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AGEOFINNOCENCECinema’s fascination with childhood is as old as the mediumitself, enabling filmmakers to depart from conventionalmodes of storytelling as they exploit an adult awareness toreflect the undoubted otherness of youthful experienceBy Pasquale Iannone

KIDS STAY INTHE PICTURE(Clockwise from above)Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror,Louis Lumière’s Baby’sBreakfast and PeterWeir’sWitness

The recent death of 1930s child star Shirley Temple hasbrought tomindonceagain the longsymbiotic relation-ship between childhood and the cinema, a relationshipthat stretches back to 1895 and one of the first homemovies, Louis Lumière’s Baby’s Breakfast (Le Repas debébé). Thefilm,only41 seconds long, observesLumière’sbrother Auguste and sister-in-lawMarguerite as theyenjoy breakfast with infant daughter Andrée in thegarden of the family home, the trees rustling gentlybehind them. LittleAndrée is fed a few spoonfuls byherfather,whothenhandsherabiscuit.Sheinspectsthebis-cuit before stretching out her hand to her uncle offscreen. “Whydon’t youhave it – it’s for you,” her fatherseems to say as he pours her a littlemoremilk, and thefilm ends. This early cinematic snapshot of childhoodwasmade by a filmmakerwhowas nonetheless rigidly‘adult’ in the approach to hismaterial. Lumière’s seem-ingly off-the-cuff executionbelied theprecision and cal-culationbehindeveryshot.Baby’sBreakfast isverymuchanadultviewofchildhood,buttofindthefirstfilmmakerwho captures thewonder, the freedom, the playfulnessof childhood,weneedonly looktoLumière’s contempo-raryGeorgesMéliès.Coming from a background in magic, theatre and

spectacle,Méliès’s relationshipwith the cinematographwaslikethatofachildstaringopen-mouthedatabundleof new toys on Christmas morning. (As OrsonWelleslater said, cinemawas “the biggest electric train set anyboyeverhad”.)Mélièsmadeuseof all of theeffects athisdisposaltocraftelaboratefantasyandtrickfilms.InfilmssuchasATrip to theMoon (1902), for instance,we see– inadmittedlyprimitive form–asortofchildhoodfromtheinside out, as opposed to childhood from the outside ininBaby’s Breakfast.Looking back at the vast quantity of films about the

subject made since those early days, it’s clear that thebest childhood pictures are those that have foundways

toharnessbothmethods,filmsthatmanagetoapproachchildhoodwith adult acuitywhile in someway reflect-ing its undoubted otherness. The presence of a childoften allows filmmakers to depart from conventionalmodes of storytelling, to wriggle free from the strictdemands of plot.We see this inworks as diverse as TheNight of theHunter (CharlesLaughton,1955)orRatcatcher(LynneRamsay,1999),Chickamauga (RobertEnrico,1962)or Fanny andAlexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982).Whenyoung siblings Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) and JohnHarper(Billy Chapin) escape the clutches of the homicidalpreacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) in The Nightof theHunter, Laughton’s camera follows the children astheirboatglidesslowlyalongtheOhioriver.Thepulsingdramaof thechase fadesawayand thefilmslips into therealmof fairy tale.While John is slumpedover, exhaust-ed, his sister sings a haunting lullaby about a flywhose“two pretty childrenflew away, flew away, into the sky,into themoon”. Laughton thencuts fromtheboat to theriverbank; a cobweb stretches across the framewith thechildrenglidingalong in thebackground.Some of the evocative imagery in The Night of the

Hunter (children and water, the child seen througha cobweb) resurfaces in Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tar-kovsky, 1962), a film that belongs to an ever-growingcanon of pictures about children’swartime experience.Usually, directors use the figure of the child to amplifythehorrorofwarbutTarkovskygoesfurther.LikeLaugh-ton, hewants to capture a sense of the child’s outer andinnerworld.CzechNewWavefilmmaker JanNemecdidthe same – albeit inmore experimental fashion –withhis 1964filmDiamonds of theNight, a feverish tale of twoteenage boyswho escape from a train bound for a con-centration campand arehauntedbyvisions brought onby fear andhunger. The violent shattering of innocenceduringwartime is a chance for the filmmaker topoint the finger at the adult world – think of the

