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Here is a moment many of my readers will recognize: The concluding image from François Truffaut’s Les 400 coups (The 400 Blows, 1959). “Freezing” within its frame, fixing the viewer with the young actor’s gaze, this image means to arrest; it arrests the young fugitive, the narrative, the viewer caught in the act of watching a film. For now, as we see the word Fin emblazoned across the boy’s face, it is time to get up and leave the theater. But the boy has stopped in his tracks and seems to regard us from that “other side,” the place where fiction lives, as if it were possible to cross through the screen and address us. Here, at the conclusion of a story in which the boy has been ignored, discounted , misjudged, shunted aside by the people who are supposed to care for him, he seems to stage a final appeal, or at least demand recognition. What difference should it make to us that this boy, Antoine Doinel, played by another boy, Jean-Pierre Léaud, represents, at least to some degree, in some way, the director François Truffaut? Certainly we can watch the film, empathize with the boy, without any knowledge of his relationship to the director. But what difference might it make for us to know? And why would the director create such a relationship in the first place? This study aims to answer these questions not only for this film but, more broadly, for a particular kind of film by a particular kind of director. The films I have in mind create a relationship in which a recognized director/author, who is understood by the viewer to be the ultimate source of the vision on-screen, projects an image to the viewer that the viewer in turn identifies with the director—not only with a specific aesthetic associated with a director, but with the director as person. In the relationship between director and viewer, mediated by the entire apparatus of auteurist cinema, INTRODUCTION Without a You, No I: Cinematic Self-Projection 1 directorial self-projection emerges as a form of intimate address, like the boy gazing out toward the space where the viewer sits in the darkness . But even now it will be apparent to the reader that it is not a truly direct address. The boy is not Truffaut, and even if the actor in the scene were François Truffaut, he would not be addressing the viewer as himself—or would he? This will be a study, then, not only of a genre of film and filmmaking, not only a modality of spectatorship , but of how the cinematic medium complicates the act of representing a self and complicates even the matter of how we define what a self is. The word Fin superimposed on the boy’s face tells us that this is “the end,” but I would argue that this end marks a beginning. Fin is the cinematic moment that marks our return to off-screen life. In this case, it marks the intersection between on- and off-screen life, the place where a relationship is claimed between the figure on-screen and the viewer, between the person off-screen, whose childhood provided the material for Antoine Doinel’s part, and the actor Truffaut chose to play the part, between the director and the spectators he challenges to see him. This end marks the beginning of a discourse of cinematic spectatorship that depends on the spectator’s recognition of the film’s author, and the author’s desire to be seen through the self he projects. It is not necessary to argue that there is a single founder of this discourse, but because François Truffaut is one of its most active proponents, and because he so beautifully (and vexingly) expresses its parameters, I will place him at the head of the line in the paragraphs that follow. Film in the First Person, Film as “Act of Love” The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary. The filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what has happened to them: it may be the story of their first love or their most recent; of their political awakening; the story of a trip, a sickness, their military service, their marriage, their last vacation . . . and it will be enjoyable because it will be new...

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