Children Being Filmed by Truffaut

Children Being Filmed by Truffaut
Author(s): Georgiana Colvile

Source: The French Review, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Feb., 1990), pp. 444-451
Published by: American Association of Teachers of French
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THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol.
63,
No.
3,
February
1990 Printed in U.S.A.
Children
Being
Filmed
by
Truffaut
by Georgiana
Colvile
De tous le
opprimes
doues de
parole,
les
enfants
sont les
plus
muets.
-Christiane Rochefort
(7)
But children ...
,
what do
they
want?
-Jean
Luc Godard
(104)
II
n'y
a
pas d'enfants
nazis,
fanatiques,
terro-
ristes,
fascistes,
il
n'y
a
que
des
enfants
de
nazis,
de
fanatiques,
de terroristes et de
fascistes
et
parcequ'ils
sont des
enfants,
ils sont innocents.
-Franqois
Truffaut
(240)
FREUD
HAS ALREADY DEMONSTRATED the visual
quality
of childhood
memories,
which adults tend to
repress. Franqoise
Dolto
(37)
finds that children ex-
press
themselves and their bodies better
through drawings
than
language.
She has even used the verb
"projeter"
(=to
project).
Before
her,
Anna Freud
and Melanie Klein used
toys
and
games
to draw out their
child-analysands.
Creating
narrative films is both a child-like
picture-making activity
and a
form of
play,
as in Freud's
theory
of the
poet
and
daydreaming
(44-54).
French films about childhood are often
autobiographical,
like
Vigo's
Zero de
conduite
(1933), Truffaut's
Les
Quatre
Cents
Coups
(1959)
and Malle's Au-
revoir les
enfants
(1987),
in which case the filmmaker
goes through
a
regres-
sion
process
in order to re-member his/her child self and retrieve an
imago
through
the mirror of
past
memories.
Truffaut wrote about the
responsibility
he felt towards
spectators
when
filming
children,
on account of
people's
inevitable
symbolic self-projection
into the
past
when confronted with a screen
image
of a child
(240-41).
The
mirror-configuration
is at least
triple
(without
taking
the critic into ac-
count!):
the director behind the
camera,
the
spectator
and
finally
the child-
actor,
who alone has almost no distance from the screen character. Here
Frangoise
Dolto's
reinterpretation
of Lancan's "Mirror
Stage" (50) should
be considered. She maintains that the child, upon recognizing
his own
image,
feels not
jubilation
but castration and loss at his
separateness
from
444
CHILDREN BEING FILMED 445
the reflection. I would like to add that the loss felt could be that of a
potential playmate. Similarly,
the child
actor,
once the excitement of
being
filmed
(shot)
is
over,
retains
nothing
but his screen
image.
Bufiuel
declared
that his best actors were children
(237).
Truffaut never tired of
working
with them
(21):
for them
playing/acting
was not
regression,
nor even
simulation.
Concerning
the
spectators,
as well as the adult characters in films about
children,
feminist theories on male
scopophilia
and the female
image,
as
elaborated
by
Laura
Mulvey
(78),
Teresa de Lauretis and Ann
Kaplan,
for
example,
can be
displaced
onto an
"adults-looking-at-children" pattern.
Ann
Kaplan's question:
"Is the
gaze
male?"
(23-25)
then becomes: "Is the
gaze
adult?" Since there are no child filmmakers
(except, perhaps,
as amateurs in
certain
experimental high
schools),
the child
represented
in films necessar-
ily
takes on the role of an
ethnographic subject,
filmed as
opposed
to
filming, analysand
rather than
analyst, signified,
not
signifier.
The result is
frequently
a
false,
sentimental
portrayal
of children as seen
by
adults.
Truffaut once said: "When I hear an adult
regretting
his
childhood,
I tend to
think his
memory
must be bad"
(22).
