Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema: Borders and Encounters 1501318608, 9781501318603

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Nation, Film, Child
Part One: Home and Away
Chapter 1: ‘A Bath, a Toilet and a Field’: Dreaming and Deprivation in Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher
Chapter 2: Lost and Found: Children in Indigenous Australian Cinema
Chapter 3: ‘Away from Girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard
Part Two: Disappearance and Removal
Chapter 4: The Lost Children of Latvia: Deportees and Postmemory in Dzintra Geka’s The Children of Siberia
Chapter 5: Among the Nations: Children as Czechs, Germans and Jews in Post-1980 Czech Cinematic Representations of the Second World War1
Chapter 6: Child, Cinema, Dictatorship: Ignacio Agüero’s One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train
Part Three: Education and Serious Games
Chapter 7: Graphic Tales: Class, Violence and South Korean Childhood in Sang-Ho Yeon’s The King of Pigs
Chapter 8: Citizenship in the Classroom: The Politicization of Child Subjects in Nicolas Philibert’s To Be and To Have and Laurent Cantet’s The Class
Chapter 9: Education, Destiny and National Identity in Raúl Ruiz’s Manuel on the Island of Wonders
Chapter 10: An Allegorical Childhood: Identity and Coming of Age in Terry Loane’s Mickybo and Me
Part Four: Performance
Chapter 11: Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake: Child Labour and Commodity Culture in the Bollywood Adaptation of New Iranian Cinema’s Children of Heaven
Chapter 12: The Child as Hyphen: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah Dimanche
Chapter 13: Beiqing, Kuqing and National Sentimentality in Liu Junyi’s Left-behind Children
Chapter 14: Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness in Albertina Carri’s Barbie Gets Sad Too and Néstor F. and Martín C.’s Easy Money
Bibliography
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

ii

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema Borders and Encounters Edited by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Emma Wilson and Sarah Wright

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Emma Wilson, Sarah Wright and contributors, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1858-0  ePDF: 978-1-5013-1860-3 ePub: 978-1-5013-1859-7 Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Film Toomelah (Ivan Sen, 2011), Denieka Connors and Daniel Connors. Image courtesy Bunya Productions

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

This collection is dedicated to children forced to cross borders alone.

vi

Contents Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Nation, Film, Child  Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Emma Wilson and Sarah Wright

ix xi xiv

1

Part 1  Home and Away 1 2 3

‘A Bath, a Toilet and a Field’: Dreaming and Deprivation in Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher  Vicky Lebeau Lost and Found: Children in Indigenous Australian Cinema  Greg Dolgopolov ‘Away from Girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard  Emma Wilson

15 32 43

Part 2  Disappearance and Removal 4

5

6

The Lost Children of Latvia: Deportees and Postmemory in Dzintra Geka’s The Children of Siberia  Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Klāra Brūveris Among the Nations: Children as Czechs, Germans and Jews in post-1980 Czech Cinematic Representations of the Second World War  Jan Láníček Child, Cinema, Dictatorship: Ignacio Agüero’s One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train  Sarah Wright

63

89 103

Part 3  Education and Serious Games 7 8

Graphic Tales: Class, Violence and South Korean Childhood in Sang-Ho Yeon’s The King of Pigs  Susan Danta Citizenship in the Classroom: The Politicization of Child Subjects in Nicolas Philibert’s To Be and To Have and Laurent Cantet’s The Class  Victoria Flanagan

121

131

viii

Contents

  9 Education, Destiny and National Identity in Raúl Ruiz’s Manuel on the Island of Wonders  Stefan Solomon 10 An Allegorical Childhood: Identity and Coming of Age in Terry Loane’s Mickybo and Me  Jennifer R. Beckett

147 160

Part 4  Performance 11 Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake: Child Labour and Commodity Culture in the Bollywood Adaptation of New Iranian Cinema’s Children of Heaven  Michael Lawrence 12 The Child as Hyphen: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah Dimanche  Hannah Kilduff 13 Beiqing, kuqing and National Sentimentality in Liu Junyi’s Left-behind Children  Zitong Qiu and Maria Elena Indelicato 14 Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness in Albertina Carri’s Barbie Gets Sad Too and Néstor F. and Martín C.’s Easy Money  Jordana Blejmar Bibliography Filmography Index

181 200 215

225 245 257 264

Illustrations Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3

Figure 4.4

Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6 Figures 4.7i   and ii Figures 4.8i   and ii Figure 4.9

Figure 4.10 Figure 4.11 Figure 4.12 Figure 8.1

Shoah. Directed by Claude Lanzmann. 1985 The Children of Siberia (Sibīrijas Bērni). Directed by Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. 2001 Anonymous photographer (assumed perpetrator image). Jewish women and children waiting execution by Arajskomando, Latvia, 1941 Childhood Land of Siberia (Bērnības zeme Sibīrija) (Russian Sequence). Directed by Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. 2013 Remember or Forget (Atcerēties vai aizmirst). Directed by Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. 2006 Childhood Land of Siberia (Bērnības zeme Sibīrija). Directed by Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. 2013 Remember or Forget (Atcerēties vai aizmirst). Directed by Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. 2006 A man recalls his mother’s transformation. Childhood Land of Siberia (Bērnības zeme Sibīrija). Directed by Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. 2013 Interviewed survivors are left standing behind their fences, reminded of who they were and who they are not. Greetings from Siberia (Sveiciens no Sibīrijas). Directed by Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. 2004 The Children of Siberia (Sibīrijas Bērni). Directed by Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. 2001 Balance Sheet of Siberia (Sibīrijas bilance). Directed by Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. 2011 Balance Sheet of Siberia (Sibīrijas bilance). Directed by Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. 2011 The space of the classroom acts to reinforce hierarchical boundaries between teacher and pupils. The Class (Entre les murs). Directed by Laurent Cantet. Sony Pictures Classics. 2008

69 69

71

75 76 77 79

80

81 81 83 84

132

x

Illustrations

Figure 8.2

The intimate and dialogic relationship created between pupil and teacher in Monsieur Lopez’s classroom. To Be and To Have (Être et avoir). Directed by Nicolas Philibert. Maia Films. 2002 Figure 11.1 Generic plimsolls in Children of Heaven (Bacheha-Ye aseman). Directed by Majid Majidi. 1997 Figure 11.2 Adidas trainers in Bumm Bumm Bole. Directed by Priyadarshan. 2010

136 183 184

Contributors Jennifer R. Beckett is Lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is a researcher, writer and social commentator who works in the fields of public communication, social media, cinema and the psychology of trauma. Jordana Blejmar is Research Associate at the University of Liverpool. Originally, a literature graduate from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, she was awarded an MPhil and a PhD (as a Gates Scholar) at the University of Cambridge. She is a member of the steering committee of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (London). She has curated art exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Liverpool and Paris. Her current research focuses on the material culture of childhood, ludic art and playful memories of trauma in Latin America. Klāra Brūveris is a specialist in Latvian film, and has a doctorate on that subject. She has taught at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Australia) as Teaching Fellow, and is currently living in Sydney. She is the founding director of the Baltic Film Festival in Australia. Her contribution to this book was partly funded by the Australian Research Council (as a Research Associate). Susan Danta has over fifteen years of experience in the film and television industry and has received numerous awards for her animated short films, including Heirlooms (2010), Mother Tongue (2003), Driving Home (1999) and Shadowplay (1999). Susan has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (animated self-portrait exhibition); Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Australian Culture Now); The Fourth Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (Seeing There – Diasporic Sites); and the Smithsonian Institute. Susan is currently completing a practice-based doctorate at UNSW Australia. Greg Dolgopolov is Senior Lecturer in Film at UNSW Australia. He is director of the Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival and the Russian Resurrection Film Festival. His research interests include post-Soviet cinema, Soviet film stars, Film Festival Studies and Australian contemporary cinema, especially crime representations. Greg has written on Indigenous cinema for Metro Magazine.

xii

Contributors

Victoria Flanagan is Senior Lecturer in Children’s Literature at Macquarie University. She is the author of Into the Closet: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature and Film (2008) and Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction: The Posthuman Subject (2014). Her research focuses on representations of gender and subjectivity in children’s literature and film, and the role of social media in Young Adult fiction. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is ARC Future Fellow and Professor of Comparative Film at UNSW Australia. She is the overseas Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme Trust Childhood and Nation in World Cinema network. Recent articles on Chinese art history and cinema have been published in Affirmations of the Modern, Asian Studies Review, Theory Culture and Society, and New Formations. Her next monograph, There’s No Place Like Home, based on the Dorothy Project, concerns child migration and film. Maria Elena Indelicato has an MA in Media and Communication Studies (Sapienza University of Rome) and a PhD in Gender and Cultural Studies (University of Sydney). She is currently Lecturer and International ViceDirector of the Huallywood Film Research Center, Department of Media and Communication, Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University. Hannah Kilduff is completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She is interested in representations of intimacy and the senses in French and FrancoMaghrebian films. She has published on mourning and intermediality in contemporary French fiction. Jan Láníček is Lecturer in Jewish History at UNSW Australia. He focuses on Modern European history, the Holocaust and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in modern East-Central Europe. He is the author of Czechs, Slovaks and the Jews, 1938-1948 (2013) and co-editor of Governments-in-Exile and the Jews during the Second World War (2013). Michael Lawrence is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Sabu (2014) and the editor, with Laura McMahon, of Animal Life and the Moving Image (2015) and, with Karen Lury, of The Zoo and Screen Media: Images of Exhibition and Encounter (2016). His articles have appeared in Screen, Adaptation and Journal of British Cinema and Television. He is currently working on a book called The Children and the Nations: Juvenile Actors, Hollywood Cinema and Humanitarian Sentiment, 1940-1960.

Contributors

xiii

Vicky Lebeau has published widely in the field of psychoanalysis and visual culture. Her work is deeply engaged by the power of the image – be it visual or verbal – in public discourse, with a particular focus on contemporary discussion of the welfare state. Her recent publications include ‘Aphanisis: Patricia Williams and Ernest Jones’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (2015), and she is currently working on the issue of class difference and psychoanalysis.  Zitong Qiu is Associate Professor and member of the Huallywood Film Research Center, School of Media and Design, Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University. She has published ‘Research notes towards a definition of Huallywood’ in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2016) and ‘Doing Chinese cultural industries: A reflection on the Blue Book syndrome and remedy paradigm’ in Handbook of Cultural and Creative Industries in China (2016). Stefan Solomon is a postdoctoral researcher in Film at the University of Reading. He is currently analysing the intermedial connections between cinema and the visual arts in the Tropicália movement in Brazil, and considering how the combinations of different media contributed to ideas about cultural spectatorship and participation over several decades. His publications include a co-edited volume, William Faulkner in the Media Ecology (2015), and a forthcoming monograph, William Faulkner in Hollywood: Screenwriting for the Studios (2017). Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. She is a partner in the Childhood and Nation in World Cinema research network. Her publications include Cinema’s Missing Children (2003), Alain Resnais (2006), Atom Egoyan (2009) and Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (2012). Sarah Wright is Reader in Hispanic Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is Principal Investigator of the Childhood and Nation in World Cinema network. She is the author of The  Trickster-Function in the Theatre of Garcia Lorca (2000), Tales of Seduction: The Figure of Don Juan in Spanish Culture (2007, 2012) and The Child in Spanish Cinema (2013) as well as articles on Spanish theatre, cinema and cultural studies and Chilean film. 

Acknowledgements We start by acknowledging the financial support for our research provided by two organizations, the Leverhulme Trust and the Australian Research Council (ARC). The Leverhulme Trust funds our Research Network, Childhood and Nation in World Cinema: Borders and Encounters since 1980. The Trust also awarded the International Fellowship that brought Stephanie Hemelryk Donald to the University of Leeds in 2012 to work on children, migration and film. An ARC Future Fellowship (FT110100007) has not only enabled Professor Hemelryk Donald to work on this project, but also co-funded Zitong Qiu and Klāra Brūveris to participate as associate researchers in 2013–14. We are grateful for the support provided by our universities: Royal Holloway, University of London (Sarah Wright), the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge (Emma Wilson), and the iCinema Research Centre and the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW Australia (Stephanie Hemelryk Donald). We also acknowledge Ningbo Institute of Technology, and Zitong Qiu, our fourth partner. The beginnings of this collection lie in the collegiality of academic friends and the three editors thank Andrew Webber, Lúcia Nagib and Duncan Wheeler for introducing us to each other. The Childhood and Nation in World Cinema network has organized a number of symposia and workshops in the UK, China and Australia, and we would like to thank all the speakers, discussants and participants – not least, the postgraduates who attended the Cambridge workshop in 2015 – for the contribution they have made, directly or indirectly, to this book. The Network and the Fellowship have also undertaken filmmaking projects with school students in China, the UK and Australia. Mark Reid, David Edgar and Christine James at the British Film Institute have made a tremendous contribution to that work, and we particularly thank (and applaud) the BFI project students at Birkenhead Sixth Form College and the students from Fairfield, Sydney who shared their films with us in 2014. We also thank the people who helped make good things happen, either through their generosity or their comradeship, or all that plus hard work: Bill Burgwinkle, Jordana Blejmar, Ian Crook, Sebastian Secker-Walker, Lydia Daniels, Leisha Wickham, Anar Dale; and of course the film-makers, artists and

Acknowledgements

xv

writers who have talked to us: Sophie Mayer, Sophie Hyde, Dennis Del Favero, and Alina Marazzi. We thank our families – especially our own mothers who worked so hard to bring us through our own childhoods, and our own children whose amazing lives and fabulous energy constantly remind us of our good fortune in a difficult world. Finally, we acknowledge the indefatigable Sofia Mason, an organizer sans pareil who as Leverhulme Network Facilitator has redefined the meaning of commitment. We all faced trials and challenges during the months in late 2015 when this volume was coming to fruition. Without Sofia’s work, and latterly Lidia Merás’s editorial care, the book would not exist.

xvi

Introduction: Nation, Film, Child Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Emma Wilson and Sarah Wright

The proposition underlying this book is not only that each of its three organizing concepts – the child, the nation and cinema – can sometimes illuminate unexpected aspects of the other two, but above all that the three taken in conjuncture offer unique insights into the ways in which people experience and negotiate a sense of place, a sense of history and a sense of self in the contemporary, changing and uncertain world. Bringing together ‘nation’ and ‘cinema’ in the idea of ‘national cinema’, understood as a body of films that are supposed to speak for as well as to a nation – in effect giving an identity and a unifying story to ‘the nation’ and so helping to bring the imagined ethnonationalist collectivity into being – has long been a staple of film studies.1 In the decades since 1980, the specifically national rubric has been subject to extensive criticism and reconceptualization, as greater emphasis has been placed on ‘transnational’ and ‘world’ cinema.2 Our return to the question of the nation here is informed by that thinking, which provides the context in which the contributions consider how, within a complex environment of meaning, attraction, identification and spectatorship, ‘the nation’ continues to provoke narratives and narrational practices that warrant examination. The authors ask how the nation is articulated in film and why the question of the nation (or what is sometimes called ‘the state of the nation’) has been important to film-makers over the past thirty or forty years – a period during which the persistence or resurgence of national sentiment as a paradoxical by-product of economic globalization has been a topic of much public debate and political anxiety. It is tempting to state the obvious, and to say that film is such a powerful vehicle of description and poetry that it is not in the least surprising if film-makers use their craft to comment on geopolitical forces that shape contemporary lives, or that they should do so through the extraordinary mixture of realism, fantasy and emotional appeal that film alone allows. Introducing the third term of ‘the child’ both unsettles and catalyses the bipartite relationship between ‘nation’ and ‘cinema’. Whatever the state of

2

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

childhood for actual children, the idea of the child is without doubt a potent symbol for the nation state, for the ethno-national group, and for those who wish either to defend or to abjure national histories and collective memories alike. This book, then, is not a study of national cinemas. Rather, the contributors, who represent a range of national standpoints and perspectives, offer a critical examination of just some of the many films from around the world that have, in recent decades, deployed the figure of the child as a national avatar, or as a metonym for national affiliation, intra-national encounter or communal dissolution. The complex relations between national borders, languages and political cultures inevitably produce conflicted representations of the national subject, all of which require politically informed and culturally nuanced readings of film texts. ‘World cinema’ is here understood less as a commercial label than as a discursive site for the mapping and remapping of local, national and transnational understandings of both child and nation. It provides a space within which to explore themes of belonging, encounter and experience, as well as agency and representation, while the category of childhood is itself in slippage across classes, ethnicities and regions. In this context, the child can act as a pivot between national, local concerns and wider, transnational identifications. Either the child on film provokes claims on the nation or the nation claims the child. Childhood has a peculiar subjective status in most modern societies. Although it is generally acknowledged that a child has rights to certain benefits (health, education, housing and security), the rights of the child to her/his own symbolic value remain vexed. (This is evident from debates in the United States about childhood innocence, futurity and the protection of children.)3 The figure of the child thus oscillates between agency and allegory. Explorations of a child’s agency on screen can push at the boundaries of film theory to create a ‘new cinematic politics of childhood’ in cinematic portrayals of the child’s experience.4 Allegorically, the child can feel pressure from the past (even when that past is imaginary), and yet be called upon to also represent hopes for the future. This makes the child a powerful symbol for nations coming to terms with shifting political or social changes, both as a mode of representation to themselves and as a projection to the wider world. The book focuses on films produced in the period from 1980 to the present. During this time, political and academic debates about the national, the transnational and the global have been reflected in world cinema. Our contributors address films in a variety of national contexts, but they are alert to issues of border crossing, and cross-border encounter, including territories

Introduction: Nation, Film, Child

3

where the idea of the nation came under acute pressure internally and externally in the latter twentieth century. Borders are not necessarily as marked on a map, but nor are invisible or excised borders quickly forgotten. Nation, film, child: the three words that hold the book together indicate ideas and practices on which the modern subject relies for a perspective on place and experience, and for a sense of grounded historicity. Belonging, background, representation and fantasy combine in films that exploit both nation and childhood in their address to the adult spectator. Vicky Lebeau has said of film that it works ‘as if the human mind can lose itself in a technology that comes too close to it, a technology that repeats the mind, as it were’ .5 That is the nub of why film remains potent and particular to national audiences, both as propaganda and as resistance, both as an appeal to belonging and as a reason to step away. The proximity of implied collective identity encroaches on the boundary between an individual spectatorial position and a human mind that understands its social and political context through place. The same might be said of the child. Looking at a child and thinking about childhood, at least in the abstracted context of visual representation, the human mind loses an element of distance, or at least its span of judgement shifts. Emotional impact and identification are (arguably, of course) sharper on screen when there is a child protagonist in play, whether because we take responsibility for the child or because we project our own remembered childishness onto the protagonist. An intensity of recognition occurs, albeit one that is highly mobile depending on the performance and our capacity to relate to a context-specific form of child behaviour. For instance, when watching The Innocents (1961), Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the uncanny quality of the film derives in large part from the instability of the children’s childishness, and this uncertainty occupies the centre of the story. Are they children at all, or are they, as the governess comes to suspect, possessed by adults playing out adult desires? If they are simply naughty children, then how should we judge the increasingly bizarre behaviour of their governess? When the extraordinary Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stephens) whisper to each other on their way into church, are they devilish? Or, are they idiosyncratic versions of the hilarious little girls in the British Channel 4 documentary The Secret Life of 4 Year Olds (2015)6 where one whispers fervently to the other, ‘You know that bully boy, if he troubles you, just bite him’? Although these are entirely different pieces of film-making, neither of which is particularly interested in national identification (although that occurs nonetheless), the two examples are instructive for what

4

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

they can tell us about adult investments in cinematic portrayals of the child with their staggered point of view.7 Our point, however, is that the child on film is the essence of what cannot be normally seen, that drifts to the uncanny, hovering disquietingly between what adults need or desire and what they fear. The notion of the child as an invisible yet potent protagonist in human existence underpins the provocative address of the cinematic child. It is, for example, a reasonable assumption that most adults are shocked when they see images of children hurt in war. ‘Q. And babies? A. And babies.’ The famous antiVietnam War campaign poster featured children running from a napalm fire in South Vietnam. One girl was naked, her youth shockingly exposed as both victim-image and human agent running for her life towards us and away from attacks that ‘we’, the assumed American public in this instance, had caused. As the use of the photograph with such a caption emphasizes ‘A. And babies’, it is supremely shocking and wicked to hurt someone so young and so vulnerable in the pursuit of war, here the ‘hot’ Cold War as it was waged in Vietnam.8 Yet, as the photographer knew and we surely know, children are all too frequently hurt by war, by national upheavals, by any set of circumstances that undermines adult capacity to care for their families and the population as a whole. Why might we be moved or surprised by the obvious and likely impact of our political decisions or apathy? Nonetheless, when the child is pulled to the foreground onscreen, their suffering is marshalled to make us register surprise and shock, and to justify a larger national narrative of victimhood and recrimination. When what is at stake is a disputed narrative – and we think here, in this book, of Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Klāra Brūveris on 1990s and 2000s films on the Latvian deportations in the 1940s or Victoria Flanagan on differing perspectives on education and national belonging in contemporary France – the child’s body challenges arguments or biases represented by the adults through the sheer clarity of their unexpected and yet inevitable presence. The harmonious and disharmonious classrooms of France are small dramas with hints of potentially massive results as children become adults and history enters the present. A disenfranchised child who may be legally French but is ashamed of that status shares a conundrum with children who have been forcibly separated from their identities over the past century of global turmoil. They have in common a confusing and destructive relationship with whatever formations of national belonging apply. Whether in the multiple genocidal tragedies of the European theatre of war of the 1940s, in Chilean and Argentinian attacks on dissident populations, or in Australian and Russian ethnic cleansing practices of

Introduction: Nation, Film, Child

5

the twentieth century, the damaged or lost child appears as it were from behind the skirt of their missing protectors to confront and refute the very idea of a safe modern world where we watch film with impunity. The contributors to this book are interested in films in which some profound national drama is at stake, or in which child protagonists reveal aspects of national life that are either unsettling or unacknowledged in other films. Their discussions necessarily touch on the notion of trauma, but this is not a treatise about trauma on screen. The figure of the child may often embody the idea of the nation under stress, but this situation is not always played out in obviously traumatic scenarios. Rather, the child’s daily experience is likely to describe the nation’s psychical, economic and political failings to itself in ways that a national culture might otherwise ignore. Film-makers do not all share the same impulses or practices. Some films have strong allegiance to specific narratives of the nation, while others seek to question national coherence through the minutiae and clarity of a child’s eye view. Vicky Lebeau’s chapter on Ratcatcher addresses a global question about a child’s right to secure housing, but she does so through the very local story of a disadvantaged Scottish boy whose life chances are severely impeded by the failure of society to create liveable homes for the poor. Her discussion ranges across reports from the House of Commons in the immediate post-war period to a critique of contemporary housing policies and legislation that attacks the poor. In late 2015, the British Government was accused of undermining the educational capacity of poor children in social housing through the bedroom tax. In one example, cited in the social science literature, one finds a sixteenyear-old sharing a room with a two-year-old in order to avoid paying the newly increased rent for a third bedroom in a family home.9 Lebeau’s chapter integrates this kind of discussion with a powerful analysis of a film that she recognizes as possessing the ‘art of listening’ to children and circumstances that have been troped in the British social realist documentary but whose stories are now increasingly visible in fiction film. On the other side of the world, Ivan Sen’s film Toomelah and Catriona MacKenzie’s Satellite Boy do similar work for Indigenous Australian boys. In Toomelah we meet Daniel, a ten-year-old whose housing is also poor and whose prospects are dismal in any upwardly mobile sense of the term. All these are films might have been conceived as social documentaries, but have succeeded as fiction and semi-fiction, both thinking with and on behalf of the child protagonists at their centres. Greg Dolgopolov argues that there is a new wave of Indigenous films where the child achieves a rite of passage in

6

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

a contemporary version of the Australian bush. These latter-day walkabouts rebuke the paranoid ‘lost white child’ anxiety of earlier Australian cinema while finding a place for non-normative child life choices and child risk-taking on screen. The lost child trope is not new to those familiar with Australian arts and film, but Dolgopolov argues that films which reclaim categories both of being lost but also of knowing the way afford symbolic vitality to the Indigenous child’s claim on the national imagination and to the voices of Indigenous film-makers in a challenging landscape. Dolgopolov suggests that onscreen Indigenous children have claimed cinematic space in ways that refuse to comply with invisibility or acquiescence. The historical undercurrent to his chapter is the history of Indigenous child removals in the interests of a hegemonic white colonial state. These films tell local stories, but their attention to the visibility of Indigenous childhoods is crucial for the cinematic recuperation of the children and grandchildren of the Stolen Generations.10 The book starts, then, with two chapters premised on historical knowledge necessary to the reading of the cinematic child in a national conversation. This approach is common to many chapters that follow, albeit in varying degrees. We identify matrices of sociality, risk, and intimacy (Home and Away), of the push and pull of agency in historical narrative (Disappearance and Removal), of institutional confinement and space to play (Education and Serious Games), and of capitalist expectations and child labour, including that of the actor her/ himself (Performance). Intertextual encounters between these sections should, we hope, allow the reader to make further comparative observations. We also have collected contributions with a commitment to an interdisciplinary approach. Lebeau works through psychoanalysis to understand film. Dolgopolov works on festival culture in Indigenous Australia – and is most concerned with the narratives derived by Indigenous audiences from films made by Indigenous artists. Jan Láníček is an historian. For him film is a document, in which the filmmaker and their audience narrate history, but in so doing betray the narrational lacunae of their own period. He is interested here in how wartime history is remade in Czech film and the extent to which this betrays the historical memory of other sub-national groups, specifically Czech Jews. Láníček focuses on screen dramas that attempt an account of 1940s child removal by German agencies for social engineering, eugenic and genocidal purposes. In these films, the very DNA of the Czech national body is at stake. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Klāra Brūveris also investigate instances of disappearance, deportation, separation and murder in wartime Europe, where the story of childhood is synonymous

Introduction: Nation, Film, Child

7

with narratives of national mourning and shame. They engage with a film-maker who reiterates Latvian wartime sufferings through annual television films with a primary emphasis on child disappearance. This is the scaffolding for a version of national identity premised on remembered attacks on the national body. That body is a collective organism, the lost Latvian children becoming a proxy for a lost national childhood, and from that is extrapolated a lost nation. The paradox is that this story of loss nevertheless underpins Latvian identity even today paradigmatically through these films. Here again, the figure of the child is deliberately invested with a national DNA to the exclusion of any other ethnic legitimacy. The temporal and spatial scaling of the suffering of children to fit national pathologies continues in an essay on South Korea. Susan Danta’s art practice as an animator draws on her family’s history of escape from North to South Korea. As she argues here, the South has its own negative pathology that affects children quite directly. The high suicide rate among school-age children is attributed to what is termed as the national characteristic of mourning (han), but Danta explains how fellow animator Sang-Ho Yeon’s nightmarish vision of bullying in a school playground amounts to a refusal to accept the concept of immutable national characteristics. Yeon offers instead an exposé of historical contingency and response. Jordana Blejmar describes the use of toys, specifically Barbie and associated dolls, in subversive films from Argentina. Once more, we find cinema concerned with the animation of national pathologies. Stories of disappearance, exclusion and loss – of children and of adults – are explored in apparently child-friendly aesthetic forms. Blejmar argues that the use of dolls expresses the central significance of childhood pain in national self-narrativization. It is not the actual filmed body of the child that takes on the representative weight of a nation’s shame, guilt or anger, but the child is there nonetheless. She is embodied through the toy-object created by an adult economy of consumer desire and, here, a cinematic surrogate for the child’s body and the child’s vulnerability to a state’s violent corruption. Jennifer Beckett’s discussion of friendship on the streets of Belfast during the Troubles, produces a compelling vision of the child’s metonymic relation to a disturbed and violent environment. Micky Bo and Me (2005) is a coming-of-age story told through voice-over of the main protagonist. The film describes the loss of childish freedom in exchange for integration and safe alliance with the group. As Beckett notes, a coming-of-age film is generally organized around a

8

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

summer of late adolescence, or a significant traumatic event, but here, in the context of continuing upheaval, it is organized through the longer timeframe of the Troubles (the period of civil strife in Northern Ireland that lasted from 1968 until 1998). Beckett’s observation allows us to suggest that many of the films and arguments contained in this book are similarly concerned with the temporal relationship between child and film, nation and child, agency and compliance. Questions such as who narrates the film, who acts in it, whose photographs are deployed and with what background, and whose survival counts in the end, are afforded by the time and space which informs each film under discussion. The spatialized marginality of the child is bound then by specific formations of time. Some of these formations indicate proximity to, or even a perverse surrogacy of, the national myth of origin and bloodline; others indicate resistance or exclusion. Questions about children’s agency articulated from the margins emerge in the chapters by Sarah Wright and by Emma Wilson. Wright considers how her Chilean child protagonists refashion everyday materials to recreate a makeshift spool of film, which offers a site of resistance to the political landscape of disappearance and uncertainty which surrounds them while at the same time situating this little-known pedagogical film within a wider politics of film history and film theory. Wilson, meanwhile looks at a fairy-tale adaptation, Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard which, while moving from national history to fantasy, explores a young girl’s departure from her child-self in a bid to achieve agency and subjectivity. This feminist retelling opens up questions about a young girl’s choices and her desires within patriarchy, confronting and redrawing images of childhood vulnerability. Hannah Kilduff ’s subtle reading of Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah Dimanche, a film also made in the context of the French film industry, but telling the story of an Algerian immigrant family reunited in France, is multivalent in its exploration of child agency embodied here in the foregrounded work of the child actors. Benguigui’s work with these children, and the hesitations and lack of artifice in their onscreen presence, are seen to open to a real experience, while within the diegesis the children are also used to think through an immigrant future and integration in France. As Kilduff writes, with words that resonate with so many chapters in the book: ‘The figure of the child negotiates between the universal and the specific, the historical and the personal and the past and the present.’ Michael Lawrence explores the relationship between the national and the transnational in a Bollywood remake of an Iranian film, observing the changes made in the process in order to trace how far we can speak of the child’s universality, and how far the child is ‘embedded within the material particularities

Introduction: Nation, Film, Child

9

of time and place’. At the same time, Lawrence expands on the question of child labour as a situated opportunity that cannot but reveal the indices of privilege. His example – of a film that crosses from Iran to Bollywood – sidesteps the easy distinction between the West and the Other, a comparison that has outlived its usefulness in an era of second and third generation post-war migration when the identity and belonging of national bodies is again contested. That is underlined by the chapter on left-behind children in China by Zitong Qiu and Maria Elena Indelicato. ‘Left-behind’ refers to rural children whose parents are domestic migrants to major cities looking for work. The treatment of such children on film is quite rare, but a film that has been made is discussed here in the context of a national performative aesthetic of melodrama. The legibility of that aesthetic depends on qualities of mourning and sentimentality that are very familiar to the Chinese filmgoer. The melodramatic mode might also open up questions of the role of rural suffering in the larger and longer engagement of city and countryside in Chinese literature and arts. If the Algerian-French children in Kilduff ’s chapter redraw forms of belonging in contemporary France and Qiu and Indelicato’s left-behind children show who may only belong through a specific aesthetic, Stefan Solomon turns his attention to Raúl Ruiz’s articulation of childhood as moving fluidly between an adopted home, Portugal, and the traces of a homeland, Chile, returned to after a period of exile. The cinema of childhood becomes a way to resist the paralysing effects of a conservative education. Blejmar, already discussed for her contribution to notions of resistance and surrogacy, recasts the notion of child presence on screen through a discussion of synthetic performance in Argentinian narratives of dissent. Childhood happens at home, in playgrounds, in classrooms or in the fantasy worlds of a child’s ambition. Their micro-borders borders of imagination and experience intersect with the great narratives of political borders and conflict. Film-makers engage with childhood so that these encounters are actualized, seen and known. Fantasy and desire are thus tied into the worlds of children through the imaginaries that they enable, even as they compete with the intersecting and demanding worlds of adults and their national sensibilities and psychoses. Across all the geographically and stylistically diverse films discussed in this book, and through the range of particular experiences they imagine and re-present, we hope to draw attention to the specificity and diversity of individual children’s lives, to vulnerability and to resilience, within and between nations, at home, at the border, in transition, in new encounters.

