Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8753 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-08-04
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Black & White, PAL
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: Greek, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Dutch
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 83 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
An ingenious and poignant experience, Francois Truffaut's fascinating The Wild Child is based on a real-life 18th-century behavioural scientist's efforts to turn a feral boy into a civilised specimen. 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 semi-documentary 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

Special Features
English
Region 2

Synopsis
A touching and philosophical film, set in the 18th century and based on the diaries of real-life French doctor Jean Itard. Itard fought authorities for the right to take charge of the social and intellectual education of a wild child--a young boy who somehow had managed to survive, alone and uncared for, in nature. Although most of the medical establishment felt that the child, who could not speak and often exhibited violent behaviour, was hopelessly retarded, the tenacious Itard, with techniques sometimes kind and frequently cruel, managed to prove them wrong.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating tale only partly told
It wasn't until I read the credits carefully that I realised the source of my "I've seen him before" reaction to the man playing Itard. Francois Truffaut! He also wrote and directed this version of (part) of the story of a teacher of the deaf who takes on the training of a 12 year old boy without language found running wild in the French forest shortly after the French revolution.

In many ways this is a masterful and detailed account, based on Itard's own account, of his attempts to "civilise" 'Victor', at a time when debate raged, as it does still, about 'nature v nurture'. But it stops well before Victor's life played out to the age of 40, as a long-term inmate of an institution (he was almost certainly severely autistic - probably the reason he was abandoned - and thus his potential was always going to be limited), still devotedly cared for by Mme Guerin, who had been employed by Itard as housekeeper.

Itard gave up his quest to prove that the right (and it was extraordinarily well-thought-out, using many techniques still used today) education could do anything, after six years with Victor yielded only patchy results.

L'Enfant Sauvage
Skill of Truffaut is to persuade you that artifice is documentary. As much as one admire's the film-making intelligence, one is moved by the story. Movie storytelling at its most skillful and poignant.

Wild child dvd
I was rather disappointed with this as I was expecting a complete story.
It mostly Dragged on over the same thing trying to educate and civilise the boy.
I assume over a 2-6 year period in his life?
The End!
No explanation of whatever happened to him?
Not unless there is a second part to the story?