The Wild Child
The Wild Child is a 1970 French film by director François Truffaut. Featuring Jean-Pierre Cargol, François Truffaut, Françoise Seigner and Jean Dasté, it tells the story of a child who spends the first eleven or twelve years of his life with little or no human contact, it is based on the true events regarding the child Victor of Aveyron, reported by Jean Marc Gaspard Itard. The film sold nearly 1.5 million tickets in France. The film opens with the statement: "This story is authentic: it opens in 1798 in a French forest." One summer day in 1798, a naked boy of 11 or 12 years of age is found in a forest in the rural district of Aveyron in southern France. A woman sees him runs off screaming, she tells them that she saw a wild boy. They hunt him down with a pack of dogs; the dogs, upon picking up the boy's scent, chase him up a tree. A branch breaks off, the dogs attack him when he falls, he fights them off leaving one wounded continues to flee and hides in a hole. The dogs continue to follow his scent finding his hiding hole.
The hunters force him out of the hole using smoke to cut off his air supply. After he emerges, the men grab him. Living like a wild animal and unable to speak or understand language, the child has grown up in solitude in the forest since an early age, he is brought to Paris and placed in a school for "deaf-mutes". Dr. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard observes the boy and believes that he is neither deaf nor, as some of his colleagues believe, an "idiot". Itard thinks the boy's behavior is a result of his deprived environment, that he can be educated. Itard takes custody of the boy, whom he names Victor, removes him to his house on the outskirts of Paris. There, under the patient tutelage of the doctor and his housekeeper, Victor becomes socialized and acquires the rudiments of language. There is a narrow margin between the laws of civilization in rough Parisian life and the brutal laws of life in nature. Victor finds a sort of equilibrium in the windows that mark the transition between the closed interiors and the world outside.
But he gains his ability to have social relations by losing his capacity to live as a savage. Jean-Pierre Cargol as Victor of Aveyron, the wild child François Truffaut as Dr. Jean Itard, the Doctor at the National Institution for Deaf Mutes Françoise Seigner as Madame Guérin, Dr. Itard's housekeeper Paul Villé as Remy, an old peasant Jean Dasté as Professor Philippe Pinel, Professor at the Faculty of Medicine Pierre Fabre as the attendant at the National Institution for Deaf Mutes Claude Miller as Monsieur Lémeri Annie Miller as Madame Lémeri Nathan Miller as Baby Lémeri René Levert as Gendarme Jean Mandaroux as the doctor attending Itard Mathieu Schiffman as Mathieu Jean Gruault as a visitor at the Institute Robert Cambourakis as a countryman Gitt Magrini as a countrywoman Jean-François Stévenin as a countryman Laura Truffaut as a girl at farm Eva Truffaut as a girl at farm Guillaume Schiffman as a boy at farm Frédérique Dolbert as a girl at farm Eric Dolbert as a boy at farm Tounet Cargol as a girl at farm Dominique Levert as a girl at farm Mlle Théaudiére as a girl at farm Truffaut had always felt a strong connection to children outcasts and young people who reject the traditions of society, used this theme in films such as The 400 Blows and Small Change.
In 1962, Truffaut had wanted to make a film based on the play The Miracle Worker. In 1966, Truffaut read an article in Le Monde by Lucien Malson about feral children, with short examples of 52 such children from 1344 to 1968. Truffaut was interested in the story of Victor of Aveyron, The Wild Boy of Aveyron, began to research the story; the film's script is based upon two reports written by Dr. Itard: one written to the Academy of medicine in 1801 and one written to the French Minister of the Interior in 1806 requesting that the Ministry continue funding Victor's guardian Madame Guérin. Truffaut studied medical texts and deaf-mutes, as well as books by Maria Montessori and documentaries on autistic children. Dr. Itard's diary was invented by Truffaut and co-screenwriter Jean Gruault in order to give Dr. Itard a more direct voice in the film. After considering several little-known actors, Truffaut decided to play the part of Dr. Itard himself so that he could interact directly with the child actor playing Victor instead of depending on an intermediary.