10

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Notes 1 See, for example, Andrew Higson, ‘The Concept of National Cinema’, in Film Studies: The Essential Resource, ed. Peter Wall, Andrew Hickman and Peter Bennett (London: Routledge, 2006). (First published in Screen 30, no. 4 [1989].) 2 See, for example, Sheldon Lu, ‘Historical Introduction: Chinese Cinemas (1896–1996) and Transnational Film Studies’, in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Lu (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 1–31, http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/books/lu-transintro.pdf (accessed 25 January 2016); Lúcia Nagib, ‘Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema’, in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 30–7; Lúcia Nagib, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (London: Continuum, 2011); Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, Cinema and Nation (London: Routledge, 2000); Mette Hjort, Small Nation, Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Public Worlds Series, 2005). 3 Henry Jenkins, The Children’s Culture Reader (New York: NYU Press, 1998); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 4 Emma Wilson, ‘Children, Emotion and Viewing in Contemporary European Cinema’, Screen 46, no. 3 (2005): 332. 5 Vicky Lebeau, Childhood and Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2008), 47. 6 Channel 4 is a British television and film producer and broadcaster. 7 David Martin-Jones, Deleuze and World Cinemas (Continuum: London, 2011). 8 The poster depicts a horrifying image of dead children in rural Vietnam after an American airstrike. Artists Poster Committee (Frazier Dougherty, Jon Hendricks, Irving Petlin), Q: And Babies? 1970: Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles. Photo: Ron L. Haeberle. 9 The editors found an example with worrying ease:  By the rules, my daughter is not 16 years old, and she can share one room with the little one [aged 2]. Again, it is not possible, because the little one is shouting in the night, crying in the day, and there is a big gap between them, an ages gap. … They cannot share one room. It is not possible for them, because my daughter studies very hard, and the little one is a baby. They live by themselves in rooms now, but I have to pay because by law, I have a spare room. (#24, Female, 36) Quoted in S. Moffat et al., ‘A Qualitative Study of the Impact of the UK “Bedroom Tax”’, Journal of Public Health (Advance Access 15 March 2015): 1–9, 6.

Introduction: Nation, Film, Child

11

10 ‘Stolen Generations’ refers to Indigenous children removed from their families between 1905 and 1969 for training in institutions. The tragic impact of removal, abuse and subsequent exclusion from their communities has become a major theme in recent Australian film and literature. See the Bringing Them Home report (1997), available online at https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/bringingthem-home-report-1997 (accessed January 2016).

12

Part One

Home and Away

14

1

‘A Bath, a Toilet and a Field’: Dreaming and Deprivation in Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher Vicky Lebeau

3. States Parties, in accordance with national conditions and within their means, shall take appropriate measures to assist parents and others responsible for the child to implement this right and shall in case of need provide material assistance and support programmes, particularly with regard to nutrition, clothing and housing. Article 27, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child So often supposed to be a privileged object of fellow feeling, the figure of the child has a privileged place in the discussion of global cinema (a notoriously elusive object) post-1990. The child’s ‘inherent right to life’, to survival and development, is one of the fundamental tenets of contemporary international society. Unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20  November 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child became international law less than one year later, making history as the most widely and quickly ratified treaty on human rights in the world. (As of January 2015, only the United States and South Sudan had failed to ratify the Convention.)1 In 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted two additional Optional Protocols on the involvement of children in armed conflict and the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. More recently, on 14 April 2014, a third Optional Protocol was adopted to allow children in those countries that ratify the Convention to bring complaints to the Committee on the Rights of the Child.2 Formally, then, the rights of the child appear to be uncontentious, a rare example of global consensus. But, as Karin Landgren, then chief of Child Protection for UNICEF, observed in 2005, many states ratifying the Convention entered reservations, either to particular articles or to the Convention as a

16

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

whole, that were incompatible with its overall aims and objectives.3 At the end of 2005, for example, the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that around 300,000 child soldiers were involved worldwide in some thirty conflicts4; while impossible to quantify, it is estimated that tens of millions of children across the world are living on the streets (with up to 10 per cent of those children abandoned by, or fleeing from, their own families).5 In June 2014, the suspicion that there may be the remains of 796 babies in a septic tank in Tuam, County Galway, prompted John Dalhuisen, Europe and Central Asia programme director of Amnesty International, to call on the Irish Government for a thorough investigation ‘into how these children died and if ill treatment, neglect or other human rights abuses factored into their death’. (As Colm O’Gorman, executive director, Amnesty International Ireland, pointed out, the discovery had to be explored in relation to ongoing allegations of ill treatment of unmarried women and children in Irish institutions, often operated by the Catholic Church.)6 In Britain, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children calculates that, on average, one child every week is killed at the hands of another person in England and Wales; in 67 per cent of cases, a parent is the principal suspect.7

‘Well-built houses for all’ There is no need for the right hon. Gentleman to impress upon me the need for building houses. I have experienced, in my own personal home life, the consequences of having to live in over-crowded houses as a direct consequence of neglect by Governments of the day. Aneurin Bevan, 17 October 1945 There can be few British people unable to recognize what is or is not a council estate.8 Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher is a film for our times. Set in the 1970s, released in the late 1990s, the film is at once a product of, and reflection on, contemporary British histories of childhood and class. Premiered at Cannes in April 1999, Ratcatcher helped to establish Ramsay’s reputation as, variously, a director of ‘new Scottish cinema’, a proponent of the ‘European art film’ and ‘one of the finest new talents in world cinema’. In other words, Ramsay was seen as a film-maker with a generative capacity to bring the national and local – Glasgow, the tenement, the bin strike: the stuff of British social realism in film and literature  – into

‘A Bath, a Toilet and a Field’

17

contact with themes, or forms, deemed more international – childhood, death, dreams, memory (the play with the surreal that turns Ratcatcher into such an extraordinary object on screen).9 To watch Ratcatcher at the time of writing – more than five years into the ‘austerity experiment’ initiated by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition in 2010 and four months into the first majority Conservative Government for eighteen years – is to watch a film finding its time.10 Or, to put the point a different way, it is to discover an object that can be used to reflect on the complex relations between housing and class, childhood and the social state, in contemporary Britain. Beginning with the death of a child, Ratcatcher takes on the tragedy of lives blighted, even destroyed, by homes and environments – young boys chase rats among the black plastic bags piled around the tenements, the mounting effects of a strike by the bin men; a young girl munches a jam sandwich perched on a pile of rubbish; the communal toilets become a space for teenage boys to explore and exploit a young woman’s lonely sexuality. In particular, the canal – a type of perverse pastoral – becomes the site of play and death, a threat to the community, especially to the children, living around it. Horribly, if playfully, shrouded by a net curtain in Ratcatcher’s opening sequence, Ryan drowns in the canal shortly afterwards in the course of a tussle with James Gillespie (that James, looking back, sees that Ryan is no longer to be seen in the water is how Ratcatcher secures James’s role, if not his fault, in Ryan’s death). Kenny, a boy who lives for his menagerie of small animals, is rescued, after falling to the canal, by James’s Da, a local hero for the remainder of the film. That both Kenny and Da subsequently develop a red and itchy rash (associated with Weil’s disease) across their faces and necks underlines the threat: children become ill, even die, in this environment, and adults can only sometimes save them. Forged through the figure of the child, Ratcatcher is also grounded in the unique ‘social experiment’ that is (or was) British council housing. As Alison Ravetz has argued, ‘council housing was a significant part of twentieth-century working-class history’ in Britain. Its design, its allocation and its management – above all, now, its shortage – frame the everyday lives and cultures of workingclass men, women and children in ways that remain to be understood.11 In particular, it is the peculiarly working-class experience of slum clearance and relocation to housing estates on the outskirts of major cities and towns across the country that helps to structure Ratcatcher’s uses of the child.12 If, as Andrew O’Hagan suggests, Ratcatcher is ‘the first [film] to put that amazing bit of life on

18

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

screen’, it does so via a child’s (James Gillespie’s) question and his longing: ‘Ur we getting that big hoose wae a bath, a toilet and a field?’13 From the beginning to the end of Ratcatcher, the house from the council is a fragile promise. James’s question, his longing for the house that might become home to his family – Ma, Da and his two sisters, Ellen and Anne-Marie, all living in a tiny walk-up tenement – is, I want to suggest, a type of royal road to Ratcatcher’s reimagining of the genre of social realism and its engagement with the material and symbolic significance of post-war British housing policy. ‘I very consciously avoided straight social realism,’ Ramsay insists in interview with Lizzie Francke in 1999, marshalling the child, the ‘childlike’ and the ‘childish’ (her terms) as privileged means to intervene in the traditions of social realism in British cinema.14 At stake is not, or not only, the child’s point of view but the child as a figure on which the forces of environment and public policy, dream and cinema, converge in the form of an insistent question: ‘Ur we getting that big hoose wae a bath, a toilet and a field?’ ‘Is it about our new hoose that we’re getting?’ ‘Are we still getting the new hoose?’ Via that passion and pathos, Ratcatcher engages the structures of feeling, as well as the material realities, belonging to that ‘amazing bit of life’: the history of slum living, slum clearance and the dream, at once national and intimate, of a ‘home’. ‘A bath, a toilet and a field’: James’s roll call of amenities contains a condensed history of post-war British housing policy, its explicit commitments to a national housing programme as ‘essential, if not to the life, at any rate to the good life, of the community’ – or, in the words of Aneurin Bevan, the minister for health in the new Labour government of 1945, to the ‘full life’.15 Almost one in three of Britain’s twelve and a half million houses had been damaged during the Second World War, with 208,000 of those completely destroyed. This was a level of destruction that, combined with the increase in marriages and births in the immediate post-war years, would turn housing into a national ‘emergency’ – the word used by Bevan in the course of a heated Commons debate on the housing shortage on 17 October 1945.16 Issued by the Labour Party in 1945, Ellen Wilkinson’s Plan for Peace gave powerful voice to a conviction that there must be ‘a better way’ to protect the nation  – its people, its futures – not, or not only, against the threat of war between nations but against the economic chaos, and the national divisiveness, of ‘Big Business’: ‘In the modern world full employment, industrial efficiency, social security and well-built houses for all can only be achieved if there is a plan.’17 ‘Well-built houses for all’ remained a national political aspiration for some thirty years, albeit one shadowed by chronic overcrowding in derelict

‘A Bath, a Toilet and a Field’

19

properties as well as by homelessness and political reservations (primarily from the Conservative Party) concerning the role of the state. In the wake of Bevan’s exemplary insistence on the need for the planning of housing – and, notably, on the quality and social mix of those houses: in 1948, Bevan removed the pre-war legislation that provided council housing only for ‘the working classes’ – the majority of local authority properties were built between 1945 and 1980 (with cross-party commitments on the need to increase council housing stock in response to Britain’s post-war housing needs).18 It is a measure of how far the political terrain has shifted that this ideal (and, indeed, achievement) of state planning of housing  – at the heart of what, in 2013, Ken Loach captured as the Spirit of ’45, its vision for a new democratic Britain – can now have the ring of nostalgic utopianism. The election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government in 1979 paved the way for a massive reconfiguration of the housing landscape in Britain. In particular, the Housing Act 1980 introduced the popular statutory right for council tenants to buy their homes at significant discounts from local authorities and, less visibly but more destructively, slashed budgets for the repair and building of council housing. ‘The privatization of public housing in the United Kingdom’, as Stuart Hodkinson, Paul Watt and Gerry Mooney have pointed out, ‘is arguably one of the most iconic and significant applications of neo-liberal policy worldwide and has been central to the transformation of UK society over the past three decades.’19 In 1981, for example, around 31 per cent of British households were living in council housing, with the percentage of children over-represented compared to households overall.20 By 2013, that figure had fallen to 17 per cent, with the vast majority of those households no longer renting directly from local authorities but from housing associations.21 Thus, combined with an overall shortfall in house building and an expanding, but expensive, private-rented sector, access to council housing has been drastically reduced since 1980, with predictable consequences. With a severe shortage of affordable homes and market rents outstripping earnings, homelessness, both hidden and visible, has been rising across Britain, while the conditions of the private housing market, both rented and mortgaged, can be best described as frenzied in London and the south east. In November 2014, the housing charity Shelter announced that more than 90,000 children in England, Scotland and Wales were without a permanent home.22 In July 2015, a revised All-Party Parliamentary Group for Housing and Planning was established to tackle the critical challenge of housing policy – or,

20

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

more bluntly, the ‘national emergency’ in housing. (This is the language not only of housing and homelessness campaigners but of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.)23 As Lord Morris of Handsworth had put the point two years before, on 6 June 2013, in the course of a House of Lords debate on the effects of the so-called ‘bedroom tax’: ‘The housing crisis is not coming – it is here; it has arrived – and because of the bedroom tax there is no room to which Cathy can come home.’24 (The reference here is to Ken Loach’s now classic protest against homelessness in the television drama Cathy Come Home – see below.) Embedded in these figures are the changing shapes of working-class childhoods in Britain and the effects of a neo-liberal misrecognition of the postwar commitment to ‘well-built houses for all’ as a symptom of dependence on the social state.25 With its retrospective reflection on the lived experience of slums and slum clearance in the 1970s, Ratcatcher spans a critical period in the history of British housing policy and its radical experiments with politics, culture and class.26 While Ramsay has indicated that she wanted to make Ratcatcher ‘seem timeless’, the squalor of the dustmen’s strike – notably, the use of the army to clear the rubbish from the tenements recalls events in Glasgow in June 1975 – comes to stand for the discontents of a decade now cast as a turning point in the post-war settlement on the development of the social state.27 ‘I looked at some photographs from that time,’ Ramsay recalls in interview, ‘and they were quite surreal – kids pulling things from the rubbish, dressing up, finding old dolls, killing rats. … People were really poor (the pictures sometimes look mediaeval) and people still are.’28 Looking back from the very end of the twentieth century to the 1970s, Ramsay appears to be struck both by the historical difference of poverty – the 1970s ‘look’ medieval – and its obvious contemporary relevance. People are still poor and where they live is a privileged means to understanding that fact. With its delicate reconstruction of the tenements from which families are being slowly decanted to new high-rise blocks and housing estates, Ratcatcher presents itself as a document of the lived experience of slum living and slum clearance: ‘Ur we getting that big hoose wae a bath, a toilet and a field?’ A child’s question, a child’s perspective, but what James’s words evoke is the fact that, if the promise of a house from the council is fragile, it is not only because there is a shortage of housing – the material, and resistant, dimension of ‘not enough’ – but because the allocation of housing is dependent on the unpredictable judgement of the local authority housing officers (‘the new hoose people’, to borrow James’s phrase). It is their inspection of the Gillespie family flat that sparks both James’s

‘A Bath, a Toilet and a Field’

21

question and his father’s furious, if impotent, rebuke: ‘Well if we don’t, it’s your fucking fault; now get out of my sight.’ At work in the pain of this scene is an entire history of the management of council housing allocation across the UK that has entailed the surveillance of working-class families and homes and their subjection to judgement by the local authority empowered to allocate, or to withhold, access to the ‘new hoose’. In letting the council officers into the Gillespie’s flat, and by revealing its cramped and chaotic state to the council officers, James exposes his family to that power. (Ravetz describes the inequitable process of allocation as a ‘laborious and lethargic maze’ that involved ‘grading’ prospective tenants for the new estates. Little wonder then, that so many council tenants opted for the ‘Right to Buy’, given the privacy and freedom that were supposed to come with it.)29 ‘How much of the stubborn rigidity of the British class system’, wonders Lynsey Hanley in Estates: An Intimate History, first published in 2007, ‘is down to the fact that class is built into the physical landscape of the country. … We are divided not only by income and occupation, but by the types of homes in which we live.’30 In this context, part of the interest of Ratcatcher derives from its attempt to bring the very material dimensions of James’s environment – bluntly, the effects of poverty, inequality and class difference – to bear on the domains of a child’s wishes, his dreams. And then to bring both environment and dream into transformative contact with the arts of social realism on screen, the capacity of those arts to intervene in what Andrew Cooper and Julian Lousada have described as the ‘changing nature of the welfare state project in Britain’.31 It’s a remarkable, and overdetermined, wager. ‘Poetry from the rubbish tip’ is how one reviewer described the film on its first release, drawing Ratcatcher towards its precedents in both the task of ‘making poetry where no poet has gone before’ (to borrow John Grierson’s phrase) and the diverse project of social realism – a project committed to the ordinary, even the mercilessly prosaic, as much as to the provocative and the scandalous.32 On this view, Ratcatcher belongs to a tradition of British social realism that, in its ongoing quest to screen the reality of working-class lives and worlds, has brought the social histories of working-class children right to the fore. Including, of course, the environments used by those children: houses, flats, streets, schools, cafés, garages, parks, canals. The work of, among others, Ken Loach, Barney Platts-Mills, Bill Forsyth, Shane Meadows and Andrea Arnold provides an invaluable archive of the intimate but collective experience of working-class homes and housing, or the lack of it, since the 1960s. Loach’s now legendary Cathy Come Home, first screened by the BBC

22

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

on 16 November 1966, may be the best-known example of British documentary fiction as both a type of revelation of the ‘state of the nation’ – in this instance, the conditions of housing and homelessness – and a force to be reckoned with in national political debate. As John Hill summarizes, ‘Descriptive montage, composed of documentary-like shots of people and places’ – more specifically, people in places such as tenement blocks and homeless hostels – is vital to the reality-effect achieved by Cathy Come Home. And that effect is vital, in turn, to the drama’s capacity to generate public protest.33 In more oblique mode, PlattsMills’s Bronco Bullfrog (1969) documents the transitional flux of the East End of London at the very end of the 1960s. It is a stunning visual record of workingclass housing in the Victorian terraces and post-war ‘prefabs’, in the new local authority high-rise flats (notably, Green Point in Stratford) and the quasi-pastoral council estates in Newhaven. In one striking scene, the film showcases, albeit inadvertently, a version of the ‘working kitchen house’ envisioned with such care in the 1949 Housing Manual published by the Ministry of Health.34 Similarly, Meadows’s films, from A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) to This is England (2006), provide an achingly lyrical testament to housing estates in the Midlands  – described by Martin Fradley as that ‘deeply and perennially unfashionable’ region of England.35 Filmed on the Mardyke Estate in Havering, East London, Arnold’s Fish Tank captures the notoriety of a so-called ‘problem estate’ before its demolition and redevelopment. (Fish Tank is also that rare thing, a film that puts the life of an adolescent girl at the centre of its story.)36 Distinguished by its use of the moving image to forge an aesthetic of the authentic and the instant, the local and the collaborative, this is a tradition that invokes the pain, the defiance and the resistance of the child as a means of rendering the failure of a liberal consensus on the rights of the child to protection against the violence of poverty, exploitation and abuse. Kes, Del and Irene (Bronco Bullfrog), Trevor (Made in Britain), Shaun (This is England) and Mia (Fish Tank) all affirm the rights of the child to a life that includes more than the bare fact of being alive. Their struggle for a ‘life’, the quest to experience whatever it is that makes the difference between living and being alive, fuels this British tradition of cinema. Certainly, putting the camera on the side of the child and his environment, Ratcatcher makes use of cinema as a means to archive and to represent – and, by extension, to argue and to persuade. In particular, the very artful use of television footage – the news coverage of the dustmen’s strike and the archive images of Tom Jones’ performance of ‘What’s New Pussycat?’ – is essential to the film’s own performance of the everyday and its claims to represent the reality of working-class experience.

‘A Bath, a Toilet and a Field’

23

At its best, this is cinema in the mode of sociology identified by Les Back as an ‘art of listening’, an embrace of ‘interpretation without legislation’.37 That Ratcatcher puts the child and the dream at the heart of its work of historical and sociological understanding is decisive to its intervention in social realism and a new acknowledgement across Britain of the need to confront, and reimagine, the neo-liberal formations of the social state.38 Nowhere is that intervention more pressing, if elusive, than in the visionary scene that mediates the film’s engagement with both national housing policy and the arts of social realism: the house and the field that James discovers when he takes his solitary bus ride to the outskirts of Glasgow. An estate of new houses, near-built, is left open to the curiosity – the playing and dreaming – of a boy for whom taps on a bath, an inside toilet, and a room with a view are a compelling novelty: the adventure of tracing whitewashed walls, lying in an empty bath, urinating into an unplumbed toilet. The house and the field that, as Stuart Aitken has suggested, become the ‘energy behind James’s dreams’.39 And, I would add, the energy behind both James’s questions and the bizarre sequence that brings Ratcatcher to its conclusion. The question of whether James is alive or dead at the end of the film is, as Ramsay insists in interview, ‘open to interpretation’. ‘When I first wrote the film’, she continues, ‘I didn’t want to make it black and white – does he live or die?’40 The final shot of James, suspended in the murk beneath the waters of the canal, belongs to Ramsay’s reimagining of what she describes as ‘straight social realism’.41 The shot concludes a sequence that begins with James slipping into the canal – whether deliberately or not is impossible to tell, given the distance from which the scene is shot. Disappearing beneath the surface of the water, suspended in the murk that becomes a black screen, James may well be dying; he may be dreaming; or he may be playing with Ryan’s death (which has been mimed at key moments throughout the film). But a sudden cut returns us to the image that has run counter to the threat of the canal throughout Ratcatcher: up close, stalks of wheat, rustling gently, close enough to touch; in the distance, a stripe of blue sky. The film is back in the scene that belongs to James. Now, on the horizon, a strange procession comes into view: led by Da, James’s family is carrying their possessions – a sofa, a chair, a doll’s house, a mirror – across the field, towards the edge of the frame. Drawing back, the camera reveals that we are now looking from inside the kitchen window of the new house that had so captivated James – before moving in close, again, first to Anne-Marie, carrying a mirror like a tray, gazing into her reflection, and then, finally, to James himself. He is stopping, putting down his chair, to look into the camera

24

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

with an inscrutable expression that, suddenly, rarely – so rarely for this film – breaks into a smile.42 Ratcatcher does not stop there. We stay with James’s smile until the camera cuts back to the black screen that becomes, once again, murk. As the credits begin to appear, we are returned to the image of James, suspended beneath the waters of the canal. What have we been looking at? Are we watching James’s suicide, and his dying hallucination of the ‘new hoose’? Or is this a dream?43 Is that smiling James a revenant, rejoicing in his family’s transfer from tenement to council house? Has he sacrificed himself to secure the new house for his family?44 Or in penance for Ryan’s death?45 The film won’t tell. Instead, it demands wondering, interpretation, using whatever it is that has been put before us. On one critical view, for example, Ratcatcher’s final sequence tends to divide audiences – at least in so far as we feel the need to decide whether James is alive or dead, playing or dreaming (and, in so doing, to risk imposing on it a coherence that the film does not possess). ‘As James sinks to his death,’ writes Aitken towards the end of his fascinating discussion of the film’s poetics of landscape and childhood, ‘we witness his final fantasy.’46 On David Trotter’s reading, ‘the film understands James’s death as the realization of his life’ – the evidence of a child’s terrible disillusionment, his final failure to create the type of sustaining illusion vital to being alive (or surviving life).47 Against this, Ratcatcher also enables us to dwell in what Tina Kendall has described as ‘the liminal space between life and death’: a space created both by interpretive hesitation and by the very stillness of the image that brings the film to its conclusion. On Kendall’s interpretation, that ending supports, in turn, a focus on the medium of cinema, its existence between photography and film, between stillness and movement: the ‘very essence of cinema’, as she points out (and, as various critics have discussed, of Ramsay’s own aesthetics).48 But what remains in question is the significance of the articulation between Ramsay’s aesthetic, its grounding in the image of a child between life and death, and the question insisting through that final scene. ‘Does he live or die?’ ‘Ur we getting that big hoose wae a bath, a toilet and a field?’ Forcing one question up against the other, it is here, precisely, that Ratcatcher gives image to its attempt to bring the very material dimensions of James’s environment to bear on the domains of dream and fantasy. The space between life and death that opens up at the end of the film is also a space between reality and fantasy, between wish

‘A Bath, a Toilet and a Field’

25

and hallucination. That space is vital to the film’s distinctive intervention into the traditions of social realism and their uses of the child on screen. Part of what Ramsay is doing is bringing those traditions into contact with the resources of what she has described as ‘childish fantasy’, and its potential to create a ‘breathing space in a relentless environment’.49 A familiar investment in the child, certainly, but Ratcatcher renews that investment by insisting on its own (‘childish’?) rights to keep that question in play: ‘Does he live or die?’ It’s an unanswerable question – even, perhaps, a question that should not be asked – if we want to stay with whatever it is that is being devolved onto the figure of the child through Ratcatcher via its engagement with that ‘straight’ form of social realism. Ramsay may well be reducing the complexity of that tradition, but by insisting on the difference of Ratcatcher – its avoidance of the ‘black and white: does he live or die?’ – she stakes a claim to the film’s capacity to do social realism otherwise and, by extension, to the potential of social realism to take on that role of creating a space to breathe – to play, to feel, to think, to live. Among other things, there is an invitation here to be ‘open to interpretation’ – openness that may well depend on noticing something other than the obvious question: is James dead or alive? What matters – what is in play – is the film’s determination to bring that question to bear on a child’s wishing for a home with a bathroom and a garden: in other words, his encounter with the worlds of social policy and social planning. Thus, and crucially, Ratcatcher creates a continuum between the two. Dreaming and dying belong to a child’s lived experience of home and housing, from the play with the canal and the trip to the unfinished estate to the encounter with the ‘new hoose people’, representatives of the welfare state. They are part of an everyday world as well as one of the means by which this film engages its audience in the work of playing with that world: looking, feeling, thinking, interpreting, not knowing. In other words, however paradoxical or even inchoate it may be, there is a generative relation in Ratcatcher between the figure of the child and the welfare project: from Bevan’s utopia of mixed communities to the disinvested worlds of the single-class estates. (‘If Hogarth were here now,’ as Hanley muses, ‘he would paint the capital’s grimmest council estates, not its sewagy, gin-soaked back streets.’)50 There is a desperate irony in the fact that Ramsay’s screenplay identifies Easterhouse, five miles from the centre of Glasgow, as the site of James’s playing with the empty house. By the mid-1980s, Easterhouse had been identified as a ‘problem estate’ – indeed, possibly ‘the most extreme case’, according to Ravetz – in which social and physical isolation (let’s recall that long

26

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

bus ride) combines with ‘entrenched material poverty’ to wreck lives and blight futures.51 Dream turned nightmare, this is the crisis of planned national housing policy, its challenge to the ‘modern welfare imagination’.52 Putting the work of a child’s playing, his dreaming and dying, at the heart of its reconstruction of a moment in working-class experience of the slums and slum clearance, Ratcatcher contains a challenge that goes far beyond the arts of social realism on screen. At stake, I think, is a challenge to explore the postwar consensus on the social state, its commitments to the welfare project, as both a material and psychic settlement: a means to redistribute wealth and to restructure inequality, certainly, but also a ‘socially sanctioned settlement for the management of our knowledge of social suffering and conflict’.53 That his wish becomes a matter of life or death for James is part of Ratcatcher’s wager, its forceful juxtaposition of the mundane and the visionary, the home and the dream, the living and dying of working-class children. In the spaces between dream and deprivation, fantasy and suicide, that open up in that final sequence, the film may well be testing its own capacity to bring the material and the psychical together in the form of an address to its audience. In the image of the child stalled, it is also testing ours.

Notes 1 ‘UN Lauds Somalia as Country Ratifies Landmark Children’s Rights Treaty’, UN News Centre, 20 January 2015, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story. asp?NewsID=49845#.VgzqCr RViko (accessed 1 October 2015). 2 Available online: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/CRC/Pages/CRCIndex.aspx (accessed 9 October 2015). 3 Karin Landgren, ‘The Protective Environment: Development Support for Child Protection’, Human Rights Quarterly 27, no. 1 (February 2005): 216. 4 Eben Kaplan, ‘Child Soldiers Around the World’, Council on Foreign Relations, 2 December 2005, http://www.cfr.org/human-rights/child-soldiers-around-world/ p9331#p2 (accessed 9 October 2015). 5 The State of the World’s Children 2006, 40–1, http://www.unicef.org/sowc06/pdfs/ sowc06_fullreport.pdf (accessed 9 October 2015). 6 ‘“Tuam babies” mass grave allegations must spark urgent investigation’, Amnesty International, 5 June 2014, see: https://www.amnesty.ie/news/%E2%80%98tuambabies%E2%80%99-mass-grave-allegations-must-spark-urgent-investigation (accessed 9 October 2015).

‘A Bath, a Toilet and a Field’

27

7 ‘Child killing in England and Wales’, NSPCC March 2014, see: http://www.nspcc. org.uk/globalassets/documents/information-service/factsheet-child-killingsengland-wales-homicide-statistics.pdf (accessed 9 October 2015); ‘Family Annihilation: Fathers who Kill their Children’, BBC News Online, 25 April 2015, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22213942 (accessed 9 October 2015). 8 Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (London: Routledge, 2001), 177. 9 Bob Nowlan and Zach Finch, Directory of World Cinema: Scotland (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2015), 218; Lynne Ramsay, Ratcatcher (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 1999). As Jonathan Murray summarizes: ‘Ramsay’s feature debut Ratcatcher saw her lauded as one of the most significant and distinctive talents to have emerged within late-twentieth-century British cinema,’ Jonathan Murray, The New Scottish Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2013), 49. 10 On the idea of austerity economics as a form of involuntary ‘clinical trial’, see Sanjay Basu and David Stuckler, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2013). 11 Ravetz, Council Housing, 6. 12 Ibid., 2. 13 Murray, New Scottish Cinema, 71. 14 Ramsay, Ratcatcher, ix. 15 Ministry of Health, Housing Manual 1949 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1949), 15; Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan (London: Indigo, 1999), 273. In 1945, Bevan was speaking passionately against the development of ‘single-class’ housing estates: ‘I believe it is essential for the full life of a citizen … to see the living tapestry of a mixed community,’ Foot, Aneurin Bevan, 273. Bevan’s insistence on the build quality of housing – quality that, for him, was an issue of class and class difference – has become legendary: ‘After all, people will have to live in and among these houses for many years. Enough damage has already been done to the face of England by irresponsible people. If we have to wait a little longer, that will be better than doing ugly things now and regretting them for the rest of our lives,’ ibid., 274. 16 The housing figures used here are cited in Foot, Aneurin Bevan, 263. Foot also records that from 1945 to 1948, the birth rate increased by 33 per cent over the three years preceding the outbreak of the Second World War, with marriages up by 11 per cent. The Commons’ debate on the housing shortage was moved by R. S. Hudson (Southport), as recorded in Hansard 17 October 1945: ‘That this House views with grave apprehension the existing shortage of houses in both urban and rural areas and urges His Majesty’s Government to give continuous attention to the related problems of labour and material required for repair and reconstruction, as well as for the building of new houses.’ Interventions throughout

28

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema this debate – a key document in understanding the politics of post-war housing – indicate the scale of the problem facing Bevan. For example, Ronald Chamberlain (Norwood) notes that

 the borough of Lambeth, in which my constituency is situated, was seriously damaged in the blitz, and housing is one of its major questions. More than 3,000 houses were totally destroyed and more than 9,000 were more or less seriously damaged. At the moment, we have between 8,000 and 9,000 families on the waiting list for houses in Lambeth, and that itself is a serious matter. With a number of maiden speeches, including Bessie Braddock’s debut in the House, the debate ran for over six hours. See: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/ commons/1945/oct/17/housing-shortage (accessed 9 October 2015). 17 See: http://collections.mun.ca/PDFs/radical/PlanforPeace.pdf (accessed 9 October 2015). 18 Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001), 145; English Housing Survey 2008, 10, 2008, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/6703/1750754.pdf (accessed 9 October 2015). 19 Stuart Hodkinson, Paul Watt and Gerry Mooney, ‘Introduction: Neoliberal housing policy – time for a critical re-appraisal’, Critical Social Policy 33, no. 1 (2013): 3. 20 Figures cited in Growing up in Social Housing in Britain, 2009, 3, https://www. jrf.org.uk/report/growing-social-housing-britain-profile-four-generations-1946present-day (accessed 1 September 2015). 21 See previous endnote. The fall in the percentage of families housed by local authorities and the effect of the Large Scale Voluntary Transfer Schemes underpinning the shift to renting from housing associations rather than local councils is reported in English Housing Survey, 2013, https://www.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/445370/EHS_Profile_ of_English_housing_2013.pdf (accessed 15 September 2015). 22 ‘Homeless Children at “Highest Level since 2011”’, BBC News Online, 3 November 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-29851119 (accessed 16 September 2015). Shelter reported that 93,000 children would be homeless by the end of the year, with the number of families living in temporary bed and breakfast accommodation almost doubling over the previous three years, http://england. shelter.org.uk/news/november_2014/90,000_children_in_britain_to_face_ christmas_homeless (accessed 15 September 2015). 23 ‘All-Party Parliamentary Group Announced to Tackle National Housing Crisis’, Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, 27 July 2015, http://www.rics.org/uk/news/ news-insight/press-releases/all-party-parliamentary-group-announced-to-tacklenational-housing-emergency--/ (accessed 10 September 2015).

