Ce Gamin, L (1975) dir. Renaud Victor

Renaud Victor visits Deligny in the Cevennes in 1972, and from this meeting two films emerge, Ce Gamin La is the first of these films on Deligny. It is here on his extraordinary educational project and its desire to “rescue“ children from internment in the metaphor of spinning raft, fragile boat sailing along the water, the water Deligny said she still exercises incredible attraction for children with autism. But the heart of the film consists of a reflection on the image that illuminates all the previous work of Deligny. All his life, he has professed a distrust for the irrebuttable for language and symbolic systems. And if the cinema occupied an important place if in his research is that according to him, “the image is autistic, she does not speak.“ Thus there can be no case of simply filming as curious animals, but these children with autism to achieve, by the image, “to reach beyond a core of the language“ and to touch something you should appoint, faute de mieux, the Real. The image becomes a vital educational practices of Deligny it is outside the language and it helps create a link between these children and the world without passing through the system symbolic language. Deligny defines image as a ’memory’ of the case, referring to the time immemorial before humans. This report primitive in the world, that is what the teacher is also trying to recover from these autistic children by allowing them to recreate the link without going through the enslavement language. For Deligny, ’the act’ is on the side of the autistic while the ’how’ is on the side of the individual ’normal’ socialized. An autistic who ’worked’ only ’fact’ not something, it is in the ’act’; repetition of gesture. Once that work is done for any purpose, it switches on the side of ’doing’, the gesture socialized. This distinction is important in understanding the nature of a film like Le Moindre Geste or Ce Gamin La.