There exists a well-established tradition in the French cinema in which
the children themselves are the focalizers. If Truffaut remains to date the
best-known
example,
at the time of The 400 Blows he was influenced
by
earlier classics such as
Vigo's
Zero de conduite
(1933)
and Cocteau and Mel-
ville's Les
Enfants
terribles
(1950).
Like
Jean Renoir,
Truffaut was a
loving
and beloved filmmaker. His
unhappy
childhood
inspired
him to create
another,
better mirror world for
the screen: "To make a film means to
improve
life and
rearrange
it
your
own
way, prolonging
the
games
of childhood"
(245).
His
parents neglected
him,
but he found a father
figure
in Andre
Bazin,
the founder of Cahiers du
Cinema
and mentor of the New Wave directors. Like
Bazin,
Truffaut died
young
and was
deeply regretted.
Much has been written about the osmosis
between Truffaut and actor
Jean-Pierre
L6aud,
who at fourteen first inter-
preted
Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows
(1959). Doinel,
about whom Truf-
faut made five films in
twenty years,
all with
L6aud,
was a screen double to
both of them. After Truffaut's
death,
L6aud
said:
"Franqois
is the man I
most loved in the
world,
as he himself would
say
about Andre Bazin. I miss
him. We all miss him"
(40).
The 400 Blows was dedicated to
Bazin;
the next
film about a
child,
The Wild Child
(1969)
was dedicated to
L6aud.
In an
interview,
Truffaut referred to his three main films on childhood as
repre-
senting
the three
ages
of the filmmaker: "When I shot The 400
Blows,
I was
the
protagonist's
elder
brother,
when I shot The Wild
Child,
I was Victor's
father,
when I shot Small
Change,
I felt like a
grandfather"
(Entretiens 1:33).
Like Freud, Truffaut
approached
the
problems
of childhood
through
his
own
experience.
It is this
personal
involvement which makes his films on
children so
moving.
His crusade on their behalf was not one of radical
rebellion, but a
strong plea
to adults to
respect, accept
and love
them, hence
446
FRENCH REVIEW
his irritated reaction to Godard who "said somewhere: I made a film to
understand children. Children don't need to be
understood,
they
need to be
loved"
(Entretiens 2:33).
Looking
back at his work in
1980,
Truffaut con-
firmed his own and his
protagonists' strong
desire to
belong
in
society,
even if it
rejects
them: "From The 400 Blows to The Wild
Child,
I have
shown characters who want to be
integrated
and take
part"
(Entretiens
1:14).
The 400 Blows
plunges
the
spectator
into the
tragi-comic
world of child-
hood,
with its miseries and
joys,
exhilaration and
solemnity, compelling
him to look
through
a child's
eyes
at the adult
world,
which reveals itself to
be "one of
impunity
where
everything
is
permitted"
(29).
The fictitious
autobiographical plot
shows adult
injustice closing
in on
twelve-year-old
Antoine Doinel.
Living
with
neglectful parents
in a
cramped apartment,
unable to win his
capricious
mother's
affection,
picked
on
by
a sour
teacher,
the
originally
well-intentioned child drifts into
playing hooky
with his
friend Rene and
running away
from home. Given a second chance
by
his
mother,
Antoine tries hard at school and
enjoys
a brief interlude of close-
ness with his
parents,
who take him to the
cinema,
his and the
young
Truffaut's favorite
pastime.
Soon accused of
plagiarism by
his
teacher,
Antoine runs
away again
and commits a
petty
theft,
which leads to a
disaster. His father turns him in to the
police
and,
after a miserable
night
in
jail,
he is sent to a
reformatory by
the sea. Rene tries to visit him but is
turned
away.
His
parents
abandon him to his fate.
Finally,
Antoine
escapes
once more. The film closes with a freeze frame of the
boy running
towards
the womblike waves.
However,
young
Doinel's death-drive is checked
by
the camera
alone,
for the sake of films to come.
