AGE OF INNOCENCE

Cinemas fascination with childhood is as old as the medium itself, enabling lmmakers to depart from conventional modes of storytelling as they exploit an adult awareness to reect the undoubted otherness of youthful experience
By Pasquale Iannone

The recent death of 1930s child star Shirley Temple has

KIDS STAY IN THE PICTURE (Clockwise from above) Andrei Tarkovskys Mirror, Louis Lumires Babys Breakfast and Peter Weirs Witness

brought to mind once again the long symbiotic relationship between childhood and the cinema, a relationship that stretches back to 1895 and one of the rst home movies, Louis Lumires Babys Breakfast (Le Repas de bb). The lm, only 41 seconds long, observes Lumires brother Auguste and sister-in-law Marguerite as they enjoy breakfast with infant daughter Andre in the garden of the family home, the trees rustling gently behind them. Little Andre is fed a few spoonfuls by her father, who then hands her a biscuit. She inspects the biscuit before stretching out her hand to her uncle off screen. Why dont you have it its for you, her father seems to say as he pours her a little more milk, and the lm ends. This early cinematic snapshot of childhood was made by a lmmaker who was nonetheless rigidly adult in the approach to his material. Lumires seemingly off-the-cuff execution belied the precision and calculation behind every shot. Babys Breakfast is very much anadultviewofchildhood,buttondtherstlmmaker who captures the wonder, the freedom, the playfulness of childhood, we need only look to Lumires contemporary Georges Mlis. Coming from a background in magic, theatre and spectacle, Mliss relationship with the cinematograph was like that of a child staring open-mouthed at a bundle of new toys on Christmas morning. (As Orson Welles later said, cinema was the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.) Mlis made use of all of the effects at his disposal to craft elaborate fantasy and trick lms. In lms such as A Trip to the Moon (1902), for instance, we see in admittedly primitive form a sort of childhood from the inside out, as opposed to childhood from the outside in in Babys Breakfast. Looking back at the vast quantity of lms about the subject made since those early days, its clear that the best childhood pictures are those that have found ways

to harness both methods, lms that manage to approach childhood with adult acuity while in some way reecting its undoubted otherness. The presence of a child often allows filmmakers to depart from conventional modes of storytelling, to wriggle free from the strict demands of plot. We see this in works as diverse as The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955) or Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999), Chickamauga (Robert Enrico, 1962) or Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982). When young siblings Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) and John Harper (Billy Chapin) escape the clutches of the homicidal preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) in The Night of the Hunter, Laughtons camera follows the children as their boat glides slowly along the Ohio river. The pulsing drama of the chase fades away and the lm slips into the realm of fairy tale. While John is slumped over, exhausted, his sister sings a haunting lullaby about a y whose two pretty children ew away, ew away, into the sky, into the moon. Laughton then cuts from the boat to the riverbank; a cobweb stretches across the frame with the children gliding along in the background. Some of the evocative imagery in The Night of the Hunter (children and water, the child seen through a cobweb) resurfaces in Ivans Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962), a film that belongs to an ever-growing canon of pictures about childrens wartime experience. Usually, directors use the gure of the child to amplify the horror of war but Tarkovsky goes further. Like Laughton, he wants to capture a sense of the childs outer and inner world. Czech New Wave lmmaker Jan Nemec did the same albeit in more experimental fashion with his 1964 lm Diamonds of the Night, a feverish tale of two teenage boys who escape from a train bound for a concentration camp and are haunted by visions brought on by fear and hunger. The violent shattering of innocence during wartime is a chance for the lmmaker to point the nger at the adult world think of the
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CHILDREN AND FILM

jaccuse of Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948). Films about childhood often show the child forced into premature adulthood and in no lm is this more terrifyingly depicted than in Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985). Over the course of its 136 minutes, we see teenager Flor (Alexei Kravchenko) physically and mentally transformed by the brutality hes forced to witness. Klimovs purposely relentless approach leaves very little space for dream or fantasy. Who can forget the close-ups of Flor toward the end of the lm bruised, traumatised, prematurely aged, left alive purely by chance. If we were to place Klimovs depiction of childhood at one end of a very wide spectrum, at the other end we would nd Shirley Temple. While the likes of Ivan and Flor are eventually beaten down by the adult world, the majority of Temples good-humoured, enthusiastic characters are there to make grown-ups see the error of their ways.
REBELLION

