Dandelions For Rabbits

Miracle Worker (Penn, 1961) / The Wild Child (Truffaut, 1970)

When leaving Miracle , we welcomed a work almost avant-garde. A treatment of black and white, in fact, distantly precursor Lynchian way: the amazing generic, flirting with the fantastic, is strongly reminiscent of the treatment of space and grain in photographic Eraserhead - where we find the monstrous child, but also Elephant Man, with Anne Bancroft chaperone monster - and a certain tone too dry and hard, making the emotional climax of the outcome but without pathos, with a lyrical content .

And of course, which continues to make today is this stunning clip of fight melee expanding in space and time lockoutée a kitchen, to the point never want to end. Cinégénique scene whose power remains unmatched in contemporary cinema.

It was also suggested, regularly, a strong analogy with The Wild Child Truffaut released 9 years later, however, the benefit of the latter, which was hailed a tone "naturalist" to escape Hollywood affectations which Penn would still mark.

But beyond a misleading similarity (story learning pitting a child "savage" and a "guardian"), it is not at all the same story. The treatment is even contradictory.

The Truffaut, although it is undoubtedly a beautiful film, deploys obsessions and concerns to Truffaut in the world of childhood, particularly underpinned by a haunting history of his own biographical trajectory - pre-deliquent and "salvation" by the symbolization that made it possible for her discovery of the tool as a substitute successful film pedagogy tutorial absent or missed.

Dr. Itard is an ambiguous character, both surrogate father (winning more than is desired or chosen, but we may say that true of all fathers, if one believes in anthropology pychanalytique families) and "torturer" didactic.

The dominant narrative in the treatment of The Wild Child is a form of luminous lyricism, backed by lively music of Vivaldi, whose accents will be given to contributions in the score by George Delerue The American Night for
, film itself driven by the quest pedagogical-family recurrent Truffaut: if he carries himself, his body stiff, his voice oddly mechanical, in the character of Itard, c ' is because it wishes, in this incarnation awkward, at least celebrate the need of the ferrule tutorial, while expressing some reservations about its practical efficiency. The film thus appearing as a disguised form of projection Truffaut child "savage" to the gates of crime, suffering from deficiencies in both language and emotional, and saved in extremis, not without difficulties, by a "guardian of resilience as Fernand Deligny (which he paid tribute regularly, especially in the credits of the 400 shots). Forcing a bit, Truffaut, the paternal function seems particularly exercised by waiting for compensation or succession its own status as a child abandoned, and abandoned children primarily interpreted as an empty box to the adult-like orphan manceps afford or stand, ie cure through it's own shortcomings, be instituted in his own eyes as the father of which he himself believes is missing or lacking, requiring the need to father children without this identification melancholy.

So in a sense, yes, a movie more "staff" who invests, while diverting, if (and controversial) of the wild boy of Aveyron: as general metaphor of the child deficient and emotionally abandoned by the perception that Truffaut offers. But it also specifically limit its ambiguous: there is the celebration of the teaching profession along with a discreet criticism or secondary, the disciplinary apparatus that serves it (we think a little eddy in the descriptions "monitor and punish "or" Birth of the Clinic "), but overall, the treatment of child-teacher relationship is somehow trapped in the dialectic savagery / dressage, not without an academic who could put off (even if it refers to a historically situated concept of learning: that of scientific positivism of the 19th century).

Arthur Penn's film, though apparently concerned with profits and losses of the educational function, draws a different ratio: the child / teacher is caught in a set itself more wide: wild, vaguely pantheistic, where violence originates - in the gross contact of the colliding bodies - suggests a radically different approach to learning. That narrates and tries to give Penn perceive, this is not the disciplinary machinery for - or not - access to the symbolic order, a diving unsettling, results also uncertain qu'hasardeux in autistic universe the "off-language." Bancroft will try and cause the child on his land: in a bubble, numb with violence, terror and denial, not the other, which would bring the child on her land to her (by a method "Cartesian "ultimately steeped in the same haphazard or arbitrary violence).