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j’accuse ofGermany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini,1948).Filmsaboutchildhoodoftenshowthechild

forced into premature adulthood and in no film is thismore terrifyingly depicted than inCome and See (ElemKlimov,1985).Over thecourseof its136minutes,weseeteenager Flor (Alexei Kravchenko) physically andmen-tally transformedby thebrutalityhe’s forced towitness.Klimov’spurposelyrelentlessapproachleavesvery littlespace fordreamor fantasy.Whocan forget the close-upsofFlor toward theendof thefilm–bruised, traumatised,prematurely aged, left alivepurelybychance.If wewere to place Klimov’s depiction of childhood

at one end of a verywide spectrum, at the other endwewould find Shirley Temple.While the likes of Ivan andFlor are eventually beaten down by the adult world,themajority of Temple’s good-humoured, enthusiasticcharacters are there tomake grown-ups see the error oftheirways.

REBELLION

Aroundthesametimethat littleShirleywassingingandtap-dancingherway into audiences’ affections, the ideaof children ‘taking over’ was also the subject of Zéro deconduite (Jean Vigo, 1933), the story of a rebellion at anall-boysboardingschool.Vigo’sclose identificationwiththe rambunctious kids makes for a formally dazzlingevocationof childrenbreaking free fromtheconstraintsplaced on them by adults (here depicted as grotesquefigures except for JeanDasté’s ChaplinesqueMonsieurHuguet).Twenty-five years later, François Truffaut made The

400 Blows (1959), another picture about youthful rebel-lion, a theme that was carried on intoMaurice Pialat’sTruffaut-producedfeaturedebutNakedChildhood (1968).In Pialat’s film, ten-year-old François (Michel Terrazon)is moved from one foster home to another, seeminglyunable to settle and becoming evermore troublesome.Pialat never explains François’s antics; like the fosterparents in the film, the audience is left towonderwhatmakes the child act thewayhedoes.A decade later, Pialat returned to questions of youth

withGraduate First (1979), a follow-up of sorts toNakedChildhood. Similarly unsentimental in tone, the film fo-cuses on the lives of a group of disaffected teenagers inthenorthernFrenchtownofLens.ArguablyPialat’sbest-knownwork about youth, 1983’sÀNosAmours featuresan extraordinary performance by Sandrine Bonnaire asa precocious 15-year-oldwho embarks on a string of af-fairs to distance herself fromher dysfunctional family.Like the earlier two films,ÀNos Amours is concernedwith the capriciousness and unpredictability of youth– themes reflected in Pialat’s unsweetened approach.Saccharine depictions are, of course, themain problemwhen it comes to childhood and the cinema, andwhileit’s a criticism that certainly can’t be levelled at Pialat, itremains all too common.

LOSS

Italian director Luigi Comencinimade several films fea-turing childprotagonists.Misunderstood (1967) starsAn-thonyQuayleasarecentlywidowedEnglishdiplomatinFlorencewho fails to understand that his eight-year-oldson’s wayward behaviour is part of the boy’s grievingprocess. Set duringWorldWar II, René Clément’s For- BFINATIO

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Vigo’s close identificationwith thekids in ‘Zéro de conduite’ makes for aformally dazzling evocation of childrenbreaking free from adult constraints

YOUNGSOULREBELS(From top) The youthfulprotagonists of FrançoisTruffaut’s The 400 Blows,JeanVigo’s Zéro de conduiteandMaurice Pialat’sNakedChildhood are all trying toliberate themselves from thestrait-jacket of adult rules

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bidden Games (1952) tells of Paulette (Brigitte Fossey), afive-year-oldgirlwho isorphanedbyanaerialbombard-ment. She ends up at a farm and becomes friendswiththe farmowner’s son, 12-year-oldMichel (Georges Pou-jouly)whohelpsherbuildacemetery for smallanimals.Clément presents this as an episode of post-traumaticplay, an attempt by Paulette to start to come to termswithher loss.Given their subject matter, bothMisunderstood and