After the film's shooting was completed he said that he had "the impression not of having acted a role, but of having directed the film in front of the camera and not, as usual, from behind it." He said that "the decision to play Dr. Itard myself is a more complex choice than I believed at the time... this was the first time I identified myself with the adult, the father, to the extent that at the end of the editing, I dedicated the film to Jean-Pierre Léaud because this passage, this shift became clear to me." Truffaut elaborated on the films autobiographical elements by saying that "I think that Itard is André Bazin and the child Truffaut."Truffaut had more difficulty casting the role of Victor, knowing that he wanted a child actor, both talented and suitably undisciplined. He first considered using either an unknown gifted child or the son of a famous celebrity, thinking that a younger version of someone like ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev would be perfect. Unable to find a suitable actor, he enlisted his assistant to scout young, wild-looking boys at s
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was a French film director, producer and film critic. He is regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry, having worked on over 25 films. Truffaut's film The 400 Blows came to be a defining film of the French New Wave movement, was followed by four sequels, Antoine et Colette, Stolen Kisses and Board, Love on the Run, between 1958 and 1979. Truffaut's 1973 film Day for Night earned him critical acclaim and several accolades, including the BAFTA Award for Best Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, his other notable films include Shoot the Piano Player, Jules et Jim, The Wild Child, Two English Girls, The Woman Next Door. Truffaut was born in Paris on 6 February 1932, his mother was Janine de Montferrand. His mother's future husband, Roland Truffaut, accepted him as an adopted son and gave him his surname, he was passed around to live with his grandmother for a number of years.
It was his grandmother. He lived with his grandmother until her death, it was only after his grandmother's death. The identity of Truffaut's biological father was unknown, though a private detective agency in 1968 revealed that their inquiry into the matter led to a Roland Levy, a Jewish dentist from Bayonne. Truffaut's mother's family Truffaut himself believed and embraced them. Truffaut would stay with friends and try to be out of the house as much as possible, his best friend throughout his youth and until his death was Robert Lachenay, the inspiration for the character René Bigey in The 400 Blows and would work as an assistant on some of Truffaut's films. It was the cinema, he was eight years old when he saw his first movie, Abel Gance's Paradis Perdu from 1939. It was there, he played truant from school and would sneak into theaters because he didn't have enough money for admission. After being expelled from several schools, at the age of fourteen he decided to become self-taught. Two of his academic goals were to read three books a week.
Truffaut frequented Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque Française where he was exposed to countless foreign films from around the world. It was here that he became familiar with American cinema and directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray, as well as those of British director Alfred Hitchcock. After starting his own film club in 1948, Truffaut met André Bazin, who would have great effect on his professional and personal life. Bazin was the head of another film society at the time, he became a personal friend of Truffaut's and helped him out of various financial and criminal situations during his formative years. Truffaut spent the next two years trying to escape. Truffaut was arrested for attempting to desert the army. Bazin used his various political contacts to get Truffaut released and set him up with a job at his newly formed film magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Over the next few years, Truffaut became a critic at Cahiers, where he became notorious for his brutal, unforgiving reviews.
He was called "The Gravedigger of French Cinema" and was the only French critic not invited to the Cannes Film Festival in 1958. He supported Bazin in the development of one of the most influential theories of cinema itself, the auteur theory. In 1954, Truffaut wrote an article in Cahiers du cinéma called "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français", in which he attacked the current state of French films, lambasting certain screenwriters and producers, listing eight directors he considered incapable of devising the kinds of "vile" and "grotesque" characters and storylines that he declared were characteristic of the mainstream French film industry: Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tati and Roger Leenhardt; the article caused a storm of controversy, landed Truffaut an offer to write for the nationally circulated, more read cultural weekly Arts-Lettres-Spectacles. Truffaut would pen more than 500 film articles for that publication over the next four years.