While
telling
this sad
story,
Truffaut
simultaneously
celebrates the zest
for life of
freedom-loving boys
on the run and his own
youthful
exuber-
ance at
making
his first full-feature film. He includes tributes to his friend
Lachenay
(Rene)
and to
budding
directors Chabrol and Rivette as well as to
Bazin. Truffaut's
astonishing
sense of
composition
and subtle use of cam-
era
technique
enhance both
aspects
of this
poignant
film.
Space
is
especially
important,
as it was for
Vigo
in Zero de conduite. The film is framed
by
a
sense of liberation. In the
opening
shots,
over the
credits,
accompanied by
the musical
theme,
a
playful
camera
pans
and tracks about the beautiful
city
of Paris. A
pre-lapsarian paradise,
Paris is filmed above street level so
that no human
figure
can be
seen,
passing by
trees and
buildings
(nature
and
culture)
and
skirting
the
phallic
Eiffel Tower. The final takes follow
Antoine's
desperate flight along
the beach towards
"la
mer"
(both
sea and
absent
mother),
focusing
on the lone child in a vast
open place,
while the
same musical theme
gradually
slows down and
stops.
The initial
sequence
fades out and back in to a
close-up
of a child
writing,
followed
by
the first classroom scene, when the teacher catches Antoine
with a
circulating pin-up-girl picture
and
punishes
him. Truffaut creates a
constant outsidelinside
dichotomy
which for the children
signifies
freedom
versus confinement. The two worlds alternate and
compete
like a visual
representation
of
Antoine's
id and
super-ego.
The use of
long
shots in the
street and of
close-ups
in the
school,
home and other institutions accentu-
ates this effect. The
city,
with its
multiple
forms of
entertainment,
is where
children can "faire les
quatre
cent
coups" (get up
to endless
pranks)
but
inside Antoine receives "400 blows" from adults. He is
repeatedly
chastised
in the
classroom,
slapped by
his father at school and later
by
an instructor
at the
reformatory.
He is also
caught
with the stolen
typewriter
inside his
father's office
building.
A child is
being
beaten within the adult
system,
but
outside those walls he beats it. Out of
doors,
the illusion of the
equestrian
statue of Henri IV
galloping
forward at the
beginning
and later that of
Antoine almost
flying
at a
fairground
attraction show the boundless
scope
of a child's visual
imagination,
inaccessible to adults.
Antoine's
worship
of
nineteenth-century
novelist
Balzac
not
only
re-
flects Truffaut's own love for that
period,
but also lends a structure of
external focalization to the film: an omniscient camera follows Antoine
inside and
out,
a visual
equivalent
of voice-over narration. Both Truffaut
with his camera and Antoine on the run
challenge
Paris like
Balzac's
Rastig-
nac. Antoine is the inner focalizer and
so,
occasionally,
is
Rene,
his alter
ego. Although
from a richer
family,
Rene
appears
to be no better off than
Antoine,
between a drunken mother and an
uncaring
father.
The
pace
of the film imitates a child in constant
motion,
his
fluctuating
stream of consciousness and short attention
span.
The adult world comes
across in
fragments
unclear to the
child,
shown
visually through
mirror
images
of
grown-ups
or furtive
glimpses,
for
example,
of the mother and
her lover in the
street,
and
audibly by
voice-overs of the teacher's
anger
or
parents quarreling
at
night,
often
referring
to the child's
illegitimacy,
with
cuts to Antoine's
puzzled
face. At the
reformatory,
Antoine talks
straight
into the camera when
answering
the voice-over
questions
of an invisible
psychologist,
thus
becoming
more intimate with the audience. His
bright
smile in this scene contrasts with his usual
solemnity
and indicates his true
nature and
potential.
A bar and
grid
motif
punctuates
the film from the
very beginning,
mul-
tiplying
faster as Antoine's troubles escalate. A low
angle
shot of the com-
plex
ironwork in the
printing press
where the
boy
hides on his first
escapade
foreshadows the
prison,
where endless sets of bars and
grids
are
filmed from the child's cell below. The two most
pathetic
shots in the film
emphasize
the theme of incarceration.
