Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 17 January

The 400 Blows (aka Les quatre cents coups, Truffaut, 1959)

This time last year, inspired by hav­ing had a rest­ful hol­i­day, I decided to revive my pro­ject to watch all of the Sight & Sound Top 50 films of all time (accord­ing to the crit­ics’ poll) and write about them for RNZ.

Watching and writ­ing about one every week turned out to be more dif­fi­cult than I thought but there are quite a few now pos­ted – we are at equal-38^th – and I’ll con­tin­ue to add more as we go through 2024.

Equal 50^th in the list is a film I described as “… might be the finest film about child­hood of all time”, François Truffaut’s debut fea­ture The 400 Blows:

Inspired by Truffaut’s own child­hood, The 400 Blows refers to the mul­ti­tude of injustices and insults endured by Parisian adoles­cent Antoine Doinel (Léaud). Born out of wed­lock – a scan­dal at the time – his moth­er mar­ries a man who takes on the role of fath­er but neither have the tal­ent for it.

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Ignored or cri­ti­cised by his par­ents and houn­ded by his teach­ers, even­tu­ally he finds him­self becom­ing the scoun­drel every adult thinks him to be. He has a poet’s heart but no encour­age­ment and is left to his own mis­chiev­ous devices for most of the picture

In thrill­ing ver­ité sequences we see him and his school­friend René, wag­ging school to vis­it the cinema and fun­fair, even­tu­ally gradu­at­ing to petty thiev­ery which puts young Doinel in, what I would describe as, bor­stal – a boys home.

Truffaut’s dis­cov­ery of Léaud is the key to the suc­cess of The 400 Blows – the cam­era adores him and his abil­ity to inhab­it the com­plex­it­ies of this lov­able scal­ly­wag. Indelible image after indelible image illu­min­ate the screen until it ends with pos­sibly the most fam­ous freeze-frame in cinema history.

As you’ll dis­cov­er below, this is a film that’s not read­ily avail­able online so I apo­lo­gise to those of you who like a one-click view­ing option. This news­let­ter was always inten­ded to high­light old and clas­sic films as well as new ones but – in New Zealand at least – they are often left out of the stream­ing conversation.

Where to watch The 400 Blows

Aotearoa: Streaming on Mubi.com. Physical rent­al from Aro Street Video (DVD) or Alice in Videoland (DVD or Blu-ray). Good pub­lic lib­rar­ies should still have it on DVD.

Australia: Streaming on Mubi.com.

USA: Streaming on Max and Criterion Channel or digit­al rent­al from Apple.

UK: Streaming on BFI Player or digit­al rent­al from Apple.

Update on the Substack question

Every day the ques­tion about wheth­er to stay or leave Substack shifts as big pub­lic­a­tions depart (The Platformer) or stay (The Kākā by Bernard Hickey) and evid­ence of Substack’s atti­tude towards hate­ful (if not neces­sar­ily actu­al hate) speech continues.

I’ve had some very respect­ful dis­cus­sions about this online and mixed (but pos­it­ive) feed­back from read­ers here.

One of the things I’m wrest­ling with is that I nev­er needed a place to write – the old Funerals & Snakes WordPress site is still up and I could just post my thoughts there as I did in the past. But, as any­one still ‘blog­ging’ now will testi­fy, that doesn’t neces­sar­ily equal readers.

And read­ers are why we do this.

It was pre­cisely the kind of recom­mend­a­tion and dis­cov­ery tools that Substack offered that made me think that giv­ing them 10% of my subs was worth­while, and so it has proved. Most of my growth in the last few months has come from with­in the Substack ecosystem.

But it’s those recom­mend­a­tion tools that are also fuel­ling the growth of the bad people who are using the platform.

I’m still not sure what the future holds and I’m look­ing into altern­at­ives that might make every­body – espe­cially myself – happy. To give you an idea about how some oth­er people are going about things, this guide to self-hosting with the pub­lish­ing plat­form Ghost is over 8,000 words long. And Ghost doesn’t do its own email­ing, you need anoth­er ser­vice for that.

In the short term, one action I can take is to change the address of this site from substack.funeralsandsnakes.net to newsletter.funeralsandsnakes.net so that, if I do have to change plat­forms, inbound links from RNZ, Facebook, etc won’t break.

I prob­ably should have done that in the first place but hind­sight is won­der­ful thing.

That change should hap­pen in the next couple of days (and won’t hap­pen if it means any pos­sible inter­rup­tion of service).