ForbiddenGames can, of course, be forgiven for their sen-timentality,butafilmsuchasCarlosSaura’sCríaCuervos(1976) showsanalternativewayofdepicting loss.Ratherthan follow the linear structure of Comencini andClé-ment,Saura’sfilmisfragmentedandriddledwithgaps–acloser reflectionof truechildhoodexperience, especiallywhenfacedwithtrauma.Wheneight-year-oldAna(AnaTorrent)discoversherfatherdeadinhisbedroomafteranapparentheartattack, she is convincedshehaspoisonedhim. She then sees hermother in the kitchen, only forSaura to reveal thatAna’smother had in fact died sometimebefore.Unable to fully graspwhathashappened tothe familyandhavingnowtodealwithanauthoritarianaunt, Ana’s subjectivity is relayed through a narrativethatblendspast andpresent, fantasyand reality.CríaCuervos is thesecondofTorrent’s twoexceptional

childhoodperformances of the 1970s.Made three yearsearlier, Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) em-ploys a similar structure, only this time the story– set inaCastilianvillagein1940–isabouttheimpactofcinemaon an impressionable youngmind, how a young childdealswithimagessheisperhapsnotquitereadyfor.Thisleads us to consider a group of films that are concernedwith the child as a witness, witness not necessarily tohorrors of themagnitude ofCome and See, but to eventsthatnonethelessplace theminadangerousposition.

WITNESS

Thereare,ofcourse,countlessfilmsthatfeaturethechildaswitness to criminality. Such scenes are often present-ed as flashbacks to explain themotivation behind theaction of the characters as adults. It’s farmore unusualto have the whole story unfold from the child’s pointof view. In Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948), Phillipe(BobbyHenrey), the young sonof a foreign ambassadorin London, becomes embroiled in a secret concerningthe family butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson). AdaptedbyGrahamGreene fromhis story ‘TheBasementRoom’,it’s a film inwhich the tension – as Vicky Lebeau saysin her bookChildhood andCinema – is dependent on thefallibility of the child’s perception. Reed –who also fea-tured child protagonists in laterworks such asAKid forTwoFarthings (1955) andOliver! (1968)–makes sure thatmanyof thekeyevents in thepictureare seen fromPhil-lipe’s perspective. The chiaroscuro deep-focus composi-tions that Reedwould take to new levelswithThe ThirdMan (1949) are alreadyverymuch inevidence.MadeintheUSayearafterTheFallenIdol,TedTetzlaff’s

TheWindow (1949) is another suspenseful film on thetheme.AworldawayfromPhillipe’sprivilegedupbring-ing, we find little Tommy (Bobby Driscoll), the son ofworkingclassparents living inacrowdedNewYork ten-ement. Bobbyhas a habit of cryingwolf, sowhenhe ap-pears to havewitnessed amurder late one balmysummernight, thereareveryfewadultswillingto

CHILD’S EYEVIEW(Clockwise from above)Carlos Saura’s Cría Cuervos,Victor Erice’s Spirit of theBeehive, Carol Reed’s FallenIdol andTedTetzlaff’s TheWindow all explore the ideaof children being witnessesto an adult world they can’tyet understand

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believe him. Tetzlaffmadehis name as a cinema-tographerinthe30sand40sandshotAlfredHitch-

cock’sNotorious (1946)beforeadaptingTheWindow fromaCornellWoolrich story. Interestingly,Woolrichwouldalso provide the sourcematerial forHitchcock’s famousfilmonadult voyeurism,RearWindow (1954).At the beginning of PeterWeir’sWitness (1985), eight-

year-old Amish boy Samuel (Lukas Haas) witnesses amurder in the toilet of a Philadelphia train station. LikeThe Fallen Idol andTheWindow,Weir’s framing and shotcompositionemphasises the child’s limitedperspective.As the film progresses, Samuel’s viewpoint alternateswith thatof thefilm’s adultprotagonist, JohnBook (Har-risonFord), thedetectivewhohasbeenassigned toworkon the case.