First,
the
slightly panning
out close-
up
of Antoine
looking tearfully
at a
rainy
Paris from behind the bars of the
departing paddy-wagon.
The
other,
outside the
reformatory,
focuses,
in a
medium
shot,
on three little
girls looking
out from a
large cage
where their
groundsman father has
imprisoned them, while the
boys
are let out for
sports.
Such shots and the final freeze frame of the child-hero brand the
spectator,
like the narrator's words in Resnais' 1956 Holocaust film, Night
and
Fog:
"We are all
responsible."
448
FRENCH REVIEW
In The Wild Child
(1969),
Truffaut
ignores
the
May
1968 student revolu-
tion and sets the scene in the
pre-Romantic period.
The film is a simulated
documentary,
made from the 1806 account
by
Dr.
Itard,
Mimoire et
rapport
sur Victor de
l'Aveyron,
the true
story
of an 11- or
12-year-old
wolf-child
found in 1798.
Any attempt
at
objectivity
on Truffaut's
part proves decep-
tive. This film is as
subjective
as The 400
Blows,
since the filmmaker identi-
fies not
only
with the child
character,
but also with the father
figure,
Dr.
Itard,
whose
part
he chose to
interpret
himself. The
physical
resemblance
between
Truffaut,
L6aud,
Jean-Pierre
Cargol
(The
Wild
Child)
and
Philippe
Goldmann
(the
battered child in Small
Change)
is
certainly
no coincidence:
they
all have the
dark,
solemn
beauty
of
young
Romantics and the same
wistful look of children
longing
to be
integrated.
This film
begins
in medias
res,
with an iris-in
(the
first of
several)
creating
an archaic effect: a
peasant
woman discovers Victor in the woods while
picking
mushrooms and flees in terror. The camera
briefly
follows the
child-savage
in his edenic
freedom,
until the
villagers pursue
and catch him.
Now the child as a tracked animal is no
longer
a
metaphor
but a fact. Victor
is taken from nature and institutionalized in various
places, ranging
from'a
police
station to a deaf and dumb school. He is
mistreated,
taken for an
idiot,
and exhibited to the tourists like a freak.
Contrary
to
Antoine,
Victor
ends
up
in a foster home with
kindly parental figures:
Dr. Itard and his
housekeeper,
Madame
Gu6rin.
From then
on,
Itard's
educating
Victor be-
comes the main
subject
of the film.
The nineteenth
century
sets the entire tone and
pace.
Like earlier New
Wave
films,
The Wild Child was shot in black and white. The sober aes-
thetic
photography,
sedate
rhythm
and classical music are in
harmony
with
Itard's
grave
determination and at odds with Victor's wildness. Itard is now
the omniscient narrator: voice-overs of him
reading
from his
diary
accom-
pany
the child's
every
movement. Unlike
Antoine,
Victor is
given
a
model,
a
sudden
parental
referent. The
latter,
in the
person
of
Truffaut,
seems to be
setting
the
norm,
as he
guides
Victor's
progress
(another
nineteenth-
century
notion).
Itard dominates the
frame,
as he does the child and his
whole household. When he becomes harder on
Victor,
the
point
of view
shifts to the latter.
Increasingly,
Itard takes on a
Pygmalion
or even
Frankenstein-like dimension: Victor is his creature and a
guinea pig
for his
scientific research. As the doctor's motives become less
clear,
the
spectator
begins
to doubt Victor's
progress.
He has learned to walk on two
feet,
wear
clothes and
shoes,
eat
correctly
and
identify
various
objects
with the corre-
sponding
written
words,
yet
he still refuses to
speak.
When Victor
finally
utters a
sound,
in a
strange, high-pitched
voice,
only
one word comes out:
"lait"
(milk).
This
cry
for the absent
mother,
recalling
the shot of the
runaway
Antoine
stealing
a bottle of milk,
ironically
undermines Itard's
efforts to
bring
the child to
language
and the adult
symbolic
order of the
world
(according
to Lacan's
theory
of the
Imaginary
and the
Symbolic).