‘A Bath, a Toilet and a Field’

29

24 Lords Hansard, 6 June 2013, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ ldhansrd/text/130606-0002.htm (accessed 1 September 2015). Introduced by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition Government under the Welfare Reform Act 2012, the now notorious ‘bedroom tax’ came into force in April 2013. 25 For further discussion of the ‘important role [that] social housing has played in post-war British childhoods’, see Growing Up in Social Housing: https://www.jrf. org.uk/report/growing-social-housing-britain-profile-four-generations-1946present-day? 26 This is a critical period in the history of British politics: released three years into the landslide ‘New Labour’ government of the late 1990s, the film looks back to the previous period of Labour government (1974–9) which saw what Nicholas Timmins has described as ‘the first great fissure in Britain’s welfare state’, its commitments to full employment and public expenditure on public goods (social security, the National Health Service, state education, state housing), Timmins, The Five Giants, 313. ‘Cosy’ is the word chosen by James Callaghan in his first speech as prime minister to the Labour Party conference in 1976: ‘The cosy world we were told would go on forever, where full employment would be guaranteed by a stroke of the Chancellor’s pen, cutting taxes, deficit spending – that cosy world is gone.’ 27 Ramsay, Ratcatcher, viii. 28 Ibid. 29 Ravetz, Council Housing, 134. 30 Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (New Edition) (London: Granta, 2012), 18. 31 Andrew Cooper and Julian Lousada, Borderline Welfare: Feeling and Fear of Feeling in Modern Welfare (London and New York: Karnac, 2005), 1. 32 Peter Bradshaw, ‘Poetry from the Rubbish Tip: Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsay’s Spellbinding Debut makes Peter Bradshaw Proud of British Cinema Again’, The Guardian, 12 November 1999, http://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/nov/12/5 (accessed 9 October 2015); John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1979), 41. Ken Loach’s Up the Junction (1965) is one key example of the controversy courted by documentary: notably, the supposedly obscene abortion sequence. 33 John Hill, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 58. 34 Ministry of Health, Housing Manual, 40. 35 Martin Fradley, ‘Shane Meadows’, in Fifty Contemporary Film Directors 2nd Edition, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London: Routledge, 2010), 280. 36 ‘Orchard Village 5 Years On’ looks back at the redevelopment of the Mardyke Estate, http://www.romfordrecorder.co.uk/news/orchard_village_five_years_on_

30

37

38

39 40 41 42

43

44

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema we_look_back_at_rainham_s_mardyke_estate_as_regeneration_hits_halfway_ mark_1_2242990 (accessed 9 October 2015). Les Back, The Art of Listening (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 1. ‘Poor cow, poor cow, poor cow’: Kenny’s chanting announces Ratcatcher’s ironic acknowledgement of what it owes to that tradition (Margaret Ann, the ‘poor cow’ in question, bears a complex relation to Joy, the protagonist of Loach’s Poor Cow, released in 1967 and now a classic of the social realist genre on film). Beginning in the birth of a child, Poor Cow is a complicated mix of political criticism of the myth of post-war affluence and participation in the sexual pleasures of a young working-class woman from south London. ‘Whoever heard of girls like me making it?’: Joy’s question takes the measure of the challenge to that documentary art of making poetry out of lives subject to a form of disinvestment at once political and psychical. More generically, as Emily Cuming has pointed out, we can recognize the elements of a workingclass boy’s ‘coming-of-age’ story in Ratcatcher (her immediate point of comparison is Loach’s Kes) Emily Cuming, ‘Private Lives, Social Housing: Female Coming-ofAge Stories on the British Council Estate’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 7, no. 3 (November 2013): 331. The writing of this chapter coincided with Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the leadership of the British Labour Party. From rank outsider, Corbyn was elected as leader, with an overwhelming majority, on a broadly ‘anti austerity’ platform. In his first address to the Labour Party Conference in September 2015, Corbyn addressed the need for significant investment in council housing: http://www.newstatesman. com/politics/staggers/2015/09/jeremy-corbyns-labour-party-conference-speech2015-full-text (accessed 12 October 2015). Stuart C. Aitken, ‘Poetic Child Realism: Scottish Film and the Construction of Childhood’, Scottish Geographical Journal 123, no. 1 (March 2007): 78. Ramsay, Ratcatcher, x. Ibid., ix. The camera riveted to the child’s face is a mark of the genre: for further discussion in relation to the cinema of Shane Meadows, see Vicky Lebeau, ‘“Stick that Knife in Me”: Shane Meadows’ Children’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 10, no. 4 (2013): 878–89. In her reading of Ratcatcher, Emma Wilson refers to James’s ‘dream house’, a reading that foregrounds the relation between this final scene and the earlier sequence, more clearly coded as James’s dream, in which Kenny’s mouse, tied to a balloon, escapes to the moon, Emma Wilson, Cinema’s Missing Children (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 121. Following Ryan’s death at the beginning of the film, we see his family moving out of the tenement – as if the death of a child provides the local authority with evidence of the need for a change of environment for the family.

‘A Bath, a Toilet and a Field’

31

45 Reflecting on Ratcatcher’s engagement with the trauma of the ‘missing child’, for example, Wilson notes that the film is also constantly ‘impeding our access to James’s responses’ – access that would generate the perhaps more metabolizable narrative of a child’s experience of guilt and mourning, Wilson, Cinema’s Missing Children, 117. By contrast, it is as if Ratcatcher acts out that experience, disperses it via doubling and repetition. Thus, Wilson draws attention to the repeated images of water and drowning, the doubling of relationships through the film. 46 Aitken, ‘Poetic child realism’, 84. 47 David Trotter, ‘Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher: Towards a Theory of Haptic Narrative’, Paragraph 31, no. 2 (July 2008): 145. 48 Tina Kendall, ‘“The In-between of Things”: Intermediality in Ratcatcher’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 8, no. 2 (2010): 196. 49 Ramsay, Ratcatcher, ix. James’s attempt to shield Kenny from the knowledge that he has killed his mouse by fabricating the story, or dream, of the mice on the moon is perhaps only the most obvious example of such a ‘breathing space’ in the film. 50 Hanley, Estates, 7. 51 Ravetz, Council Housing, 186. 52 Cooper and Lousada, Borderline Welfare, 26. 53 Ibid., 11.

2

Lost and Found: Children in Indigenous Australian Cinema Greg Dolgopolov

The lost child figure in Australian cinema has always been white.1 This representation – which stands in direct contrast to the genocidal war crimes perpetrated in the real world by colonial settlers on Indigenous peoples – can be traced to the white anxiety over losing ‘home’. Until recently, the lost child was not considered, or was certainly not represented, from an Indigenous perspective. White children got lost. Indigenous children, if they ever appeared in cinema, were not lost: they simply disappeared into the bush. With the incredible rise of Indigenous cinema over the past two decades, however, and in the context of the soul searching that has played out around the storytelling of the generations of Indigenous children forcibly removed from their parents by the Australian state, this is changing. Indigenous Australian film-makers are substantially revising, recreating and transforming the language of cinema and the film narratives that are now at once transnational and postnational. As Jane Mills notes, films that embody ‘First Nation cinema’ are ‘part of a cinema involved in a border-crossing relationship with dominant cinema’.2 Indeed, these ‘border crossing’ and transnational connections of a range of films by Indigenous film-makers such as Ivan Sen, Rachel Perkins and Warwick Thornton engage as much with European cinema and classic Hollywood as with some notion of Australian national cinema. With success at major international film festivals and subsequently at the Australian box office, Indigenous filmmakers are defining a confident post-national cinema culture across the Australian mainstream. News reports of child sex abuse in the Northern Territory, which led to the bipartisan support of the Northern Territory Emergency Response and its paternalistic intervention between 2007 and 2012, have been instrumental

Lost and Found: Children in Indigenous Australian Cinema

33

in consolidating mainstream media depictions of Indigenous children as constantly in trouble.3 In contrast, and more or less at the same time, representations of Indigenous children in Australian cinema have not only increased in number, they have also changed dramatically in terms of the style of their portrayal. This can be seen in such films as Stone Bros (Frankland, 2009), Bran Nue Dae (Perkins, 2009), Samson and Delilah (Thornton, 2009), Mad Bastards (Fletcher, 2010), Here I Am (Cole, 2011), Toomelah (Sen, 2011), The Sapphires (Blair, 2012), Satellite Boy (McKenzie, 2012) and Mystery Road (Sen, 2013). Each of these films has challenged the prevailing depiction of Indigenous children as a disadvantaged ‘problem’. The young Indigenous protagonists of these films are a varied bunch, ranging from good boys like Willie in Bran Nue Dae to the wilful Julie in The Sapphires, the hero’s mischievous friend Kalmain in Satellite Boy, and the hopeless, endearing Samson in Samson and Delilah. Each is imperfect in his or her own way. They are most certainly not the uniformly ‘troubled kids’ of press and media stereotypes. In thinking about representations of the child’s experiences in war films, Karen Lury has observed how real events ‘exist in constant tension with what is being imagined and with what remains unsaid, producing a framework in which the child’s experience is glimpsed, inferred and felt from the gaps in between’.4 I seek to examine some of these gaps as they emerge in these new representations of Indigenous children and the way that they challenge the old norms and assumptions. Alongside, but not coterminous, with the lost child narrative,5 the dominant narrative about childhood in Australian cinema since the 1980s has been the coming-of-age story.6 From Puberty Blues (Beresford, 1981 and Channel 10, 2013) and Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan, 1994) to Somersault (Shortland, 2004) and more recently (and violently) Animal Kingdom (Michôd, 2010), teenagers have continually been coming of age, breaking out, transforming, maturing and, invariably in these morally conservative fables, becoming good citizens and positive role models. The consolidation of the teenage death drive to homogeneity indicates a happy ending. By contrast, the lost child does not come of age. The child does not appear to be on a quest but sets out to wander on a mysterious journey in rural areas before disappearing utterly into the wilderness. The stories are unambiguous on that point. In One Night the Moon (Perkins, 2001), the little girl Memphis Kelly is seduced by the moon to wander off in the middle of the night. The teenager Lily in Strangerland (Farrant, 2015) meanders into the desert in the dark. As a variation, the coming-of-age story may also be

34

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

set in the liminal environments of suburbia or small towns and tell of becoming, of being found or finding oneself in the midst of complex situations. Muriel’s Wedding is a perfect example of this subgenre. Here I explore how the two genres link, particularly in relation to Indigenous children who are lost and found as part of a coming-of-age adventure. The Indigenous child was never lost in the sense mythologized by John Heyer in his seminal documentary Back of Beyond (1954). Likewise, the eponymous heroine Jedda (Jedda, Chauvel, 1955) was found wandering on the land but, despite the white woman Sarah McCann’s best efforts to civilize her, she returned to it. David Gulpilil as the ‘Black Boy’ in Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1971) was wholly comfortable in the outback, navigating, and finding food and water easily. In the past decade, the emergence of an Indigenous mainstream and the popularity of Indigenous films have built on these historical precedents.7 There are also transnational connections between these films and other traditions. One such is Italian neorealism with its focus on the lives of children in a difficult political and economic environment. The core themes of the neorealist film, as Bert Cardullo argues, are ‘the conflict between the common man and the immense societal forces that were completely external to him, yet completely determined his existence. The most pitiful victims of such forces, because the most innocent, are children.’8 In examining the early post-war cinema of Italy and Germany, Jaimey Fisher argues that the male child stands in for humiliated male adults: the figure of the child ‘solves specific representational problems that arise from the surrender of the heroic male protagonist’.9 In recent Indigenous cinema, this narrative strategy is evident when children take on the battles that marginalized adult males cannot. However, the children’s effectiveness does not compromise their fathers’ and grandfathers’ heroism. Rather, the trope makes this internal challenge to the mainstream social order more digestible. To substantiate this argument about the reappraisal of the lost child and coming-of-age narratives, I look at the ways in which two films – Satellite Boy (McKenzie, 2013) and Toomelah (Sen, 2011) – and an episode from the first season of the television series Redfern Now (Perkins, 2012) address the concept of being-at-home, the lost-and-found dichotomy, the process of coming of age and engagement with traditional culture. I also consider how they do so against a background of government intervention and a simultaneous emergence of Indigenous cinema on both the Australian and international stage.

Lost and Found: Children in Indigenous Australian Cinema

35

The lost child trope In his study of the lost child in Australian narratives, Peter Pierce understands the trope as a form of haunting, and ‘the travails and sometimes the deaths of children’ as somehow ‘emblematic either of the forfeiting of part of the national future, or of an anxiety that Australia will never truly welcome European settlement’. Pierce also detects an ‘intimation of the guilt of parents for ever having brought children to such as hostile environment, which issues in anxiety (often too readily realized) about their fate’. It is within this framework of haunting, guilt and anxiety that the figure of the lost child can come to stand for the adult emigrant to Australia, ‘disorientated and vulnerable, and far from all that was consoling and familiar in Britain or Ireland’.10 A uniquely Australian folklore thus emerged from a colonial anxiety about losing a child to a strange and silent country. It endures till today, although the colonial distrust of the land has been transformed into a modern anxiety about the potentially threatening terrain beyond the home. The lost child is a persistent theme in Australian cinema between the 1950s and the 1970s. The trope achieved mythological status in the dramatized fragment of John Heyer’s Back of Beyond (1954), which tells the story of two young girls living near the Birdsville Track who become lost when they leave home to find help for their mother. When their father goes out in search of them, he sees their tracks disappearing under the windblown sand. The misadventures of the young private-school ladies in Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975) capture the vacillation of the outback, and the dread and attraction of that mysterious country, with eerie accuracy. The girls disappear into the landscape without explanation. They are swallowed up completely and forever. This is the defining image of the bewildered colonial child lost in the bush: invariably white, naïve and, if not pure of heart, then at least good of spirit.

Indigenous perspectives When we think about the children in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, is it the abandoned white children or the Indigenous teenager played by David Gulpilil that we take to be lost? After all, he too is a child, albeit on the very cusp of manhood. For him, the desert may be a challenge but it is not a wilderness. He is far more culturally confused when his mating ritual with the white girl, played by

36

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Jenny Agutter, is misunderstood. His subsequent suicide takes place at the edge of occupied settler land. In the outback, he could not get lost, but once in contact with white culture he becomes disorientated. Although most of the film presents the white children as lost, it might be argued that it was the Indigenous boy who was fatally disorientated through his generous relationship with the strangers. Their encounter subverted his walkabout and stopped his coming of age. In white Australian cinema, Indigenous children were just there, a part of the landscape. Even the seminal Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce, 2002) is less a story of lost children than of stolen children. The three protagonists miraculously negotiate a bewildering journey away from their captors in the harshest outback conditions imaginable. In the process, they navigate around savage national regimes of authority and discipline to make the long journey home without getting lost in the outback. They achieve this not just once, but twice. Felicity Collins and Therese Davis read Rabbit Proof Fence as ‘invoking the iconic image of the lost child in the melodramatic mode, but also inverting the meaning in quite significant ways’.11 In the context of a subgenre in Australian New Wave cinema built around the lost child motif, Collins and Davis argue that ‘at some level in the Australian social imaginary “the Aborigine” may still be seen as the “lost child”’.12 This equation between ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘lost child’ is explored in the ‘Stand Up’ episode of Redfern Now (Rachel Perkins, 2012), which provides one of the most innovative narratives about finding a sense of belonging and coming of age in Indigenous representations of children. Having just won an Indigenous scholarship to Clifton Grammar School, one of Sydney’s most elite private schools, sixteen-year-old Joel refuses to sing the Australian national anthem at an assembly – despite enormous pressure from the school authorities. The principal sees Joel as ‘lost’ and employs a range of strategies to help him find his way, to integrate by compliance with the school’s colonial traditions and values. Joel undergoes a long and arduous process of self-understanding, research and discussion to make sense of why ‘he just doesn’t feel right singing the words’. The school, presented as a bastion of ‘good deeds’ that helps underprivileged Indigenous children, views Joel as misguided. ‘Stand Up’ thus examines the theme of not being intimidated by a sandstone institution and challenging the white status quo by questioning enforced compliance.13 Joel’s Indigenous identity is validated when local young people support him. Eventually, it is not just Indigenous students at the school who remain mute during the national anthem; a number of other pupils join the silence for their own reasons. This story is a sophisticated example of the coming-of-age motif – of challenging a

Lost and Found: Children in Indigenous Australian Cinema

37

conservative notion of a manufactured, contextually oppressive ‘tradition’ with intelligent dignity, and of refusing to be perceived as ‘lost’.14

Satellite Boy Satellite Boy (Catriona McKenzie, 2012) recounts the journey of a young activist, Pete, who negotiates a passage through his ancestral lands and, in the process, contends with the legal process of land ownership, wielding a combination of youthful naivety, charm and sheer good fortune. His home is an abandoned drive-in cinema in the middle of nowhere. In order to save it, Pete must take the long, unsealed road into town in order to talk to the mining company bosses. His grandfather, Old Jagamarra (David Gulpilil again, forty years on from Walkabout), tells him, ‘This is our land: it’s alive. It feels you. It knows you.’ Already displaced from their ancestral camps, Jagamarra sets up a modest, transient camp in the open air outside the rusting old structure with its manmade projection room. For him, this is not a home.15 At the outset, Pete appears not to listen to his grandfather or to hear what he is telling him. A feisty antiauthoritarian, he has yet to learn the ‘old ways’. When he sets off in search of the mining boss to get him to change his mind about demolishing his cinema, however, Pete and his friend Kaliman get lost in the bush. Without food or water, and without initially realizing what he is doing, Pete starts to use traditional bushcraft skills and keeps them alive by thinking as his grandfather does. Pete has ‘breathed in his granddad’s lessons’, notes Peter Galvin in his review. His confidence grows as he manages each hardship and treacherous encounter ‘with an air of confidence that speaks of respect’. What he comes to understand is that the desert can kill, but that it can be a friend too. ‘It’s a question more than attitude, and deeper than bush skills. For Pete, it comes down to who you want to be, how you want to live, and a place you can call your own.’16 Pete is not truly ‘lost’. Rather, he is in a process of finding himself and getting closer to his friend and his grandfather through the journey in the tough and magical landscape of the bush. It is his walkabout. Satellite Boy is a meditation on the meaning of home, and what it takes to make a home and defend it, irrespective of what it looks like and where it is now. The film undermines any assumption that a clean air-conditioned house in town is the universal goal, no matter how attractive it may seem while sitting in the red dust. It also questions the notion that home for Indigenous Australians

38

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

is found specifically on ancestral lands. His odyssey teaches Pete that ‘home’ is bigger than any one place – in his case, the abandoned cinema he starts out from – and that it can be found not just in buildings but by sitting under the sky. Satellite Boy is a parable of a world teetering indecisively between the old and the new ways, between the openness of the bush and the sterile spaces of the town. It comes down firmly on the side of the bush home and the traditional ways. The narrative reverses the lost child figure, while at the same time presenting a proud story of a young man coming of age through walkabout and finding the meaning of home that is a drive-in cinema, transient by design.

Toomelah The films of Ivan Sen, and specifically Toomelah (2011), are characterized by a redemptive narrative that traces the passage of an Indigenous child from a low ebb to a more knowing sense of his or her own future. Sen explores the motif of the found or revealed Indigenous child through children finding themselves, rediscovering their indigeneity and their purpose in life through making choices. While this may appear a traditional coming-of-age narrative strategy, in Sen’s films this motif does not blend into the white Australian subgenre. His stories have a specific, non-compliant way of intersecting with the lost child narrative. Indigenous children change, their views may mature, but they do not necessarily become better citizens, or become integrated into their community or the mainstream settler world. The children in Sen’s first feature Beneath Clouds (2002), for instance, find each other and find themselves on the road. Vaughn and Lena gain a deeper understanding of their place in the world and they do not find that it is necessarily good. Their parting at the railway station could be read pessimistically: Vaughn will go to jail for assaulting police officers and Lena will never find her father. Or, it could be read as promising unpredictable possibilities for both Lena and Vaughn. They have passed through a trial together on the road, they have found one another and they have grown and been enriched as the result of their mutual discoveries. Daniel, the ten-year-old hero of Toomelah, is a bad boy. He swears, he brawls, he shows signs of malevolent disrespect and he associates with the wrong crowd. He struggles at school and he appears not to be settled within a family unit. His family is dysfunctional not only from a non-Indigenous perspective, but from Daniel’s perspective. We first meet him as he wakes up on a cushion from

Lost and Found: Children in Indigenous Australian Cinema

39

the couch on the floor of a shabby house in an isolated community. Dogs bark outside. He opens the fridge. It is empty. He wanders into his mother’s room. She is sleeping. He opens her handbag. It too is empty. Daniel goes to school hungry. The film is shot as a shaky-handed blend between neorealism and a social welfare documentary. (Ivan Sen famously made the film as a one-man band, writing, directing, shooting, editing and doing the sound almost entirely by himself with untrained actors on location. In such circumstances, the handheld camerawork appears commendable rather than deleterious.) There follows a seemingly aimless process of tracking Daniel through the shabby little township as he gets up to all manner of quotidian, low-level escapades and interacts with the community that knows him only too well. The family’s strength resides in Daniel’s grandmother and their scenes together are quiet and intimate. She asks him early on, ‘What you going to do with your life?’ He responds, ‘I don’t know. What can I do?’ It is a question as much for the audience as it is for his grandmother. Although at first there seem to be few life options for a kid in a town with massive unemployment, Daniel discovers attention and purpose and respect through labour, albeit as a runner for the small-time local drug boss. Daniel asserts himself, and defines his emerging, if postural manhood, through petty crime. The film does not make a value judgement. Rather, it shows that the options open to Daniel appear to be either becoming a drunk like his father or being a ‘bad cunt’ like Linden, the drug dealer. By taking on the role of kid gangster, brawling with the better dressed ten-year-old Tupac and laying claim to his ‘woman’ – all of ten years of age – Daniel makes a choice. It is not normative. It is certainly not an idealized or aspirational childhood. Although Toomelah, the community, could easily have appeared in a social welfare documentary about real, existing issues, this is a piece of cinema about modern Australian approaches to their children on film. The Australian anxiety for the lost child has been displaced from the bush to the context of abusive, violent, predatory communities in the suburbs, to drugs and violence in the inner cities. In Sen’s film, however, the ‘lost’ child of the abandoned, isolated community is faced by another choice towards the end of the film. Daniel’s tenyear-old ‘girlfriend’ Daneeka says to him, ‘Mr Damien says that you can come back to class if you stop playing up. Will ya?’ Daniel looks at her with a silent acquiescence, before returning to school with a newfound hope. ‘The film portrays the people of Toomelah as a community that is immobilized,’ Jane Mills has argued. ‘They’re stuck in a space behind borders

40

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

that are no longer recognized by the State, unable to speak their own language, practice their traditional customs or participate meaningfully in the nation’s dominant white society and culture.’17 Although there is a good deal of truth in that observation, the comment perhaps misses the sense in which Daniel does feel that he is making choices about his mobility and his own sense of space. Sen’s treatment acknowledges his self-awareness and that agency. Daniel’s journey of reversed normative values – from school to drug running and back to school – sits symbolically alongside the life of his aunt. She has recently returned to Toomelah after being forcibly removed as a child. She now sits on the one spot, a little away from everyone else, and gazes into the distance, occasionally reaching into her red sling bag for fortification. She was stolen and now she has returned to what she considers her hometown, even if it is a mission and not her ancestral lands. In this respect, Daniel’s family story has a happy ending of sorts, insofar as the film refuses the binary evaluation of lost and found, deprivation and privilege. Daniel is still at home. His community and school peers accept him as he is and support his transformations. He looks with wonderment at the regional Indigenous map in the school, which offers a more expansive conception of his home. His mobility is currently limited to a shabby ex-mission town, but that place does not define all that Daniel is nor all that he may become. He is a young man in process. Sen’s tale suggests that, as the boy learns more about himself and his history, he will be ready to occupy more space, with the same self-assertion. Rather than seeing only deprivation in Toomelah, Sen’s Indigenous narrative discovers a training ground for change. The boy stands in for the man.

Redemption stories Looking at representations of children in Indigenous films in the first decades of the twenty-first century makes it possible to rewrite a number of traditional Australian tropes and myths about childhood. The new Indigenous cinema challenges the boundaries of the Australian imagination, connecting with other cinematic traditions and expanding the understanding of a post-national cinema. There are now far fewer stories about Indigenous children than there are films showing active Indigenous children negotiating their own paths between multiple cultures, pathways and traditions. Satellite Boy, Toomelah and Redfern Now are different but connected examples of a counterargument

Lost and Found: Children in Indigenous Australian Cinema

41

against the media’s representation of children in Indigenous communities as being constantly in trouble, neglected and abused. These new Indigenous representations revise the colonial childhood narratives into redemptive stories of salvation and opportunity – of being lost and now found – by making considered choices that negotiate between multiple demands and assert a strong stance to political intervention.

Notes 1 See, for example, Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Elspeth Tilley, ‘The Lost-Child Trope in White Australian Narrative’, Cross/Cultures 152 (2012): 21. 2 Jane Mills, ‘First Nation Cinema: Hollywood’s Indigenous Other’, Screening the Past, no. 2 (2009). http://www.screeningthepast.com/2015/01/first-nation-cinemahollywood’s-indigenous-‘other’/ (accessed 20 November 2015). 3 Jon Altman and Susie Russell, ‘Too Much “Dreaming”: Evaluations of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Intervention 2007–2012’, Evidence Base 3 (2012), https://journal.anzsog.edu.au/publications/3/2012Issue3Final.pdf (accessed 28 October 2015). 4 Karen Lury, The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 8. 5 See Pierce, Country of Lost Children and Tilley, ‘The Lost-Child Trope’. 6 See, for example, Raffaele Caputo, ‘Coming of Age: Notes Toward a Re-appraisal’, Cinema Papers 94 (1993): 12–16; Felicity Collins and Therese Davis, Australian Cinema After Mabo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Kristina Gottschall, ‘Coming-of-age’, in Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand, ed. Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand, vol. 3 (Bristol: Intellect Publishers, 2010), 176–87. 7 Greg Dolgopolov, ‘Beyond Black and White: Indigenous Cinema and the Mainstream’, Metro Magazine, no. 181 (2014): 78–83; Kristina Gottschall, ‘“Black Kid Burden”: Cultural Representations of Indigenous Childhood and Poverty in Australian Cinema’, in The ‘Poor Child’: The Cultural Politics of Education, Development and Childhood, ed. Lucy Hopkins and Arathi Sriprakash (London: Routledge, 2015), 43–62. 8 Bert Cardullo, European Directors and Their Films: Essays on Cinema (Plymouth, UK: The Scarecrow Press, 2012), 84. 9 Jaimey Fisher, ‘On the Ruins of Masculinity: The Figure of the Child in Italian Neorealism and the German Rubble-Film’, in Radical Fantasy: Italian Neorealism’s

42

10 11 12 13

14

15

16 17

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema Afterlife in Global Cinema, ed. Laura E. Ruberto, Tomas Taraborrelli and Kristi M. Wilson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 25–53. Pierce, Country of Lost Children, 6. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 149. The Australian term for elite, private establishments is ‘sandstone’, often referring to the oldest tertiary education institutions that were founded in the colonial era and built of sandstone. The Stolen Generations refers to Indigenous children removed from their families between 1905 and 1969 for training in institutions. The tragic impacts of removal, subsequent abuse and exclusion from their communities have become a major theme of Australian film and literature. See ‘Bringing Them Home’ Report (1997), https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/bringing-them-home-report-1997. Tara Judah, ‘Call of Country: Satellite Boy’, Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, no. 177, 2013, 18, http://search.informit.com.au.wwwproxy0.library. unsw.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=501918902797009;res=IELLCC (accessed 28 November 2015). Peter Galvin, ‘Satellite Boy Review’, SBS, 19 June 2013, http://www.sbs.com.au/ movies/review/satellite-boy-review (accessed 24 April 2015). Jane Mills, ‘Bordering Activity in Ivan Sen’s Film Toomelah (2011)’, Screening the Past, no. 6 (2015), http://www.screeningthepast.com/2015/06/bordering-activityin-ivan-sen%E2%80%99s-film-toomelah-2011/ (accessed 20 November 2015).

3

‘Away from Girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard Emma Wilson

One In her retelling of the Bluebeard story, The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter’s girl heroine narrates: I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of a pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage. And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my mother would be moving slowly about the narrow bedroom I had left behind for ever, folding up and putting away all my little relics, the tumbled garments I would not need any more, the scores for which there had been no room in my trunks, the concert programmes I’d abandoned; she would linger over this torn ribbon and that faded photograph with all the half-joyous, half-sorrowful emotions of a woman on her daughter’s wedding day. And in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, when he put the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife.1

Carter’s writing has some kinship with the attention to sensory impression in Catherine Breillat’s lush, lovely Bluebeard (2009).2 The ‘burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of a pillow’ is an image of contact, of desire and purity, heat and pallor, that seems apt for Breillat’s sensorium, for her pictorial attention to skin and material touching one another. But beyond this, the extract draws my attention for the ways in which it emphasizes the psychic resonance of

44

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

space, territory and travel. On this train journey, the young heroine is borne away from Paris, also away from girlhood. Her girl childhood is figured spatially in the ‘white, enclosed quietude’ of her mother’s apartment, the ‘narrow bedroom’ she leaves behind. She is venturing into the ‘unguessable country of marriage’. The pulse and freedom of this territory newly entered brings with it ‘a pang of loss’, the pathos of all she leaves behind in exiting this childhood world, the conflicted affect that departure brings. In Carter’s story, it is the mother who comes as a ‘wild thing’3 at the end and saves her daughter from the wife-killing husband, putting a single bullet through his head. The story resembles a retelling of the story of Proserpine and Ceres, where the daughter’s affective attention and desire remain divided between demon bridegroom and adoring mother.4 As we find in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Now the goddess whose divinity is shared by two kingdoms spends the same number of months with her husband and with her mother. Her expression and her temperament change instantly: at one moment she is so melancholy as to seem sad to Dis himself; the next, she appears with radiant face, as when the sun breaks through and disperses the watery clouds that have previously concealed him.5

If Carter’s story imposes a temporal sequence where her heroine replaces her ogre by her wild mother (and a new husband), its affective concerns, for a heroine to have a strong, strange erotic bond with both lover and mother, reflects the double resolution of the myth. Like Carter’s story, Breillat’s adaptation is also set up to explore conflicted affect, but of somewhat different valence. If her heroine, Marie-Catherine, is again a Proserpine figure, entering Bluebeard’s castle as an Underworld realm, she goes in part through her own volition, not raped in terror like the goddess. Yet the economic necessity, and enforced emptying of the childhood home, that determine her choice, also impact on her freedom. She is at once a voluntary subject and a girl in rebellion sensing the constraints all around her, seeking possibilities of infraction. More irrevocably than Carter’s tale, Breillat’s is a fiction about leaving home, leaving behind maternal love, timidity, devotion, about what this means for girls and young women as they experience metamorphosing, bodily shifting identities and a changing relation to power and knowledge. This fairytale film is a reflection on departure and refashioning. It binds together questions of loss, exile and exiting from childhood. Breillat’s film offers a symbolic frame, a sensory, imagined setting, for the exploration of the affect of transition and

‘Away from Girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard

45

transformation. Its particular emphasis is on a fully contestatory yet sensuous relation to patriarchy. I see Bluebeard as a Dorothy film, to borrow Stephanie Hemelryk Donald’s beautiful formulation, a narrative about a child-traveller growing up, ecstatic, in a strange new land.6 In this way it opens reflections, as a dream and fantasy narrative, on the psychic experiences of growing up, of moving away from home, of encountering new territories and nations.

