The following essay responds to the first topic on the Essay #1 assignment sheet.

      The ambiguous endings in The 400 Blows and Salaam Bombay! give audiences a vehicle for deeper consideration than standard story resolution allows.  Techniques like mise-en-scene, camera height, and shot duration, set up the final frame of the film by drawing the viewer well into the character’s primary themes. In the final frame, at a high level of audience involvement, the boy’s expressions are frozen at a moment when viewing perspectives are reversed. This challenge to looking relations provides an opportunity to sift through expectations, beliefs, and perspectives to create meaningful personal interpretations. 
       Mise-en-scene elements in the final minutes of Salaam Bombay! guide the viewer to identify with Chaipau’s losses and retreating goals: returning home, recapturing childhood, and restoring his mother’s love. Earth and sand colors dominate the scene recalling the circus grounds where his filmic journey began. Here, at film’s end, we find him as alone and abandoned as when we followed his gaze to that first slow pan of the deserted grounds. He weeps and winds his top absently. The top is a poignant reminder that childhood can be one of joy and entertainment, but here the symbol represents Chaipau’s loss and abandonment. It emphasizes the incongruence of his age and experience.  Its reappearance now prompts reminiscence of Chaipau’s life before he was abandoned by the circus and since. A childhood of love and toys is far from him now.
       By contrast, the final scene of The 400 Blows, and specifically Antoine’s long run/escape, recalls exuberance and freedom.  Antoine is outdoors throughout the entire scene, a mise-en-scene choice that connects the viewer with indoor/outdoor patterns underpinning the film’s form and recalling times when he was most free.  The duration of the run heightens its story importance. The escape places Antoine within the capture and release theme throughout the film, a theme accentuated by the sound of Antoine’s footfall. In this final scene Antoine appears to elude his captor and will remain free long enough at least to reach the sea, a location with which he has affinity. The camera tracks and frames his run against expansive scenery evoking a memory of the opening Paris drive-by montage. The montage mixes realism, shots of tops of ordinary buildings, with romance, the tree-lined avenue and spontaneous freeze frame looking up though the base of the Eiffel Tower.  Here, the camera pulls away from Antoine’s run to pan the grandeur of sea and shore—a closing nod to romanticism in the last minutes of this realist text. The film is book-ended by symbols of power and awe, the Eiffel Tower and the sea.  The sea, the escape, the tension between reality and romance all imbue this final scene with hope and potential.
      The final frames of each film are frozen close-ups. The duration of these close-ups exaggerates their effects. One effect is an abrupt halt to character development and to the viewer’s progress with the character.  In the end, the viewer is left with the image, the sense of the story, the lingering mise-en-scene and camera impacts, and themselves: their expectations, beliefs, and perspectives. The abrupt endings prompt the question: what happens next? A Westerner looks at this question through the lens of cultural beliefs about childhood.  Potential and spontaneity are properties of Western childhood and these properties are vehicles of hope that fit into a broader social construct having to do with progress and the promise of a better future. They are reference points for measuring characters as children and for defining the relationship of children to childhood.
       Another effect of a freeze frame is to stop an image in time and place to provoke specific interpretations. By freezing Chaipau alone as he’d been in the first scenes and moments after Baba’s murder, spontaneity seems to have been the decline of his character and potentiality appears diminished.  Our meditation on his image will be determined by how we measure him in relation to our construct of childhood. Empathy or pity may be a strong response.  By freezing Antoine in a spontaneous and original expression as he turns from his first encounter with the sea, his potentiality seems high.  The viewer’s meditation on his image may be one of hope or may reflect the uncertainty at the core of potentiation.
          Both boys are arrested in a private moment. The viewer is also caught unexpectedly in the moment because the frozen images shift viewing-perspective.  In The 400 Blows, Antoine suddenly turns into a zoom close-up that blows up to full screen and diffuses. The camera captures him at eye level. He looks tenuously empowered, uncertain, and expectant. His full screen gaze confronts the viewer in a reversal. Is the viewer looking at Antoine or is he looking at the viewer? Up to now, there has been a double standard about looking allowed by film norms. The viewer has had distance in anonymity, but for Antoine, looking sometimes crowds space and invades privacy. We watched over his shoulder and hung out with him in cramped spaces. The looking relation was to a child, a character.  Film norms governing looking don’t suggest the viewer take responsibility for the gaze. In this last frame, the dynamic shifts. The nature of the shift is playfully informed by the puppet chapter in The 400 Blows.  There, the viewer watched children watching a puppet show unfold. Here, the viewer is captured watching Antoine’s story unfold.  Antoine’s gaze dares engagement. His character isn’t just a play or a fiction. His experiences reflect real life.  His adults didn’t watch him, they didn’t look closely and his institutions weren’t helpful. How will we look at his story? Will we take responsibility for our gaze- in what way? Or will we simply watch as FIN superimposes the image and dilutes the impact of his final frame. 
       In Chaipau’s story, the camera gradually closes in on his private moment finally framing him in a tight close-up.  When the frame freezes, Chaipau looks away from the lens and into the distance. Throughout Salaam Bombay! the viewer gains compassion and understanding by viewing scenes through Chaipau’s gaze. We watch Chaipau’s open face as he apprehends anger, cruelty, rejection, and abandonment. We listen to people through his gaze. At the end of the film, the viewer comes upon Chaipau’s vulnerability, draws close to his sadness and despair, and finds the steadying gaze gone. He is the viewer’s guide to a strange adult world, but he is a child afterall. In this frame, perhaps we realize that Chaipau cannot always be the guide for adults or the nobler figure. The viewer has the opportunity to rehearse reversal of this unjust dynamic. It is our turn to hold the compassionate gaze. The dedication appears.  This movie is about real lives.   How much of a responsibility if any do we have for our new gaze?
       The ambiguous endings in The 400 Blows and Salaam Bombay! are intensified by techniques in the last scene that bring together key narrative and stylistic themes.  Shot duration, camera angles, and mise-en-scene all contribute to the impact of the close-up freeze frames of Antoine and Chaipau.  Where and when the freeze occurs adds to the meaning and meditation the viewer may experience watching the final image. In each freeze, the viewer confronts a reversal in looking relations that offers an opportunity to see the characters in a new way and to experience ambiguity as a vehicle to meaning.