When Itard overstresses the child with too much
training
and
finally
resorts to a cruel test of his emotions
by chastising
him
unjustly,
Victor
rebels
normally
and is
subsequently
rewarded. The
punishment
had con-
sisted in
locking
the
boy
in a dark room or "camera obscura." A child is
being
filmed: the filmmaker is his
super-ego,
educator and tormentor.
However,
the
early
shot of Itard
showing
Victor how to
identify
his own
image, alongside
the
doctor's,
in the
mirror,
confirms the child's structured
dependency
on the one hand and
posits
Itard as the
reassuring presence
of
an adult
helping
the child
go through
the mirror
stage
on the other. We
also know that Truffaut
recognized
the double
image
in the mirror of his
film to be his own. To make that
film,
he
projected
himself into the
pre-
cinema
days
(for once,
there can be no
sequence
at the
movies!),
just
as
Victor chooses to
linger
in his
pre-linguistic, "imaginary"
state.
Like Antoine's and later
Julien's,
Victor's future is left
pending.
His mute
condition makes him even more
representative
of
children's
colonized
state.
Uneasy
at Truffaut's deliberate
ambivalence,
the
spectator
can
neither
completely accept
nor
entirely
condemn Itard's neo-Rousseauist
education methods.
When he shot his
early
short film Les mistons
(The Brats, 1957),
Truffaut
had so
enjoyed working
with children that he had
planned
a series of five
films on
childhood,
with a
great many
characters. Doinel and other
projects
interfered,
so
he
didn't
get
back to his initial idea until
1976,
at which
point
he condensed it into a
single
film,
L'Argent
de
poche
(Small
Change).
In color this
time,
the film
opens
with an iris-in
again,
now
seeming
to
indicate a window
opening
onto a
new, modern,
post-68, utopian
world.
Though
more
distant,
the
personal
touch is there. Like
Hitchcock,
Truffaut
himself
appears briefly
at the
beginning
of the film as the father of Mar-
tine,
the little
girl
who frames it. Truffaut's own
daughter
Ewa also
plays
one of the numerous children.
Though basically plotless,
the film often reads like a
happy
remake of The
400 Blows. After the
opening
shots of Martine
mailing
a card from "the
Center of
France,"
children
literally pour
onto the screen. The camera
movement is
familiar,
only
at a lower
level,
as it follows endless
joyful
kids
running
down countless
steps
and streets and across a
bridge during
the
credits,
until the name of the small
town, Thiers,
coincides with the direc-
tor's. Cut to a
close-up
of a child in class
again.
Once more the
teacher,
this
time
young
and
kind,
asks for whatever is
being passed
around: Martine's
postcard,
received
by
her cousin in Thiers. Instead of
punishing
the
child,
Monsieur Richet makes use of the card in his lesson.
Everything
so
sadly
missing
in The 400 Blows has now been lavished on these
children,
who are
no
longer neglected
loners like Antoine and
Rene.
Thiers
represents
a
happy
microcosm,
especially
the low-income
apart-
ment
building
where most of the
protagonists
live. In
spite
of some
prob-
lems, like the child who lives alone with a
handicapped father, everyone
helps everyone
else in this ideal little
community. Something
of the 60's
commune dreams
lingers
in the air. Central to the
building
are Monsieur
450 FRENCH REVIEW
Richet and his
wife,
who
provide
a norm and a natural sex education for
the children:
they
are seen
kissing through
the
glass
door of the
classroom,
and Richet's students share in the birth of their
baby.
Coeducation is
planned
for the next school
year.
Martine and
Patrick,
one of the Thiers
boys, enjoy
it at the summer
camp
which closes the film. Their
puppy
love
expresses
a new
acceptance
of child
sexuality,
no
longer repressed
as in the
previous
films,
in which
girls
and women
belong
to another world.
The Richets
gently disagree
after a small child has
narrowly escaped
a
serious accident. To
him,
children "are in
danger
from
morning
until
night."
To
her,
they
are
"very tough."
