The Wild Child
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Features
• PAL
In Theaters : 11 September, 1970 |
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The Wild Child description
François Truffaut's fascinating 1969 film, based on a real-life, 18th-century behavioral scientist's efforts to turn a feral boy into a civilized specimen, is an ingenious and poignant experience. In a piece of resonant casting that immediately turns this story into an echo of the creative process, Truffaut himself plays Dr. Itard, a specialist in the teaching of the deaf. Itard takes in a young lad (Jean-Pierre Cargol) found to have been living like an animal in the woods all his life. In the spirit of social experiment, Itard uses rewards and punishments to retool the boy's very existence into something that will impress the world. Beautifully photographed in black and white and making evocative use of such charmingly antiquated filmmaking methods as the iris shot, The Wild Child has a semidocumentary form that barely veils Truffaut's confessional slant. What does it mean to turn the raw material of life into a monument to one's own experience and bias? The question has all sorts of intriguing reverberations when one considers that Truffaut's own wild childhood was rescued by love of the cinema and that a degree of verisimilitude factors into his films starring Jean-Pierre Leaud--the troubled lad who grew up in Truffaut's work from The 400 Blows onward. (The Wild Child is dedicated to Leaud.) --Tom Keogh |
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The Wild Child Customer Reviews
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The Wild Child
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1970, black and white, French with English subtitles. I spent my teen years in Tampa, Florida, which enjoys a fine independent film scene, but I never saw a single one. I was washing dishes for minimum wage, okay? So, for the last time, I'm no art film snob. Don't be on my case because I watch movies with subtitles sometimes. I watched HERO that way. It really sucked. It really, really, really sucked. Not like a Hoover. Like a black hole.
True story. In the late 1700s, a boy who was roughly eleven years old was found living in the woods. He'd been there eight or so years. Jonathan Swift's yahoos in all their glory, and perhaps the basis for every jungle boy myth before and after Tarzan. As an amateur teacher myself, I would NOT want to be the one educating this child. The guy who took on the job left journals, and they're the basis for this movie. Realism was the obvious goal, and it was achieved.
Consider this. Fiction loves to look at humanity from perspectives outside ourselves. STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. Mr Spock. Kwai Chang Caine. Data. BABYLON 5. Odo. THE WILD CHILD covers a lot of ground, subtly, in under 90 minutes. I'd love to know how they found this child actor who always looked more comfortable on four legs than on two. I'll watch this one again.
After you've enjoyed the film -- not before -- watch the trailer they showed in the USA in 1970. It's on the DVD. You will laugh your butt off. HAMLET, as sold by Barnum and Bailey barkers. Clueless marketing morons are a constant in every age. Conga line of suckholes.
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The Wild Child dvd movie.