Children In The Cinema

This collection seeks to broaden the discussion of the child image by close analysis of the child and childhood as depicted in non-Western cinemas. Each essay offers a counter-narrative to Western notions of childhood by looking critically at alternative visions of childhood that does not privilege a Western ideal. Rather, this collection seeks to broaden our ideas about children, childhood, and the child’s place in the global community. This collection features a wide variety of contributors from around the world who offer compelling analyses of non-Western, non-Hollywood films starring children.

A groundbreaking parenting guidebook addressing the trait of “high sensitivity” in children, from the psychologist and bestselling author of The Highly Sensitive Person whose books have sold more than 1 million copies With the publication of The Highly Sensitive Person, pioneering psychotherapist Dr. Elaine Aron became the first person to identify the inborn trait of “high sensitivity” and to show how it affects the lives of those who possess it. In The Highly Sensitive Child, Dr. Aron shifts her focus to the 15 to 20 percent of children who are born highly sensitive—deeply reflective, sensitive to the subtle, and easily overwhelmed. These qualities can make for smart, conscientious, creative children, but also may result in shyness, fussiness, or acting out. As Dr. Aron shows in The Highly Sensitive Child, if your child seems overly inhibited, particular, or you worry that they may have a neurodevelopmental disorder, such as ADHD or autism, they may simply be highly sensitive. And raised with proper understanding and care, highly sensitive children can grow up to be happy, healthy, well-adjusted adults. Rooted in Dr. Aron’s years of experience working with highly sensitive children and their families, as well as in her original research on child temperament, The Highly Sensitive Child explores the challenges of raising an HSC; the four keys to successfully parenting an HSC; how to help HSCs thrive in a not-so-sensitive world; and how to make school and friendships enjoyable. With chapters addressing the needs of specific age groups, from newborns to teens, The Highly Sensitive Child is the ultimate resource for parents, teachers, and the sensitive children in their lives.

This book illustrates how global horror film images of children re-conceptualised childhood at the beginning of the twenty-first century, unravelling the child's long entrenched binding to ideologies of growth, futurity, and progress. The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema analyses an influential body of horror films featuring subversive depictions of children that emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and considers the cultural conditions surrounding their emergence. The book proposes that complex cultural and industrial shifts at the turn of the millennium resulted in potent cinematic renegotiations of the concept of childhood. In these transnational films-largely stemming from Spain, Japan, and America-the child resists embodying growth and futurity, concepts to which the child's symbolic function is typically bound. By demonstrating both the culturally specific and globally resonant properties of these frightening visions of children who refuse to grow up, the book outlines the conceptual and aesthetic mechanisms by which long entrenched ideologies of futurity, national progress, and teleological history started to waver at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Photographs of missing children are some of the most haunting images of contemporary Western society. Wilson contends that the loss of a child is perceived as a limit-experience in contemporary cinema, where filmmakers attempt to transform their means of representation as a response to acute pain and horror. She explores the representation of missing and endangered children in a number of the key films of the last decade, including Kieslowski's Three Colours: Blue, Atom Egoyan's Exotica, Todd Solondz's Happiness, Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady, Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, and Almodovar's All About My Mother.

Winter 2015 Top Ten IndieNext Pick When Mr. Squirrel awakens to find that the moon has landed on his tree, he frantically tries to get rid of it before someone suspects him of stealing it and puts him in jail. But when he rolls the moon off of his tree, it's gets stuck on Mrs. Hedgehog's bristles and when the billy-goat arrives and butts it with his horns . . . Will the moon ever be the same again? Sebastian Meschenmoser's hilarious illustrations and rollicking tale will be a bedtime favorite.

This book brings together a host of internationally recognised scholars to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the representation of the child in cinema. Individual chapters examine how children appear across a broad range of films, including Badlands (1973), Ratcatcher (1999), Boyhood (2014), My Neighbour Totoro (1988), and Howl's Moving Castle (2004). They also consider the depiction of children in non-fiction and non-theatrical films, including the documentaries Être et Avoir (2002) and Capturing the Friedmans (2003), art installations and public information films. Through a close analysis of these films, contributors examine the spaces and places children inhabit and imagine; a concern for children's rights and agency; the affective power of the child as a locus for memory and history; and the complexity and ambiguity of the child figure itself. The essays also argue the global reach of cinema featuring children, including analyses of films from the former Yugoslavia, Brazil and India, as well as exploring the labour of the child both in front of and behind the camera as actors and filmmakers. In doing so, the book provides an in-depth look into the nature of child performance on screen, across a diverse range of cinemas and film-making practices.

This book explores cultural conceptions of the child and the cinematic absence of black children from contemporary Hollywood film. Debbie Olson argues that within the discourse of children’s studies and film scholarship in relation to the conception of “the child,” there is often little to no distinction among children by race—the “child” is most often discussed as a universal entity, as the embodiment of all things not adult, not (sexually) corrupt. Discussions about children of color among scholars often take place within contexts such as crime, drugs, urbanization, poverty, or lack of education that tend to reinforce historically stereotypical beliefs about African Americans. Olson looks at historical conceptions of childhood within scholarly discourse, the child character in popular film and what space the black child (both African and African American) occupies within that ideal.