Two Bluebeard is the first of Breillat’s two fairy-tale adaptations to date; the second is her Sleeping Beauty of 2010. She has spoken of a possible third adaptation, The Little Mermaid.7 The themes of the films, in particular their attention to intelligent, resourceful adolescent girls, are in keeping with the broader corpus of Breillat’s work. In Bluebeard Breillat maintains that link to her wider corpus of films, and to the autobiographical ethos of her work, by offering a dual narrative. Interposed into the historically staged Bluebeard story are sequences in which two little girls, Catherine and Anne, in gingham pinafores, play in a storybook attic and read one another fairy tales. Breillat has said that the two girls represent herself and her sister, and there is in the relation between these sisters a mirage of the sister affect we see in her previous A ma soeur (2001). The sisters of Bluebeard are as powerful emotionally, as avid, playful, rivalrous and sexually curious as the previous girls. Here these two little sisters shadow the adolescent MarieCatherine (Lola Creton), who will marry the ogre, and her sister Anne (Daphné Baiwir). Indeed Breillat says in an interview that the whole film displays what the little reading girls imagine as they immerse themselves in the Bluebeard story. She says she seeks the naïve fascination of children with what attracts them, is seductive to them, but which they do not yet fully understand. In interweaving the thread of the girls reading the story with the Bluebeard narrative itself, Breillat’s film holds echoes of a volume about ‘Bluebeard’ by French feminist writer Annie Leclerc.8 Leclerc speaks about the fairy tale literally picking her up by the hair like the heroine Bluebeard attempts to kill. She evokes in febrile terms the nameless, infinite curiosity the story animates and this seems aligned with her own passionate involvement as a child. Leclerc describes going into the attic to read ‘Bluebeard’ and this reading scenario is borrowed by Breillat in her adaptation. Reading the two, film and text, together, allows insight into sensory and affective aspects of the Bluebeard text. This is

46

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

mediated through identification, involvement, the fevered sense of the text felt in the child. Leclerc says she herself suffocated as the heroine was strangled by the blue monster, she herself was near death in her fervent wish to let the girl come back to life. The text allows her to hesitate on this borderline between life and death, as she sees the dead women, the child bride’s fear, she senses what she describes as ‘the irresistible attraction of the spectacle of death’.9 This passage through the Underworld, through death, is only to allow life to surge back more sweetly. Leclerc’s reading identifies ‘Bluebeard’ as a Proserpine story hesitating between death and life, the Underworld and deliverance. She writes with particular delicacy of the ravishment of the text, which she describes as the ‘strange pleasure’10 of feeling in herself an ‘immense wave of deliverance, a fervent wish to live’.11 She identifies the text’s hidden eroticism here, the mindstretching beauty of its delayed, yet actual, rescue and survival. The world arrives in all its devastating beauty. The child bride has known the unnameable, indelible jouissance of the stained key, she is destined for death, yet she is saved and survives. Leclerc’s account summons the depth, the headiness of her childhood sensations, her sensuality.12 Reading Bluebeard with Leclerc’s Clé (as with Carter’s ‘Bloody Chamber’) identifies the ways in which Breillat’s adaptation draws, intentionally or not, on a further series of female-authored reflections on fairy tales, taking her sometimes very far from literal adaptation. Leclerc here gives Breillat the reading scenario which is key to the critical consciousness and reflection in Bluebeard; she allows, too, the identification of dimensions of the conflicted affect, the intense sensation of the story, its luxuriating on the borders of murder and survival, its potential as a vehicle of sensation. This is what Breillat seeks in her Bluebeard film. She pursues this estrangement of fairy tales still further in her Sleeping Beauty. Here she departs wildly from Perrault, allowing a narrative of the torpid, dream reality of the heroine to unfold. The film follows her fever dreams as she lies asleep between living and dying. Her child persona sets out like Dorothy across a strange new landscape, entering other fairy tales at labile will, passing through ‘The Snow Queen’, riding on a mythic deer, losing her virginity as she makes love with a gypsy girl. Breillat’s fairy-tale films follow the form she established in Romance X (1999), where her narratives proceed through a series of densely cathected scenarios with an indirect relation to reality. This mode allows her work to access and unleash different truths of desire and female sexuality. She uses the fairy-tale films to pursue at this symbolic level the more realist work on girlhood and the spectacle of desire she has pursued from A Real Young

‘Away from Girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard

47

Girl (1976) onwards.13 She has a feminist agenda here that is deeply involved with recognizing young women and girls as desiring, complex, contestatory, volitional subjects.

Three ‘Bluebeard’ as a tale itself has particular connections to questions about sexuality and roles for women. As Maria Tatar observes: ‘The story of Bluebeard and his wife has a cultural edge so sharp that it continues to be recast, rewritten, and reshaped.’14 Bruno Bettelheim’s reading is sobering: ‘The female must not inquire into the secrets of the male.’15 Loss of virginity is seen as capital, as damage: The key that opens the door to a secret room suggests associations to the male sexual organ, particularly in first intercourse when the hymen is broken and blood gets on it. If this is one of the hidden meanings, then it makes sense that the blood cannot be washed away: defloration is an irreversible event.16

Affect is not conflicted, as in Breillat, but wholly negative. For Bettelheim the child bride is fearful. Vision of the bloody chamber becomes ‘her anxious fantasy which depicts corpses of women who had been killed for having been similarly unfaithful’.17 And so this is ‘a tale about the destructive aspects of sex’18 in which we learn that ‘sexual feelings can be terribly fascinating and tempting, but also very dangerous’.19 Bettelheim concludes that to the child, ‘part of the attraction of the story is that it confirms his idea that adults have terrible sexual secrets’.20 As Marina Warner sums it up: ‘For Freudian commentators, like Bruno Bettelheim, the story of Bluebeard confronts the mystery of sexuality, and, by dramatizing so bloodily the terror of defloration, helps to assuage it.’21 Her own reading emphasizes, by contrast, the strange feminist agenda already implicit in the story, explaining perhaps its appeal for Breillat and others: ‘“Bluebeard” is a version of the Fall in which Eve is allowed to get away with it, in which no one for once heaps blame on Pandora.’22

Four Jack Zipes offers a more social than sexual understanding of Perrault’s works: ‘It is not by chance that Perrault and the women writers of the 1690s created their fairy

48

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

tales for the most part to express their views about young people and to prepare them for roles that they idealistically believed they should play in society.’23 Zipes puts emphasis on the ways in which, in this period, fairy stories were used to provide models of behaviour. He argues in particular that pressures on children to conform became more severe as French society became more regulated in the later seventeenth century. He offers insight into the ways that ‘fairy tales operate ideologically to indoctrinate children so that they will conform to dominant social standards that are not necessarily established on their behalf ’.24 He does suggest too that, in the specific case of the women writers, ‘they also sought to subvert the male code and replace it with a more liberal one favorable to the predilections of educated women, who wanted more power to determine their lives’.25 This vision of the period perhaps leaves Perrault’s tale poised between regulatory codes of behaviour, which would punish female curiosity, and a certain vision of such codes’ subversion. Breillat, in adapting a fairy tale, responds to the short prose form as a mode of sexual trial, as in Bettelheim, and also of social regulation as in Zipes. Her aim is to use this mode to contest and deregulate both sexuality and society, reimaging the metamorphosis of girls into women, going to the quick of the tale and unleashing its power. Zipes himself turns to Breillat’s film adaptation in his later volume, The Enchanted Screen, where he describes the adaptation as ‘unusual’.26 He makes reference to Carter’s rewritings of fairy tales as well, describing them as ‘provocative’ and speaking of Breillat too as a provocatrice. His reading of Bluebeard, also motivated by social and historical concerns, makes a specific case about the two time sequences of the film: ‘The interplay between the 1950s and the 1690s involves a critique of both periods in which women are deprived of their rights.’27 Zipes continues: ‘And perhaps Breillat is inferring that young women are still threatened by bluebeards.’28 He acknowledges the film as femalecentred: ‘Breillat’s focus is more on the two sisters, especially Marie-Catherine/ Catherine, and the double narrative than it is on Bluebeard and his original sin.’29 Indeed Zipes goes so far as to say: ‘For Breillat, the “original sin”, if there is one, concerns the fragile and strong female psyches and competitive sisters. Her ambivalent heroine in both stories is a defiant young female, who takes charge of her own destiny. She is not necessarily vicious but cunning and assertive.’30 Zipes concludes on the film’s sexual politics: If men are ogres and brutal, there appears to be no way but to use their violence psychologically and physically against them. This is a disturbing choice, but

‘Away from Girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard

49

Breillat implies that men have been disturbing women’s lives for hundreds of years, and violent resistance may be the only answer to male domination, especially when men show no remorse.31

Breillat is questioning power and violence and exploring this across history and ideology. But for me her strategy is not to plot two time periods against one another. Neither the fairy-tale thread nor the attic scenes are securely anchored in one particular period. The fairy tale is set in an elastic, fantasy realm that is a prehensile, sensually vivid space of romance and sensation. Attention to period detail, to a sense of authentic pastness, is witnessed in the use of period locations for the convent school and for Bluebeard’s castle, historically apt paintings and furnishings, and carefully stitched and laced costumes.32 Breillat’s concern is with sensory realism, atmosphere, pictorial calm and precision, rather than any particular historical veracity. The same is true of the attic sequences. Catherine and Anne are dressed in blue and pink gingham pinafores, with white socks and patent shoes. Breillat creates an ideal image of the little girl, reminiscent of the images of girlhood she summons up and contaminates in A Real Young Girl. This is a girlhood image from Alice in Wonderland or from the sculptures of Hans Bellmer. In their stylized imaging, these are not contemporary children. Yet their discussions of sexuality, their confidence, their frankness lift them beyond 1950s girlhood. Rather than acting as a specific period reconstruction, this is a narrative strand exposing and releasing cultural myths and personal memories of the little girl.33 Equally, the fairy-tale thread can be seen to act as a more heavily cathected imagining of an unconscious of girlhood. If Breillat is critiquing the power structures of Perrault’s time and her own, she is achieving this critique through the indirect representation of conflicted affect in both contexts, in such a way that she allows her film to act as a symbolic rite of passage, as a series of saturated, purposeful landscapes to be passed through, of scenarios to be entered. The two narrative lines shadow each other and offer a shading and intensification of each other. The two pairs of girl heroines of different ages moving through the film give a multiple, serial rendition of childhood and adolescent experiences of difference in age, maturity and metamorphosis. Breillat follows the dizzying lability of child experience, and of leaving home, that Lewis Carroll explores with Alice: ‘It was much pleasanter at home’, thought poor Alice, ‘when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I

50

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole – and yet – and yet – it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!’34

The existence of the two strands, with girls of different ages, allows Breillat to show girlhood as knowing largeness and smallness at the same time. Catherine’s fascination with her fairy-tale alter ego and the faltering lines between them intimates something of the co-existence of child and girl selves.35 Indeed in the initial conception of the project, Marie-Catherine would herself have been a younger girl. Breillat approached Arte about a Bluebeard film in 2005. At that stage she already wanted to cast Lola Creton, who was only eleven. The project was put on hold for Breillat to make The Last Mistress and she only began casting again in 2008, looking for a child actress who resembled Lola Creton. In the end she cast Creton herself.36 If Creton is older than initially intended, as filmed by Breillat, her stillness, her pellucid skin, her large dark eyes recall those of the iconic child actress Ana Torrent. Breillat also encourages us to recall this image of a childlike Creton through the play of scale and framing in her shots where Marie-Catherine is frequently dwarfed beside Bluebeard (played by Dominique Thomas). This difference in scale is shown playfully where they eat supper together, Bluebeard savouring an ostrich egg while Marie-Catherine eats quail eggs, and more lavishly in the film’s fascination with thresholds and narrow passages, with exiguity. Marie-Catherine’s delicacy is one of Breillat’s visual points of fascination, but this littleness is by no means equated with disempowerment. Imperiously, she refuses to sleep in the truckle bed Bluebeard has placed at the feet of his fourposter. Instead, she chooses her own room, trying a number for size until she has found the smallest in the palace. If Marie-Catherine in Bluebeard’s castle is a sister of Alice in Wonderland, she is also an avatar of Carol Clover’s final girl.37 Breillat describes Bluebeard not as an ogre as such but as a serial killer, suggesting that the fairy tale holds the first serial killer story in literature. And Marie-Catherine is the last of his wives and will, as final girl, ensure his demise. Breillat offers ways of living through transacting and transcending girlhood and embracing a new curiosity. Her film is alive in particular to the force as well as to the conflicted affect of this. And that emphasis on force and conflicted feelings in turn informs her approach to violence. Breillat works less to advocate women assuming patriarchal violence, in Zipes’s terms, than to affirm the

‘Away from Girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard

51

affective value of scenarios of violence and prise de conscience. In the screenplay to her film Romance X she explains: ‘What matters to me is not morality in cinema, that would just be moralism, but to make a truly ethical cinema. So without compromise.’38 She specifies further: ‘The young girl is my ethical figure of choice’ (her emphasis).39 In this concern for a truly uncompromising cinema, she stages scenarios, in symbolic settings, both spatial and pictorial, that allow for deep reflection, sensation, pause.

Five In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes: Certain photographs – emblems of suffering, such as the snapshot of the little boy in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, his hands raised, being herded to the transport to a death camp – can be used like memento mori, as objects of contemplation to deepen one’s sense of reality; as secular icons, if you will.40

The context and content of the images Sontag evokes here are very different from those of Breillat’s work, and she refers to still images not moving footage, but her notion of the images as ‘objects of contemplation to deepen one’s sense of reality’ (my emphasis) chimes with what I find in the aesthetic of Bluebeard. The aesthetic style of the whole film is carefully designed, and Breillat is widely acknowledged to be a director whose work is in dialogue with still images, in particular paintings from the Western tradition, notably the high Renaissance and Baroque, as well as nineteenth-century Realism. Beyond this, in Bluebeard, there are a couple of particular instances, what I want to call capital scenes, where Breillat offers in the frame an image and scenario for deep contemplation, for open, limitless moral reflection, and, aptly in this fairy-tale film, for expression, sensing, of the force and complexity of moving, in Carter’s words, ‘away from girlhood’. Karen Lury has noted the importance of illustrations by artists such as George Cruikshank, Gustave Doré, Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham in determining ‘the meaning and feel of the fairytale’.41 She also observes how ‘the visual aspects’ of films she studies ‘offer a similar aesthetic pull on the viewer that disrupts the conventional chronology of the fairytale’.42 The images bring depth and synchronicity, offer a different visual aesthetic and making of meaning. This same strategy I find in Breillat.

52

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Julia Kristeva has a chapter on the story of John the Baptist in The Severed Head: Capital Visions. ‘Many of us have now lost the memory of these myths, stories, metamorphoses, and economies’, she writes. ‘Others, from distant lands, never knew them. Nevertheless, we are all overwhelmed by the severed head laid on a platter: source of multiple, irresolvable personal and cultural projections.’43 It is the sense of being ‘overwhelmed’ by the severed head that I want to pause over here, as well as Kristeva’s fine sense of the ‘irresolvable personal and cultural projections’ the image invites. Reference to Kristeva may jar since, as Claire Clouzot observes, Breillat has always refused psychoanalysis. In Clouzot’s argument, film itself is Breillat’s couch, fiction her transference.44 For Clouzot, ‘the subject of her work is her unconscious’.45 Breillat’s move in her capital scenes is, however, with and beyond Kristeva, to produce images which yield conflicted affect, echo lost myths and metamorphoses, and overwhelm us  – offering thereby not diagnosis but a form of transaction, even bodily release. In interpreting another beheading sequence, that of Perseus and Medusa,46 Kristeva asks: ‘Who is looking at whom? Who is killing whom? Repetition, reflection: a dialectic of representation is formed between Perseus and the Gorgon that reproduces the ambivalent passions of the mother-child separation.’47 For Kristeva matricide and sublimation in art offer protection against engulfing love: ‘Thus the Medusa-Gorgon only becomes bearable as eikon. Cut off the monster’s head and offer its reflection for view: that is the only way to protect yourself from death and from the female genitals that could swallow you.’48 Breillat seeks rather to offer a space for the expression of fear, for ambivalent passions, for vision as engulfing. In Bluebeard Breillat brings forth the archaic, the sensuous, the bloody, and gives it limitless, delirious form.

Six (Capital scene 1: The severed head) The inception of the romance with Bluebeard is the death of the sisters’ father and the ensuing penury that deprives the girls of their convent education and steeps their life in mourning. Death is the making of Breillat’s heroine, the moment of her move away from girlhood, and it is the film’s first indication of her sensuality. She is told she is too young to see her dead father, but she enters into his bedchamber undaunted and, as he lies waxy and dead, she reaches in fearless and kisses him. There is here a certain labile, lovely quality to her gestures, a cherishing of contact. Marie-Catherine kisses a dead man, her lips against his

‘Away from Girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard

53

skin. This kiss in all its transgression foreshadows her love for Bluebeard, and the film’s aesthetic fascination with congress between the living and the dead. If Marie-Catherine desires her dead father in the figure of the indigo-haired monster she will marry, Bluebeard’s love for this infant, childlike woman is, arguably, laced with the forethought that she will find her place among the wives in his bloody chamber.49 In Breillat’s adaptation, which is a love story, Bluebeard and his child bride love each other in the shadow of once and future mourning. This image of Marie-Catherine as not quite alive, as imperfectly living, is fostered as we see her framed at the same height and on the same scale as carved figures on the castle fireplace. She is a doll, an automaton. The film follows, thus, an established line in cinema’s fascination with children. As Sarah Wright observes of the children in Spanish cinema she treats: ‘[They] retain traces of their mechanical origins: thus they are dolls, ventriloquists’ dummies, cyborgs or automata.’50 Linking these mechanical traces, through Frankenstein, to monstrosity, she argues further that her films ‘return repeatedly to a central motif: the child’s confrontation with a monster and, derivatively, the theme of the monstrous child’.51 Breillat is interested both in the child’s confrontation with the monster, Bluebeard, variant on the animal grooms and demon lovers of fairy tale,52 and also in Marie-Catherine as monstrous child. In Breillat’s logic we are all monsters, and this is laid bare in her reckoning with Marie-Catherine as fearless, sensual, desiring, deeply curious, her transgressions taking her over the boundary between the living and the dead, her moves away from girlhood across the line between child and adult. In Marie-Catherine, Breillat explores metamorphosis and transformation, growing up, in their most transgressive, taboo and monstrous forms and she uses this monstrous romance to reveal to us something of the truth of desire and attachment. Explaining her choice of this fairy tale over others, Breillat says that it is the darkest because it teaches little girls to love the man who is going to kill them. She says of her own version that there is, between the characters, an immense love. The film lingers with this love, so sensuously, as Marie-Catherine places her tiny hand over Bluebeard’s ringed fingers, as she desires the blue bristles of his beard and the fur of his clothes, and sits eating carnivorously beside him like his miniature double.53 She is lonely without him and pines for him. They have a monstrous intimacy that is complicit, oral, polymorphous. Marie-Catherine watches a duck being slaughtered, its body still moving with its pulse moments after its head has been detached. Her sensuality is gloating, fearless and macabre.

54

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

And this is felt most tremulously in the final scene of their love affair. She stands before Bluebeard’s head, laid out on a platter and, impassive again, with infinite tenderness she strokes the edge of his cheek and hair. The scene is languorous, almost still, but for tiny moves of her hand. In the near stillness of the image and its framing, Breillat creates a pictorial scene, a portrait of her heroine with a severed head. The image draws together the affect and monstrosity of the relation between child and ogre, but it does not quite work to fix or freeze it. The image is pictorial, but Marie-Catherine’s hand is still moving, the very motion of her tactile gestures belying her conflicted affect even in the face of the luxurious repose of the image. Her stance is one of composure and survival. Bluebeard has threatened her and brought her close to bloody demise. The most erotic sequence of the film shows Marie-Catherine with her white neck craned back, Bluebeard’s dagger tracing it with blood, a red liquid ribbon. (Carter’s girl wears a choker of rubies ‘like an extraordinarily precious slit throat’.)54 The peculiarity of Breillat’s film, of its feminism, is its bid to allow us to take pleasure from these surreal images – the slit neck, the severed head – to feel the shiver of moisture and horror in Marie-Catherine’s abandonment, and to enjoy, gloat over, the final stilling of her patriarch. In her discussion of severed heads, Kristeva makes reference to Artemisia Gentilleschi’s Judith Decapitating Holophernes, writing: ‘The greatest female painter, whose masterpiece is a decapitation! What feminist of the “Belle Epoque”, the 1970s, did not scrutinize the details of the carnage before applauding Artemisia’s talents and Judith’s exploit?’55 Kristeva sees ‘a fierce Judith, floating there in her brocade dress’56 who painted ‘a violated man’.57 Judith here, in Artemisia’s paint, is seen as the vengeful figure Zipes finds in Breillat’s work. For Kristeva, ‘only the rigid reserve of her body, drawing back from the stream of spurting blood, betrays some disgust’.58 Marie-Catherine cradling Bluebeard’s head appears not vengeful like Judith, but elegiac. She is now mistress of Bluebeard’s castle, the palace she first glimpsed covetously from the window of the carriage bearing her away from her convent school. She has loved Bluebeard and survived like the final girl. Her image reminds me of Ovid’s Proserpine. As a nymph says to Ceres: So it happened that, while I was gliding through the Stygian pool beneath the earth, there I saw your Proserpine, with my own eyes. She was sad, certainly, and her face still showed signs of fear: none the less, she was a queen, the greatest in that world of shadows.59

‘Away from Girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard

55

Seven (Capital scene 2: Cells) The two strands of the film intersect only once, at the height of the story, and (as we find in Leclerc’s account) at the moment of greatest immersion in it. We find the tiny Catherine running down the spiral staircase of Bluebeard’s castle. We see a close-up of Catherine’s face as she comes to the part in the story where ‘the temptation was so strong’ that Bluebeard’s wife had to enter the room. Rather than Marie-Catherine, we see the infant Catherine, in her white nightgown, enter Bluebeard’s attic, a strange composite of the childhood space in which she reads the story and the arcane, terrible castle she imagines. The room is at first in shadow, but then it comes to light as the door opens further. Three wives in white nightgowns hang from the rafters, their blood in wet crimson pools on the floor. Initially the image seems painterly with its patterning of shadow, white fabric and red blood, but its spatial dimensions are emphasized as the child moves through this Underworld setting. The blood on the floor creates a gory rink over which the child moves, repeating to herself, ‘I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid.’ The bodies are decaying, green, with long nails that have gone on growing after death, while the blood is liquid, staining, fresh, seeping into the hem of the child’s nightgown. She is an infant copy, a visual echo, of the hanging women, but animate, mobile. In this space she drops the key, staining it with blood, and returns the film to the storytelling. This scene in the attic, the little room, the bloody chamber, is so intense and mesmerizing that the child Catherine has forgotten her heroine and lives it, immersed in it as her own fleshy experience. Breillat speaks in interview of her own fascination as a child with the image of Bluebeard’s dead wives and how it fostered her imagination. She adds too, beyond Bettelheim, that the story educates children about forms of masochism.60 This capital scene works, beyond painting, as an art installation, a space of transition through which Catherine passes. I see it as a cell, recalling Louise Bourgeois’s spatial artworks. Of these Bourgeois explains: ‘I wanted to create my own architecture, and not depend on the museum space, not have to adapt my scale to it. I wanted to constitute a real space which you could enter and walk around in.’61 Breillat creates a saturated installation space in her film: it is the space where the move away from girlhood is felt at its most bloody and intense. She marks this as a point of intrusion where one story strand enters another, where the child Catherine literally metamorphoses into Bluebeard’s bride.

56

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Louise Bourgeois’s cells are installations the viewer can traverse, transitional spaces. They are also home spaces estranged, their personal materials and found objects strangely apt for Breillat’s attic. In Cell VII (1998) we see nightgowns hanging from hooks, and a model of a spiral staircase. When Brooke Hodge describes the hanging garments in Cell (Clothes) (1996) as ‘evoking the memory of the bodies that once inhabited them’,62 she brings them close to Breillat’s hanging women. Hodge continues: ‘On the back of a white coat, Bourgeois has embroidered the phrase “The cold of anxiety is very real.” The red thread she used is the colour of blood, pain, danger and passion.’63 One of Bourgeois’s artworks from 1994 bears the words ‘Home for Runaway Girls’. Her installation here offers an intertext for Breillat’s capital scene, her story of straying girls, a space whose shadow allows a fuller apprehension of the attic as red room, bloody chamber, space of incubation.

Coda When Perseus cuts off Medusa’s head, the sea is stained with blood and the monster’s power is absorbed in the seaweed. In Ovid this offers the myth of the origin of coral, this substance that hardens at the touch of air. Ovid’s sea nymphs, delighted, ‘tested this miracle’.64 Kristeva muses: ‘The generic word coral could come from coré, which means “young girl”, like Medusa; or it might be an allusion to Coré-Persephone, the queen of the dead, to whom the severed head of the Gorgon belongs.’65 Breillat’s girls, like the sea nymphs, delight in transition and metamorphosis. They are labile yet harden at the touch. Bluebeard offers a delirious cinematic space for opening the mess and glory of moving away from girlhood. Its capital scenes offer conflict, heightening sensual intensity as they work to deepen our reflections on young girls, their desires and their metamorphoses.

Notes 1 Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981 [1979]), 7. 2 When Catherine Breillat was present for a Q&A with Jonathan Romney after the BFI London Film Festival screening of Bluebeard in 2010, she claimed no knowledge of Angela Carter.

‘Away from Girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard

57

3 Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 40. 4 The story of Proserpine and Ceres is told by one of the Muses, reporting the song of Calliope to Minerva, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innis (London: Penguin, 2012 [1955]), 125–31. 5 Ibid., 131. 6 See Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, http://dorothyproject.stephaniedonald.info (accessed 2 February 2016). 7 See Elisabeth Lequeret, ‘Barbe bleue, ma soeur et moi’, and an interview with the director, ‘Breillat dans les chaumières’, Cahiers du Cinéma (Les), no. 649 (October 2009). 8 See Annie Leclerc, Clé (Paris: Grasset, 1989). Bluebeard has recently been retold by Amélie Nothomb in Barbe Bleue (Paris: Albin Michel, 2012). Refrains from the fairy-tale figure in the interior monologue in Marie Darrieussecq’s Bref séjour chez les vivants (Paris: P.O.L., 2001). Reference to Perrault’s fairy tales continues to return as trope in French writing by women, as witnessed, for example, in Catherine Millet’s Riquet à la houppe Millet à la loupe (Paris: Stock, 2003) where the novelist writes about her desire for Perrault’s deformed and ugly Ricky of the Tuft. It is in this context of feminist and sexual exploration that Breillat’s fairy-tale adaptations find their place. Fairy tale is used in particular, by Breillat and Leclerc, to engage in questions about childhood apprehensions of sensuality and desire. 9 Annie Leclerc, Clé, 44. Translations from the French are mine unless otherwise stated. 10 Ibid., 36. 11 Ibid. 12 One aspect of Clé is a reckoning with child pleasure and possibility, as Leclerc remembers, for example, her joy in her blood-red velvet dress, her ‘scarlet happiness’, 54. 13 This first film shows a teenager, Alice, going home from boarding school to her family in the country, and both acting out and imagining (the borderlines are unclear) a series of sex encounters. 14 Maria Tatar, Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 12. 15 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Penguin, 2014 [1976]), 300. 16 Ibid., 300–1. 17 Ibid., 301. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 302. 20 Ibid.

58

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

21 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), 246. 22 Ibid., 244. 23 Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization, 2nd edn (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 30. 24 Ibid., 34. 25 Ibid., 32. 26 Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), 167. 27 Ibid., 168. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Breillat has also made one period drama, with similar attention to sensory detail, the careful pictorial adaptation of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novel, The Last Mistress (2007). 33 In this, they may be aligned with another temporally ambiguous treatment of girlhood, Lucille Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (2004). 34 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (London: Penguin Books, 1998 [1865 and 1872]), 32–3. 35 In this, the film might be compared with Todd Solondz’s vertiginous Palindromes (2004) where seven actors of different ages and genders play the child heroine Aviva, or indeed the serial photographs of Rineke Dijkstra which allow the alignment of changing child selves through time. I’ve summoned these images of the ages of girlhood elsewhere in work on girls in the films of Mia Hansen-Løve. 36 That a child Creton was first there in Breillat’s imagination and artistic vision seems significant in relation to Creton’s filmography as an actress where, for Mia HansenLøve in Goodbye First Love (2011), she plays her character Camille at two different ages (and Hansen-Løve’s work has delicately explored blossoming, changing girl identities, often through the casting of sisters and other family members). 37 See Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 38 Catherine Breillat, Romance: scénario (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma [Petite bibliothèque des Cahiers du cinéma], 1999), 8–9. 39 Ibid., 9. 40 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 107. 41 Karen Lury, The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 136.

‘Away from Girlhood’: Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard

59

42 Ibid., 138. 43 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 65. 44 Claire Clouzot, Catherine Breillat: Indécence et pureté (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma/ auteurs, 2004), 11. 45 Ibid. 46 See Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV, 115. 47 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head, 30. The passage from Ovid reads:  Everywhere, all through the fields and along the roadways he saw statues of men and beasts, whom the sight of the Gorgon had changed from their true selves into stone. But he himself looked at dread Medusa’s form as it was reflected in the bronze of the shield which he carried on his left arm. While she and her snakes were wrapped in deep slumber, he severed her head from her shoulders. 115 48 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head, 30–1. 49 For Marina Warner, the very colour of Bluebeard’s hair is tinted with conflicted affect: ‘The colour blue, the colour of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and of the abyss at once, encodes the frightening character of Bluebeard, his house and his deeds’, From the Beast to the Blonde, 243. 50 Sarah Wright, The Child in Spanish Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 17. 51 Ibid. 52 Bruno Bettelheim discusses the story ‘Bluebeard’ in this context. 53 Karen Lury comments on the ambiguity of relations of girls with adult men in a range of films: ‘There are elements of these little girls’ interactions which their favoured adult partner – touching, flirtation, the expression of a “crush” – which are erotic’, The Child in Film, 4–5. See also Vicky Lebeau’s discussions in the chapter ‘Child, Sexuality, Image’, in Childhood and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 86–134. Breillat’s film shows great melancholy, seriousness, fellow feeling in Marie-Catherine’s developing relations with Bluebeard. She feels for him, and he educates her. Their relations are reimagined outside and beyond social norms. 54 Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 6. 55 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head, 89. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 129. 60 At moments, Lola Creton, filmed by Breillat, recalls the heroines who engage in masochistic scenarios in Romance and Anatomy of Hell (2004).

