Alright, I'm going to start with the plaid shirt. In the movie 400 blows the boy was wearing an almost plaid jacket. To me, plaid is rugged and working class. Plaid is for the hoi-polloi. A high class snob wouldn't be caught in plaid (at least not in certain time periods).The lead character in the movie commented several times that he would like to just go out into the world and start earning his living. He really had no interest in school. His family was very working class as well, unlike his best friend from school. Plaid is also very masculine. Around Shakespeare's time, plaid was only worn by working class men. So it makes sense that the lead character is a boy wearing plaid. In a way, it shows his status in the world.
Though there is no actual chopping of wood in 400 Blows, a family does get chopped to pieces. The boy's mother and father abandon him at the military school (observatory), his father disowns him and his mother must admit to him that his father is not his biological father. Everything the boy has ever know is ripped to shreds. By the end, his life has completely done a one eighty. He escapes the school and runs toward the sea in search of a new life.
I like the switch you make here between visual (or more precisely, iconographic) and textual modes: the repeating of the plaid clothe across these contexts and your pun-like transition from the wood-chopping image in Shelton's film (which of course also involves plaid shirts) and the "chopping" or cutting up of the boy's family life in The 400 Blows.
ReplyDeleteThis kind of semiotic switching across registers is absolutely central to the language of film (and key to our understanding of the Mumblecore and New Wave avant garde movements).
One caveat: As you move into rush 4, you'll need a specific scene from 400 Blows to work with. Choose one now, before you begin the fourth rush. (To do it the other way around will ruin the temporal structure we're concerned with). Just pick a scene from 400 Blows in which the boy's plaid shirt seems (if only to you) to connote the cutting up (i.e. "unraveling") of the family. And if you can, make note of Truffaut's staging of this shot/scene (in terms of our four key cinematic principles).
100/100
CS