Hermeneutic analysis of the film «Four hundred blows» (1959) by F. Truffaut on media education classes with students

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Salny R. V.

The article describes the results of a hermeneutic analysis of F. Truffaut’s film “Four Hundred Blows” (1959). The film was a debut of a director where he tells the story of a teenager (Antoine Doinel), reflecting largely the author’s own way of living. Following the logic of V. Dilthey that a work of art as a cultural phenomenon must be achieved, experiencing and understanding it as a kind of “vital whole”, the analysis of the picture was based on immersing students in the sociocultural and historical atmosphere of France from the 1940s – 1950s. A series of questions were developed by A.V. Fedorov and A. Silverblatt for hermeneutic analysis of media texts to penetrate the artistic and semantic dimension of the film. They allowed to find links between historical and cultural subtexts and author’s motives, describe and clarify the behavioral patterns and worldviews of F. Truffaut’s contemporaries and his characters, reveal not only their psychological properties, but also interpret the multidimensional content of the whole artistic meaning of the film.

Keywords: hermeneutic analysis, F. Truffaut, «Four Hundred Blows», cultural context, France 1940s – 1950s, movie.  

 

*Support and acknowledgement

This article is written within the framework of a study financially supported by the grant of the Russian Science Foundation (RSF). Project 17-18-01001 “School and university in the mirror of the Soviet, Russian and Western audiovisual media texts”, performed at Rostov State University of Economics.

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