Truffaut devised the auteur theory, which stated that the director was the "author" of his work. Although his theory was not accepted it gained some support in the 1960s from American critic Andrew Sarris. In 1967, Truffaut published his book-length interview of Hitchcock/Truffaut. After having been a critic, Truffaut decided to make films of his own, he started out with the short film Une Visite in 1955 and followed that up with Les Mistons in 1957. After seeing Orson Welles' Touch of Evil at the Expo 58, he was inspired to make his feature film directorial debut with The 400 Blows, released in 1959 to much critical and commercial acclaim. Truffaut received a Best Director award from the Cannes Film Festival, the same festival that had banned him only one year earlier; the film follows the character of Antoine Doinel through his perilous misadventures in school, an unhappy home life and reform school. The film is autobiographical. Both Truffaut and Doinel were only children of loveless marriages.
Cinematographer
A cinematographer or director of photography is the chief over the camera and light crews working on a film, television production or other live action piece and is responsible for making artistic and technical decisions related to the image. The study and practice of this field is referred to as cinematography; the cinematographer selects the camera, film stock, filters, etc. to realize the scene in accordance with the intentions of the director. Relations between the cinematographer and director vary; such a level of involvement is not common once the director and cinematographer have become comfortable with each other. Several American cinematographers have become directors, including Reed Morano, ASC who lensed Frozen River and Beyonce's Lemonade before winning an Emmy for directing The Handmaid's Tale. Barry Sonnenfeld the Coen brothers' DP. Ellen Kuras, ASC photographed Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind as well as a number of Spike Lee films such as Summer of Sam and He Got Game before directing episodes of Legion and Ozark.
In 2014, Wally Pfister, cinematographer on Christopher Nolan's three Batman films, made his directorial debut with Transcendence. In the infancy of motion pictures, the cinematographer was also the director and the person physically handling the camera; as the art form and technology evolved, a separation between director and camera operator emerged. With the advent of artificial lighting and faster film stocks, in addition to technological advancements in optics, the technical aspects of cinematography necessitated a specialist in that area. Cinematography was key during the silent movie era. In 1919 Hollywood, the then-new motion picture capital of the world, one of the first trade societies was formed: the American Society of Cinematographers, which stood to recognize the cinematographer's contribution to the art and science of motion picture making. Similar trade associations have been established in other countries too; the ASC Vision Committee is known for working to encourage and support the advancement of underrepresented cinematographers, their crews and other filmmakers, to inspire us all to enact positive changes through hiring talent that reflects society at large.
However, the Soviet filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, writing in Kino-fot No.1 rejected the role of Cinematographer in the "We: Variant of a Manifesto": "We call ourselves kinoks – as opposed to "cinematographers", a herd of junkmen doing rather well peddling their rags. We see the cunning and calculation of the profiteers. We consider the psychological Russo-German film-drama – weighed down with apparitions and childhood memories – an absurdity." There are a number of national associations of cinematographers which represent members and which are dedicated to the advancement of cinematography. These include: the American Society of Cinematographers the International Collective of Women Cinematographers the Canadian Society of Cinematographers the British Society of Cinematographers the Australian Cinematographers Society the Cinematographers Guild of Korea the Filipino Society of Cinematographers the French Society of Cinematographers the Italian Society of Cinematographers the Indian Society of Cinematographers the German Society of Cinematographers the Netherlands Society of Cinematographers the Spanish Society of Cinematography Works the European Federation of Cinematographers / IMAGO the Uruguayan Society of Cinematographers the Lithuanian Association of Cinematographers Cinematographers XX IlluminatrixThe A.
