Book contents
5 - “Les Enfants Terribles”
Summary
Small Change (1976) marks a return to the territory of Truffaut's first films, Les Mistons (1957) and The 400 Blows (1959). Together with The Wild Child (1969), these films constitute a vision of childhood, unequalled in the history of the cinema for sensitivity, humor, poignancy, and respect for children themselves. With neither sentimentality nor condescension, Truffaut captures the need for freedom and tenderness, the spontaneity and the frustrations of being a child in a society made by and for adults. His praise of Jean Vigo— the only other director to have rendered childhood with such poetic realism—can now be applied to his own efforts:
In one sense, Zéro de Conduite represents something more rare than L'Atalante because the masterpieces consecrated to childhood in literature or cinema can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They move us doubly since the esthetic emotion is compounded by a biographical, personal and intimate emotion. … They bring us back to our short pants, to school, to the blackboard, to vacations, to our beginnings in life. (FV, 37–38)
The resonances in Small Change lead us to Truffaut's earlier films, to his own experience, and to a collective emotional truth about childhood. As Jacques Rivette said of The 400 Blows, “in speaking of himself, he seems to be speaking of us.”
In the light of Truffaut's attachment to spontaneity and improvisation, it is no surprise that children have figured so prominently throughout his work.
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- Information
- François Truffaut , pp. 145 - 172Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995