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11 portrait of the artist as ayoung boy François Truffaut, Antoine Doinel, and the Wild Child Patrick E. White To speak about the autobiographical nature of much of François Truffaut’s work has long been a critical commonplace. Certainly the series of films focusing on the character of Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud beginning with Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) (1959) and continuing as Léaud aged with Antoine et Colette, an episode in L’Amour à vingt ans (Love at Twenty) (1962), Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses) (1968), Domicile conjugal (Bed and Board) (1970), and concluding with L’Amour en fuite (Love on the Run) (1979), constitutes one of the most sustained autobiographical sequences in film. Truffaut acknowledges that much in The 400 Blows reflects his own childhood in details of setting, character, and action. He notes for example that he lived with his parents in a cramped apartment where he slept in the entryway, that his mother was often furious with him, his father was a kinder more jocular pal, and that if he happened to break a plate he would drop the pieces in the sewer rather than admit to his parents what had happened—all elements of character and action that are replicated in detail in The 400 Blows. 1 In Truffaut’s various recollections of his childhood he remembers himself as a lonely, inquisitive, rebellious boy, one not afraid to lie, who finds solace in reading and film, but not in schoolwork , who comes to at least a momentary bad end, consigned by his parents to a juvenile detention center (1987, 11–12, 16–17). The physical similarity between Léaud and Truffaut is much commented on by critics and enjoyed by Truffaut himself. Even before he grew into the thin, sharp-featured echo of the director in Bed and Board and other films, Jean-Pierre Léaud was seen as a young Truffaut and even mistaken for his son (Truffaut 1971, 7). At the same time, Truffaut has said that the central impulse of The 400 Blows is not fidelity to his own life (1987, 59). Truffaut’s interest in boyhood and youth goes beyond the autobiographical. Although the number of his films where children dominate is relatively few—his 217 patrick e. white 218 first short film, Les Mistons (1957 [almost always noted in French, translated variously as The Mischief Makers or The Brats]), The 400 Blows, L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child) (1969), and L’Argent de poche (Small Change) (1976)—the world of boyhood seems Truffaut’s natural milieu, the place of his heart. Looking at Truffaut in the context of other writing about boyhood in film encourages me to shift the discussion from an analysis of his work as autobiography to an exploration of how Truffaut’s films enrich our understanding of boyhood more generally . By placing the evidently autobiographical The 400 Blows next to The Wild Child, clearly historical and not autobiographical in any obvious way, we will be able to illuminate his vision of boyhood and the nature of his art and explore how the two are profoundly interrelated. Truffaut’s films are central to a study of boyhood in film because he probes the conventional view of boys as rowdy, undisciplined , and rebellious troublemakers. This convention is an old one in literature and film, finding expression in broad comedy such as Hal Roach’s Little Rascals shorts in the 1930s, in fantasy rebellion in Jean Vigo’s 1933 Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct)—a film Truffaut greatly admired—and in teen melodrama in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), much praised by Eric Rohmer, Truffaut’s fellow Cahiers du cinéma critic ([1956] 1985). Truffaut does not deny the partial truth of the convention. As his first short film Les Mistons shows, boys are brats, mischievous rule breakers, but the convention does not tell the whole story, for it is in that rebellious streak, that creative undiscipline, that the artist is born. From his own childhood, Truffaut sees something more, not only in exceptional boys, but also in all boys: in the rebel boy, in the apparent incompetent slacker, in the silly goof-off he sees something admirable and necessary, the boy as artist. His boys are admirable not because they are rebels and mischief-makers, but because out of the chaos and disorder of their boyhood comes invention, creativity , and artistry. In Truffaut’s films he...

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