MYOFNF #5: The 400 Blows (dir. Francois Truffaut, 1959)

I normally don't like movies that feature child protagonists: they're either really precocious and hyper-verbal and therefore unrealistic, or they're realitically monosyllabic and therefore boring. The teen protagonist of Truffaut's first film, Antoine Doinel, strikes just the right mixture of sullen stoicism and bright-eyed youthful enthusiasm. Watching this film, it's easy to see how Truffaut almost single-handley jumpstarted the French New Wave with it: the subject matter and especially the strong directorial vision behind the camera radically break from the conventions of filmmaking until that point. Not only was it revolutionary to film a movie entirely from the point of view of a child, but Truffaut's camera work fully embraces that point of view. This film ushered in the era of the auteur with restless camera movement and nakedly autobiographical content that strongly announces the director's point of view. It's hard to imagine many of the films of the past forty years that have dealt with the pain and confusion of growing up being made the same way without the powerful example of The 400 Blows.