I grew up on a couple-acre patch of green amid rolling farmland in the west of Kentucky—I spent eighteen years there one week, the tired joke goes—and didn’t grow up with movies. I grew up among people. People who talked. And talked. Stories were everywhere. Histories were spoken aloud. Women and men in their eighties and nineties who had sat on the lap of Civil War veterans when they were small. Legacies were alive. Everyone knows and trusts implicitly the basic, indispensable relationships and alliances and mutual associations in a town of a thousand. You’re forced to, through fires, floods, illness, economic slumps. Cemeteries were filled with the names of people you knew who were the successors of the passed. A dozen identical headstones would answer to the same name. One night, young, I saw both “Nashville” on a big screen and “The 400 Blows,” uncut, Janus Films logo and all, on late-night TV. And that was it. There was a path in the darkness ahead, like through the thicket across the way. Many movies followed. Stories—movies—still hold weight for me in the smaller, smallest details, such as every aspect of the final, chilling, thrilling shot of young Jean-Pierre Leaud’s face at the end of “400 Blows.” Truffaut described similar vivid details, glimpsed only by the viewer in solitude with a character, as “privileged moments.” “The 400 Blows” is one extended privileged moment. (Ray Pride) “The 400 Blows” starts Friday at the Music Box, with the thirty-minute short, “Antoine and Colette.”
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