Word: enfants
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...Enfant Sauvage is entirely narrative cinema, Where Godard's events reflect on their own significance in terms of film, Truffaut's effect on their significance in terms of human actions. The subject of L'Enfant Sauvage is the essential subject of all narrative films: human actions and what they mean...
...Festival opened with Francois Truffaut's newest film, L'Enfant Sauvage. Its story is simple and factually accurate, based on the journal of Jean Itard, a Parisian doctor who tries to turn a wild child found in the woods into a human being. Although the boy was thought to be deaf, dumb, and retarded by his discoverers, Itard manages to teach him to speak and understand language, to read, and ultimately, to love. L'Enfant Sauvage is a lot less violent than The Miracle Worker, a film which Truffaut admires, but the essential themes are similar: the birth...
...Enfant Sauvage is shot in black and white, and Truffaut frequently uses an iris diaphragm rather than a dissolve to end a scene. There are few close-ups in the film; most of the shots, in fact, are full-length portraits: Itard standing in his frock coat at his writing desk, his housekeeper pouring milk into a white china bowl, the boy drinking water at a window. The visual effect is to capture the period charm of engravings. By discovering conventions and exploiting them, Truffaut is inviting us to share in an artistic is trust with him. That he succeeds...
What makes L'Enfant Sauvage so interesting is that the child is not being civilized and humanized in an abstract or theoretical sense. The civilization toward which he is being inched possesses a very special race, moment, and milieu. He is being crafted into the late eighteenth-century conception of human beings. The boy is not exactly a Noble Savage, but it is impossible for Itard not to have had Rousseau in mind; the doctor many not be a poet, but he is inexorably caught up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the birth of Romanticism. The film...
...came out of his self-styled retirement only once, in 1938, to construct a valise containing each of his important works in miniature, really a portable Duchamp museum. He kept a studio, but visitors hunting for some clue that the aging enfant terrible was working again searched in vain. Duchamp died last October, having created little except for occasional graphics, a few objects and the inevitable puns he uttered, in almost 30 years...