Both statements are true of Truf-
faut's
young protagonists.
Small
change
is a
utopia,
with a twist.
Early
in the
film,
the camera cuts from a classroom scene to the school
playground.
It follows the
staring janitor's gaze
to a
beat-up pair
of
shoes,
pans up
to torn
jeans,
an old broken satchel and
jacket, finally revealing
the
pale
bruised face of a beautiful dark-haired
boy.
The
physical
and
psycho-
logical
link between
Antoine,
Victor and this
lonely figure
is
instantly
established. In Mlle Petit's older
class,
he looks out of
place.
His teacher is
warned that he is a welfare case. After
class,
the camera cuts to him
going
home. In the midst of lush
green shrubbery,
the
shabby
hut
he enters with
a ladder could be a tree house for the wild child.
His name is
Julien
Leclou.
Julien
refers
again
to the
nineteenth-century
novels Truffaut and Antoine loved. Leclou in French means "the
nail,"
figuratively
the main
point
to a
story, Julien's
role in the film. Like
Antoine,
he
spends
a
night away
from
home,
at a
fairground.
Like Truffaut and
Antoine,
he loves the movies and has
perfected
a
system
for
sneaking
in.
He too wants to
belong, asking
a
neighbor
about the
previous night's
TV
program
so
he
can discuss it with the others at school. Like
Patrick,
the
spectator
follows him
about,
gradually picking up
clues to his battered
predicament,
until a medical
inspection
reveals the truth. This time the
paddy wagon
comes for the
guilty
adults:
Julien's- hag-like
mother and
grandmother. Julien
no
longer appears
in the film.
The incident
provides
Truffaut with his cue. Monsieur Richet delivers
the
film's
openly
didactic
message
in a
speech
to the children. The teacher
explains
Julien's predicament
and future in a foster home. He
gives
his own
orphaned
childhood as the reason for his
pedagogical
vocation and devotion
to
children,
urging
his
pupils
to become
caring parents
when
they grow up.
In his
optimism,
he assures them that life is hard but beautiful.
Although
the
concluding
Patrick and Martine
episode
softens the
heavy impact
of
Truffaut/Richet's tirade,
the series of films on children was
necessarily
terminated. In The 400
Blows,
the
camera-eye
was a
child's;
in The Wild
Child it alternated between
boy
and father
figure.
In Small
Change,
the
gaze
has
grown up
and the filmmaker has
irrevocably
entered the
logocentric,
adult world.
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER
Works Cited
Bufiuel,
Luis. Mon dernier
soupir.
Paris:
Laffont,
1982.
de
Lauretis,
Teresa. Alice Doesn't.
Bloomington:
Indiana
UP,
1984.
Dolto,
Franqoise. L'enfant
du miroir. Paris:
Rivages,
1987.
"Entretiens avec
Franqois
Truffaut"
(1).
Cahiers du
cinema
315
(1980).
"Entretiens avec
Franqois
Truffaut"
(2).
Cahiers du cinema 316
(1980).
Freud, Sigmund.
On
Creativity
and the Unconscious. New York:
Harper
and
Row,
1958.
Kaplan,
Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides
of
the Camera. New York and London:
Methuen,
1983.
Lacan,
Jacques.
"Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du
Je."
Ecrits
I.
Paris:
Editions du
Seuil,
1966. 89-97.
MacCabe, Colin.
Godard:
Images,
Sounds,
Politics.
Bloomington:
Indiana
UP,
1980.
Mulvey,
Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16.3
(1975):
6-18.
Rochefort,
Christiane.
Les Enfants
d'abord. Paris:
Grasset,
1976.
Le
Roman de
Francois
Truffaut.
Paris:
Special
issue of Cahiers du
Cinema,
1984.
Truffaut,
Franqois. Le
Plaisir des
yeux.
Paris: Cahiers du
cinema,
1987.

Children Being Filmed by Truffaut

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Children Being Filmed by Truffaut

Author(s): Georgiana Colvile

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