S. C. defines cinematography as: A creative and interpretive process that culminates in the authorship of an original work of art rather than the simple recording of a physical event. Cinematography is not a subcategory of photography. Rather, photography is but one craft that the cinematographer uses in addition to other physical, managerial and image-manipulating techniques to effect one coherent process. Camerimage Cinematography Cinematography Mailing List, a communication forum for cinematographers Filmmaking Glossary of motion picture terms Indian cinematographers List of film director and cinematographer collaborations List of film formats List of motion picture-related topics Cinematography.com Cinematography Mailing List International Cinematographers Guild The History of the Discovery of Cinematography American Society of Cinematographers The Guild of British Camera Technicians British Society of Cinematographers Indian Society of Cinematographers European Federation of Cinematographers / IMAGO Australian Cinematographers Society German Society of Cinematography, BVK Italian Society of Cinematography, AIC Lithuanian Association of Cinematographers, LAC
Bande à part (film)
Bande à part is a 1964 French New Wave film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It was released as Band of Outsiders in North America; the film is about three people. It received positive critical reviews, its dance scene has been referenced several times in popular culture. A young woman named, she has told him of a large pile of money stashed in the villa where she lives with her aunt Victoria and Mr. Stolz in Joinville, a Parisian suburb. Franz tells his friend Arthur of the money, the two make a plan to steal it. Franz and Arthur go to the English class, where Arthur flirts with Odile and asks her about the money. Odile finds the money in Stolz's room, she meets Franz and Arthur, they go to a café, order drinks, dance. Odile tells Arthur that she loves him, the two go back to his place and spend the night together; the next day, Arthur's uncle wants a cut of it. Franz and Odile decide to commit the robbery sooner than they planned; the three run through the Louvre in record time. That night, they find that the door to Stolz's room is locked.
Arthur tells Odile to find the key. Franz and Arthur return to the house the following night, Odile tells them that the locks have been changed, they gag Victoria, before locking her in a closet. They go to Stolz's room and see that the money is not there anymore, they find only a small amount of cash. When they open the closet to interrogate Victoria, she appears to be dead. Franz and Odile leave, Arthur stays behind. While driving away and Odile see Arthur's uncle heading to the villa, they go back, they see that Arthur has found the rest of the money in a doghouse. Arthur and his uncle kill each other. Stolz returns to the house, Victoria is shown to be alive. Franz and Odile drive off with the small stack of money from the robbery, they realize that they love each other. Character names are not indicated in on-screen cast credits. Bande à part was filmed in 25 days. Godard described it as "Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka"; the film is an adaptation of the 1958 novel Fools' Gold by American author Dolores Hitchens.
Film critic Pauline Kael described Bande à part as "a reverie of a gangster movie" and "perhaps Godard's most delicately charming film". Bande à part is considered one of Godard's most accessible films, its accessibility has endeared the film to a broader audience. For example, it was the only Godard film selected for Time's All-TIME 100 movies. Bande à part was ranked No. 79 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010. In tribute, Quentin Tarantino named his film production company "A Band Apart". Bande a part has a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 48 reviews, with an average rating of 8/10; the website's critical consensus calls the film "an oddball heist movie with an dark streak that picks apart every rule in filmmaking." When Franz and Odile are in a crowded café, Arthur and Odile decide to dance. Franz joins them; the music is R&B or soul music composed for the film by Michel Legrand, but Anna Karina said the actors called it "the Madison dance", alluding to a novelty dance of the time.
The Madison scene influenced the dance scene with Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. It influenced scenes in Hal Hartley's Simple Men and Martin Hynes' The Go-Getter. In Roger Michell's Le Week-End, the principal characters see the dance scene on a television in their Paris hotel room and dance along with it; the final scene of the movie is a longer reenactment in a café after one of the characters plays the music on a jukebox. The entire dance scene was used as the music video for the song "Dance with Me" by Nouvelle Vague from their album Bande à Part; the group took their name from a scene in the film, where Arthur and Odile are walking on a street and pass a business with Nouvelle Vague in large letters over the door. In "The Gentlemen's Wager", a 2014 short film made to promote Johnnie Walker whiskey, Jude Law and a group of dancers perform the Madison dance in order to win a bet. Emma Stone, Jonah Hill, Rome Kanda perform the dance in "Exactly Like You", the fifth episode of the 2018 Netflix series Maniac.