60

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

61 Frances Morris, Louise Bourgeois, ed. Frances Morris (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), 71. 62 Ibid., 76. 63 Ibid. 64 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 114. 65 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head, 29.

Part Two

Disappearance and Removal

62

4

The Lost Children of Latvia: Deportees and Postmemory in Dzintra Geka’s The Children of Siberia Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Klāra Brūveris1

In August and September 1987 demonstrations in Riga, Latvia, and in the other Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania, openly challenged Soviet rule by recalling the 1918 declarations of independence and protesting the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that brought the Soviets back into the Baltic in 1940. In 1988, there were public commemorations of the forced removals of Latvians from Riga to Siberia in 1941 and 1949. These events marked the emergence of a confident and resurgent Latvian National Independence Movement.2 It was in this post-Soviet climate of historical recuperation that the lost children of Latvia appeared as figures of the nation’s origin. Here, we discuss the complex issue of how childhood memory is reconfigured as national memory, and then placed on an international stage to compete with multiple sites and experiences of human trauma for visibility and condolence.

Deportations The Soviet deportations of Latvian citizens from Latvia took place in two waves. The first occurred on the night of 14 June 1941. Among this group were 2,400 children under the age of ten. Families were targeted if they had members who held positions of power in the independent Latvian government (deemed a fascist puppet organization by the Soviet Union), who were fighting for the Home Guard or who were otherwise prominent in the economic or cultural sectors. The families were taken away in cattle cars, usually with no warning. The men were separated into different cattle cars and transported to Gulags or labour

64

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

camps. The women and children, or at least those who survived the journey, were taken to relocation sites in the Siberian wilderness. They were often dumped in settlements where there was no existing shelter or food supply. Many died from the cold, famine and disease; others were shot.3 The second wave of mass deportations occurred on 25 March 1949. Targeted on this occasion were landowning farming families who were resisting the collectivization of the farms. This group was considered dangerous, as it embodied Latvia’s agrarian tradition – a powerful signifier of the nation’s independence. In this second wave, 42,133 people were deported. Among them were 10,990 children under the age of sixteen, some of whom were taken directly from their classrooms to the trains. Overall, 73 per cent of the deportees were women and children. The focus on children and women underpins Latvian claims that this was a genocidal act of social destruction, albeit one focused on a certain class grouping. The deportees were transported to the same range of camps and settlements as those who had been taken in 1941, although many were allowed to return after the death of Stalin. After their homecoming, however, they continued to suffer persecution in Latvia, as they were now viewed as ‘unreliables’ by the Latvian Soviet Government.4 Survivors have described how they felt excluded by Latvians who had remained and who had either benefited from the redistribution of property, or who simply found the returnees too Russian for comfort.

Documentaries In 2001 an archival televisual project called Sibīrijas Bērni/The Children of Siberia (2001–15) was initiated by Dzintra Geka. The films (sixteen to date) are ideologically aligned to the Latvian government’s aims and objectives and are part of a nationally funded project to research and describe the Latvian experience of the twentieth century.5 Geka’s documentaries have thus been made in a wider context of a nationwide narrative of collective victimhood, intended for Latvians at home and in the diaspora. This narrative, it must be said, has been questioned and challenged, both inside and outside Latvia.6 The Latvian sensitivity to a perceived lack of international acknowledgement of their losses has prompted historical and political debates among scholars and in the media; and it may well be the main reason why public funding has been made available for such an extended film project. It also explains why Geka’s intervention has

The Lost Children of Latvia

65

to be understood as a response to national trauma. Nonetheless, our assessment is that, in Geka’s contribution to these debates, images of child victims are deployed specifically to avoid discussion of more confronting contexts of collaboration, complicity and competition in recent accounts of mid-century European genocide, murder and war. Less controversially, children are deployed to create a simple equation between innocence and victimhood, one that circumvents the difficult contemplation of the historical conditions of the European theatre of war.7 Geka has now made sixteen one-hour films, each of which deals with aspects of deportation, arrival and re-settlement during the late 1930s and 1940s, but most consistently with the deportations of 14 June 1941. Geka’s films detail these events and explore their continuing impact on survivors and, by implication, their impact on Latvia as a nation. They have been screened on Latvian television, usually on the anniversary of 14 June. Many of them focus on child deportees. When adults feature, their main identity is as relatives of children – as mothers, fathers or grandparents. Their position within the family is emphasized over their political, economic or historical role at the time.

Memory and postmemory Using a term coined by Baltic-based, German social theorist Eva-Clarita Onken,8 we suggest that Dzintra Geka has positioned herself as a ‘memory actor’ in her attempt to disseminate her vision of Latvia’s inter-generational national identity. Onken divides memory actors into four categories, each characterized by a particular type of political consciousness: recognition, representation, participation and complicity. These types, or stages, may or may not be developmental, but are most likely to be circumstantial. The fourth, complicity, refers to those who are politically engaged at a high level, quite probably politicians or those with comparable influence. Geka works at the third stage: that is, participation. Her films have received public funding for political reasons and their aim is to influence the formation and maintenance of national memory in a certain way. Geka draws on her own family history to fuel the passion in her films. At the same time, she is working with people at the first and second stages of memory action: the victims themselves and those who bring them into a collective group in order to understand (or recognize) and express (or represent) their continuing sense of loss.

66

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

It might be said that Geka is herself also working at the second stage of action  – representing, and so managing – the personal tragedy of her own father’s forced exile. Geka did not share that exile, but it has undoubtedly shaped her relationship to both Latvia and her understanding of European history. To explain: Geka was born in 1950 between two periods during which her father was deported to Siberia. He was then exiled in perpetuity and Geka did not meet him again until she turned sixteen and made a first pilgrimage to Siberia to track him down.9 That pilgrimage is echoed in the many visits she has made since as a film-maker in the company of other Latvians, both those who were deported as children and those whose parents were deported when young themselves. Geka’s film project has been both the prompt for these returns to the site of the trauma and their record. Onken describes this type of secondary memory and active memorializing as memory consciousness, suggesting that those who produce cultural or political objects from such consciousness are ‘active agent(s) of a particular social memory’. Marianne Hirsch, the European-American theorist of the Holocaust, family portraits and visual elicitation, has written a body of work on the concept of postmemory, beginning with her intervention in the debate about Art Spiegelmann’s Maus in the 1990s.10 Spiegelmann used the graphic novel form to investigate and recount the story of his father’s journey through the camps. Hirsch (writing with Leo Spitzer) argued that such intense experiences of trauma are passed to a second and third generation, sometimes to the point of excluding or undermining the value of current apparently non-traumatic life histories. Hirsch’s work encompasses the spatial as well as temporal disjunctures that the murder and dispersal of an entire continent of European Jewry occasioned. Indeed, in later work Hirsch has traced narratives of return in which diasporic survivors revisit Europe with their children to encounter loss through material traces and records.11 Whereas Onken provides categories of memory agency, Hirsch offers a more complex understanding of the prompts and drivers that underlie the power of memory in individual lives and through social political action. In Geka’s work we recognize an embedded notion of children inheriting the remembered pain of parents and grandparents, as well as suffering the actual disadvantage and psychosocial injuries of a generational assault, their removal from the homeland. Although Geka’s strategy may be open to criticism, especially for the visual claims she makes for equivalence between the Holocaust and other

The Lost Children of Latvia

67

world genocidal events (which we discuss below), the strength of her work lies in the way that she indicates the common ground across many sites of intense or protracted trauma worldwide. Of particular significance here is the way that, in her films, the figure of the child is crucial to these expressions of inherited trauma and political avoidance. Our approach to the questions raised by Geka’s work is influenced by Michael Rothberg’s studies of multidirectional memory and his groundbreaking critique of the binary responses evident in many historical accounts of the Holocaust and other genocidal events. Although Rothberg does not eschew comparison per se, he argues against a competitive approach to genocide history (meaning those that compete with the Holocaust itself), while also cautioning against an exceptionalist account of the Holocaust. His point is not that the extermination of European Jewry was to be in any way normalized or compared easily with other degenerate horrors committed at other times and in other places. Rather, it is that violence is constitutive of other violence and cannot therefore be described without attention to the conditions of its emergence. For Rothberg, then, colonial history readies the colonizer for violence nearer to home, and political exclusions at home allow the colonizer to behave ruthlessly with the tacit support of ‘the people’ when abroad. The reduction of Jewish prisoners in the camp system to bare life, ‘those who might be killed but not sacrificed’,12 was not equivalent to all other forms of genocide. However, nor was it wholly unique, as violence and dehumanization condition perpetrators and systems to more violence and less humanity, and drive systems and people closer to bare life. Geka’s films do acknowledge to some degree the conditions of the removals, albeit in an emotional register that is most legible for fellow Latvians. There is, for instance, a great deal of music on her soundtracks, which layer the sound of Latvian identity onto shots of the Siberian landscape. Her stories of forced removal include the experiences of those adults who lost jobs, professional status and land to both Russian occupiers and to other Latvians, through a process of socially and politically inspired redistribution. Geka, then, represents a generation, or some section of that generation, which insists that the removals of the 1940s should carry the heavy symbolic weight of remembering all economic, social and political slights of the period. In this way of thinking, those who were children at the time of their deportation are metonymic of ‘Latvianness’ itself. As such, these selected childhoods carry forward the momentum of the 1988 bid

68

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

for independence, but – and herein lies a problem – sustained victimhood and innocence thereby become the premise of ongoing national legitimacy. Rothberg’s intervention about the problems associated with invoking the Holocaust in the study of other cases of genocide alerts us to three matters essential to reading Geka’s lost children. First, Geka visually cites another genocide through her cinematic references to Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985).13 Second, she does so without discussing the relevant pan-European events that were more or less concurrent with the events she records and commemorates. So, although Jewish deportees are mentioned, the murder of over 35,000 Jews in Latvia, in the period from the deportations in June 1941 until 1943, is not. Geka fails to acknowledge that the adult deportees were necessarily innocent of those killings, given their absence or their extreme youth, whereas some of the adult Latvians who remained did collaborate with the Nazi occupiers. Third, Geka tells much of her story not only through the lens of survivors’ childhood memory, but also through the postmemory of people who are descended from deportees. In Shoah, by contrast, Claude Lanzmann only worked through testimony of survivors (and perpetrators and bystanders), and refused to countenance photographic evidence in his work. Geka’s approach draws to some extent on a multidirectional sensibility in her use of the Shoah imagery, for example, but it also contains elements of historical obfuscation and competition. It is relevant that Geka worked on the aftermath of the Lanzmann project through Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History.14 Mimicry is an historical act and, as such, one that has ethical implications for disclosure, and for situating difference and divergence from the original text. Lanzmann specifically used train tracks still in place in the 1970s during his shooting, instead of photographic evidence, made mainly by perpetrators, of the trains and tracks as they were in 1941–5 (Figure 4.1). Geka borrows that imagery but overlays it with close-up photographs of children, which invite collective emotional identification on the part of Latvian viewers who will recognize types, dress codes and national or even family facial similarities (Figure 4.2). One interviewee in our research commented on the number of twins featured, as something she felt was peculiar to Riga. Apparently, Latvians have a high proportion of twins in the population.15 Geka also superimposes names of children, thus directly addressing the family memories of many Latvian viewers. There is a question here about what is being covered up as well as what is revealed in Geka’s suture of a trope of exile and murder with specific names and pictures of the Latvian victims.16

The Lost Children of Latvia

69

Latvia The Soviet occupation interrupted a brief period of Latvian independence (1918–40) at a time when the young and very small nation was beginning to imagine its psychological contours and to create systems of government that could supersede earlier German and Russian influence.19 The impact of occupation was critical, happening as it did at a moment of collective identity formation. More controversially, the occupation followed a wartime period in which Latvian and German relations were relatively friendly, not least given the

70

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

despair caused to the elites by the Soviet deportations. The Latvian Home Guard, for example, had active connections with National Socialism, a relationship that was at its most explicit among the political elites after the German occupation in July 1941 and which was exacerbated by forced conscription into the Waffen SS in 1943–4 following the collapse of the Russian campaign.20 In his recent history of the Baltic, Michael North makes a direct connection between the 1941 deportations and the response to German forces the following month. Given that 15,400 people were ‘dragged off ’ during the night of 14 June alone (out of a total of approximately 35,000 Latvians deported), North comments that ‘it is perhaps understandable that Wehrmacht soldiers would have been greeted as liberators when they marched into Riga on July 1’.21 The current Latvian government hotly disputes any systematic connection between the Latvian Legion, which was affiliated to the Waffen SS, and war crimes committed on Latvian soil. Be that as it may, they do admit that individuals who may have joined the legion did bear responsibility for the annihilation of the Jewish population and the destruction of the Riga Ghetto.22 Indeed, by 1943, Geka’s father was himself a member of the legion. The culture of denial is widespread, however. Russia is also loath to admit culpability in relation to the deportations, and the violence inflicted by Russian troops on previous satellite populations. Western European nations are almost entirely ignorant of the panoply of events and in any case see little reason to concern themselves with others’ wartime histories. Latvians experience this silence as an international refusal to acknowledge their national status in any meaningful way and, in reaction; they claim genocide against the Soviet occupiers. How then, might we read these counterfactual and conflicting versions of a deportation as a genocidal event? The centrality of childhood testimony and postmemory for Geka is important. She presents the deportees as essentially innocent: not perpetrators, landowners or class criminals, but children, mothers and fathers. Thus, they are collectively de-politicized, de-historicized and permanently infantilized into an argument for continuing generational sympathy and honour. And, thus, the larger conditions of violence that spawned such tragedies are eliminated from the national record. The image in Figure 4.3 is taken from a website that seeks to maintain Jewish memory in the Baltic. Presumably taken by a perpetrator, the photograph shows Jewish women and children targeted for execution in Latvia. The youth of some of the people in the group appear very different from the wide-eyed portraits of children in happier

The Lost Children of Latvia

71

times that feature in Geka’s films. These young women, pictured at the moment of attack, are far more difficult to read. Are they posing or are they captured by the violence of an aggressive gaze? And do we have any right to guess whether their looks back indicate defiance or knowledge of their imminent murder? Hirsch’s insight is invaluable here. She reads the images of child victims – whether a smiling Anne Frank or perpetrator images of a child with his hands up in the Warsaw Ghetto, or of a little girl cowering behind a small group of semiclad women in a Latvian massacre – as vulnerable to misreading and projection, ‘children invite multiple projections and identifications. Their photographic images, especially when cropped and decontextualized, elicit an affiliative as well as a protective spectatorial look marked by these investments, a look that promotes forgetting, even denial.’24 The child in Figure 4.3 is contextualized only by her re-appearance on a website that ‘defends history’ against what the website owners see as Baltic revisionism. We do not know whether this image has been cropped. We can only assume that it matches testimony elsewhere that women were instructed to strip before being shot. We infer that these women, in underclothes, outside, with armed men in the background, and piles of used clothes (or possibly bodies, it is impossible to see), are indeed about to be massacred. We guess that the youngest is faced by a hostile photographer, because she will not look at us. She is perhaps shamed, and probably terrified. The children in Geka’s films, by contrast, look directly at the lens. They are generally happy and confident in appearance, facing friendly cameras held by parents and friends. These images present the context of clear eyes and warm clothes – everything that they will likely lose in the wrench of deportation – and an identification with their older selves, or those who remain

72

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

to speak about the experience through postmemory. But these family portraits do not reveal the context of Latvia as an actor in a larger staging of conflict and choice. All we can see is that which Susan Sontag and others have noted: that every photograph is a premonition of death. Genocide indicates the intentional destruction of an entire people, defined by ethnicity, an intention that is perhaps of a different order of criminality to selective removal and abandonment and murderous neglect. Nonetheless, there are those who define genocide as a social practice of mass murder and a technology of power oriented to the destruction and reorganization of a social group. Latvian scholars, including Māra Lazda,25 Mārtiņš Kaprāns26 and Veida Skultans,27 argue that both Soviet deportations are central to Latvian national identity as failed attempts to destroy Latvian character.28 Skultans asserts that for Latvians the Soviet deportations have become as central a feature to identity as the Holocaust is, in her view, central to Jewish identity.29 Argentinian writer Daniel Feierstein has propounded the argument that genocide has its roots in social dislocation but does so not to suggest that any form of deportation amounts to genocide. Rather, he is concerned to describe the precise stages of alienation, dehumanization and isolation that precede wholesale slaughter of a population.30 He also notes that a post-genocidal phase is to remember victims as innocent, in the sense that they are not historically situated at the point of slaughter in retrospective accounts. Feierstein is concerned that such de-historicization is counter-productive. It makes it harder to see why groups were targeted, and consequently removes guilt from collaborators, including those passive citizenries which did not resist the process of alienation. (He makes honourable mention of the Danes and the Bulgarians who did resist the deportation of Jewish co-nationals.)31 By using Feierstein’s position to evaluate Geka’s emphasis on children to represent Latvian deportees en bloc, it becomes clear that her move retrospectively describes the deportations and exile as genocide, in no small part because of the youth of many of those removed from the homeland. Survivors’ memoirs were collected after the collapse of the Soviet Union and were used to form a social memory of trauma.32 This in turn led to a construction of a national metanarrative, the central focus of which were traumatic events of large-scale force and violence.33 In the 1990s this metanarrative was key to breaking from the previous conception of Soviet history, and allowed for a new post-Soviet history and identity to form.34 Thus, the Soviet deportations are at once the key to Latvian collective trauma and an affective attractor against which Latvian self-value is measured. The victim identifies with the captor to such an

The Lost Children of Latvia

73

extent that he or she has a reduced sense of self other than in relation to the trauma of origin. In the narrative of deportation, Latvia cannot exist without a constant memory of the Soviet era. It cannot forget without putting the nation at risk of forgetting why it has to remember. This resonates with Hirsch’s argument that postmemory occludes any other way of being in the world.

Children With these complex interactions in mind, we now look more closely at the formal aspects of these sixteen films, and in particular, the ways in which they make their argument and emotional appeal through the figure of the child. The framing argument of this book is that cinematic representations of children are often used to create, manage and articulate collective identity by nations in the throes of transition. The child in film may be deployed as representative, generative, nostalgic or – and this is partially what we suggest here – as a form of expressive repression. Geka’s process is both a documentation of the traumatic events of the past and a psychological assault on collective memory in the present, through what might be termed as – borrowing from Freud – a constant return to a melancholic history created through childhood trauma. Geka leads a number of actual ‘returns’ to the Siberian wilderness in an undisclosed echo of her own journey to meet her father when she was sixteen. The main sequences of the films comprise interviews with elderly Latvians about their childhood deportation experiences. In other sections, returned child deportees, now old, and younger descendants of other deportees travel to Siberia, and elsewhere, in pilgrimages to honour their dead and to revisit the scenes and peoples of their childhoods or those of relatives. During these trips, led by Geka herself and a priest, other Latvians are ‘discovered’ in Siberia, apparently assimilated into a place that they have inhabited for over half a century and mostly unable to recall the Latvian language. (Some remember songs when prompted.) People are filmed in close-up, medium shot or in small groups of pilgrims. There are occasional shots of other inhabitants of the Russian hinterland. They do not generally have speaking roles. They are figures of desolation that complement Geka’s view of the places they inhabit. There are also numerous landscape shots, usually of the Siberian wilderness, or of the sea passage to forsaken island settlements. These function as metaphors for the gulf between the homeland and the places of arrival.

74

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

While Geka’s work serves a larger national project of mourning and identityconstruction, it simultaneously creates an uneasy relationship with its subjects in a quasi-therapeutic scenario of exploring irretrievable loss. The longevity of her project produces an emphatic vision of the long-term aftermath of childhood rupture but it still fails, ultimately, to find a formal aesthetic solution to understanding and moving beyond the deficit model of Latvian identity. In the end, Geka deploys lost childhoods to find Latvia.35 The Latvian sense of abandonment in relation to these traumas is both personal and collective. Personally, most families have a direct link to a deportee. The poignant contrast between the hopeful youth in the old photographs and the tired experience inscribed on the aged faces of interviewees is crucial to the identification demanded of the viewer. Every child is every adult and every deportee is potentially a relative of every Latvian viewer. The viewer is also interpellated into a complaint against larger forces that are not innocent but that claim ignorance. So, we are compelled to share a cycle of childhood trauma, abandonment and frustration. The process places Russia and Western Europe squarely in the roles of the two bad parents. Parents contrive to forget childhood just as the adultchild is striving to remember and shape her version of what happened and who was responsible. The second parent is difficult. Once it was Germany, but now it has become a major force in the even more complex European Union (EU). Although the EU was initially welcomed as an alternative to Soviet communism, now it is unmentionable except within the new pan-European context. The older fascist past, when Germany ‘liberated’ Latvia from the Soviets, both condemned many Latvians to Soviet deportation, and blinded Western Europeans and Russians to the plight of those deported. The ironies abound. Only children are presumed innocent, as Hirsch might point out, and that is why Geka forces the children in her films onto our attention, simultaneously entrenching the parental relationship to European neighbours and asking for absolute sympathy. This presumption of childhood innocence, however, is not extended to Russians. The apparent poverty and backwardness of Siberian Russian lives, even today, are conveyed through shots of scruffy Russian children, loafing teenagers, and teenage mums in Childhood Land of Siberia (2013) (Figure 4.4).36 This rundown and dysfunctional place – the film-maker shows us – has learned nothing from the Baltic peoples it robbed of their childhoods, childhoods that matter. The collective experience of remembering the traumatic event in order to reiterate Latvian identity is achieved through an unwavering address to us: the

The Lost Children of Latvia

75

viewer as Latvian. Interviews with deportees are revisited so that their faces become familiar to us, so that they too are our family, so that we, now presumed Latvians, remember that this was our national family ripped apart. The interviews are usually filmed as headshots, with the camera in medium close-up. The interviewees tend to be filmed at home. The cuts between interview segments illustrate the memory under recount: a child’s photograph, a beloved father in uniform, the image of a train or a forsaken shore. The interviews with old men and women, remembering fragments of the night that ended childhood, are marked by a signature memory, the last or worst thing they can tell us to sum up the terror that they experienced when they were removed: ‘My childhood was very brief ’, ‘You’ve eaten enough of Latvia’s good things’, ‘He dashed her [my cat] against the wall. Such a gesture!’ (Figure 4.5). Despite the project’s apparent intention to honour the dead and articulate the trauma of the survivors, which includes both individuals and the nation itself, there are contradictions in play. For an audience, the continued pain of victims proves and maintains the rights and wrongs of history. Thus, the oneon-one interviews in Latvian homes tend to be psychologically draining for the interviewee and upsetting for the spectator. The close-up is intense and the framing is tight and constrictive. By contrast, the scenes in Siberia, where deportees return either singly or in large groups, are mobile and motivated as the old rediscover childhood spaces, friends and memories. In Childhood Land of Siberia a man stands in the ruins of a wooden house, a house that he and his mother had prepared for construction in the mid-1950s,

76

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

but which another family had finished after they repatriated to Latvia in 1956. He is proud of the resourcefulness of his childhood self and the home that they never built. Another man revisits a tiny shack that he shared with seven others when he was a boy. He begins by explaining that they had some rendering, and even a roof space where he and his brother could sleep in the summer months to make more space for the adults and girls below (Figure 4.6). He notes that their conditions were ‘quite good’. But, as he stands and looks, the camera remains obdurate, and his child’s eyes waver. Confronted by the perspective of Geka’s crew, and – prospectively – fellow Latvians watching the film, he revises that proud, long-held opinion. It is a moment of psychological breakthrough, or breakdown, as his memory of sufficiency, surely linked to some pride in his family’s capacity to achieve that status of ‘quite good’, crumbles, along with the achievement of his mother in making that possible. Is such a revelation for good or ill? What will replace the pride he has in his family’s resilience and his mother’s adaptation to changed and changing circumstance? One thinks of camp survivor Charlotte Delbo’s wrenching description of mothers in Auschwitz who could not protect their young: ‘The women hide the children against their bodies.’38 Or look back at the women in Figure 4.3, and that young girl with her face down, sheltering behind an older woman’s back. Would it not be better in this companion tragedy in Siberia to celebrate a woman’s relative opportunity and her appropriate bravery and note that mothers everywhere do what they can do?

The Lost Children of Latvia

77

The films thus engage in a morally complex development of identity, in which there is a constant struggle between the need to acknowledge the atrocities of the past without inflicting more pain upon the victims. Not to recognize the injuries of the past is, arguably, to side with the enemy, but to remember oppression is to allow ‘the scar to do the work of the wound’.39 And, in Rothberg’s sphere, to remember tragedy only as horror is to remove one’s story from other stories in which Europeans, including Latvians, played a part. The 1949 deportations were intended to remove landowners and to punish those who might resist collectivization and further inward migration of Russian peasants. Unsurprisingly, powerful discourses of rural dispossession feed into Latvia’s internal articulations of its identity, at once mutual and dissonant: the rural and the metropolitan, the thriving survivor-nation that is also the ongoing victim of Soviet rule. The sources of the division between country and city were in place in the 1920s but the Soviet and latterly EU experiences reiterated the class differences associated with it. Indeed, this particular division or ‘identity discourse’ encapsulates much of the drama of parental abandonment evidenced in Geka’s films. The Soviet deportations were a violent way of redistributing land, as well as a way of settling of political scores and wartime differences. In the current EU era, the prominence of rural–urban divisions is a function of European economic expansionism. This has led to what another Latvian identity theorist, Karl E. Jirgens, calls a ‘psyche of rupture’. We see this rupture played out in the traumas registered on the faces of the deportees in Geka’s films, both those

78

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

who returned home to ambivalent welcome as Russianized peasants, the rural dregs, and also those who remained and assimilated into Russian peasant life.40 As we have suggested, certain key images of the films are indebted to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, the epic work of memorialization of the genocide committed against European Jews in the same period. Unlike Geka, Lanzmann eschews the testimony of SS footage and post-liberation footage in favour of a juxtaposition of collected witness, and empty shots of landscape and places. He evokes rather than proves horror. Lanzmann felt that to try to bring the past into the present through visual testimony (photographs of children would be in this category) was to betray and banalize the nature of the crimes committed. ‘The filmed images from the camps have become cultural icons, their very familiarity a memento of their emptiness,’ argues Paula Rabinowitz. ‘Rather it is the word “Treblinka” naming a railway depot that holds the powers of horror. … At this place of death, the train still stops.’41 Geka attempts to juxtapose memory and place, with photographs, testimony and music, to demonstrate a period of extreme cruelty, abuse and a massive death toll. Whereas Lanzmann assumes that we create our own internal vision of the dead, Geka seeks to bring the dead and the living and the lost back to our notice. She needs their names, their faces and the precise coordinates of their journeys to be seen and known. She superimposes a perfect past onto the Russian desolation – a lovely child smiles, innocent of the ice behind her. Another child laughs, innocent of the bleak huts of her likely settlement (Figures 4.7i and 4.7ii). It is at this level of forced affect that Geka’s redeployment dilutes the effectiveness of Lanzmann’s documentary style. The crossing to Siberia is recalled by ex-deportees as their first sight of poverty. One man, then a boy, recalls standing on the shoulders of an older boy, staring in horror at the landscape they entered. He remembers tradesmen joking that they would have a lot of work – unfortunately, they had no idea how much. They imagined setting up as tradesmen, whereas, says the man-once-boy, they had to build their own communities from scratch. These remarks may reflect actual memory, but they are also indicative of the accentuated rural–urban divide between Russia and Latvia. In Latvia, Russia is equated with poverty, such that a girl wearing long petticoats showing below her skirt ‘Russian’-style looks ‘déclassé’. This is not an accurate portrait of Russia in any objective sense, but it does indicate the deep-seated alienation that feeds back into these memories, between ethnic Russians and ethnic Latvians in Latvia itself (where 27 per cent of the population is Russian.) In Childhood Land of Siberia, for example, a man

The Lost Children of Latvia

79

recalls his mother’s transformation from a beautiful young woman in a thin dress to a warrior in harsh rags battling poverty in Siberia, and subsequently broken by the experience of being seen to be poor when she returned to Latvia. Before and after photographs illustrate her humiliation. As a Latvian she has golden curls. As a Siberian deportee she wears a headscarf and stares at the camera as at a prison wall (Figures 4.8i and 4.8ii). Her transformation is extreme, but her child is alive and beside her. She has triumphed in that. Once in Siberia, the films shift their attention from the Latvian survivors to discovering the few Latvians left in the deportation districts. Both groups are often ill at ease, not entirely certain of the film-makers’ intentions. Many of the

80

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

ex-deportees are unable to converse in Latvian, and so they respond in Russian. Albeit gently, their loss of language is questioned, their lives with Russian/ Tartar/Albanian wives or husbands are not celebrated, and they are left – often literally – standing behind a low fence or at a doorway or in a yard, reminded again of who they were and who they are not (Figure 4.9). It is as though their loss of identity must be confirmed and reiterated as a Siberian nightmare in order that Latvia can survive. This is, of course, the process by which an identity of victimhood is formed and sustained. These aged faces are valued in the film as living examples of a wasted Latvian child, a lost Latvian voice. In The Children of Siberia Geka also interviews

The Lost Children of Latvia

81

Russians. Some remember the arrivals (from the Baltic States and from German regions of the period) and claim that the settlement was happy. One (drunk) interviewee lectures the interviewer on Latvia’s continued reliance on Russia for its basic foodstuffs. A Siberian Russian woman describes a scene of random brutal murder of children, and the death through cold and exhaustion of their mothers (Figure 4.10).

82

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Memorialization The continued official Russian silence on the question of the deportations ensures that the Latvian nation remains dead or fatally wounded, at least in the minds of Russian politicians, and as such seriously threatens the sovereignty of the Latvian state. To that extent, the deportations continue to affect the selfhood of Latvians, which remains pre-sovereign and politically infantile in the Russian system of thought.43 Another political rhetoric of childhood obscures historical analysis, perhaps. By implicitly disavowing the atrocity of the occupation and deportations, Russia also fails to acknowledge that a sovereign state and independent people inhabited Latvia’s territory before the invasion, thus eliminating Latvia from their history books entirely. This silence is then doubled by the ignorance of the West, where little is known, or at least openly discussed, of the Baltic States’ experience of the twentiethcentury wars. This ignorance further exacerbates the metanarrative of invisible suffering in the minds of the Latvian people. The West does not acknowledge the deportations of Latvian nationals to Siberia and the Russian Gulags as genocide. For Latvians, not to acknowledge the Soviet actions as genocide is not to recognize the crimes at all. Latvians feel that not only are they invisible as people, but that they are located in an invisible part of the world. Geka’s films represent an attempt to find a voice for this subaltern past and the people connected to it. The films would lock the nation into a perpetually unfulfilled analysis of its abandonment and childish incapacity to be heard, and a compulsion to inherit the memories of their parents. Following Hirsch, Hannah Starman examines how Holocaust survivors transmit the trauma of genocide to their children through particular parenting strategies.44 Geka likewise facilitates the transmission of the trauma experienced by those deported to new generations of Latvians. She does this not only through the repetition of her subject matter, but also through the pilgrimages that she organizes for descendants of deportees. This is most evident in Balance Sheet of Siberia (2011), in which the key protagonist is Liveta Sprūde.45 Liveta’s grandfather, along with his wife and daughter, Liveta’s mother, were deported because of his work building aircraft for the military. In Balance Sheet of Siberia, we see Liveta visiting the final resting place of her grandmother, Otīlija Vītola, in Tolstiy Nos, a settlement village that no longer exists. All that remains are crumbling graves; the bones of those buried there clearly visible through the rotting wood (Figure 4.11).

