Word: truffauts
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...LEARNING that Arthur Penn was already making a film of The Miracle Worker (which is, by the way, scrupulously to be avoided) Francois Truffaut abandoned the idea of adapting the original stage play and began looking for a similar property. He found one much better in the accounts of an early nineteenth century scientist, Dr. Itard, who tried to bring a boy living wild in the woods of Southern France back to civilization...
...writing the screenplay Truffaut showed unbelievable sensitivity to the way each event in the film would affect his audience. And in the film's realization, Truffaut's spare performance as Dr. Itard and the boy's bestial miming both work against every conventional means of melodramatic expression, so that in no case does the playing of a scene signal, "I am a piece of drama being played for emotion." It is rather the simple conditions of each situation that shape our emotional responses...
...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...
...Truffaut himself plays the part of Itard. He explained after the screening, "I think the role of the film director is like Itard's. Both are trying to create form, to give shape and personality where none existed before, I wanted to be the director in front of the lens instead of behind it; I didn't want to work through an intermediary...