MEMORY

Rather than focus on the child’s act of looking, someof the most affecting pictures on childhood havefilmmakers themselves looking back at their youth.Dealingas theydowithmemory, theseworks tendtode-viatemost from traditional narrative structures – thinkagain of Tarkovsky, of Federico Fellini, the films of Ter-enceDavies and JaneCampion, or indeedClaireDenis’sChocolat (1988).Fellini drew on childhoodmemories formany of his

films, but children aremost prominent in films such as8 1⁄2 (1963),Roma (1972) andAmarcord (1973). Inhis1980memoir Fare un Film, Fellini notes: “For children, every-thing is fantasticalbecause it isunknown,unseen,nevertested, theworld presents itself to the childwithout in-tentions… It’s a huge, marvellous free spectacle, a kindof boundless, breathing amoebawhere everything lives,subject andobject, confused in one incessant flux.” It’s apassagethatperfectlycapturesnotonlyFellini’svisionofchildhood,butalsohisapproachtofilmmaking,placinghimfirmly in theMéliès tradition. In thefilmsofFellini,memories are not clearly detached from a linear narra-tivebutformpartofafree-flowingstreamofimagesas inSaura’sCríaCuervosandTarkovsky’sfilm-poemMirror.WhenTarkovskystartedthinkingabout thestructure

ofMirror (1974),hecameupontheideaofblendingchild-hoodmemorieswith contemporary documentary foot-age(aninterviewwithhismother)–thetwoperspectiveswould thenbe alternated in thefinal cut.Ultimately, he

felt such an approachwould feel too studied (“Artificialandmonotonous like agameofping-pong,”hewrites inSculpting inTime). Sooutwent themore ‘adult’ approachand incame the freer,more associative style.

THECHILD LEFTALONE

Having talked about the tension, the push and pullbetween the worlds of adult and child, what happenswhen the child is left alone,when there are no rules leftto break? In Jack Clayton’sOurMother’s House (1967), afamilyofsevenchildrendecidesnottoreporttheirmoth-er’sdeathfromillness for fearofbeingsent toanorphan-age. Instead, theyburytheirmotherinthegardenoftheirlarge family home and continue life as normal. Claytoncharts the full gamut of childhood emotion – carefreeandplayfuloneminute,unforgivinglycruel thenext–inwhat remains one of themost sorely underappreciatedportraits of thevicissitudesof childhood.HirokazuKore-eda’sNobodyKnows (2004)isalsoabout

children left alone. LikeOurMother’s House, adult-lessfreedomandadventureiscounterbalancedbyapalpablesense of unease. Kore-eda’s is an intimate, synaestheticapproachwith the camera, alive to the small details ofthe children’s lives, much like Korean-American film-maker So YongKim inTreelessMountain (2008). In thisfilm,Kim’s second feature, twoyounggirls (aged six andfour) are left with their aunt as theirmother sets off tofind their estranged father.Together with works such as SamiraMakhmalbaf’s

incredible debutTheApple (1998), the films of Kore-edaand Kim show that to understand the child throughfilm,we don’t always need the restless spatio-temporalflowof Fellini orTarkovsky– there arekids’movies thatare brilliantly effective at simplywatching children be.While it’s certainly true thatmore formallydaringworkcan reflect a child’s inner world,Mark Cousins is rightwhenhenotes near the beginning ofAStory of Childrenand Film, “Art shows us again and again that if we lookclosely, openly at a small thing,wecan see lots in it.”

i Aseasonof 17 films curatedbyMarkCousins,

‘CinemaofChildhood’,will launchon 11April at

Filmhouse in Edinburgh,BFI Southbank in London

andother key venues across theUK.Cousins’s

documentaryA Story of Children and Film is

releasedon4April and is reviewedonpage85

For children,everythingis fantasticalbecause it isunknown, unseen,never tested…everything lives,subject and object,confused in oneincessant flux

CITYOFLOSTCHILDRENJack Clayton’s Our Mother’sHouse and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows (below)explore what happens whenchildren are left alone andthere are no longer any rulesto break

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PI:You’ve embraced the essay form in a big

way over the past few yearswithA Story of

Children and Film,What Is This Film Called

Love? andHere Be Dragons.You’ve alsowritten

amanifesto on the essay filmand, looking

through it,what strikesme is this sense of

looseness, of freedom that the formcan give

you. I waswondering if therewas any filmmaker

who has influenced you in particular?

