This lecture focuses on François Truffaut’s The Wild Child (1970), which stages the confrontation between nature and culture through Jean Itard’s account of the “wild child.” The true story of Victor of Aveyron marks a decisive shift in the history of science, from Enlightenment ideals of the bon sauvage to nineteenth-century positivism and its colonial codifications. Truffaut’s dialogue with thinker and educator Fernand Deligny proves central to this reworking, reframing questions of emotional deprivation and the limits of pedagogy within a broader genealogy of subject formation attentive to gesture, silence, and non-verbal relation. At its core, the film traces a fragile tension between the child’s lines of flight and the reifying pull of schematization. It emerges as one of Truffaut’s most ambivalent works, traversed by nineteenth-century epistemological contradictions and poised, ultimately, between seeing and saying. The Wild Child thus becomes not just a reflection on pedagogy but a pedagogy enacted, where cinema itself performs a co-intentional act of witnessing, and where the political force of education emerges through the resistant gestures it cannot fully contain.

Speaker

Anne-Gaëlle Saliot is Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University, with a secondary appointment in Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. Since 2020, she has served as Director of Duke’s Center for French and Francophone Studies. She is the author of The Drowned Muse (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Troubling Modernities: Godard, Rivette, Truffaut and the 19th Century (forthcoming), and co-editor of the Cahiers de la NRF issue dedicated to Philippe Forest. Her current research explores the reception of Japan in French theory, cinema, and dance. She has published widely on figures such as Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, Maurice Pialat, Philippe Forest, Marguerite Duras, and contemporary dance. She has also created several performances combining literature and music for the Philharmonie de Paris; her most recent, Duras Song, premiered in June 2023.

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