In a scene, Franz and Odile attempt to break the world record for running through the Louvre museum. The narration informs the viewer that their time was 9 minutes and 43 seconds, which broke the record set by Jimmy Johnson of San Francisco at 9 minutes and 45 seconds; the Louvre scene is referenced in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers in which its characters break the Louvre record. The Louvre scene is further referenced in the 2017 documentary Faces Places, directed by Agnès Varda and JR. Bande à part on IMDb Bande à part at AllMovie Band of Outsiders: Madison-sur-Seine an essay by Joshua Clover at the Criterion Collection
The Last Metro
The Last Metro is a 1980 historical drama and directed by François Truffaut, that stars Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu. Opening in 1942 during the German occupation of France, it follows the fortunes of a small theatre in the Montmartre area of Paris which keeps up passive resistance by maintaining its cultural integrity, despite censorship and material shortages, to emerge triumphant at the war’s end; the title evokes two salient facts of city life under the Germans: fuel shortages led people to spend their evenings in theatres and other places of entertainment, but the curfew meant they had to catch the last Métro train home. In 1981, the film won ten Césars for: best film, best actor, best actress, best cinematography, best director, best editing, best music, best production design, best sound and best writing, it received Best Foreign Film nominations in the Academy Golden Globe Awards. The Last Metro was one of Truffaut's most successful productions, grossing $3,007,436 in the United States.
On his way to start rehearsals at the Théâtre Montmartre, where he has been hired as male lead for a new production, young Bernard Granger tries to talk to an attractive woman, who rebuffs him. When he arrives, she turns out to be a lesbian, he is taken to see the icily beautiful Marion, both owner of the theater and leading lady. Her Jewish husband Lucas is believed to have left Paris but is in fact living in the cellars, where Marion visits him each evening to bring books and food and talk about the new production; however Marion is quite struck by Bernard, whom Lucas can just hear through a heating vent but never see. Unknown to anybody at the theater, Bernard is a member of a Resistance group and delivers the bomb that kills a German admiral; the first night is loved by a full house but one of the newspaper reviews next morning is viciously hostile, damning the show as Jewish. The writer Daxiat, an anti-semite, hopes to take over her theatre. While cast and crew are celebrating their success in a night club, Daxiat enters.
Bernard, furious that the man has insulted the gentile Marion, hustles him out to the street and pushes him around. Furious that Bernard has jeopardised her theatre, Marion refuses all contact. One night, pretending to be air raid wardens, two Gestapo men start searching the theatre and it is Bernard who Marion turns to in desperation for urgent help in concealing Lucas and his effects; when Bernard's Resistance contact is arrested by the Gestapo, he decides to devote his life to the cause and give up acting. As he is clearing out his little dressing room, Marion comes in to say goodbye and the two make love on the floor. After the war, Bernard returns to be male lead in a new play that the freed Lucas wrote while hiding. In it, the female lead played by Marion offers to share her life, but he claims he never loved her. At the end of the opening night, Bernard and Lucas stand hand in hand to take the applause. Truffaut had wanted to create a film set during the French occupation period for a long time, as his uncle and grandfather were both part of the French Resistance, were once caught while passing messages.
This event was recreated in The Last Metro. Truffaut was inspired by the actor Jean Marais’ autobiography, basing the film on this and other documents by theatre people from during the occupation; this film was one installment—dealing with theatre—of a trilogy on the entertainment world envisaged by Truffaut. The installment that dealt with the film world was 1973's La Nuit Américaine, which had won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Truffaut completed the screenplay for the third installment, L'Agence Magique, which would have dealt with the world of music hall. In the late 1970s he was close to beginning filming, but the failure of his film The Green Room forced him to look to a more commercial project, he filmed Love on the Run instead. Truffaut began casting in September 1979, he wrote the role of Marion with Catherine Deneuve in mind for her energy. Gérard Depardieu did not want to be involved in the film, as he did not like Truffaut’s directing style, but he was subsequently convinced.
Most of the filming took place in an abandoned chocolate factory on Rue du Landy in Clichy, converted into a studio. During shooting Deneuve suffered an ankle sprain from a fall, resulting in having to shoot over scenes at short notice. Scriptwriter Suzanne Schiffman was hospitalised with a serious intestinal obstruction; the film shoot lasted fifty-nine days and ended on April 21, 1980. A recurring theme in Truffaut's films has been linking film film watching; the Last Metro is self-conscious in this respect. In the opening the film mixes documentary footage with period re-creations alongside shots of contemporary film posters. Truffaut commented “this film is not concerned with anti-semitism but intolerance in general” and a tolerance is shown through the characters of Jean Poiret playing a homosexual director and Andrea Ferreol plays a lesbian designer; as in Truffaut's earlier film Jules et Jim, there is a love triangle between the three principal characters: Marion Steiner, her husband Lucas and Bernard Granger, an actor in the theatre's latest production.
