The Child In World 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.

This anthology is organised into five distinct sections which address the significance, qualities and characteristics speaking to the figure of the child in film. The 'child' is understood as a figure that refers to real children, representations of childhood, the memories of imagined and actual childhoods as well as more abstract or theoretical and historical conceptions of the child in relation to subjectivity and agency. Following an introductory essay by the editor, the first section, 'Working children', establishes perhaps the most familiar context for the child in film - Hollywood cinema - and provides examples of the child actor's labour observing a loose chronology - from the 1930s 'prodigies', to the 'juvenile' supporting actor in the 1940s, to the exceptional career of one of the most well known 'child stars' - Jodie Foster. In all these instances the child's 'work' and performance is scrutinised and assessed in relation to popular understandings of what and who children are in relation to specific historical and cultural contexts. In the second section, 'Relations and representations', the effect of the child on different film's constructions and representation of time and space are considered. How does each film represent how the child apparently 'sees' and experiences its world? How successfully - or not - are the peculiar relations of the child to space and time managed and mediated by either live action or animated film? In the third section, 'The child in history', three case studies of different national cinemas (Post-Yugoslavian, Tamil, Brazilian) offer analyses of how the figure of the child may enable film-makers to portray alternative versions of history, or 'ways of telling' history, that reach toward alternative understandings of political conflicts and the formation of national identities. In the fourth section, 'Subjectivity, performance and the voice of the child', each essay seeks to uncover how the child's subjectivity (their agency and sense of self) is mediated and performed in both fictional and non-fictional films while understanding that the child's 'interiority' is often understood to be both precarious and elusive. In the fifth and final section, 'The didactic and nostalgic child' the essays refer explicitly to the use and function of the child for cinema, and indicates how the study of cinema may be enhanced by looking beyond commercial film-making. In this section essays address didactic or educational films made to directly influence the behaviour of children (or their caregivers) and a number of avant-garde and video installations in which memories of childhood are used and re-staged.

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.

The child has existed in cinema since the Lumière Brothers filmed their babies having messy meals in Lyons, but it is only quite recently that scholars have paid serious attention to her/his presence on screen. Scholarly discussion is now of the highest quality and of interest to anyone concerned not only with the extent to which adult cultural conversations invoke the figure of the child, but also to those interested in exploring how film cultures can shift questions of agency and experience in relation to subjectivity. Childhood and Nation in World Cinema recognizes that the range of films and scholarship is now sufficiently extensive to invoke the world cinema mantra of pluri-vocal and pluri-central attention and interpretation. At the same time, the importance of the child in figuring ideas of nationhood is an undiminished tic in adult cultural and social consciousness. Either the child on film provokes claims on the nation or the nation claims the child. Given the waning star of national film studies, and the widely held and serious concerns over the status of the nation as a meaningful cultural unit, the point here is not to assume some extraordinary pre-social geopolitical empathy of child and political entity. Rather, the present collection observes how and why and whether the cinematic child is indeed aligned to concepts of modern nationhood, to concerns of the State, and to geo-political organizational themes and precepts.

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.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2018 The Wizard of Oz brought many now-iconic tropes into popular culture: the yellow brick road, ruby slippers and Oz. But this book begins with Dorothy and her legacy as an archetypal touchstone in cinema for the child journeying far from home. In There's No Place Like Home, distinguished film scholar Stephanie Hemelryk Donald offers a fresh interpretation of the migrant child as a recurring figure in world cinema. Displaced or placeless children, and the idea of childhood itself, are vehicles to examine migration and cosmopolitanism in films such as Le Ballon Rouge, Little Moth and Le Havre. Surveying fictional and documentary film from the post-war years until today, the author shows how the child is a guide to themes of place, self and being in world cinema.

This book provides an overview of the cinemas of Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia, interpreting some of the recent developments as strategic responses to globalisation. Highlighting transnational and cross-cultural structures, influences and themes.