The Lost Children of Latvia

83

After the memorial ceremony for her grandmother, Liveta tells the story of how she died. She speaks as though she had been there and seen her grandmother’s last breath. This highlights how real these memories are for Liveta, as if they were lived experiences of her own. Then, just before she pushes the cross into the ground, she declares: ‘God somehow brought me to this place, and now I do not want to leave it’ (Figure 4.12). The place, Tolstiy Nos, is established as traumatic through the multiple shots of decaying graves and skeletal remains. Liveta’s words suggest a desire to inflict suffering upon herself so as to be closer to those in her family who died during their exile. This is not her only pilgrimage to Siberia; she goes many times and appears in many of Geka’s documentaries. Similarly, the priest who travels with Geka’s crew to perform religious ceremonies at the gravesites of lost family members encourages this continuity of suffering and also claims embodiment. ‘If we could only get into a time machine and travel back to June 1941 in Latvia,’ he proclaims before Liveta’s grandmother’s memorial service, ‘then we could be sure that some, if not all of us would be next to them in the same place and time, and also in suffering and death’. The emphatic use of the words if we could only implies continuity and empathy, if not embodied identification. Is this meant to highlight that the pilgrims too want to be there with those who suffered, with the priest as chief sacrificial body, as though these Latvians are on a par with the body and wounds of the crucified Christ? That is certainly implied in the rhetoric of endless return to the place of death, articulating a level of desire to inflict

84

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

the trauma of the deportations upon oneself. It also indicates a philosophical gulf between Lanzmann, and those like him who describe the extermination and concentration camps of the European Holocaust as beyond historical description, and Geka’s ethno-religious returns to sites with the flags and prayers of Latvia. The words of the priest also separate those ‘who could be killed but not sacrificed’, the bare life of despair, from these children who are now redefined as sacrificial for the future of Latvian selfhood. Geka’s Children of Siberia films both invoke and record an expression of intense physical closeness to the past. This is achieved through her memorialization practices as memory agent on behalf of Latvia and the filmed actions of those she records in their multiple returns to a family and a common site of childhood trauma. The separation between national subject, film protagonist and profilmic event is therefore minimal. It recalls the reliance on visual cinematic representation of modern subjectivity, and as such is a peculiarly twentiethcentury approach to a reclamation of childhood and national consciousness.

Notes 1 The original research for this chapter was funded by the Australian Research Council. We thank anonymous readers as well as Child and Film Network colleagues for their assistance in shaping the paper.

The Lost Children of Latvia

85

2 Tony Judt, Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage Books, 2010), 645. 3 Valters Nollendorfs, Uldis Neiburgs, ‘Briefing Paper 04: Soviet Mass Deportations from Latvia’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Latvia, 16 August 2004, http://www.mfa.gov.lv/en/policy/history/briefing-papers/briefing-paper4/ (accessed 10 January 2015). 4 Nollendorfs, Neiburgs, ‘Briefing Paper 04’. 5 See, for example, the national research programme on Latvian identity. http:// erawatch.jrc.ec.europa.eu/information/country_pages/lv/supportmeasure/ support_0038. 6 http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Latvia.html#3 is one of a number of websites seeking a new historical approach. Meanwhile, the official account refuses to accept any widespread involvement, placing the blame of a few ‘co-opted’ individuals. http://www.mfa.gov.lv/en/policy/information-on-the-history-of-latvia/ briefing-papers-of-the-museum-of-the-occupation-of-latvia/the-holocaust-ingerman-occupied-latvia. 7 See Marianne Hirsch’s discussion of the deployment of perpetrator images of the Warsaw Ghetto and their re-use by post-war artists and memorialists. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia, 2012), 212: 127 ff. 8 Eva-Clarita Onken, ‘Memory and Democratic Pluralism in the Baltic States – Rethinking the Relationship’, Journal of Baltic Studies 41, no. 3 (2010): 282. 9 Ilze Nāgela, ‘Intervija ar kinorežisori Dzintru Geku: Par filmēšanu, Sibīriju un dzīvi’, Laikraksts Latvietis, 10 May 2012, http://laikraksts.com/raksti/raksts. php?KursRaksts=2399 (accessed 14 July 2015). 10 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 18. See, especially, the reference to Frieda Wolfinger, a survivor of the Riga Ghetto. 11 Hirsch, The Generation of Post-Memory, 205 ff. 12 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 54. 13 Valters Nollendorfs and Uldis Neiburgs, ‘Briefing Paper 03: The Holocaust in German-Occupied Latvia’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Latvia, 16 August 2008, http://www.mfa.gov.lv/en/policy/information-on-the-history-oflatvia/briefing-papers-of-the-museum-of-the-occupation-of-latvia/the-holocaustin-german-occupied-latvia (accessed 14 November 2015). 14 This is now known as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, recording visual testimonies of Holocaust survivors in Latvia. The project records testimonies of other genocide survivors (such as the Armenian genocide).

86

15

16

17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema Geka pursues her subsequent Latvian project so as to include Latvian experience in these larger narratives of genocide in Europe’s early-twentieth-century history. Maruta Z. Vitols, ‘Investigating the Past, Envisioning the Future: An exploration of post-1991 Latvian documentary’, in A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (Malden, Oxford, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 335. This recognition is not borne out by contemporary data, which indicate that Latvia is now on the lower end of the scale for multiple foetuses in Europe. We have not found evidence of the changing patterns in birth rate from the 1930s, however. EURO-PERISTAT Project with SCPE and EUROCAT. European Perinatal Health Report. The health and care of pregnant women and babies in Europe in 2010. May 2013, see www.europeristat.com. Trains and train tracks are central images used to remember the Soviet deportations in many other eastern European cinemas, for example, In the Crosswind (Martti Helde, 2014). Undoubtedly, however, Shoah sets the standard for understanding the train as a route to death, and recalling the inevitability of the destination. Much earlier Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955) did also reference trains but through the use of archival material and perpetrator footage. The Children of Siberia, DVD, directed by Dzintra Geka (2001; Riga: SB Studio, 2001), Film. Shoah. DVD, directed by Claude Lanzmann (1985; New York: New Yorker Films, 2005), Film. Michael North, The Baltic, A History (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 228 ff. Unsurprisingly, the history and motivations of this period are hotly contested by Latvians, especially Russian-speaking Latvian residents. We do not have the space here to do justice to the perspectives of all relevant arguments but note that Geka’s stance is not the only approach to the period in cultural discourse in Latvia today. See North, The Baltic, 256 ff. North, The Baltic, 256. Inesis Feldmanis, Karlis Kangeris, ‘The Volunteer SS Legion in Latvia’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Latvia, 13 February 2002, http://www.mfa.gov.lv/ en/policy/information-on-the-history-of-latvia/the-volunteer-ss-legion-in-latvia (accessed 4 August 2015). http://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Arajs-komando.jpg. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 142. Māra Lazda, ‘Women, Nation, and Survival: Latvian Women in Siberia 1941–1957’, Journal of Baltic Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 1. Mārtiņš Kaprāns, Olga Procevska and Laura Uzule, ‘Persistence and Transformation of Cultural Trauma: Commemoration of Soviet Deportations in

The Lost Children of Latvia

27 28

29 30

31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39

40

41 42

87

the Media of Post-Soviet Latvia (1987-2010)’, in Trauma Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice, ed. Catherine Barrette, Bridget Haylock and Danielle Mortimer (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011), 245–52. Veida Skultans, ‘Looking for a Subject: Latvian Memory and Narrative’, History of the Human Sciences 9, no. 4 (1996): 65–80. The contemporary research landscape in Latvia is dominated by scholarly work on identity. The narratives identified through this research include: Latvia – the farming nation, Latvia – the singing nation, Latvia – the cosmopolitan centre of trade between East and West and Latvia – the nation of invisible victims. Skultans, ‘Looking for a Subject’, 65. Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social practice: Re-organizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Junta (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 101ff, 209f. Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice, 113. Kaprāns, Procevska and Uzule, ‘Persistence and Transformation of Cultural Trauma’, 7. Dovile Budryte, ‘Experiences of Collective Trauma and Political Activism: A Study of Women “Agents of Memory” in Post-Soviet Lithuania’, Journal of Baltic Studies 41, no. 3 (2010): 331. Kaprāns, Procevska and Uzule, ‘Persistence and Transformation of Cultural Trauma’, 2. Lazda, ‘Women, Nation, and Survival’, 1. Childhood Land of Siberia, DVD, directed by Dzintra Geka (2013; Riga: SB Studio, 2013), Film. Remember or Forget, DVD, directed by Dzintra Geka (2006; Riga: SB Studio, 2006), Film. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 8. Leon Wieseltier in, Garrath Williams, ‘Dangerous Victims: On Some Political Dangers of Vicarious Claims to Victimhood’, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (2008): 77. Karl E. Jirgens, ‘Fusions of Discourse: Postcolonial/Postmodern Horizons in Baltic Culture’, in Baltic Postcolonialism, ed. Violeta Kelertas (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006), 60. Paula Rabinowitz, ‘Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory’, History and Theory 32, no. 2 (1993): 135. Greetings from Siberia, DVD, directed by Dzintra Geka (2004; Riga: SB Studio, 2004), Film.

88

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

43 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 44 Laura Jeffrey and Matei Candea, ‘The Politics of Victimhood’, History and Anthropology 17, no. 4 (2006): 287–96. 45 Balance Sheet of Siberia, DVD, directed by Dzintra Geka (2011; Riga: SB Studio, 2011), Film.

5

Among the Nations: Children as Czechs, Germans and Jews in Post-1980 Czech Cinematic Representations of the Second World War1 Jan Láníček

This chapter represents an historian’s analysis of two Czech films and one television mini-series that deal with the fate of children caught up in the CzechGerman conflict when it was at its most intense around the time of the Second World War – the decade from 1938 to 1947.2 All three works were made in the period after 1980, and so are themselves revealing about the way children were depicted during the final years of communist rule and after its overthrow by the Velvet Revolution of 1989. The films are Cuckoo in a Dark Forest (Kukačka v temném lese, Antonín Moskalyk, 1986) and The Spring of Life (Pramen života, Milan Cieslar, 2000). Both address the question of Nazi ‘Germanization’ of Czech children and their attempted absorption into the German nation. The protagonists are young or teenage girls, one of whom is taken away from her Czech parents and sent to German families for a ‘proper upbringing’ (Germanization), while the other is asked to join the Nazi racial programme and provide children for the German nation. The mini-series, The Train of Childhood and Expectation (Vlak dětství a naděje, Karel Kachyňa, 1984, 1988), tells the story of the war in one Czech city through the eyes of a small girl. The American historian Tara Zahra’s excellent monograph Kidnapped Souls provides a useful framework for thinking about these films. Zahra shows how, in the conflict over Bohemian and Moravian territories during the first half of the twentieth century, both Czech and German nationalists tried to claim children from either side of the national barrier as their offspring in order to legitimize their supposed right to national domination. One relevant implication of

90

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

this observation, which frames my account here, is that in the imagination of ethnonationalists, children epitomize and embody a nation’s existence. Such ethnonationalists consequently believe that a forced removal of children, or their denationalization, could mean that the nation would not develop properly and its future would be in peril.3 This symbolic national status may suggest that children can play only a rather passive historical role, and it is the case that the three films I discuss do represent children as innocent witnesses and victims of the brutal Nazi regime. However, I also argue that all three child heroes ultimately take on the role of empowered actors. Although we tend to perceive children as powerless victims of an oppressive regime, they in fact possess the power to influence events and they do not figure purely as symbols of innocence.

Context The history of twentieth-century German-Czech disputes stretches back as far as the thirteenth century, when German settlers began to colonize the border regions of the territories that nowadays form the Czech Republic. The influx of the ethnic German population increased after the Bohemian lands became part of the Habsburg Empire in the sixteenth century. When independent Czechoslovakia was established in 1918, over three million Germans, almost 23 per cent of the whole population, lived within its borders. After initial problems the republic stabilized, but the problem of minorities, in particular of the Germans, eventually led to its demise following the Munich Conference of late September 1938. Six months later, in March 1939, Hitler’s armies destroyed all remaining semblance of the Czechs’ independence and the Bohemian lands were incorporated into the Third Reich. Although the German occupation of Czechoslovakia was not as brutal as in other countries in Eastern Europe, 360,000 Czechs, Slovaks and Ruthenes (approximately 277,000 of them Jews) did not survive the war. In the following two years, between 1945 and 1947, Czechs – with the approval of the major Allied powers (United States, Britain and the Soviet Union) – executed a massive population transfer that forced almost all the Germans who had lived in the Czech territories to leave and resettle in occupied Germany. (Some historians consider this to have been a case of ethnic cleansing.)4 The German occupation and the subsequent expulsion from Czechoslovakia of over two and a half million Germans, which was presented as an attempt to end the centuries-long conflict, played a key role in the formation of the Czech

Among the Nations

91

national historical narrative and consciousness after the Second World War. The brutality of the German regime in the Bohemian lands served as a justification for the post-war expulsion.5 As elsewhere in Europe, Czech and Slovak societies employed selective commemoration of wartime events to shape a collective memory of the war, as well as of the Holocaust. The themes of resistance and victimization were the main features of the Czech ‘master-narrative’ of the war. Any particularization of the conflict, in the sense of emphasizing the particular fate of the Jews, as the main victims of the Nazi racial programme, was rejected. The fact that the Jews formed a decisive majority of the victims of the German occupation was silenced in the official collective memory.6 After the end of the war in 1945, many Czech artists, and not least film-makers, attempted to represent the final traumatic chapters of the interethnic conflict in the Bohemian lands. In the early years, films like Uloupená hranice (1947), Němá barikáda (1947) and Nástup (1952) explored themes around German brutality in the Czech territory even before the Nazi occupation, the role of the Bohemian Germans as Trojan horses undermining interwar Czechoslovakia, and the brutality of the German regime during the war. These cinematic tales of German barbarism were initially designed to justify the post-war transfer of the German population from Czechoslovakia and later to serve as a reminder of a horrific past. They also became a unifying force for the Czech population, as well as offering a justification for the close cooperation with the Soviet Union, the only power that could protect Czechoslovakia against the revival of German imperialism and revanchism. Although Czechoslovak cinema in the 1960s produced several major feature films depicting the fate specifically of Jews during the war, the theme of the Judeocide (the Holocaust) was marginalized in the wake of the diplomatic freeze in Czechoslovak-Israeli relations in 1967. After this, only minor references to the fate of Czech Jews found their way into films about the war experience in the Bohemian lands. The widely acclaimed 1979 film The Golden Eels, for example, which depicts the fate of a Czech-Jewish family during the war through the eyes of the youngest son, rarely mentions the word ‘Jew’ at all, even though the audience had to be aware that it was based on an autobiographical novel by the Czech-Jewish writer Ota Pavel (previously Otto Popper). Similarly, the films I am analysing here rarely introduce the viewer to the specificities of the Jewish fate during the war, though a gradual thaw in the second half of the 1980s did see an increase in the number of references to the fate of the Jewish minority. (Smrt krásných srnců/Forbidden Dreams in 1986 would be one example.7)

92

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Children and war As the films I am discussing are not widely known internationally, and in order to bring to light similarities and variations in the narrativization of children’s removal and Germanization, it may be helpful briefly to summarize their individual plots. The first to be made, in the early 1980s, was the mini-series, The  Train of Childhood and Expectation. It was based on an autobiographical novel by Věra Sládková. The young Věrka, who is not even ten years old at the beginning of the mini-series, lives with her parents in a small border town with a predominantly German population. Her parents, both Czechs, are from the outset confronted by growing pro-Nazi sympathies among the local Germans, and her father, a fervent Czech patriot, is threatened by the local German paramilitary troops. After her terminally ill mother commits suicide, Věrka’s father finds a new wife; a big, gutsy woman nicknamed ‘the Amazonian’. Forced to leave town when the borderlands are annexed by the Third Reich, the family moves to Věrka’s grandparents’ house in Brno, in the inner Czech territories. Věrka matures during the war, living under the wing of her overprotective stepmother, but is also witness to the suffering of her family members and the Czech people at large at the hands of the Nazis. Věrka and both her parents live to see the liberation and after the war victoriously return to their original home, from where the once dominant German population had been expelled. Rather than glorifying any overt Czech heroism, The Train of Childhood and Expectation is a part-comedic, part-melancholic story of ordinary people surviving German occupation and coping with the difficulties of life during the war. Cuckoo in a Dark Forest (1986) and The Spring of Life (2000) both delve into the subject of the forced Germanization of the Czech people by the Nazi regime. The same author, Vladimír Körner, wrote the screenplays for both. In Cuckoo in a Dark Forest, young Emilka Fejfarová (twelve at the beginning of the film and fifteen in 1945) is taken by the Germans from her parents who had been active in the resistance. Her father is murdered by the Gestapo and her mother is sent to a concentration camp. Körner based his screenplay on a factual book, Děti s cedulkou (Children with Tags), by Eduard Pergner and Karel Slabý, which reconstructed one of the most powerful incidents during the German occupation of the Bohemian lands, the story of the Lidice children.8 In June 1942, the Germans razed the village of Lidice in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Deputy Reichsprotektor (the German administrator) of Bohemia and Moravia, by Czech and Slovak paratroopers sent from London.

Among the Nations

93

All adult men (non-Jews) were executed and women sent to the concentration camps. Some of the children were sent to be raised by German families, but the majority were gassed in the Chełmno extermination camp. The story of Lidice is the most sacred element in the Czech collective memory of the war and its traumatic symbolism cannot be exaggerated.9 In the film, Emilka, who looks ‘Aryan’ with her blonde hair and blue eyes, is sent to a special German camp for re-education and later selected for adoption by the fearsome commandant of the local concentration camp, Stutthof. This character’s name – Otto Kukuck – is an intentional play on words; in Czech, ‘ku ku’ represents the noise made by a cuckoo. It is not entirely clear why Körner and the director Antonín Moskalyk decided to use the character of a cuckoo in the title and in Kukuck’s name. A cuckoo lays an egg in another bird’s nest and pushes all the other eggs out of the nest. Of course, Emilka was not sent to Germany by her parents: she was kidnapped by the Germans and then bought for 50 marks by Kukuck. When her German classmates bully her, they repeatedly remind her that she does not belong among them and accuse her of being a ‘cuckoo’, as if her biological parents had sent her to Germany and asked her to pretend to be a German. Emilka stays with Kukuck and his wife until the end of the war. After the liberation, Kukuck abandons his disabled wife and tries to escape, taking Emilka with him. His identity is revealed in a Displaced Persons camp, with the help of Emilka, and he is lynched by former camp inmates. At the end of the film Emilka is reunited with her mother, who survived the camps (as did 153 of the 184 women from Lidice). Körner returned to the subject of German racial experiments in The Spring of Life in 2000. Whereas Emilka in Cuckoo in a Dark Forest is forcibly removed from her parents, the protagonist of the later film is the teenage daughter of a German father and a Czech mother, who is selected by her own community, following secret Nazi racial screenings, for the programme of creating pure Aryan children for the Führer. Grétka does not resist this privilege and voluntarily leaves her father to travel to an SS castle, Sanatorium Isolde, in occupied Poland. There Grétka and other girls from all over Europe wait for the ceremonial evenings when they are supposed to mate with selected German soldiers, mostly young SS officers. Grétka’s partner is repelled by her fear and also suffers a mental breakdown as a reaction to his memories of the mass murders and rapes he committed in Eastern Europe. Instead, then, she has sex with Leo, the son of the castle’s departed Jewish owner, who is being held as a hostage and servant and with whom she had fallen in love soon after her arrival. Leo is murdered

94

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

the next day by Grétka’s SS partner, but she eventually has Leo’s baby. Later, all the children born in the castle are kidnapped and removed by the Nazis. Grétka, who rebels after finding out about Leo’s death, is sent to a concentration camp, but survives and returns to her home village. The film ends without revealing the fate of her half-Jewish son, who lives at an unknown location, presumably being raised as a part of the purest Aryan race. Each of the films discussed here was made under different conditions and had a distinct fate after its release. Both Cuckoo in a Dark Forest and The Train of Childhood and Expectation were made during communist rule. They were produced at the time when Czechoslovakia was preparing for the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet liberation at the end of the Second World War and were to be the contribution of the Czech film and television industry to the celebrations. Cuckoo in a Dark Forest generated a good deal of publicity during its shooting and also on its release. It was considered a worthy contribution to the commemoration. In contrast, The Train of Childhood and Expectation, with its melancholic atmosphere and lack of obvious heroics, did not fit into the framework of what the communist watchdogs considered a proper representation of the war and of the Czech struggle against the Germans: the familiar narrative of victimization and resistance. Shortly after shooting finished, production  of the series was suspended and the director, Karel Kachyňa, spent four years struggling with the authorities and editing the footage, before he received the green light at the beginning of 1989, just a few months before the Velvet Revolution. Even then, the television broadcast received only minor publicity and was relegated to unpopular programming slots (Hrdinství po  česku). The  Spring of Life was released ten years after the Velvet Revolution, in 2000. Even though it received positive reviews and the script was nominated for a Czech Lion Award (Český lev), the response to the film could not even remotely be compared to the publicity surrounding the release of Cuckoo in a Dark Forest, at the point when the state-controlled cinema was celebrating the anniversary of the Soviet liberation.

Narrating the child As my plot summaries indicate, the three films use a number of similar strategies in their narration of children’s experiences during the trying time of war and its aftermath. The first of these is the presentation of children as defenceless

Among the Nations

95

victims of brutality and as witnesses to actions committed by adults, both their defenders and adversaries. Věrka, Emilka and Grétka all watch helplessly as the Germans gradually restrict the lives of the Czech people, as they persecute their victims and directly shape the fate of the child heroes. This perspective is most strongly pronounced in The Train of Childhood and Expectation, partly perhaps because Věrka is the youngest of the three heroines. Directors of war films often use methods like this to stress the brutality and senselessness of the German occupation machinery. The audience is prompted to feel compassion for the children, who cannot be blamed for any wrongs that the Czechs could have ever committed against the Germans. The nature of German brutality is accentuated all the more when we see children suffering.10 The fact that all three children are girls reinforces the message. In the men’s world of war, weapons and mass killings, children, and in particular girls, appear to be entirely powerless. Věrka remains powerless almost until the very end of the film. Her story is mostly shaped by the Germans, as well as by her new overprotective mother. Even if she tries to influence the fate of other people, especially that of her elderly and sick aunt Amálka, who lives with a brutal Germanizing Czech, or later that of her work colleague Mrs Greberová, who divorced her Jewish husband, which led to his deportation to Auschwitz, Věrka is not successful. In spite of her interventions, her aunt and Mrs Greberová both end their lives by jumping out of windows. The feeling of powerlessness is omnipresent throughout The Train of Childhood and Expectation but is particularly strong when we see Věrka witnessing the suicides of those two women. Věrka is simply not in a position to mitigate the impact of momentous historical events on the lives of other people. In all three films the child protagonists are drawn into the vicious circle of the national conflict between the Germans on the one side and their victims on the other. Beyond the omnipresent evil power of Nazism, both Věrka and Emilka encounter particular power-figures, who haunt them in their struggle to survive the war. In The Train of Childhood and Expectation, the German barber’s apprentice Sepp, himself still a child (or teenager), constantly torments Věrka. At the beginning of the film he is much older and taller, which accentuates the imbalance of powers between both the characters, and he bullies her on their way to school. Later, wearing the uniform of the local pro-Nazi militia, he threatens her father with hanging, and in Brno, he denounces her mute uncle for the distribution of illegal prints. Indirectly, Sepp thus causes the death of both Věrka’s grandparents, who do not survive the shock caused by the Gestapo search in their flat. (Her uncle is murdered in a concentration camp.)

96

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Throughout the mini-series, Věrka is haunted by the memory of Sepp, now fighting in the Wehrmacht. The character shows how the film-makers utilize children and teenagers to emphasize the particular message they try to convey. Sepp is a deplorable character, but the fact that he is still a youngster serves as an accusation against the brutal Nazi regime and its propaganda, which turned the young and inexperienced members of the German nation into monsters. Although we clearly perceive Sepp to be the epitome of evil, we cannot resist the feeling that his behaviour is not entirely his own fault, that he was simply misled by the German nationalists who moulded the character and psyche of children and turned them into willing henchmen of the regime. The depiction and narrative deployment of the main characters in Cuckoo in a Dark Forest and The Spring of Life are more problematic. Emilka, after her adoption, lives in the house of a brutal Nazi murderer. Kukuck, who in the camp he runs enjoys torturing and killing prisoners, is otherwise an insecure man, under the thumb of his strict Germanic wife, who is confined to a wheelchair after an accident.11 Kukuck loves Emilka as if she were his real daughter. In her presence he behaves decently. He buys her presents, and he enjoys teaching her to play the piano or to shoot his rifle. Emilka also gradually learns to appreciate his presence, especially as a way of opposing and demeaning her hated stepmother. Nevertheless, the seemingly powerful Kukuck entirely misreads Emilka’s feelings when he persuades himself that he might re-educate her in the German spirit and make her accept him as her father. Likewise, in The Spring of Life, Grétka’s main adversaries are not straightforward characters at all. The woman who is director of the SS Sanatorium appears to be a fanatical adherent of Nazi racial theories. Only later do we find out that, apart from working for the SS, she was looking after Leo, the Jewish boy, and had been the mistress not only of his father, but also of his mother. Although she knows that Grétka’s child is Jewish, she does not disclose this fact to her superiors. (She even gives Grétka an address where she might find the boy after the war, though the place is later destroyed by Allied bombing.) There is also no ultimate confrontation between the director and Grétka. We learn only that she commits suicide at the end of the war, at the point when Soviet soldiers enter the castle. Another strategy common to the three films is the allusion to fairy-tale motifs in order to evoke the theme of childhood innocence in times of war.12 When her mother dies in The Train of Childhood and Expectation, Věrka thinks that she has only fallen asleep like Snow White, bewitched by a German beggar who came to their house and cursed at her, calling her ‘the Czech Swine’. At the funeral, Věrka

Among the Nations

97

demands that her mother be put in a glass coffin to allow a prince to liberate her from eternal sleep – although even she admits that her rather comical father is probably not the archetypal prince to take on the role. Similarly, in Cuckoo in a Dark Forest, Emilka is sent to the dark forest (Germany), a place that in the child’s imagination has the mythical symbolism of insecurity and danger, and the place of the unknown. (Recall the fairy-tale Hansel and Gretel about a gingerbread house located deep within a forest.13) Although the main characters in fairy-tales often encounter adversaries much stronger and more powerful than themselves, they are usually able to prevail in the fight between good and evil. Trickery, cunning and courage are traits often positively associated with child heroes in fairy tales (such as in Hansel and Gretel). These tropes are also symbolically evoked in the public perception of the modern Czech-German conflict, not least in the oft-employed image of Czechs as David fighting the German Goliath. (This was evident even before the war in the famous satirical theatre play Heavy Barbora (1937) by Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich.) There is thus a fairy-tale dimension to the way that, with the progress of events, all three heroines become empowered actors, who through their wit and shrewdness overcome their adversaries. Věrka is haunted by Sepp and constantly lives in the fear that he will come back from the war. Yet, during their final encounter in the first post-war days, when Sepp tries to force her to bring him civilian clothes, she finally rebels and calls to a Red Army soldiers patrol that kills him. This courageous act finally liberates her from her tormentor. In Cuckoo in a Dark Forest, Emilka finds out only halfway through the film that her radiant, allegedly decent stepfather is in fact a brutal concentration camp commandant. Emilka is never entirely Kukuck’s helpless victim. At one point she complains about the German classmates who are bullying her. They are brutally beaten by Kukuck and his guards, and some are sent to work for the war industry. Emilka tricks Kukuck into believing that she loves him as her father, and, as it seems, he even imagines their life together after the war is over. In the end, however, Emilka, who, thanks to trickery or courage, survives the war living in Kukuck’s household and also enjoys the luxurious life of the commandant’s family, brings about his ultimate downfall. When he, in civilian clothes, tries to escape justice, Emilka intentionally discloses his real identity to a group of camp survivors who stone him to death. Emilka is not interested in his fate and leaves the scene before its bloody finale. The innocent child thus turns out to possess significant power to shape her personal fate, as well as that of significant adult

98

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

adversaries. It is symptomatic of most of the war films that children display the attributes of adult heroes and shape the progress of events in a manner that we would not anticipate.14 A major piece of trickery, however, is pulled off by Grétka in The Spring of Life. At the beginning of the film she follows the order to move to the SS castle with apparent passivity, her acquiescence influenced in no small part by the apathy and alcoholism of her father, the death of her mother and the fact that after her selection she is rejected by her Czech friends. Once at the castle, however, Grétka quickly begins to make her own choices. She is caught trying to escape after the SS doctor surgically removes her hymen prior to the intercourse with the SS soldier. She sleeps with Leo instead of her designated SS partner. She rebels openly against the Nazis and ends up in a concentration camp. Nevertheless, her trick of substituting Leo for her Aryan ‘stud’ in the end ensures the continuation of Jewishness, though now in the midst of the Aryan master race. In one move, Grétka fools both the Nazi hangmen and the Nazi racial scientists. The symbolism of the stories and of the child protagonists for the collective memory of the war is another theme to recur in the three films. In The Train of Childhood and Expectation, Věrka undoubtedly embodies the Czech nation: her father repeatedly calls her ‘a daughter of the homeland’ or ‘the brave female border guard’. It therefore seems inevitable that, at the end of the film, she should finally get rid of Sepp, the symbol of the German betrayal and German racial onslaught against the Czechs. It is significant that she achieves this ‘cleansing’ with the help of Soviet soldiers and a Czech communist underground fighter. The message is clear: Soviet weapons liberated Věrka, the embodiment of the Czech nation, from her German enemy and thus safeguarded the existence of the Czech nation for the future. In the final scene, Věrka’s stepmother finds out that she is expecting a child, further emphasizing the beginning of a new life for the Czech nation after the end of the war in what used to be predominantly German territories in the Czech borderlands. In Cuckoo in a Dark Forest, Emilka, although still a teenager, intentionally and determinedly opposes any effort to be transformed from a Czech into a German. At the beginning of the film, in a powerful scene when the kidnapped children undergo drilling in the German re-education camp, instead of reciting the drilling verses in German, as demanded by the female wardens, Emilka mocks the whole process by reciting in her mind derisory verses in Czech. Using the Czech language becomes her way of resisting the Germanization attempts of the Nazi regime, as well as a way to cope with the new and unknown situation.15 Later, three years of residence

Among the Nations

99

in the house of an elite Nazi family have not broken her Czech spirit nor made her into a German. According to Antonín Moskalyk, the director, this was one of the main messages of the film.16 Emilka uses her weakness as a strength. Her available weapons are innocence and cunning: on one occasion, she calls Kukuck ‘daddy’ and she repeatedly uses her childlikeness as a veil to hide her true feelings. Such shows of weaknesses enable her to manipulate her brutal stepfather. The attempt to Germanize her has been unsuccessful. Here we need to remember the story of Lidice, the symbol of Czech suffering during the war. In the same spirit, Emilka – a simple Czech girl and symbol of the Czech nation – has survived the war as a Czech. Having a baby by a Jewish man also bears a deeper symbolic meaning when we take into account Nazi racial theories and the hierarchy of races as established by the regime’s racial scientists. The Lebensborn programme was designed to breed the ‘purest’ Aryan people. Instead of helping the Nazis with their eugenics programme, in The Spring of Life, Grétka (unintentionally) ensures that the ‘race’ that was to be exterminated continues to live among the future Nazi racial warriors. As the SS female doctor says, ‘We have cheated death.’ Nevertheless, this perception raises problematic questions. It seems to force us implicitly to accept the validity of the Nazi racial theories, meaning that each ‘race’ has a set of traits that are immutable by upbringing and education. If we reject these charlatan theories, we are left with the less reassuring image of Grétka’s son being brought up by a group of racial warriors, quite possibly hating his own (unknown) Jewish heritage.