LOSS

Italian director Luigi Comencini made several lms featuring child protagonists. Misunderstood (1967) stars Anthony Quayle as a recently widowed English diplomat in Florence who fails to understand that his eight-year-old sons wayward behaviour is part of the boys grieving process. Set during World War II, Ren Clments For34 | Sight&Sound | April 2014

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Around the same time that little Shirley was singing and tap-dancing her way into audiences affections, the idea of children taking over was also the subject of Zro de conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933), the story of a rebellion at an all-boys boarding school. Vigos close identication with the rambunctious kids makes for a formally dazzling evocation of children breaking free from the constraints placed on them by adults (here depicted as grotesque gures except for Jean Dasts Chaplinesque Monsieur Huguet). Twenty-ve years later, Franois Truffaut made The 400 Blows (1959), another picture about youthful rebellion, a theme that was carried on into Maurice Pialats Truffaut-produced feature debut Naked Childhood (1968). In Pialats lm, ten-year-old Franois (Michel Terrazon) is moved from one foster home to another, seemingly unable to settle and becoming ever more troublesome. Pialat never explains Franoiss antics; like the foster parents in the lm, the audience is left to wonder what makes the child act the way he does. A decade later, Pialat returned to questions of youth with Graduate First (1979), a follow-up of sorts to Naked Childhood. Similarly unsentimental in tone, the lm focuses on the lives of a group of disaffected teenagers in the northern French town of Lens. Arguably Pialats bestknown work about youth, 1983s Nos Amours features an extraordinary performance by Sandrine Bonnaire as a precocious 15-year-old who embarks on a string of affairs to distance herself from her dysfunctional family. Like the earlier two lms, Nos Amours is concerned with the capriciousness and unpredictability of youth themes reflected in Pialats unsweetened approach. Saccharine depictions are, of course, the main problem when it comes to childhood and the cinema, and while its a criticism that certainly cant be levelled at Pialat, it remains all too common.

Vigos close identication with the kids in Zro de conduite makes for a formally dazzling evocation of children breaking free from adult constraints

YOUNG SOUL REBELS (From top) The youthful protagonists of Franois Truffauts The 400 Blows, Jean Vigos Zro de conduite and Maurice Pialats Naked Childhood are all trying to liberate themselves from the strait-jacket of adult rules

bidden Games (1952) tells of Paulette (Brigitte Fossey), a ve-year-old girl who is orphaned by an aerial bombardment. She ends up at a farm and becomes friends with the farmowners son, 12-year-old Michel (Georges Poujouly) who helps her build a cemetery for small animals. Clment presents this as an episode of post-traumatic play, an attempt by Paulette to start to come to terms with her loss. Given their subject matter, both Misunderstood and Forbidden Games can, of course, be forgiven for their sentimentality, but a lm such as Carlos Sauras Cra Cuervos (1976) shows an alternative way of depicting loss. Rather than follow the linear structure of Comencini and Clment,Sauraslmisfragmentedandriddledwithgapsa closer reection of true childhood experience, especially when faced with trauma. When eight-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent)discoversherfatherdeadinhisbedroomafteran apparent heart attack, she is convinced she has poisoned him. She then sees her mother in the kitchen, only for Saura to reveal that Anas mother had in fact died some time before. Unable to fully grasp what has happened to the family and having now to deal with an authoritarian aunt, Anas subjectivity is relayed through a narrative that blends past and present, fantasy and reality. Cra Cuervos is the second of Torrents two exceptional childhood performances of the 1970s. Made three years earlier, Victor Erices The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) employs a similar structure, only this time the story set in a Castilian village in 1940 is about the impact of cinema on an impressionable young mind, how a young child deals with images she is perhaps not quite ready for. This leads us to consider a group of lms that are concerned with the child as a witness, witness not necessarily to horrors of the magnitude of Come and See, but to events that nonetheless place them in a dangerous position.
WITNESS

There are, of course, countless lms that feature the child as witness to criminality. Such scenes are often presented as flashbacks to explain the motivation behind the action of the characters as adults. Its far more unusual to have the whole story unfold from the childs point of view. In Carol Reeds The Fallen Idol (1948), Phillipe (Bobby Henrey), the young son of a foreign ambassador in London, becomes embroiled in a secret concerning the family butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson). Adapted by Graham Greene from his story The Basement Room, its a film in which the tension as Vicky Lebeau says in her book Childhood and Cinema is dependent on the fallibility of the childs perception. Reed who also featured child protagonists in later works such as A Kid for Two Farthings (1955) and Oliver! (1968) makes sure that many of the key events in the picture are seen from Phillipes perspective. The chiaroscuro deep-focus compositions that Reed would take to new levels with The Third Man (1949) are already very much in evidence. Made in the US a year after The Fallen Idol, Ted Tetzlaffs The Window (1949) is another suspenseful lm on the theme. A world away from Phillipes privileged upbringing, we nd little Tommy (Bobby Driscoll), the son of working class parents living in a crowded New York tenement. Bobby has a habit of crying wolf, so when he appears to have witnessed a murder late one balmy summer night, there are very few adults willing to

