First the child was wild. And then he was tamed. Then he alternated between being an “attraction” and a scientific speciman.
But it had to be better than “before”. Didn’t it?
In a strange way it’s almost like watching The Miracle Worker.
All through his “training” though he never lets go of nature as he once knew it. It’s always his first choice. It makes you ponder “freedom” from a whole other perspective.
IMDb
[b]Truffaut remained true to Dr. Itard’s written accounts in most respects. A few variations are: (1) Victor was not stark naked when first captured; he had the shreds of a shirt around his neck. (2) Victor’s hair would have been much longer, because he was indifferent to hygiene or how he looked. (3) Jean Itard was merely a young medical student, while the film suggests that he was on an equal basis with Pinel. (4) Madame Guerin became almost a mother to Victor, always attending to him, whereas the film suggests that she merely helped to train him and to clean up after him. (5) Itard would rub Victor’s back to relax and comfort him, but then had to worry about sexual responses. Victor also often wet his bed, but Itard never punished him; he decided to allow Victor to learn whether he preferred to lie in a wet bed or to get up to relieve himself. These problems are not shown. (6) In the scene in which Victor throws a tantrum about learning the alphabet, his and Dr. Itard’s responses were different than are shown in the film. Real-life Victor bit his bedsheets and began to throw hot coals around the house before falling to the ground and writhing/screaming/kicking; and Itard (Truffaut) did not merely put him into the closet for a few moments. Itard admits [in translation] that he actually “violently threw open the window of his room, which was on the fifth floor overlooking some boulders directly below … and grabbing him forcibly by the hips, I held him out of the window, his head facing directly down toward the bottom of the chasm. After some seconds, I drew him in again. He was pale, covered with a cold sweat … I made him gather up all the [alphabet] cards and replace them all. This was done very slowly … but at least without impatience.” Viewers may thank Truffaut for choosing the lesser of two evil punishments! (7) Finally, Dr. Itard took care of Victor for 5 years; in 1806, Victor moved into Madame Guerin’s house and stayed there for the rest of his life, with the French Government paying for his care. It is believed that he died there, without ever marrying.
The incidents based on true life, as reported by Dr. Itard and as shown by Truffaut, include the facts that: (1) Victor was captured by hunters. (2) Pinel did conclude and dismiss Victor as a helpless retarded child, “an incurable idiot.” (3) Crowds of Parisians really did come to see the “Wild Boy of Aveyron.” (4) Victor really did prefer the “O” sound, and accepted the name Victor, which in French has an accent on the “O” [veek-TOR]. (5) Dr. Itard appears to have been truly kind to the boy, as were Mme. Guerin and the neighbors. (6) Victor appears to have had great affection for Itard and Guerin, but was never interested in children of his own age.
The Los Angeles opening of this film occurred one week before the discovery of an American “wild child”, a young girl who had been kept isolated from human contact much of her life. The team of doctors working with her, arranged a private viewing of the French film for inspiration.[/b]
FAQs at IMDB:
imdb.com/title/tt0064285/faq
The Wild Child at wiki:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Child
feral children at wiki
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
trailer:
youtu.be/vzr-xFAfQbs
THE WILD CHILD [L’enfant Sauvage] 1970
Written and directed by François Truffaut
[b]Doctor [examining scar on neck]: No doubt, whoever abandoned him meant to kill him.
…
Dr Itard: I think the only cause of his dumbness is the isolation in which he lived.
…
Colleague: What now?
Dr Itard: The child will die here. All we do is exhibit him as a freak.
Colleague: See here, Citizen Itard. The boy is an inferior being. He’s lower than an animal.
Dr Itard: That’s just the point. Animals are cared for, trained. It’s useless to bring him from the forest and lock him up as if he were being punished for disappointing Parisians.
…
Dr Itard [voiceover]: What fascinates me is that all the boy has done since his arrival, he has done for the first time.
…
Dr Itard [voiceover]: I must say that for the present his emotions appear unaffected. Despite the ill treatment he endured at the Institute no one ever saw him cry.
…
Dr Itard: His first pair of shoes.[/b]
You can almost hear the kid thinking: What’s the fucking point? He doesn’t like them.
[b]Dr Itard [voiceover]: It was not what I had hoped. Had he said the word before the thing he desired was conceded he would have grasped the use of words. A point of communication would have been established and rapid progress would have followed this initial success.
…
Dr Itard [voiceover]: Victor has always shown a marked preference for water and the way he drinks it shows he finds great pleasure in it. He stands near the window, gazing upon the countryside as if in this delectable moment the child of nature sought to reunite the two blessings to survive his loss of freedom.
…
Dr Itard [voiceover]: For an interminable moment, I thought what I’d dreaded since Victor came to live with us had happened: that his fancy for the freedom of the woods had prevailed over his newfound needs and burgeoning affection.
…
Housekeeper: His tantrums are your fault. You make him study from morning to night. You turn his only pleasures into exercises. His meals, his walks, everything. He works ten times more than the normal child.
…
Dr Itard [voiceover]: Today, for the first time, Victor wept.
…
Dr Itard [voiceover]: Had I not known his limits, I’d have thought he understood my criticisms. I had barely chastized him when I saw his chest heave noisily and a stream of tears falling from underneath the blindfold.
…
Dr Itard [voiceover]: Now, ready to renounce the task I had imposed upon myself, seeing how much time I’d wasted on him, how deeply I regretted having known this child, I condemned the sterile curiosity of the men who had wrenched him away from his innocent and happy life.
…
Dr Itard [voiceover]: When he succeeds I reward him, when he fails I punish him. Yet I can’t say I have instilled a sense of justice in him. He obeys me and corrects hmself out of fear or out of hope for a reward and not out of a sense of moral order. To obtain less ambiguous results I must do an abominable thing.[/b]
How abominable?
Dr Itard [voiceover]: I will test Victor’s heart with a flagrant piece of injustice by punishing him for no reason after he succeeds right before my eyes. I shall administer a punishment as odious as it is unjust precisely to see if his reaction is one of rebellion.
How odious? It’s pretty fucked up. And Victor rebels. And then this observation:
Dr Itard [voiceover]: I wish my pupil could have understood me at this moment. I would have told him that his bite filled my soul with joy. I had irrefutable evidence that what is just and unjust was no longer alien to Victor’s heart. By giving him the sentiment, or rather by invoking it, I had elevated the savage man to the nature of a moral being by the most noble of his attributes.
I can just imagine the reaction of the objectivists here. And, no doubt, they can imagine my own reaction in turn.