The Wild Child

François Truffaut, Jean Gruault

Washington Square Press, 1973 - Motion picture plays - 189 pages

Follows the capture of a young boy found living like an animal in the forest. Dr. Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard of the National Institute for the Deaf and Dumb, Paris, believes the child can be transformed into a civilized being. The doctor removes the boy from the institute into his own home. The boy, named Victor, is divided between his longing for the wilderness and his new life with the doctor. Itard, whose teaching strategies survive today in the Montessori Method, is unsure whether he is helping a savage become human or turning a forest child into a semi-civilized idiot.

Contents

• Section 1: 24
• Section 2: 26
• Section 3: 31
• Section 4: 41
• Section 5: 43
• Section 6: 53
• Section 7: 58
• Section 8: 70
• Section 9: 72
• Section 10: 123
• Section 11: 152

About the author

Francois Truffaut was one of the principal figures in the French New Wave movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. As a young critic for the avant-garde film magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema, he formulated the politique des auteurs---the idea that directors with a personal vision are the true authors of films, rather than conventional screenwriters or script-bound directors. An admirer of American films, Truffaut was much influenced by Alfred Hitchcock (see Vol. 1). In several of his own films, Truffaut, who had an unhappy childhood and youth, portrayed a fictionalized version of himself, a character called Antoine Doinel, to create personal cinema. The first of these films, which was also his first feature film, was The Four Hundred Blows (1959). It is still one of the most popular of his works. Other notable Truffaut films are Shoot the Piano Player (1960), the lyrical menage a trois Jules and Jim (1961), the Academy Award-winning Day for Night (1973), The Last Metro (1980), and The Woman Next Door (1981).

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Wild Child; Pocket book; [A Washington Square press book]
• Authors: François Truffaut, Jean Gruault
• Publisher: Washington Square Press, 1973
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Feb 6, 2007
• ISBN: 0671478931, 9780671478933
• Length: 189 pages