CHILDS EYE VIEW (Clockwise from above) Carlos Sauras Cra Cuervos, Victor Erices Spirit of the Beehive, Carol Reeds Fallen Idol and Ted Tetzlaffs The Window all explore the idea of children being witnesses to an adult world they cant yet understand

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CHILDREN AND FILM

believe him. Tetzlaff made his name as a cinematographerinthe30sand40sandshotAlfredHitchcocks Notorious (1946) before adapting The Window from a Cornell Woolrich story. Interestingly, Woolrich would also provide the source material for Hitchcocks famous lm on adult voyeurism, Rear Window (1954). At the beginning of Peter Weirs Witness (1985), eightyear-old Amish boy Samuel (Lukas Haas) witnesses a murder in the toilet of a Philadelphia train station. Like The Fallen Idol and The Window, Weirs framing and shot composition emphasises the childs limited perspective. As the lm progresses, Samuels viewpoint alternates with that of the lms adult protagonist, John Book (Harrison Ford), the detective who has been assigned to work on the case.
MEMORY

Rather than focus on the childs act of looking, some of the most affecting pictures on childhood have lmmakers themselves looking back at their youth. Dealing as they do with memory, these works tend to deviate most from traditional narrative structures think again of Tarkovsky, of Federico Fellini, the lms of Terence Davies and Jane Campion, or indeed Claire Deniss Chocolat (1988). Fellini drew on childhood memories for many of his lms, but children are most prominent in lms such as 8 12 (1963), Roma (1972) and Amarcord (1973). In his 1980 memoir Fare un Film, Fellini notes: For children, everything is fantastical because it is unknown, unseen, never tested, the world presents itself to the child without intentions Its a huge, marvellous free spectacle, a kind of boundless, breathing amoeba where everything lives, subject and object, confused in one incessant ux. Its a passage that perfectly captures not only Fellinis vision of childhood, but also his approach to lmmaking, placing him rmly in the Mlis tradition. In the lms of Fellini, memories are not clearly detached from a linear narrative but form part of a free-owing stream of images as in Sauras Cra Cuervos and Tarkovskys lm-poem Mirror. When Tarkovsky started thinking about the structure of Mirror (1974),hecameupontheideaofblendingchildhood memories with contemporary documentary footage(aninterviewwithhismother)thetwoperspectives would then be alternated in the nal cut. Ultimately, he

For children, everything is fantastical because it is unknown, unseen, never tested everything lives, subject and object, confused in one incessant ux

felt such an approach would feel too studied (Articial and monotonous like a game of ping-pong, he writes in Sculpting in Time). So out went the more adult approach and in came the freer, more associative style.
THE CHILD LEFT ALONE

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN Jack Claytons Our Mothers House and Hirokazu Koreedas Nobody Knows (below) explore what happens when children are left alone and there are no longer any rules to break

A season of 17 lms curated by Mark Cousins, Cinema of Childhood , will launch on 11 April at Filmhouse in Edinburgh, BFI Southbank in London and other key venues across the UK. Cousinss documentary A Story of Children and Film is released on 4 April and is reviewed on page 85

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Having talked about the tension, the push and pull between the worlds of adult and child, what happens when the child is left alone, when there are no rules left to break? In Jack Claytons Our Mothers House (1967), a family of seven children decides not to report their mothers death from illness for fear of being sent to an orphanage. Instead, they bury their mother in the garden of their large family home and continue life as normal. Clayton charts the full gamut of childhood emotion carefree and playful one minute, unforgivingly cruel the next in what remains one of the most sorely underappreciated portraits of the vicissitudes of childhood. Hirokazu Kore-edas Nobody Knows (2004) is also about children left alone. Like Our Mothers House, adult-less freedom and adventure is counterbalanced by a palpable sense of unease. Kore-edas is an intimate, synaesthetic approach with the camera, alive to the small details of the childrens lives, much like Korean-American filmmaker So Yong Kim in Treeless Mountain (2008). In this lm, Kims second feature, two young girls (aged six and four) are left with their aunt as their mother sets off to nd their estranged father. Together with works such as Samira Makhmalbafs incredible debut The Apple (1998), the lms of Kore-eda and Kim show that to understand the child through lm, we dont always need the restless spatio-temporal ow of Fellini or Tarkovsky there are kids movies that are brilliantly effective at simply watching children be. While its certainly true that more formally daring work can reect a childs inner world, Mark Cousins is right when he notes near the beginning of A Story of Children and Film, Art shows us again and again that if we look closely, openly at a small thing, we can see lots in it.

