Real wild child films
Originally, the film was divided evenly between Victor’s time before Itard and his time with him.
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This new adoption did not “take” creatively – Cargol, though adept, was not another Léaud, and did not continue working in film. Casting himself as Itard, Truffaut as director created a project in which he needed to engage on screen as a mentor for his child protagonist. He was a Gypsy child found by Truffaut’s assistant, Suzanne Schiffman, on the street in Montpellier. Truffaut tried to create the same kind of relationship with 12-year-old non-actor Jean-Pierre Cargol, who plays Victor. In The Wild Child, Truffaut recreates this mentorship pattern yet again – the film’s opening title states that it is “for Léaud”. (Léaud would continue to play Antoine in four sequels spanning 20 years.) This film’s success launched Truffaut’s and Léaud’s illustrious film careers. When Truffaut turned to his own boyhood as the raw material for his first feature film, Les quatre cents coups ( The 400 Blows, 1959), he cast 14-year-old amateur Jean-Pierre Léaud as alter ego Antoine Doinel. His initial rise to public notice as a fiery, bad-boy film critic (termed “the gravedigger of the French Cinema of Quality”, he was banned for a time from Cannes 4) was abetted by his mentor and father figure, film critic and theorist Andre Bazin. Truffaut himself was a precocious but neglected child, self-taught and rebellious. The narrative in which a pupil is raised from “beastly” to “human” status is also found in such films as The Miracle Worker (Arthur Penn, 1962) and The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980). Truffaut calls Itard’s records “superb, consisting of writing that is simultaneously scientific, philosophical, moralizing, humanistic, by turns lyrical and familiar” 3 – qualities we find in Truffaut as well. Itard took the child from the institute for the deaf where he was housed and brought him into his home, attempting to civilise him and teach him language. Jean Itard’s 1801 memoir and 1806 report on his tutelage of Victor, the “Wild Boy of Aveyron”, a feral child who was captured in 1800 near a small forest village in southern France.
Truffaut found the story in Lucien Malson’s 1964 historical survey of children recovered from the wild, Les enfants sauvages: mythe et réalité. 2 By stepping into his own narrative, Truffaut makes The Wild Child much more than a historical retelling – he performs a personal examination. It looks back at Truffaut’s relationship with children on film, and puts him in front of the camera as a principal actor in his own work for the first of three significant times in his career.
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Using documentary-style strategies – the film is “based on a true story” – it possesses simplicity of construction and depth of vision. Made halfway through the director’s career, L’enfant sauvage ( The Wild Child, 1970) is François Truffaut’s most seemingly straightforward work. “As I saw it, the essential task in this was not to do the directing, but to attend to the child.” – François Truffaut, introduction to The Wild Child screenplay 1