Conclusion Half a century after the Second World War, in the 1980s and 1990s, the CzechGerman conflict continued to intrigue and inspire Czech film-makers. Even though the communist regime deployed a particular depiction of German antiCzech policies to justify the need for closer cooperation with the Soviet Union, films made during the 1980s went beyond any simplistic depiction of the Nazi brutality. They evoked national trauma, but at the same time they reaffirmed the difficulty of the relations between – at that time still – Czechoslovakia and her western neighbour. As Karen Lury has observed, directors and scriptwriters use children to ‘manipulate their audience’, because they know that ‘tears and emotion erupt when the innocent – dumb animals, little children – are seen to

100

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

suffer’.17 Children are the symbol of innocence, and the brutality of the war and the German occupation regime seem even less understandable when its victims are defenceless and blameless children. The films functioned as a warning for the future, helping to spread (perhaps against the intent of the directors), the idea of Czech-German divide, not only in the Czech collective memory but also in the contemporary world. Yet, the films analysed here do not simply depict children as victims of Nazism. In each case – sometimes sooner (Cuckoo in a Dark Forest), sometimes later (The Train of Childhood and Expectation) – they become empowered actors who are able to shape their fate, as well as the fate of the German aggressors. Their cunning and trickery symbolize the fight of the weak against the strong, as was the case with the Czech resistance against the German invasion and occupation. The stories in these films have several layers. Apart from depicting the suffering of civilians under the Nazis, the children function to epitomize Czech defiance, on the one side, and to highlight Nazi brutality, on the other. In this way, they are used as a metaphor for the suffering (as well as resistance) of the Czech nation under German domination, and the final happy end represents the redemption of the Czech nation, which has survived the racial onslaught. The ethnic boundaries between Czechs and Germans are depicted in film as the divide between Czech children and German adults. The innocent, blameless, though cunning children face powerful and brutal German adults. This divide is evident especially in The Train of Childhood and Expectation and Cuckoo in a Dark Forest. It becomes more blurred in the case of the post-communist Spring of Life, in which Grétka comes from a mixed marriage and in which Jews, as an ethnic group, play a more prominent and acknowledged role than in the previous films. Also, whereas in the first two cases the main child heroes are passively pulled into the events (in the case of Emilka it is a matter of survival, the children who are not selected for Germanization are apparently murdered), Grétka initially decides to go to the SS sanatorium out of ignorance, or perhaps hatred for her father. Evidently, the fall of communism and the de-ideologization and depoliticization of the film industry allowed film-makers to portray a more complex picture of the war, and of the difficult Czech-German(-Jewish) co-existence, which ultimately led to a brutal conflict. The black-and-white dichotomy between Czech good and German evil became more blurred, with less stereotyped depictions of national groups being further problematized by increasing attention to the question of Jewish suffering during the conflict.

Among the Nations

101

Notes 1 My work on the chapter was part of grant project GAČR 13-15989P, The Czechs, Slovaks and Jews: Together but Apart, 1938-1989. 2 Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Václav Kural, Místo společenství – konflikt! Češi a Němci ve Velkoněmecké říši a cesta k odsunu (1938–1945) (Praha: Ústav mezinárodních vztahů, 1994). 3 Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands 1900-1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 4 Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Ray M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 5 Martin Wein, A History of Czechs and Jews: a Slavic Jerusalem (New York: Routledge, 2015). Eagle Glassheim, ‘National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945’, Central European History 33, no. 4 (2000): 463–86. 6 Michal Frankl, ‘The Sheep of Lidice: The Holocaust and the Construction of Czech National History’, in Bringing the Dark Past to Light. The Perception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, ed. John-Paul Himka and Beata Michlic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 171–8 (166–94). Livia Rothkirchen, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, ed. David S. Wyman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 156–99. Tomas Sniegon, Vanished History. The Holocaust in Czech and Slovak Historical Culture (New York: Berghahn, 2014). 7 Petr Bednařík, ‘Jews in Czech Film and Television Production during Normalization’, in The Representation of the Shoah in Literature and Film in Central Europe: 1970s and 1980s, ed. Jiri Holý (Praha: Akropolis, 2012), 207–16; Rothkirchen, ‘Czechoslovakia’. 8 Zpravodaj, 5f. 9 Frankl, ‘The Sheep of Lidice’. 10 Karen Lury, The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010). 11 ‘O Sněhurce, zlé maceše a kouzla zbavené kukačce’, Scéna 6 (1985): 5. 12 Lury, The Child in Film. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.

102

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

15 See the article by Chad Bryant on how the Czech language served during the war as a way for Czechs to resist the German occupation. Chad Bryant, ‘The Language of Resistance? Czech Jokes and Joke-Telling under Nazi Occupation, 1943–45’, Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 1 (January 2006): 133–51. 16 ‘Tvorba je také dialog s divákem. Rozhovor s režisérem Antonínem Moskalykem’, Film a doba 5 (1985): 245–61. 17 Lury, The Child in Film, 105f.

6

Child, Cinema, Dictatorship: Ignacio Agüero’s One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train Sarah Wright

Ignacio Agüero’s film One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (Cien niños esperando un tren) (1988) (hereafter One Hundred Children), a documentary about cinema workshops held for the children of Chile’s slums, is now regarded as a cult classic within Chile. Patricio Guzmán, director of the iconic Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz) (2010), listed it as one of his ten ‘greatest films’ in the directors’ poll conducted by the British Film Institute in 2012.1 In 2011, a scene from the documentary was recreated in Los ochenta (The Eighties), a Chilean TV series modelled on the Spanish concept Cuéntame qué pasó (Tell Me How It Happened), which follows the fortunes of one family through life under dictatorship and the transition to democracy.2 The combination of live (fictional) action with documentary footage from Agüero’s film (the characters appear to be sitting with the children observing lecturer Alicia Vega’s teaching) embodies the need within Chile for ongoing public and collective engagements with the nation’s recent traumatic past. Yet, in spite of the iconic status of One Hundred Children, there is surprisingly little critical work on the film, notwithstanding Valeria de los Ríos and Catalina Donoso’s excellent recent analysis of Agüero’s oeuvre.3 Alicia Vega’s own book Taller de cine para niños (Film Workshop for Children) meanwhile, produced with the assistance of Agüero, is a beautiful record of some of the children’s drawings used in the project on which the film is based.4 The absence of critical commentary about the film in print is in part testament to the void in film-making created by the Pinochet regime and a corresponding paucity in film criticism, something which the recent upsurge in film-making in Chile, a product of filming initiatives, international and domestic prizes, and an openness towards international co-production, looks set to change.5 But it may

104

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

also be a sign of the film’s resistance to analysis. One Hundred Children appears to be a study of the pedagogical value of cinema (in fact its value to pedagogy has been recognized as far afield as Brazil and Japan) but its audiovisual frissons and fretwork of mnemonics afford it resonances beyond its surface. Shown regularly in schools, the film forms part of contemporary Chilean cultural heritage. The very look of the film, its ‘pastness’, renders it a work of memory while childhood opens up a productive space from which to work through memories of the past.

The persistence of vision One Hundred Children begins at mass in a chapel in one of the poblaciones (slums) on the outskirts of Chile. Once the mass is over, a huge screen is hung in front of the altar as the space is converted into a film workshop. Alicia Vega, an unassuming woman in her late forties, introduces the children to early animation, to Lumière’s The Arrival of a Train at a Station (1895) and to a variety of films which appear as inter-texts, from Chaplin’s anarchic comedy to Lamourisse’s The Red Balloon (1956) and Padre Padrone (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1977). The children will make their own film by drawing still images and carrying them together as they form a human caterpillar that winds its way like a spool of celluloid around the patio outside. At the end of the documentary, Vega takes the children on a trip to a cinema on the other side of town. For the majority of these children, this is the first time they have visited a cinema; a couple reveal they have seen Rocky. By exploring the world around them, this film offers a critique not only of what it means to be a child in the poorest sector of society under dictatorship, but also an exploration of the possibilities for cinema under the Pinochet regime. In key scenes, Vega shows the assembled children how to make optical toys like a zoetrope (in which a horse appears to gallop) and a thaumatrope (a disc which spins to make it appear that a bird is in a cage) to shrieks of delight. In the film, she explains that these ‘toys’, which emerged in the late nineteenth century, relied on the theory of the ‘persistence of vision’ for their effects; they work because the human eye retains the image, thereby creating the illusion of motion. The zoetrope was invented by British mathematician William George Horner in 1833 as the daedaleum, and was later named the ‘zoetrope’ by American inventor William F. Lincoln. It consisted of a spinning drum of still images with small slits which, when peered through, made the images appear

Child, Cinema, Dictatorship

105

as if they were in motion. The thaumatrope, invented by Dr J. A. Paris in 1825, produced an illusion of superimposition rather than movement. A circular card with a design on the front and the back (a bird and a cage, for example), when rotated swiftly, gave the appearance that the images were superimposed: thus, the bird appeared to be inside the cage. The theory of the persistence of vision proposed that the ‘retinal impression provoked by one frame of film persists and blends with the next frame so that the slightly different images merge to produce the illusion of motion’.6 This is the afterimage. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Mary Ann Doane explains how the vocabulary of flaw and deception is inscribed into both the theory of the persistence of vision and the technology of the cinema: the eye is deceived into thinking it is seeing things. Furthermore, experiments to create an afterimage by staring at an image and then looking away led to the concepts of phantasms and ocular spectra.7 These optical toys remind us that cinema is based on a disavowal in which the inanimate is made to come alive and in which absence (the mere trace, through delay, of a contingent event) is made to look like presence. The assumptions underlying the theory of the persistence of vision – retinal retention, the physiological duration of images – have since been rejected in favour of the ‘notion of critical thresholds beyond which the human eye is incapable of perceiving difference’.8 However, Doane explains that it was so firmly ensconced as an explanation for the illusion of motion at the turn of the century not so much because it was the only theory available, but because ‘it was so firmly imbricated with insistent concerns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about representation, inscription, temporality and the archive’.9 One Hundred Children is similarly preoccupied with questions about representation, inscription, temporality and the archive. These questions emerge as silent points of reflection in the film. The dialectic between absence and presence ushered in by the theory of persistence of vision is a brooding concern of the film: an issue that gained urgency against the political background of Chile in 1988.

Archiving history In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor distinguishes between two types of embodied memory. One, which she calls the ‘repertoire’, is the body of memory that might be archived through live performance. It consists of ephemeral acts

106

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

(‘gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing’) that can yet ‘generate, record and transmit knowledge’. The other is the ‘archive’, which relies on documents, maps, literary texts, bones, videos, films, CDs that are all ‘supposedly resistant to change’.10 Taylor cautions that a live performance can never be captured by video. Rather, ‘embodied memory, because it is live, exceeds the archive’s ability to capture it’.11 In One Hundred Children, the children’s creation of a spool of film by sticking together images which they then wind through the courtyard outside might be seen as a form of ‘embodied memory’. Furthermore, the documentary’s registering on film of their action is in itself important: capturing the ephemeral or the contingent on film is a political act. This perception recalls Ann Cvetkovich’s argument about the ephemeral being a means to capture trauma: ‘An unusual archive whose materials, in pointing to trauma’s ephemerality, are themselves ephemeral.’12 Cvetkovich points out that memories of trauma can be embedded in material artefacts. Importantly, she notes, of trauma, that because ‘it can be unspeakable and unrepresentable and because it is marked by forgetting and dissociation, it often seems to leave behind no records at all’.13 In One Hundred Children the camera dwells on the faces of the children as they listen to Vega’s instructions in the classroom or watch films on the makeshift screen. Their faces register their absorption and fascination with the ‘new’ medium of cinema. At the same time, the juxtaposition of (early) cinema with the spectacle of the child brings to mind Vicky Lebeau’s claim that cinema has been fascinated by the child since its inception.14 Agüero’s children bear the visual traces of a concatenation of intertextual relations, which move back to a domestic lineage that encompasses Patricio Kaulen’s Chilean itinerant child flâneur in Largo viaje (A Long Journey) (1967) and sideways to a host of international films. These might include Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (also released in 1988) and Víctor Erice’s 1973 El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) which, with its similar mnemonics (the steam train signalling the arrival of cinema, the emphasis on the firstness of the child’s cinematic experience and the children’s drawings) presents the similar theme of children caught up in the wonders (and horrors) of the cinematic experience as conduits to the expression of national historical traumas.15 In One Hundred Children, the capturing of children’s faces acknowledges its cinematic antecedents in a self-conscious way (they are like cinematic ‘winks’) that makes the film into an archive. At the same time, the freezing of the fleeting or the contingent in the faces of the children absorbed as they watch can be seen as a political gesture. The

Child, Cinema, Dictatorship

107

screen images of the children’s drawings, and the trauma they express, would thus constitute a counter-archive. And yet there is also a sense in which the forcefulness of the sustained focus on the beauty of the child on screen (the plenitude of the image) reveals the central paradox that these children are representatives of society’s margins. The fact that they have not previously visited a cinema is presented as a supreme example of their disenfranchized status. There is a sense of the breaking of taboos even to portray these children on screen. These children are what Agamben in a different context would refer to as ‘bare life’.16 Their lives matter little under dictatorship and they can be destroyed with impunity. That children were victims of torture or repression under the Pinochet regime was confirmed by the publication of the Valech report in 2006, which cited at least 2,000 cases of children being tortured or ‘disappeared’.17 But as ‘bare life’, these children share a structural affinity to all of Chile’s disappeared. The disappeared were often conceptualized as ‘children’ sought by their ‘mothers’.18 Inherent in the images of the children in One Hundred Children, then, is an anxiety: a sense that the recording of their faces in some way bears testimony to their existence. With its aesthetic of old-fashioned typed questionnaires, drawings and theme of the persistence of vision, the film shows a preoccupation with the need to record the present in an archive. There is an insistent desire to record the present for future generations. But while the theme of the documentary is the bringing of joy and innocence to the children of the slums through cinema, there is also a sense that these children already know too much. They are always already lost children. The children underline the (im)possibility of witnessing, to use Agamben’s term.19 These children are the fortunate ones, the ones who have not known the real terror of torture or disappearance. Nevertheless, the spectre of a missing child arguably stalks One Hundred Children. There is a psychic or emotional loss always at work, even in the images of children’s joy and playfulness.20 The missing child, then, operates as an example of the ‘ocular spectra’ that Doane sees as cinema’s legacy from the persistence of vision. There is a sense in which the film records what is fleeting (the faces of children, their experiences through drawings) to establish a testimony of life under dictatorship. The date of the film places it very close to the end of the dictatorship and the plebiscite of 1988 that finally ousted General Pinochet. Its celebration of early cinema as a form of ‘primitivism’ (a primitivism aligned with the child in the film)21 also anticipates the anxiety felt at the ‘death of cinema’ in the new millennium.22 Psychically, emotionally, the film hints at the further revelations of loss after the end of the dictatorship, which may or may not have

108

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

been captured on film. The missing child comes to represent psychically not just a lost sector of society (the disenfranchized poor), nor even those disappeared under the regime, but a lost generation which grew up in fear and anxiety during the regime. In an interview, Alicia Vega identifies the nature of the tension felt in One Hundred Children when she describes an occasion when she screened a remake of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1979, Anthony Page). One girl in the workshop reacted by saying that ‘people disappear here and no-one says anything’ (aquí la gente desaparece y nadie dice nada).23 Vega notes that the person responsible for allowing her to book the room to show the film had later been interrogated. The dialectic of absence and presence introduced into One Hundred Children through the theme of the optical toys creates the film’s unspoken anxiety about the ease with which people may be disappeared, might suddenly disappear from view. The focus on the images of children seems like a reaction to the fear generated by those other faces: the disappeared, who have vanished without trace, and yet whose faces, retrospectively, adorn memorials and are carried by relatives as protest. Those photos, as Diana Taylor notes (of the Argentine context) become ‘magic fetishes’, which simultaneously point to the absence of the bodies and also to the need to keep those bodies ‘alive’ in the imagination so that they are not forgotten. The presence of the children in Agüero’s film is closely linked to ‘two ways of experiencing the temporality of the cinematic image: as both here-and-now and passed, both live and always already concluded’.24 The film’s enactment of the dialectic between absence and presence performatively points to the unacknowledged disappearances of the regime. Furthermore, the unease present in the film ‘can be attributed to a structural affinity between the temporality of the cinematic image and the experience of human contingency that was part of life under Pinochet’s dictatorship. The cinema’s ability to archive the fleeting and contingent serves to redeem the fate of those whose existence has undergone a terrible erasure’.25

The ‘child seer’ and the inscriptions of history One trope evident in One Hundred Children is that of the ‘child seer’.26 One Hundred Children expresses a preoccupation with what the children have seen, and what indelible traces of trauma might have scarred their memories. There is a symmetry between the theory of persistence of vision, introduced by Alicia

Child, Cinema, Dictatorship

109

at the start of the film, and the implication that the children will be unable to rid themselves of the violence they have seen. As Doane notes of the theory of the persistence of vision, ‘in vision, there is always an inscription (the evidence of which is there on the dead retina, presumably recorded forever) and hence a delay in clearing the “slate” for new impressions. This is a delay linked to metaphors of imprinting, recording and the duration involved in that process.’27 The traumas are hinted at as we glimpse reactions of the children to the films they watch and as they are interviewed on camera by Agüero. Two little girls, bright faces surrounded by the gloom of the house, reveal that this is not the first time they have been recorded. One, coughing, shows the interviewer around their sparse bedroom. ‘Have you ever been filmed before?’ they are asked. They reply that they have been recorded on sound by the CNI, the secret police who came to interview them at home. Two boys separately express a desire to be a milico (member of the military) when they grow up. When one is asked about this, he explains that he likes the way the policemen walk, and the way they get to use weapons. As ‘child seers’, these children reveal the contours of their world. But, without denying their role as bringers of ‘truth’, there is an element of performativity about them, when placed before the camera, which makes their contribution more active, more of an intervention, than their role as ‘child seers’ might suggest. Furthermore, Agüero reveals his active participation in the film. We hear his voice as he interviews the children, often asking leading questions (‘have you been filmed before?’, for instance). In the sequence showing the children’s visit to the cinema in town, we see him running alongside them, Bolex camera in hand. Agüero’s acknowledgement of his own intervention in the film renders the documentary a performative act. In New Documentaries, Stella Bruzzi seeks to move beyond the ‘BazinBaudrillard tussle’ about the status of the image and whether film offers a faithful reflection of reality or whether reality is perceived as just another image.28 In documentary, suggests Bruzzi, reality is always in negotiation with interpretation and bias. Documentary cinema has been ‘predicated on a dialectical relationship between aspiration and potential’, in the sense that the ‘pursuit of the most authentic mode of factual representation and the impossibility of this aim’ are simultaneously revealed.29 Bruzzi argues for an alternative view. She conceptualizes documentary as a set of performative acts in which the ‘multilayered, performative exchange between subjects, filmmaker/ apparatus and spectators’ is perpetually in play.30 This dimension of the genre is

110

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

exemplified in One Hundred Children by the way that the children are given the space to speak openly about their lives and their concerns. In fact, however, what we learn from what they say is merely the tip of the iceberg. In interview, Alicia Vega recalls how low-flying helicopters would pass over the Lo Hermida slum at night in order to prevent its inhabitants from sleeping: ‘durante las noches pasaban helicópteros rasantes con mala intención de impedir el reposo.’31 Ignacio Agüero recalls how the military would come regularly to search or to hand out beatings. For children of the Chilean slums, the spectacle of violence was a common occurrence. Life was lived constantly under threat, and the presence of paid spies/snitches was also common: ‘También era habitual la presencia de “soplones” pagados.’32 Under cover of a film about cinema workshops, Agüero is able to ask the children about such experiences. In retrospect, Agüero insists that he had no prior thesis in mind when he started to make the documentary, but the theme of children making a game out of brutality and playing this out through cinema came to him in the process of shooting the film. Agüero’s intervention in the film is an important aspect of its performativity. There is a clear irony, for example, in the selection of the first film for the children to watch: Walt Disney’s propaganda short Defense Against Invasion (1943), a film purportedly about the importance of vaccination that was really distributed in Latin America in order to foster anti-Nazi support during the Second World War. In the Disney film, the body is rendered as a land under attack from faceless creatures with machine guns and other weapons. In 1988, however, under Pinochet’s regime, the metaphor of the diseased body under attack was often used as a reason for the amputation of ‘undesirables’: the people of the slums were regarded as just such undesirables. (Film is as much about context and reception as it is about artistic intentions.) At the screening of the 1908 animation Fantasmagorie, by Emil Cohl, one of the children shouts out, ‘Look! He’s being beaten by the police!’ What remains rather oblique in the interviews is rendered vivid in the drawings the children create for Alicia Vega. After showing the children a sequence of protestas from Agüero’s documentary Como me da la gana (The Way I Feel Like It) (1985), Vega asks the children to draw some images that they will make into a film. They choose to draw scenes of protestas.33 Agüero’s earlier documentary becomes the pretext for the children to render their experiences on film. The drawings, some of which are vividly violent, are linked into a long chain and carried outside by the children in a human caterpillar. (Vega herself dons the head of the caterpillar.) The human caterpillar/spool of film goes outside and snakes around the patio like a Chinese

Child, Cinema, Dictatorship

111

dragon. This is a performative political act. It uses film creatively to allow the children to express their traumas artistically and then parade them outside like a street performance. A parallel might be drawn between the children’s parade and the funa – an often aggressive performative act of protest begun in 1999 by HIJOS-Chile (the Chilean wing of an Argentinian group challenging the impunity offered to torturers and human rights abusers). In a funa, a group peacefully carries placards through the streets to the workplace of someone accused of human rights abuse, before publicly and noisily denouncing the person in question. Here, although the children do no more than create a human spool of celluloid, at the same time they are publicly performing the creative expression of their traumas. One Hundred Children explores the relationship between children and cinema at a particular point in Chile’s history. The children who take part in the workshop organized by Vega and the film-maker do not simply reveal but rather enact their experience of political repression. In this, the approach to film-making recalls the work of the great ethnographic film-maker, Jean Rouch, who defined his method as ‘not to film life as it is, but life as it is provoked’.34 The result was a ‘shared anthropology’ in which the film-maker, as well as the people being filmed, are transformed by the experience. Here, Agüero and Vega have set up the scenarios for the children to enact their traumas. It seems significant now that the children also enter into a tactile relationship with the simulated film spool, allowing them to edit stories from their lives. As we have seen, these stories, often images of trauma, may be drawn from prosthetic images (influenced by television) as much as from scenes they have witnessed in real life. But rather than detracting from the ‘authenticity’ of the ‘truth’ of these experiences, the film points to the way that the children use the debris of the media available to them to record their traumas. Valeria de los Ríos and Catalina Donoso point to Walter Benjamin’s description of the child’s tactility as a way to understand the approach of the children to the cutting and pasting actions of the optical toys they make out of paper and the drawing of the images.35 Like the ragpickers he described in another context, children for Benjamin are ‘irresistibly drawn by … detritus’ and ‘in using these things, they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artifacts produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship’.36 In One Hundred Children, children attending a workshop in the slums capture the traumas around them by making a film from the cultural bits and pieces they have at their disposal, including fragments of fictional violence on television. In the process they learn

112

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

the implicit lesson that cinema is always already a construction, rather than a direct exposition of reality. Cinema’s extraordinary relationship to history had been captured in Patricio Guzmán’s film La batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile), which was made in three instalments in 1975, 1976 and 1979. In one scene, Argentine cameraman Leonardo Henrichsen, who has been filming the coup d’état that would result in the military takeover, unwittingly films his own death, the camera canting to the side as he loses consciousness. The film arguably never recovers from that scene, even as it continues to record the violence of the events of those opening acts of the military regime. In some senses, the children’s making of their own ‘film’ might be seen as a reaction to that scene. Children create something from the margins, using detritus to create something new which can stand in opposition to that destruction of the image; they can capture images which have been lost in the gaps between where official film-making has created official history. The issue here is not to distinguish between fiction and reality, but to project into a space between the two, where cinema is performative and political, re-enacting the traumas of the children and, by extension, of the nation. In such a reading, the child is not a marker of authenticity. Rather, the child is the figure that foregrounds the performativity of cinema itself and its necessarily mediated engagement with history. At the same time, the ‘pro-filmic event’ (understood as the event staged in front of the camera) is notable for its ability to establish a counter-history that both draws on and reworks the national history surrounding the filming.37 In After-effects, After-images, Griselda Pollock identifies certain aesthetic practices that express traumatic events through what she calls the ‘creation of after-images’. She asks whether such works can ‘bring about transformation’. While cautioning that such transformation ‘does not imply cure or resolution’ of the ‘traces, the after-effects of trauma, personal or historical’, Pollock does suggest that encounters can be staged that may allow others to witness trauma and so bring about ‘reparative transformations’.38 The children’s drawings in One Hundred Children might be considered as an example of such afterimages, and Vega’s caterpillar of images as transformative. (What better image of metamorphosis is there than the caterpillar?) There is a further parallel to be drawn. Just as the children make a selection of stills to create a spool of film, so Agüero’s documentary is self-consciously edited into a film that simultaneously presents the traumas of a group of children. Cinema might have a reparative function, to the extent that it makes the witnessing of trauma possible.

Child, Cinema, Dictatorship

113

After-images into the future One Hundred Children received a censorship classification in Chile that designated it as suitable viewing only for audiences over twenty-one years of age. In effect this meant that the film could not be screened on television. Paradoxically, its categorization as inappropriate for the very children who had helped to create it seems to underscore one of its central themes: the potentially subversive power of documentary film. Alicia Vega reports that, despite its restrictive classification, the film was screened in Lo Hermida for the children and their families before it opened at the Biógrafo Cinema in Santiago. As Vega notes, in the intervening years, the film has become ‘un clásico’ with a continuing legacy. Andrés Wood’s breakthrough international hit Machuca (2004) resonates with One Hundred Children in its depiction of the sacking of a slum by the military and the way it also invokes disappearances through its camerawork.39 As noted earlier, the inclusion of a sequence from One Hundred Children in the television series The Eighties underlined its iconic status, as well as the desire for Chileans to engage with this period of history. (At the same time, the film-maker Silvio Caiozzi is no doubt right when he asserts that the apertura [opening up] of the portrayal of torture and repression has as much to do with the removal of extreme right-wing, pro-Pinochet representatives from power as with any public demand for engagements with history on television.)40 The Eighties evoked a nostalgia for that decade and its quotation from One Hundred Children, with its ‘soft’ theme of cinema workshops for children – in contrast to, for example, the harder-hitting theme of torture portrayed in the 2013 TV series Ecos del desierto (Desert Echoes) – might be seen as a way of making a return to that painful history more palatable.41 Vega describes the film as ‘a recognition of a little thread of joy that we fostered there with great hope. It is the memory of Chile’ (un reconocimiento a un hilito de alegría que hicimos prosperar allí con una gran esperanza. Es la memoria de Chile).42 The year 1988 was the year of the plebiscite in Chile – now immortalized in Pablo Larraín’s 2012 film No, starring Gael García Bernal. This was the moment when Chileans decisively voted to end the Pinochet dictatorship. No ‘recognises that Pinochet laid the seeds for his own downfall when he brought market-driven economics and their social ramifications to Chile’.43 Continuing with the upbeat theme, it might be argued that, whereas No was criticized for suggesting that the Chilean nation was persuaded to end a dictatorship by an advertising campaign, One Hundred Children restores faith in the power of collective action from the margins. But

114

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

watching the documentary today with a view to what it reveals about the legacies of dictatorship makes for more sobering conclusions. Life in Santiago’s slums is still difficult. ‘There is still poverty, but it is different now,’ observes Alicia Vega. ‘Lo Hermida is paved and has all the urban services you would expect. But there is still a lack of housing and food as a result of the miserable salaries.’ (Sigue la pobreza, pero es distinta. Lo Hermida ahora está pavimentada y tiene todos los servicios urbanos. Ya no existen casas de madera … la gente se ve major vestida. Pero hay carencias en vivienda y alimentación debido a los ínfimos salaries.44) At the same time, drugs have arrived in the slums and there is widespread use of cocaine paste. Chile remains very much divided along the class and racial lines that we witness in One Hundred Children. The love/ hate relationship with the military continues to split the nation, even if those who express open admiration for the Pinochet regime are now a small minority. Even so many years after the end of dictatorship, and even in the present-day politics of the Concertación, the unfinished search for answers to questions about the disappeared and the continuing demand for retribution against the perpetrators of torture mean that Chilean society remains fractured and wounded. The classification of One Hundred Children as suitable only for over-twentyone-year-olds appeared to close off the productive space it opened up, turning children into passive objects rather than the active subjects implied by the participatory theme of the film.45 Nearly three decades after it was made, however, Agüero’s film not only continues to be used in Chile’s schools, it has achieved the status of a dynamic memorial and a living archive. What continues to endow it with a forceful subversiveness is the powerful way in which it describes and documents the thwarted possibilities for children’s active participation in their own representation and empowerment.

Notes 1 ‘The Greatest Films Poll’, http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/ voter/1106 (accessed 15 June 2014). 2 On the importance of the Spanish television series in the Spanish context, see Paul Julian Smith, ‘The Emotional Imperative: Almodóvar’s Hable con ella and Televisión Española’s Cuéntame cómo pasó’, MLN 119, no. 2 (2004): 363–75. 3 Valeria de los Ríos and Catalina Donoso, El cine de Ignacio Agüero: El documental como la lectura de un espacio (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2015).