The film recorded admissions in France of 3,384,045. Academy Awards Nominated: Best Foreign Language Film National Board of Review Nominated: Best Foreign Language Film Boston Film Critics Won: Best Foreign Language Film César Awards (Franc
Confidentially Yours
Confidentially Yours is a 1983 French film directed by François Truffaut. It is based on the novel The Long Saturday Night, by the American author Charles Williams, was Truffaut's last film, he died the next year, aged 52, after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. The film had a total of 1,169,635 admissions in France and was the 39th highest-grossing film of the year. Jacques Massoulier is murdered while hunting at the same place as Julien Vercel, an estate agent who knew him and whose fingerprints are found on Massoulier's car; as the police discover that Marie-Christine Vercel, Julien's wife, was Massoulier's mistress, Julien is the prime suspect. But his secretary, Barbara Becker, while not quite convinced he is innocent, defends him and leads her private investigations. Fanny Ardant as Barbara Becker, Julien's secretary Jean-Louis Trintignant as Julien Vercel, estate agent Jean-Pierre Kalfon as Massoulier's brother, priest Philippe Laudenbach as Maître Clément, Julien's lawyer Philippe Morier-Genoud as Superintendent Santelli Xavier Saint-Macary as Bertrand Fabre, Barbara's ex-husband Jean-Louis Richard as Louison, night club owner Caroline Sihol as Marie-Christine Vercel, Julien's wife Castel Casti as taxi driver Anik Belaubre as Paula Delbecq, cashier at the Eden Yann Dedet as Angel Face Nicole Félix as the scarred whore Georges Koulouris as Lablache, private investigator Pascale Pellegrin as would-be secretary Roland Thénot as Jambreau Pierre Gare as Inspector Poivert Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko as the Albanian Confidentially Yours on IMDb
The Woman Next Door
The Woman Next Door is a 1981 French film directed by François Truffaut. Reminiscent of the medieval legend of Tristan and Iseult but set among young middle-class people in a provincial city, it tells the story of a fatal romance between a loving husband and the attractive woman who moves in next door; the last of Truffaut's serious films, being followed by the more light-hearted Vivement dimanche!, it was the 39th highest-grossing film of the year, with a total of 1,087,600 admissions in France. Bernard lives with his wife Arlette and young son in a village outside Grenoble. One day a married couple with a little boy and Mathilde, move into the house next door. Bernard and Mathilde are shocked at meeting each other because years before, when both single, they had a stormy affair which ended painfully. At first Bernard avoids Mathilde, until a chance meeting in a supermarket reawakens long-buried passions and soon, while good neighbours, in secret they pursue an affair. Though both find the strain of living their normal family and working lives unbearable, it is Bernard who cracks first.
After publicly revealing his violent passion for Mathilde at a garden party, he keeps away from her and the two households try to get on with their lives. But the rejected Mathilde cracks and, after publicly collapsing at the tennis club, is hospitalised with depression; when she is released, she finds that to get far away from Bernard her husband has moved them out of the village. One night Bernard is woken by a banging shutter on the empty house next door and gets up to investigate. In the house, he spots Mathilde in the darkness. After they have made love on the bare floor, taking a gun out of her handbag she shoots first him and herself. Gérard Depardieu as Bernard Coudray Fanny Ardant as Mathilde Bauchard Henri Garcin as Philippe Bauchard Michèle Baumgartner as Arlette Coudray Roger Van Hool as Roland Duguet Véronique Silver as Madame Odile Jouve Philippe Morier-Genoud as the Doctor Olivier Bedquaert as Thomas Coudray The Woman Next Door on IMDb