SONGS OF FREEDOM
Mark Cousins seized the chance to take liberties with form in his essay lm A Story of Children and Film, an examination of the notion that kids movies are all about freedom
Interview by Pasquale Iannone
PI: Youve embraced the essay form in a big way over the past few years with A Story of Children and Film, What Is This Film Called Love? and Here Be Dragons. Youve also written a manifesto on the essay lm and, looking through it, what strikes me is this sense of looseness, of freedom that the form can give you. I was wondering if there was any lmmaker who has inuenced you in particular? MC: Its funny but when it comes to the

The child within: Mark Cousins

essay lm, its writers who have inuenced me more. The essays of Virginia Woolf, for instance; everyone talks about Montaigne, and quite rightly, his writings still so fresh; Rousseaus Confessions. But a lm like Godards Two or Three Things I Know About Her [1967], the idea that a lm can be about two parallel tracks: about a woman and a city, about urbanism and gender and the sparks that y between those its fantastic. I particularly like heterodox lmmakers, those who put several apparently unrelated things in one lm. For some reason Ive been less inuenced by the 8mm lmmakers, who have been lming their own lives for many years. Its because they are impressionists; theyre more like Monet whereas my style and I cant believe Im saying this is more like Paul Czanne. Czanne did his thinking as he painted whereas an impressionist does their thinking afterwards.
PI: A Story of Children and Film doesnt present a chronological history of childhood and cinema. The lms based around a series of themes shyness, class, the strop, storytelling, parenting et cetera but it all starts with you observing your niece and nephew Laura and Ben playing in your at. MC: Yes, I had just come out of A Story of

Children are probably some of the least free people in the world. Somebody tells them when to eat their dinner, when to go to bed. Theyre little slaves
about children are in some way playing with the idea of breaking out of that enslavement, so the theme of A Story of Children and Film in a way is freedom and I needed a free and loose form to make it work. At rst, people who were backing the lm were a little scared that there was no spine to it, no solid structure, that it wasnt didactic. The concern was, Well, is it going to be this little tonal thing? and the answer was, Well, yes. But its not abstract in any way; it goes to particular places and moments. Theres factual stuff in there but it enjoys the kind of liberty that the kids in childrens lms enjoy.
PI: In the lm, you unearth an extraordinary range of very rarely seen lms alongside more familiar titles such as Kes [1969], The 400 Blows [1959] and E.T. [1982]. How did you go about nding these lesser-known lms? MC: I knew a lot of them already, especially

the Iranian stuff Ive been banging the drum for Mohamed-Ali Talebi for the longest time (see Dispatches, page 13). Then I hooked up with Neil McGlone, whos really knowledgeable about cinema and he sent me a couple of titles, including the Karel Kachyna lm Long Live the Republic [1965], which is fantastic. Then I just asked around. I asked my producer in Sweden, Anita Oxburgh, about the best Swedish lm about children and she said Hugo and Josephine [Kjell Grede, 1967] its just so brilliantly grown up about the relationship between children and adults. I asked Karel Och, whos the artistic director of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, if he knew of any Czech lms that maybe we had missed and he sent me Miroslav Janeks The Unseen [1996] and I was just blown away by it.
PI: A recurring image in the lms you discuss is the balloon its such a powerful, vivid symbol of childhood. MC: One of the things you see children do

most is play with balloons. Something that is so cheap and so everywhere should be banal and yet there remains something almost mystical about them. Theyre so cinematic too thats why there are loads of them in A Story of Children and Film.

Film where I had to stick to the truth, a kind of through-line, so I just wanted to do something more free, and as I started thinking about children and cinema I started to realise that what interested me about kids movies wasnt that the lms were about kids. Kids movies are about freedom. When you think about it, children are probably the least free people in the world. Somebody tells them when to eat their dinner, to change their trousers because that doesnt go, and when to go to bed theyre little slaves. All lms

E.T. the Extra-terrestrial

Hugo and Josephine

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