Aprender a escrever no cinema: Jean Renoir, François Truffaut, Satyajit Ray

In a small piece published in Cahiers du Cinéma (“Amphisbetesis”), Serge Daney draws on the structure of L’Enfant Sauvage to tackle that which he considers the main issue at stake in Truffaut’s work: the interplay between a temporary lack of reference and the painful reconstitution of the link between words and images. In L’Enfant Sauvage, Itard struggles to bring the child to bridge this gap; and Victor as a child is a figure of resistance to this plan, as the terrible scene in which the child breaks down before a blackboard filled with words without the corresponding object makes clear.

My aim in this paper is to explore the link between pedagogy, childhood and the problematic scene of writing by discussing some examples of children’s resistance to writing (or to the ideas of writing these films are putting forward) in some moments from Renoir’s, Truffaut’s and Satyajit Ray’s films. My working hypothesis is that these moments may be read as disruptive moments in which the tensions between writing and cinema are explicitly questioned and depicted.