MC: It’s funnybutwhen it comes to theessayfilm, it’swriterswhohave influencedmemore. TheessaysofVirginiaWoolf, forinstance; everyone talks aboutMontaigne,andquite rightly, hiswriting’s still so fresh;Rousseau’sConfessions. But afilmlikeGodard’sTwoorThreeThings IKnowAboutHer [1967], the idea that afilmcanbeabouttwoparallel tracks: about awomanandacity, abouturbanismandgender and thesparks thatflybetween those– it’s fantastic.I particularly likeheterodoxfilmmakers,thosewhoput several apparentlyunrelatedthings inonefilm.For somereason I’vebeenless influencedby the8mmfilmmakers,whohavebeenfilming their own lives formanyyears. It’s because theyare impressionists;they’remore likeMonetwhereasmystyle – and I can’t believe I’msaying this– ismore likePaulCézanne.Cézannedidhis thinkingashepaintedwhereas animpressionist does their thinkingafterwards.PI:A Story of Children and Filmdoesn’t

present a chronological history of childhood

and cinema.The film’s based around a

series of themes– shyness, class, the strop,

storytelling, parenting et cetera – but it all

starts with you observing your niece and

nephewLaura andBen playing in your flat.

MC:Yes, I had just comeoutofAStory ofFilmwhere Ihad to stick to the truth, akindof through-line, so I justwanted todosomethingmore free, andas I started thinkingabout childrenandcinema I started to realisethatwhat interestedmeaboutkids’movieswasn’t that thefilmswere aboutkids.Kids’movies are about freedom.Whenyou thinkabout it, childrenareprobably the least freepeople in theworld. Somebody tells themwhen toeat their dinner, to change theirtrousers because thatdoesn’t go, andwhentogo tobed– they’re little slaves.Allfilms

about childrenare in somewayplayingwiththe ideaofbreakingoutof that enslavement,so the themeofAStory ofChildrenandFilmin away is freedomand Ineededa freeand loose formtomake itwork.Atfirst,peoplewhowerebacking thefilmwerealittle scared that therewasno spine to it, nosolid structure, that itwasn’t didactic. Theconcernwas, “Well, is it going tobe this littletonal thing?” and theanswerwas, “Well,yes.” But it’s not abstract in anyway; it goestoparticularplaces andmoments. There’sfactual stuff in therebut it enjoys thekindofliberty that thekids in children’sfilmsenjoy.PI: In the film, you unearth an extraordinary

range of very rarely seen films alongsidemore

familiar titles such asKes [1969],The 400

Blows [1959] and E.T. [1982].Howdid you go

about finding these lesser-knownfilms?

MC: I knewa lot of themalready, especially

the Iranian stuff – I’vebeenbanging thedrumforMohamed-AliTalebi for the longesttime (seeDispatches, page13). Then IhookedupwithNeilMcGlone,who’s reallyknowledgeable about cinemaandhe sentmeacoupleof titles, including theKarelKachynafilmLongLive theRepublic [1965],which isfantastic. Then I just askedaround. I askedmyproducer inSweden,AnitaOxburgh,about thebest Swedishfilmabout childrenand she saidHugoand Josephine [KjellGrede,1967] – it’s just sobrilliantly grownupaboutthe relationshipbetweenchildrenandadults.I askedKarelOch,who’s the artistic directorof theKarlovyVaryFilmFestival, if heknewof anyCzechfilms thatmaybewehadmissedandhe sentmeMiroslav Janek’sTheUnseen[1996] and Iwas just blownawayby it.PI:A recurring image in the films you

discuss is the balloon– it’s such a

powerful, vivid symbol of childhood.

MC:Oneof the thingsyou see childrendomost is playwithballoons. Something thatis so cheapand soeverywhere shouldbebanal andyet there remains somethingalmostmystical about them.They’re socinematic too– that’swhy there are loadsof theminAStory ofChildrenandFilm.

SONGSOF

FREEDOMMark Cousins seized the chance totake liberties with form in his essayfilm ‘A Story of Children and Film’,an examination of the notion that kids’movies are all about freedomInterview by Pasquale Iannone

The child within: Mark Cousins

E.T. the Extra-terrestrial Hugo and Josephine

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Children are probably someof the least free people in theworld. Somebody tells themwhen to eat their dinner, whento go to bed. They’re little slaves