The Cinematheque

“L’enfance nue applies acid where many films about childhood prefer sugar … Even Truffaut’s classic starts to look indulgently lyrical next to Pialat’s unflinching portrait of a boy on society’s margins … Pialat [is] one of cinema’s great chroniclers of youth.”

Sam Wigley, BFI

A debut of staggering intention and execution, Maurice Pialat’s first feature, made at the relatively mature age of 43, falls within the great French tradition of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite. L’enfance nue presents a poignant but unsentimentalized portrait of a young boy’s slide into delinquency after he is abandoned by his mother and farmed out to foster homes. Made with Truffaut’s encouragement and support, it screened to great acclaim in Venice and New York, and was the 1969 winner of France’s prestigious Prix Jean Vigo. Today it stands as one of cinema’s most granular and sobering portrayals of childhood gone astray.

In French with English subtitles

Advisory: L’enfance nue includes a scene of simulated violence involving a cat.

The opening-night screening on July 10 will include introductory remarks by Artistic Director Shaun Inouye.

“There is a ferocious cinematographic intelligence behind the conclusive inconclusiveness of L’enfance nue, with its refusal to submit to the pathos of the fictional. An intelligence that likes to articulate drama more than it cares to illustrate it.” Jean-Pierre Gorin, Film Comment

“One of the few beautiful films I have seen this year that are moving in a human and sentimental way … Pialat is doing something that movies rarely do anymore: tell a simple, touching story warmly, straight.” Renata Adler, The New York Times

preceded by

L’amour existe
France 1960
Maurice Pialat
19 min. DCP In French with English subtitles

Pialat’s sardonic early short, set to the music of Edith Piaf and Georges Delerue, was one of the first films to explore Paris’s burgeoning banlieue—the soulless suburbs populated by immigrants, the poor, and the working class—and to denounce the urban planning that created them.