, and tribulations. Parents are “themselves a milieu that the child moves through, and for whose qualities and powers he or she draws a map” (82). In its growth a child’s libido undergoes monumental metamorphoses as it charts “historico-worldwide trajectories” (83). In this cartography imaginary and real places are fused, sometimes juxtaposed, and at others laminated upon one another.
And this is where, Deleuze goes on to note, a cartographic conception of psychogenesis is very different from the archeological model we usually associate with Freud. For Freud the analytical vector moved backward and downward, into commemorative or monumental places. But when the child’s maps are overlaid upon each other we no longer are witness to “the search for an origin, but of an evaluation of displacements. Each map is a redistribution of impasses and entries, of thresholds and closures that naturally go from the bottom to the top.” The unconscious is no longer something to be commemorated; rather, it enables movement and ever-shifting itineraries and new discoveries. For that reason the analyst ought not interpret symptoms but instead get a glimpse of patterns and vectors that subjects trace among and through images, letters, words, and things. Thus maps are not to be understood in terms of their extension, not only “in respect to a constituted space of trajectories,” but also to mappings of intensity, density, that are taken up with what fills space, what sub-tends the trajectory” (83–84).
The sequences devoted to Antoine and René’s movements through Paris when they play hooky (to what in French is called “l’école buissonnière,” as if wishing to evade Ferdinand Buisson’s cartographic schemes), or else steal and return a typewriter—one of the many writing instruments that figure as contraband— from one end of Paris to another can be read as mappings of this kind. The film begins with the most familiar icons and monuments on the Parisian horizon before it tells of spatial itineraries of another order, of the child’s underground world, of discoveries and adventures that turn the city into a site that unfolds new surfaces and plots unforeseen and unpredictable displacements. As Balzac had done in his cartographies of the city in La Comédie humaine, Paris becomes a site of adventure and of apprenticeship (Balzac 1922–29). The city and its children are filmed in the manner of a stratigraphy, with many layers and levels of intensity that the actors and their milieu make manifest through their travels. In this light Les 400 coups could be taken to be a film of voyage and adventure. But if, like Les Mistons, the a film has an underside with untold memories of war and occupation or if, like La Règle du jeu, it anticipates an unwished future, it might be fitting to look at films done after the New Wave retracted and receded and, perhaps, came back and forward again.