L'Enfance-nue: the title is French for Naked-Childhood. What's with the hyphen? I think it emphasises the relationship between adolescence and emotion (still in its raw state before growing-up hews it into some kind of form — if not quite perfect, if not exactly stable, maybe settled, at least, or dulled, at worst). I squint my eyes: The hyphen resembles a railroad spike, one element on the track that accommodates, and illustrates, a journey — the rail spike which young François, an hour and ten minutes into the film, will hurl from an overpass into the windshield of a passing auto. I peer harder and the hyphen looks like an arm outstretched: "Keep your distance." 45 minutes in and François has chucked a dagger at his foster-brother's head. Life is a journey, night becomes day, to love is to hurt, day becomes night. François's hand is stand-offish, and equipped for generosity: it directs a shopclerk to the scarf he'll gift to a difficult guardian; and to the elderly couple with the photo albums it pens the words: "I think about you every day." — L'Enfance-nue is Maurice Pialat's feature debut, and a phrase that describes the Pialat-genius.
The first feature film by Maurice Pialat is one of the great feature debuts in the history of cinema. L'Enfance-nue (Naked Childhood) provides a perspective on growing-up that rejects both sentimentality and modish cynicism. Its unflinching, but also warmly accommodating, outlook on childhood attracted François Truffaut to take on the role as co-producer of Pialat's film — which, ironically, exists as much as a response to Truffaut's own debut The 400 Blows as that film was to the 'cinema of childhood' that came before the New Wave.
First-time actor Michel Tarrazon plays the young François, a provincial orphan whose destructive behaviour precipitates his relocation from the home of a long-term foster family to the care of a benevolent elderly couple. In the course of this transition, Pialat's film presents the turbulence of François's unmoored existence, and his explosive reactions to the contradictory emotions it engenders. This is the naked portrait of a soul's — and an entire society's — dysfunction, before the moment of reconciliation.
L'Enfance-nue represents the ideal introduction to the films of Maurice Pialat — an artist whose work resides alongside that of Jean Eustache and Philippe Garrel at the summit of the post-New Wave French cinema, and who has had an incalculable influence on contemporary directors as diverse as Bruno Dumont, Olivier Assayas, Michael Haneke, and the Dardenne brothers. His passing in 2003 led Gilles Jacob, president of the Festival de Cannes, to declare: "Pialat is dead and we are all orphaned. French cinema is orphaned."
New anamorphic transfer of the film in its original aspect ratio
New and improved English subtitle translations
L'Amour Existe (Love Exists) (1960) - Maurice Pialat's poetic 19-minute film about life in the Paris banlieues
2003 video interview with co-screenwriter Arlette Langmann, conducted by former Cahiers du cinéma editor-in-chief, and current director of the Cinémathèque Française, Serge Toubiana
32-minute 1973 interview with Maurice Pialat, from the programme Champ contre-champ
Choses Vues Autour de L'Enfance-nue (1969) — 50-minute documentary by Roger Stéphane shot in the course of L'Enfance-nue's production, examining Pialat's film-in-progress and the plight of foster children
2005 video interview with Michel Tarrazon, the star of L'Enfance-nue
The film's original trailer, along with trailers for other Maurice Pialat films to be released by The Masters of Cinema Series
40-page booklet containing a new essay by critic and filmmaker Kent Jones, and newly translated interviews with Maurice Pialat.
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LEnfance-nue (Masters of Cinema)
