Week 23/2025

This Monday, RITCS Cinema will be revisiting the classic Hollywood tale The Wizard of Oz (1939), a film directed by Victor Fleming – though its production also saw contributions from other directors, including King Vidor and George Cukor. Highly influential and for many an emblem of the Technicolor era, the well-known story is told through the eyes of Dorothy, a twelve-year-old girl who is suddenly not in Kansas anymore. Among the film’s admirers is Salman Rushdie, who cites it as his first literary influence. The author was mesmerized when he first saw the film at the age of ten, and he aptly titled his very first short story “Over the Rainbow,” equating his own experiences with Dorothy’s adventurous voyage to Oz. For Rushdie, the sentimental conclusion that, after all, “there’s no place like home” is of lesser importance than the themes of growing up and “growing down”. He notes: “[…] The Wizard of Oz is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults; a film that shows us how the weakness of grownups forces children to take control of their own destinies, and so, ironically, grow up themselves.”

The Virgin Suicides (1999) by Sofia Coppola can also be labelled as a coming-of-age story, albeit one that places a much heavier emphasis on disillusionment rather than wonder. Screening this Thursday at De Cinema, the film centres around five young sisters who are raised in a conservative Catholic home. The narrators of their eventually tragic story are their neighbourhood boys, to whom the girls appear not only enigmatic but also one-dimensional.

On Friday, De Cinema will be screening one of the most iconic and gut-wrenching films of the Nouvelle Vague: Les quatre cents coups (1959) by François Truffaut. Antoine, the young protagonist, is a poor student, a plagiarist, a thief; but above all, he is a child who never stood a chance. Growing up in a loveless home, he is doomed in a deterministic sense and his story couldn’t have ended with any other final shot. Truffaut’s film is not so much a parable as it is a careful and precise examination of the social circumstances that violently force an imperfect child into an untenable position, a position that no longer allows him to defend himself against the injustice being imposed upon him. Antoine is partly Truffaut, and Truffaut is partly Antoine: the director was, according to his biographers, “the child of his oeuvre, inventing the story of his origin through the character of Antoine Doinel, who is both himself and already another, since this child of cinema belonged to everyone from the outset.”