The Cinematic Representation of the Wild Child: Considering L'enfant sauvage (1970)

Abstract

In examining François Truffaut's L'enfant sauvage (1970), I will consider the feral child Victor (Jean-Pierre Cargol) with regard to the film's cinematic portrayal as typifying the cultural construction of a child. Following James R. Kincaid, the figure of the child can be seen as a ‘hollow category’, seemingly featureless in its alleged innocence. As a result, it functions as an adult ‘repository of cultural needs or fears’. For this reason, the child, and especially the feral child, can serve as a projection screen for a variety of different and even opposed questions and symbolic constructions. The film effects this subliminally through the portrayal of Victor. This is mainly achieved by constantly shifting between a Romantic discourse of the noble savage and child of nature and the Lockean empiricist view, with the infant's mind as a tabula rasa condition and the doctor Jean Itard's (played by Truffaut himself) consequent need to educate Victor.