Miracle worker is a movie sensation, "primitivist" mean by then close to this vision of the cosmic world of poets and elementalist American transcendentalists like Thoreau, Whitman and Emerson. The output from the darkness of isolation is not conditioned by the dialectic savagery / discipline with profit and loss processes of identifications lame indeed quite quickly held in check, creating a lively sense of hopelessness and helplessness. It gives way, in a second phase, a form of "letting go" or dropout who rely on some form of providentialism goal: a "miracle" unlikely in an arid land, in this soil Specifically puritanical discipline which is the parental environment, much closer to the method of Itard and expectations than that, despite its tentative determination, the schoolteacher - a savage, a wild-rebel (from an institution "poor" for the blind) rather at war against the rules and methods of this world. Although in
watermark, the issue of racial segregation here is called. It is not coincidence that the issue of "miracle" is tied specifically about the case of a child blind-deaf-mute, whose violence indicates a failure as a refusal to integrate near-native or recognize her family fabric (a bourgeois mother, perhaps Quaker, married too young to an old retired captain in the Confederate Army), codes and rules that govern this closed world and divided (at the table, the aristocratic Southerner does not serve himself and reluctant to use some settings, it is used by the black slave, etc.). In psychic and social space explored by the camera of Penn, the radical child's disability could equally be approached as a metaphor clinical symptom of a way, "answer" in a "no answer" somatic this subdivision. And if unlikely "miracle" was actually to blow all the walls, all points of propping and upholstery suturent that this secular world, locked to the brink of explosion? Three years later, in "The Chase " (The Chase, 1965), his great movie cursed butchered in editing the majors, Penn exhibit frontally this question by exhibiting as the crudest racist violence and social (eg "how a" negro "can tu a white woman?"), and by literally explode all partitions that ensured cohesion even in a city notable arranged around oil wells Val Rogers.

This "letting go" mentioned in Miracle worker - who is also a return to violence founder of archaic social order - is the most singular aspect of the film . She radically away, in advance of the praise of pedagogy "French", she was crossbred oblation pathogen: salvation comes, not if it happens, a hard (even accompanied by genuine affection) but in a strange form of abandonment, cessation (the interiority of a "self"), acquiescence (to an external force) adjacent to a more "mystical nature" in a rational confidence the tools of teaching men.

In this, the miracle happened that Bancroft is a unlimited opportunity, the result of a conjunction ultimately mysterious and imponderable, between manic phases of imposition of the mastery and reflux, is the opposite of the method Itard. Both the Truffaut film belongs to the lineage of classically paternalistic learning narratives ultimately governed by the actions of adults "responsible", as the Penn advances towards a much more ambiguous and opaque dull: the revelation comes, possible without deduction in the meanderings of violence itself wild adults engaging in strange ballets with the child, rather then constituting what Jankelevitch appoint a "body-obstacle" paradox which is indistinguishable the power of selfless love, objective, almost anhumain, could potentially erupt and communicate, transmit beyond the intention of releasing potential traffic between objects, associations between signs and things.

Love (as possession, to return home, sharing commutative) was not enough, even being powerless (the child is pampered, any obstacle to his fury is carefully kept at a distance, rather it is the disease protective parents who weaves this prison without contours it has no chance of release).

And if there is something to love in teaching, but rather by a "beyond of love "which, in a denial of parental identification, parental love breaks the powerless and invisible chains.

Truffaut, he, too identified with the triad wild child / guardian / father, he does may grope towards "salto mortal" a letting go that would allow that shattered this alternative basically self-centered in which oscillate continuously phases of gratification and frustration, in a succession of turns increasingly enveloping and suffocating .

Also the story of Penn, too easily equated with a "cautionary tale" about the virtues of combined education and love, returns in the strings rather humanism both sentimental and positivist Itard, burdened with the legislative / father (the father figure and mentor are well matched throughout the film there is not also question ultimately, adoption?)

is why the first meaning sent by Helen Keller to his human environment is "teacher" addressed to that which took the risk dive with her, without a parachute, in the chaos of darkness. Penn's film turns a celebration rather amoral anomic or intuition, the "immediate data of consciousness "dear to Bergson.

The didacticism grotesque Arthur Penn, however, a double bottom that pessimism does not alter the final superb bravura leaving the protagonists dazed in the doorway of the house, in-between an uncertain future (emphasized by the beautiful motto diatonic Laurence Rosenthal, oscillating between ebb and flow, calming and tension, which blends a theme that suggests reminiscences of the "Night of the Hunter" mentioned the last tracking shot). In his best films - all, in fact, to "Georgia" - Penn probe stubbornly themes inappropriateness of passage problem "child" - generally a state of immaturity
- in adulthood. It matches the query, however, a paradox lucid sorely needed to Truffaut, among which are praised as further attention to children (although his concerns are all sentimental focus on the couple or, more generally, dual relationships): how to become "adult" when it encounters an obstacle much more fundamental and formidable, blindness and intractable violence of society itself as a whole.