Child, Cinema, Dictatorship

115

4 Alicia Vega, Taller de cine para niños (Santiago, Chile: Ocho Libros, 2011). 5 For an analysis of the difficulties facing film-makers in Chile to gain audience and distribution, see my articles: Sarah Wright, ‘Noli me tangere: Memory, Embodiment and Affect in Silvio Caiozzi’s Fernando ha vuelto (2005)’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia 21, no. 1 (2012): 37–48 and ‘Spectral Voices and Resonant Bodies in Fernando Guzzoni’s Carne de perro (2012)’, in Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Practices, eds. Tom Whittaker and Sarah Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 243–61). 6 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 70. 7 Ibid., 72. 8 Ibid., 70. 9 Ibid., 72. 10 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 19. 11 Ibid., 20. 12 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 7. 13 Ibid. 14 Vicky Lebeau, Childhood and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008). 15 For the importance of the child’s gaze and cinephilia in The Spirit of the Beehive, see Chris Darke, ‘“Les Enfants et les Cinéphiles”: The Moment of Epiphany in The Spirit of the Beehive’, Cinema Journal 49, no. 2 (2010): 152–8. For an analysis of the child’s gaze and trauma in The Spirit of the Beehive, see Sarah Wright, The Child in Spanish Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 16 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1998). 17 ‘Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (Valech I)’, http://bibliotecadigital.indh.cl/handle/123456789/455 (date accessed 29 January 2016), 579–82. 18 Cecilia Sosa’s book, Queer Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dictatorship: The Performances of Blood (Woodbridge: Támesis, 2014), draws on queer theory and performance studies to develop an alternative kinship framework to understand the affective transmission of trauma beyond the structure of the family writ large. 19 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 20 For the psychic loss of the missing child trope, see Emma Wilson, Cinema’s Missing Children (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

116

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

21 The film might also be read in the context of studies of media archaeologies, perhaps particularly in the way it suggests that an excavation of past medial forms can have much to contribute to the present. My thanks to Stefan Solomon for these observations. 22 See, for example, Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 23 Alicia Vega, Taller de cine para niños (Santiago, Chile: Ocho Libros, 2011), 97. 24 George Kouvaros’s unpublished response to my paper at the ‘Childhood and Nation in World Cinema’ conference, University of New South Wales, July 2014. 25 Ibid. 26 See, for example, the work by David Martin-Jones on the ‘child seer of history’ from Italian neorealism and elsewhere. For example, ‘The Child-seer in and as History: Argentine Melodrama\Kamchatka (2002)’, in Deleuze and World Cinemas (London and New York: Contiuum, 2011). 27 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 78. 28 Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary (London: Routledge, 2006), 6. 29 Ibid., 9. 30 Ibid., 10. 31 Ignacio Agüero, in discussion with the author, 12 June 2014. 32 Ibid. 33 Interestingly, then, the film lays itself open to the accusation of coercion of the children. It is only after viewing scenes of protests that the children draw their own: in this sense the film reveals its own status as a construction. 34 My thanks to George Kouvaros for this observation, Sydney, July 2014. 35 Valeria de los Ríos and Catalina Donoso, El cine de Ignacio Agüero, 121. For them, this process points to a ‘defensa frente a una industralización avasalladora’ (defence in the face of overwhelming industrialisation’), ibid., 121. 36 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock, Michael W Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 408. See also Carlo Salzani, ‘Experience and Play: Walter Benjamin and the Prelapsarian Child’, in Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice (Melbourne, Australia: re.press, 2009), 175–201. 37 Developed from comments made by George Kouvaros’s unpublished response to my paper at the ‘Childhood and Nation in World Cinemas’ conference, University of New South Wales, July 2014. 38 Griselda Pollock, After-effects, After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), xxi. 39 As I have written elsewhere, in a classroom scene, the children of ‘undesirables’ are asked to stand against the wall in a way which evokes the later images of the disappeared carried by protesters. The camera cuts away to a different scene but

Child, Cinema, Dictatorship

40 41

42 43

44 45

117

when it returns to the classroom, it finds merely a series of empty seats where the boys had used to sit, while the camera hovers to the side, reflectively. See Wright, 那年阳光灿烂》中的记忆，表演和儿童证人 /Memory, Performance and the Child Witness in Andrés Wood’s Machuca (2004). / Wright, Sarah; Zitong Qiu (Translator), China Media Report/《中国传媒报告》, vol. 14, no. 1, 01 January 2015, pp. 50–6. Silvio Caiozzi, private telephone interview with the author, 16 May 2014. I am extremely grateful to Silvio Caiozzi for ongoing discussions about Chilean cinema. This was a four-part mini-series directed by Andrés Wood and broadcast on 9, 10 and 11 September 2013 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the coup and then transmitted to Latin American countries by TNT in November of the same year. Reportedly, it was the most expensive Chilean series ever at 1.6 million dollars. The series is a mini biopic of Carmen Hertz, a well-known human rights lawyer whose husband was murdered by the so-called ‘caravan of Death’, the military unit led by General Arellano Stark that assassinated ninety-seven people around Chile at the end of the 1973. The series moves backwards and forwards in time, returning to the scene of the crime in a depiction of the atrocities that took place in the 1970s and then tracking the efforts of Hertz (Maria Gracia Omegna as a young woman and Aline Kuppenheim as an older woman) to discover the truth about what happened to her husband. Ignacio Agüero, in discussion with the author, 12 June 2014. My profound thanks to Ignacio Agüero for talking to me about his film. ‘Film of the Week’, Sight and Sound, March 2013, http://www.bfi.org.uk/newsopinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/film-week-no (accessed 10 June 2014). Ignacio Agüero, in discussion with the author, 12 June 2014. This is not quite the participatory video explored by Kelly Royds (‘Listening to Learn: Children’s Experiences of Participatory Video for Global Education in Australia and Timor-Leste’, Media International Australia 154, no. 1 (February 2015): 67–77), but its theme is similar. See also the important work on children’s media use by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, ‘Children, Media and Regional Modernity in the Asia Pacific’, in International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture, ed. Kirsten Drotner and Sonia Livingstone (London: Sage, 2008), 299–313.

118

Part Three

Education and Serious Games

120

7

Graphic Tales: Class, Violence and South Korean Childhood in Sang-Ho Yeon’s The King of Pigs Susan Danta

We seem to be looking at a highly stylized panel from a comic book. There is no movement other than the panning of the camera directing our eye across its harsh graphic lines. The stillness and silence are unnerving. What we see in the image is a woman’s lifeless body, slumped over her dining table with a rope-burn around her neck. The camera slowly reveals fragments of a domestic crime-scene: a wedding photograph obscured by an eviction notice; furniture and possessions marked with red repossession stickers. We are drawn to the sound of sobbing coming from the open door to a bathroom, from which a warm light emanates. Here, a man – the husband and murderer – stands naked under the shower. In contrast to the opening frames, life and chaos emanate from the animated movement of the man shaking uncontrollably. His violent sobs are also an intake of breath, defiantly living on. Suddenly, a child’s voice is heard calling to the man: ‘Kyung-min, Kyung-min Hwang.’ The shadowy figure of a child is sitting in a dark corner of his living room. The child continues to speak: ‘The guys who live a good life without doing much are like pet dogs. They’re motherfuckers. And we are the pigs they feed on. We finally become valuable when we’re dead and torn apart.’ From the shadows there emerges a monster-child, deformed and mutated, with the head of a slaughtered pig and the body of a living boy. This is the opening of Sang-Ho Yeon’s animated film The King of Pigs (2011). Inspired by schoolyard memories and comics from his own childhood, Yeon uses the techniques of animation and comics to tell a story about childhood that addresses two of the most urgent social challenges of his time – youth suicide and rapid westernization – and in doing so confronts us with a surreal yet highly recognizable evocation of contemporary South Korea. Yeon uses the

122

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

graphic form of animation to distort and amplify the image of the child in order to destabilize a vision of the nation and to show it as divided and in conflict with itself. He deploys animation’s connotations of ‘childishness’ and ‘childhood’ to highlight the dark adult themes of the film. What is Korea’s national identity in the modern world? Who and what have been sacrificed in its rush to escape a war-torn past, and at what cost? These questions are personified in the three child-protagonists of The King of Pigs, with very different and tragic fates. One is these children is the murderer at the start of the film, Kyung-min, the chimerical pig-boy whose gruesome monstrousness reflects his position in South Korea’s class-divided society. In The Kings of Pigs, ‘dogs’ represent the upper class and ‘pigs’ the downtrodden underclass. The film explores the traumatic long-term effects of childhood violence and of growing up in an oppressive class system. In a nation experiencing economic prosperity, childhood suffers. No one leaves childhood untouched by the violent oppression of school life. Adulthood is just as corrupt and violent as childhood, with one generation’s suffering feeding into the misery of the next and deforming it. Kyung-min meets up with his school friend, Jong-suk, a fellow victim of classroom bullies. Together, they remember the terrors of their past. Eventually a secret is revealed about the death of their friend, the violent outsider and third protagonist, Chul. The past appears in the present, sometimes as hauntings, sometimes as reminiscences. Unrelenting abuse stunts the boys’ emotional growth. There are no innocents in this film. Children fend for themselves, fighting tooth and nail, learning to survive. The children depicted by Yeon are dark and complex. They are at once victims and perpetrators in a cycle of social violence fuelled by a suffocating class system. Voiced by adult female actors, the animated children speak in voices older than their years. Their bodies are simply drawn and their expressions are as direct as a sketched illustration. The King of Pigs communicates the brutal life of children who suffer from bullying and social inequality in the visceral picture-language of childhood comics.

The paradox of South Korean animation Sang-Ho Yeon’s disturbing 2D-animation aesthetic is unusual for South Korean animation. It is closer to Japanese manga than to traditional South Korean manhwa (Korean for cartoon). The King of Pigs thus competes with a long-term rival. South Korean animation has been overshadowed by Japanese animation

Graphic Tales

123

for decades. There are a number of reasons for this. One is the colonization of Korea by Japan between 1910 and 1945, a period during which Korean animators were used to create propaganda work for the Japanese government. Another was the resulting ban on Japanese media content in Korea that lasted from 1945 until it was lifted in 1999.1 Made for less than US$150,000, The King of Pigs was the first Korean feature animation to be selected for screening at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2012. The film became a beacon of hope for an industry that had long been saddled with the reputation of being merely a service industry for Western producers. The South Korean animation industry boomed in the 1990s as an export industry providing inexpensive labour to foreign animation studios. Famous examples of its output include The Simpsons (1989–present), Family Guy (1998–present) and Marvel television cartoons (1992–7).2 Although respected for the high quality of its work, South Korean animators felt some shame at being regarded as low-paid ‘workers’ rather than high-paid ‘content creators’. Korea struggled to develop local stories and local content, deferring instead to foreign companies.3 Foreign creatives brought over the intellectual property for South Korean animators to render. Because of the disparity between content creation and technical output, South Korea’s animation industry has been disparaged for not making a stronger contribution towards Korean culture.4 In recent years, South Korea has achieved enormous success in exporting a commercial children’s television franchise, Pororo the Little Penguin (2003–14). Its popularity followed the massively influential wave of Korean ‘soft power’ represented by K-pop and Hallyu – or Korean Hollywood – that swept across Asia and the West in the 1990s. Despite such successes, there was little impact on the way in which the South Korean animation industry overall was perceived until the international acclaim for King of Pigs – an independent animation production that was creatively driven by South Korean talent. Yeon’s film is therefore both a technical triumph and a defiant expression of individualism in an otherwise highly conformist and hierarchical system. It has reclaimed the role of the animator as artist and producer of works of national significance.

Animation’s sceptical cinema Cartoons approximate reality; they have no interest in replicating reality. Animation has a ‘tenuous relationship to realism’, asserts Marc Stenberg. ‘It is in

124

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

not in any obvious way a realist form.’5 Discussing the unique representational qualities of drawn narratives, comics theorist Scott McCloud has argued that ‘by stripping down an image to its essential “meaning”, an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t’.6 In the introduction to Joe Sacco’s book Palestine, Edward Said shares his memory of encountering the comic book in childhood.7 ‘I don’t remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result,’ he recalls. ‘I feel that comics freed me to think and imagine and see differently.’8 There is something in the comics aesthetic that stirs a recollection of childhood excitement and defiance. The child is sceptical of the adult world. Like the child, the comics artist does not accept the world as it is: he or she will embellish and comment in order to change the world, if only on paper. Drawing from its origins in comics, animated film has a long history of tackling complex issues through simplified, satirical images. An example of this capacity is the groundbreaking work of Art Spiegelman, who redefined the genre of comics through his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Maus.9 In Maus, Spiegelman radically subverted traditional representations by using childlike visual imagery to document the experience of growing up as a child of Holocaust survivors. Adopting a simplistic visual approach to draw people as animals, the striking, absurd and disturbing combinations of comic drawings, maps, photographs and text make for a disarming experience on the part of the reader. Spiegelman’s childlike images take us back to our pre-language memory and associations with childhood. In the naïve visualizations of graphic novels, these absent moments of childhood become the points of entry for the narrative. The comics narrative demands active participation because the reader-viewer has to ‘fill in the gaps’ between the reality and its approximation on the page or screen. This act subverts the role of the passive viewer, who instead takes on the active role of co-author, reinventing and reimagining the story onscreen as it unfolds before them. The King of Pigs makes visual reference to the comic format, both in the use of stillness and in its line-work, thus intensifying the graphic quality of the film. The roughness of the animation is a disarming device. There is an honesty in the sketchy graphics that are clearly an interpretation of the world, not a facsimile of it. This is a sceptical cinema, one in which the form itself draws attention to its own artificiality in an almost confessional act. Esther Leslie has drawn attention to this aspect of the experience of animation. Its ‘small worlds’, she suggests, call for ‘certain stances on the part of viewers,

Graphic Tales

125

encouraging them to be at least minimally alert to the ways of the image world unrolling before them, especially as it compares to the world in which they sit’. The viewer is thus propelled ‘from image to thought’ and ‘from percept to concept’. Through this type of engagement, concludes Leslie, ‘the animated form models the motion of thinking itself – such that viewers are invited to complete the film through an act of appropriation of its new, and subverted, nature’.10 In the small world of The King of Pigs, the notion of subversion is an unattainable fantasy. But for the viewer, the film is an exploration of taboos expressed through the non-threatening unreality of animation.

Suicide and school life South Korea has the highest suicide rates in the developed world. The OECD iLibrary has collected a frightening series of figures outlining the seriousness of the country’s problem, and the New York Times has reported that suicide is ‘the No.1 cause of death for people between the ages of 10 and 30’.11 According to a BBC report in 2013, ‘South Korea’s success is built on an extraordinary work ethic that has delivered rich economic rewards, but that’s exacted a heavy price from its people and particularly its children.’12 Another BBC report a few months later confirmed that nearly 140 South Korean school students had killed themselves in 2012, ‘mostly as the result of family problems, exam stress and bullying’.13 It is widely accepted that the Asian financial crisis of 1997 had a particular disastrous impact on South Korea. The Tiger Economy – the economic miracle of Asia – crashed. ‘South Korea was one of the countries worst hit by the crisis,’ reported The Economist, ‘and its IMF-led emergency bail-out programme cost around US $60bn.’14 Today, South Korea has made a remarkable comeback and enjoys one of the strongest economies in the world. According to OECD statistics, however, South Koreans work the longest hours per year, on average, of any OECD member country. The financial pressures, social pressures, school pressures and pressures coming from within the family have proved to be a lethal combination, especially for the young. The problem is so serious that the South Korean government has taken the extraordinary step of providing free bodyguards to bullied students. At the same time, insurance companies have started to offer bullying insurance.15 Yeon Song-Ho proposes no solutions to this endemic problem in The King of Pigs. Instead, he offers an insight into some of its causes and into the escalating

126

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

cycle of abuse that is produced by a system that is so terribly unforgiving of the weak. It may be that this intolerance of weakness stems from decades of violent unrest in the Korea region. In the course of the twentieth century, Korea was repeatedly devastated by colonization and war. During the three years of the Korean War (1950–3), the Korean casualty tally was reported to be four million people.16 In the West, the Korean War is often referred to as ‘The Forgotten War’, because it sits historically between the devastating events of the Second World War and the Vietnam War. For the Korean people, however, the impact of ‘their’ war is still being felt three generations on. A sense of collective mourning is evident in Korean melodramas and works of literature. This mourning has been described as han, a concept that implies deep resentment, sorrow or regret. Many Koreans believe that han is inherited at birth and is an intrinsic part of their being. In Haan of Minjung Theology and Han of Han Philosophy, Chang-Hee Son describes han, for modern Koreans, as ‘the mired, beaten, sinridden state of oppressed humanity’.17 Korea has a highly hierarchical society entrenched in Confucian values of familial and social duty. The idea of han dates back to an ancient Shamanistic culture and it is this historical association and cultural identification with han that perpetuates the national tradition of collective grieving. Although han may seem to provide an easy explanation for the extraordinary rates of suicide Korea, it is not a convincing one, because it assumes that han is a national and natural condition that cannot be overcome and therefore does not need to be dealt with. To invoke han is to deny that there can be a Korean consciousness without despair. There is almost a national pride in han and the fact that there is even a word for this affect is evidence that Korea is a nation that is still in the process of recovery.

The animated child Yeon’s animated child is a visceral being made up of the flesh and gore of physical violence. The monster-child at the start of The King of Pigs beckons us into the living nightmare of the protagonist Kyung-min’s past. In The Child in Film, Karen Lury observes how, in many instances, the ghost-child ‘betrays or serves to reveal a secret (a murder, a wrongdoing) that must be solved before he/she can properly and finally “pass over”’.18 Yeon animates the dead past in The King of Pigs by moving backwards and forwards in time, entangling the mystery in an

Graphic Tales

127

impossible sense of time. His monster-child is a mutated form of the young Chul from Kyung-min’s past. Chul is an outsider who bravely, and perhaps naïvely, stood up for the downtrodden. Powerful and aggressive, Chul took the weaklings Kyung-min and Jong-suk under his wing, protecting them with the power of his fists. But violence inevitably begets violence, and Chul’s apparent suicide is actually an act of murderous betrayal by one of his own. There are no winners in this film and losers appear to be the inheritors of the earth, surrounded by ghastly bodies that have met violent ends. In the final scene of the film, Jongsuk is left sobbing next to the body of Kyung-min who – after decades of living with humiliation and guilt – has committed suicide. The camera zooms out to an extreme wide shot of a cityscape at night, with not another soul to be seen. Yeon developed the script for The King of Pigs while he was in compulsory military service in South Korea. The story was based on real events that he had witnessed during his school years. He carried the guilt of inaction over the years. One particular event involves a misunderstanding of a Western fashion label. Jong-suk, in a desperate attempt to impress the ‘dogs’, steals his sister’s new Guess designer label jeans and wears them to school. His friend, Kyung-min, has money but is a social outcast. Kyung-min understands the iconic meaning of labels. Kyung-min: Jong-suk! (pause) Your jeans… Jong-suk: Yeah, my mum bought them for me. Kyung-min: Oh, I see. Pause It’s just that … the red triangle is for girls. For boys, it’s green. Low shot of Jong-suk’s Guess jean label, clearly red. Jung-suk quickly un-tucks his t-shirt to cover the label on his jean pocket. Kyung-min looks painfully embarrassed for both of them.

The inevitable happens. Jong-suk’s ignorance of the Western fashion label is made humiliatingly public. A group of ‘dogs’ gather around the blackboard, laughing at the predictably homophobic images of Jong-suk. The expensive, irreplaceable designer jeans are vandalized. The red Guess label is pasted onto the black board for the world to see. ‘I witnessed the Guess Jeans incident,’ Yeon has acknowledged. ‘That really happened. I drew the characters while looking through my middle-school yearbook. Even the character names are similar to certain students I knew. I think if they watch the movie they will know which

128

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

character represents which student. I think nowadays, the situation in schools are worse than in the movie.’19

The horror The King of Pigs marked a new phase in Korean national cinema and it has become a landmark production in South Korean animation production. The first of three scathingly satirical feature animated films by Yeon Sang-Ho, The King of Pigs dispels the myth of innocent childhood in a society suffocated by strict class system. When asked why he expresses his ideas through the medium of animation, Yeon replied: ‘We have a very tight framework in this society so room for discussion can be very limited.’20 Through his naïvely visualized animation, Yeon is able to open up a space to discuss cultural taboos. Film-maker Yang Ik-june, who provided the voice for Jong-suk in The King of Pigs, reiterates the problem of violence within Korean society and the limitations in expressing commentary on the issue. ‘With Korea’s violent history in the last century, it was inevitable that this kind of violence is to be found in Korean society,’ he has said in interview. ‘No country wants to expose its flaws to others, but we should express this.’21 Yeon’s animated children never escape the terrors of his imagined childhood. Instead, the terrors mutate into a sterile world of a stunted adulthood. The anthropologist Andrea Arai uses the term ‘the stunted child’ to characterize a child prevented from moving through a sequence of development into adulthood by traumatic experiences in childhood.22 The Kings of Pigs is a parable that warns of a dark, bleak future as tortured – or stunted – childhoods prevent adults from achieving full maturity. Yeon evokes the horror of a world to come, a cold and hopeless landscape. He voices his despair through the voice of his character Jong-suk at the end of the film as he mourns over the body of his friend, Kyungmin: ‘This is where the icy cold asphalt and even colder bodies come together … it’s called “the world”.’

Notes 1 Karsie A. Kish, ‘Protectionism to Promote Culture: South Korea and Japan: A Case Study’, University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Economic Law 22, no. 1 (2001): 178.

Graphic Tales

129

2 Joonkoo Lee, ‘Animating Globalization and Development: The South Korean Animation Industry in Historical-Comparative Perspective’ (PhD thesis, Department of Sociology, Duke University, 2011), 135–6. 3 Ae-Ri Yoon, ‘The Inbetweeners: The Korean Animation Industry Negotiates the Global and the National’ (Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2010). 4 This negative self-image reached its lowest point in 2010, when the artist, Banksy, was commissioned to write an opening sequence for The Simpsons. In the opening sequence for the episode MoneyBART (2010), Banksy makes a satirical statement about the exploitation of outsourced workers in the developing world. Banksy depicted the animators of The Simpsons at AKOM studios in South Korea as impoverished sweatshop workers. Unfortunately, the joke was lost in translation and caused upset in South Korea, which, first, is not a developing nation and secondly, has been running high-tech animation studios to a world-class standard. Nelson Shin, founder and director of AKOM studios, responded to the opening sequence concept: ‘Most of the content was about degrading people from Korea, China, Mexico and Vietnam. … If Banksy wants to criticize these things … I suggest that he learn more about it first.’ Geoffrey Cain, ‘South Korean Cartoonists Cry Foul Over The Simpsons’, 30 October 2010, http://content.time.com/time/ world/article/0,8599,2027768,00.html (accessed 27 January 2016). The storyboard of the opening sequence devised by Banksy resulted in a protest by the South Korea animators of The Simpsons because of the insulting and racist nature of the piece (e.g., Asians were depicted as slanty-eyed, bucked-teethed, conical hat wearing clones). In the end there were minor amendments (e.g., the conical hats were replaced with baseball caps) and AKOM studios created the sequence anyway which was aired in the United States in October 2010. This humiliating experience exacerbated the South Korean animation industry’s negative self-image and it is perhaps no surprise that Yeon Sang-Ho created an animated film that is so far outside what audiences have come to expect out of the South Korean scene. 5 Marc Stenberg, ‘Realism in the Animation Media Environment: Animation Theory from Japan’, in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press), 287. 6 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 30. 7 Joe Sacco, Palestine: The Special Edition (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2007). 8 Edward Said, ‘Introduction: Homage to Joe Sacco’, in Sacco, Palestine, v–vii. 9 Art Spiegelman, Maus I : A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (London: Penguin Books, 1987). 10 Esther Leslie, ‘Animation and History’, in Beckman, Animating Film Theory, 32. 11 Young-Ha Kim, ‘South Korea’s Struggle With Suicide’, NYTimes.com, 2 April 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/opinion/south-koreas-struggle-with-suicide. html?_r=0 (accessed 27 January 2016).

130

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

12 Reeta Chakrabarti, ‘South Korea’s Schools: Long Days, High Results’, BBC.com, 2 December 2013, http://www.bbc.com/news/education-25187993 (accessed 27 January 2016). 13 BBC News, Asia. ‘South Korea Firm to Sell “Bullying Insurance”’, BBC.com, 7 February 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26080052 (accessed 27 January 2016). 14 The Economist, ‘Ten Years On: How Asia Shrugged Off Its Economic Crisis’, Economist.com, 4 July 2007, http://www.economist.com/node/9432495 (accessed 27 January 2016). 15 BBC, ‘South Korea Firm’. 16 Bruce Cummings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library Press, 2010), 35. 17 Chang-hee Son, Haan of Minjung Theology and Han of Han Philosophy (Maryland: University Press of America, 2000), xviii. 18 Karen Lury, The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 19. 19 ‘Han Cinema. King of Pigs: Zoomorphism and Class Warfare’, Hancinema.net, 19 November 2011, http://www.hancinema.net/hancinema-s-film-review-king-ofpigs-zoomorphism-and-class-warfare-35454.html (accessed 19 June 2014). 20 Nam-woong Huh, ‘Director YEON Sang-ho’s THE WINDOW’, Koreanfilm.or.kr, 2 November 2012, http://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/jsp/news/interview.jsp?blbdCom Cd=601019&seq=11&mode=INTERVIEW_VIEW (accessed 19 June 2014). 21 Tony Rayns, ‘Yang Ik-june on His Personal Struggle to Make Breathless’, BFI.org. uk, 20 December 2011, http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/5345 (accessed 19 June 2014). 22 Cited in Lury, The Child in Film, 40.

8

Citizenship in the Classroom: The Politicization of Child Subjects in Nicolas Philibert’s To Be and To Have and Laurent Cantet’s The Class Victoria Flanagan

The cultural institution of the school is often presumed to function as an entry point for civic engagement with the nation state. The etymological origin of the term ‘nation’ is, in fact, directly associated with childhood, as it invokes the process of ‘being born’. Nationhood, the story or process of a nation’s emergence, is a ‘narrative of becoming’ and as such is a concept that is frequently mapped onto metaphors of childhood. The ideological link between childhood and the nation state becomes explicit in the context of education systems, where curricula are designed to foster citizenship capabilities in child subjects through the acquisition of both linguistic and cultural literacy. Such curricula seek to engage students with the narratives of national history, promote awareness of political systems and how they operate, and facilitate community-building activities which produce an affinity for the values associated with that particular nation state. The ultimate objective of these educational systems is to encourage child subjects to become thoughtful, active and effective citizens. As a consequence, ‘the child’ becomes a politicized entity onto which the hopes and dreams of a nation are projected. Modern conceptualizations of the ‘child’, however, are underpinned by contradictory impulses. On the one hand, Romantic ideologies of children as innocent, playful and vulnerable remain dominant in Western societies. Yet these idyllic visions of childhood are under constant attack because of a paradoxical image of adolescent subjects as dangerous, corruptible and out of control: representations of this nature frequently appear in news stories which focus on teenagers and their bad behaviour. So although children and adolescents can

132

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

function as idealized symbols of social stability within the context of the nation state, they can also be used to signify social dysfunction. The link between childhood and citizenship is further problematized by the contested nature of citizenship itself in the modern era, whereby the tensions of an increasingly multicultural and heterogeneous population render traditional understandings of citizenship obsolete.

Childhood and citizenship Two comparatively recent French films provide a clear illustration of the ideological complexity of the relationship between child subjects and citizenship by providing viewers with a glimpse of how the school classroom can function as a space that can either empower or marginalize its pupils in relation to dominant social discourses. To Be and To Have (Être et avoir, 2002, directed by Nicolas Philibert) is a documentary about a primary school teacher working in a tiny, one-room school in rural France. The Class (Entre les murs, 2008, directed by Laurent Cantet) is set in a Parisian high school and explores the relationship between a teacher and his pupils, most from immigrant families. (The Class deliberately blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. It is based on a book, also called Entre les murs (2006), by former teacher François Bégaudeau about his experiences working in an urban French high school (Figure 8.1). Bégaudeau takes the lead role of teacher François Marin in Cantet’s film.) Each film focuses on child subjects that are marginalized. In To Be and To Have, this

Citizenship in the Classroom

133

marginalization is largely a result of geographical isolation, while in The Class, it is a product of the adolescent students’ non-white racial identities. The films differ, however, in their politicization of child subjects within the French education system. The classroom featured in To Be and To Have is an environment that functions as a symbol of liberal democracy. Monsieur Lopez, the school’s only teacher, is responsible for turning his pupils into future French citizens – they signify the idealistic hopes and dreams of the nation. The principles of formal equality and inclusion are clearly evident in Lopez’s classroom. His pedagogical practices are Socratic; he is rarely filmed standing at the front of the room, preferring to sit among the students, and he treats his young charges with respect and patience. The film primarily employs diegetic sound, which emphasizes the fact that Lopez’s schoolroom is remarkably quiet, a testament to the calm and studious learning environment he creates. The institution of the school has ceased to function in such an idealistic manner for the adolescent pupils of The Class. These teenagers demonstrate the social liminality of the adolescent subject and, for much of the film, the classroom in which they are located is constructed as a site of conflict and dissonance. James S. Williams argues that the basic storyline of The Class is ostensibly conservative, because the film fails ‘to provide a proper framework for challenging outmoded universal republican ideals and the muddled direction and blind spots of the education system’.1 However, Williams also suggests that Cantet cleverly uses the ‘politics of space’ to provide his adolescent pupils with a framework for resisting the assimilationist and marginalizing discourses that define the French school system – itself an emblem of French republican ideology. Cantet achieves this through an unusual method of filming. He filmed using three, mostly hand-held cameras, where ‘one camera stays on the teacher, another on the pupil speaking, and a third on the pupil about to speak or act’.2 The effect, according to Williams, is to deny viewers the ‘basic means of character identification such as shot/ counter-shot or establishing long-shot’.3 Spatial relations are a way of conveying power relations in film, and thus Cantet’s unconventional use of filmic space works to situate the viewer within the action and reveals his ‘deep ambivalence about framing owing to its ideological implications’.4 Williams’s analysis of Cantet’s formal techniques and how they are used to create subject positions for the film’s adolescent characters that are agentic rather than disempowered complements my own reading of The Class as an exploration of the analogous relationship between the ‘othered’ subject positions occupied by non-white and adolescent subjects in modern French society. The film draws attention to the

134

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

liminality of its adolescent pupils as subjects, but it simultaneously constructs them as inherently subversive – and it is their ability to destabilize and derail Marin that contributes to their representation as agentic subjects. Cantet’s skilful construction of scenes (which swiftly move from the teacher, to the students, back to the teacher again) establishes a combative relationship between Marin and his pupils, which also functions as a metonym for the cultural divide between adults and children, and white and non-white French subjects. Although the teenage students in The Class are on the cusp of accessing their citizenship rights, the film reveals how the concepts of ‘child’ and ‘citizenship’ have become increasingly contested in the modern era.

Class and inequality The relationship between social class and the school system is a central theme of both The Class and To Be and To Have. The issue of class is linked to the issues of immigration and multiculturalism in each – although this connection is made more explicitly in The Class, where Marin’s students are effectively positioned as lower class because they are born to first-generation migrants who typically lack the skills (most notably literacy skills) necessary to transcend their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy. To Be and To Have focuses on the rural working class, but its introductory scenes – which feature a young Asian student riding to school on the bus – also make reference to the issue of race within the educational context. Each film offers a representation of how the process of schooling contributes to the positioning of ‘othered’ subjects and uses the social space of the classroom to comment upon national identity and how it is configured within an educational context. Schools play a principal role in the socialization and enculturation of children, yet Henry Giroux is quick to point out that schools, as ‘primary agencies of socialization neither “mirror” wider societal interests nor are they autonomous from them’.5 Instead, Giroux views the relationship between schools and society at large as a dialectic one, which can also ‘vary under specific historical conditions’.6 To Be and To Have and The Class both effectively corroborate Giroux’s claims, as each film offers a distinctive (and conflicting) perspective on the ideological relationship(s) between schools and the wider community. The crucial difference between their representations of children pertains to whether the child (or adolescent) subject is seen as an emblem of

Citizenship in the Classroom

135

national belonging, as in To Be and To Have, or an image of social crisis, as is the case in The Class. The titles of the two films indicate their ideological approaches to education and its role in the formation of child subjectivity. To Be and To Have – originally titled Être et avoir in French and therefore a direct translation in English – takes its name from the infinitive forms of the two most basic verbs in both English and French. The meaning of this title works on two levels. The verbs are the basic building blocks of both languages and hence constitute fundamental learning in a child’s acquisition of language. However, ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ are also verbs that signify states of lived experience – ‘being’ and ‘possessing’. The order of the verbs in this title is also critical, as it suggests a progression from one state to the other and a positive acquisition. The film’s thematic focus on education lends this title additional impact, because the implication is that the process of acquiring knowledge is one that enacts a transition from simply ‘being’ to ‘possessing’ – even if that possession relates to something intangible. The English title of The Class, in comparison, is much less intellectual and narrow. Unlike the use of two verbs in infinitive form, which is both formal and unusual in terms of common linguistic register, ‘the class’ is a relatively simple denotation of the film’s subject matter. The film’s original French title, Entre les murs, translates into English as ‘Between the Walls’ and is a title that gives a much clearer signal of the film’s exploration of social issues such as immigration and the role of institutions, including schools, in the promotion of multicultural ideology. Indeed, ‘Entre les murs’ self-consciously plays on the concept of liminality – the status of being ‘in between’ or occupying a border position – which applies to Marin’s students not simply because they are adolescents, poised between childhood and adulthood, but also because of their ‘othered’ ethnic identities. The English title, ‘The Class’, is, however, deceptively simple. Cantet’s film uses the daily interactions of a teacher and his students as a metonym for the complex relationship between ethnic minorities and the dominant culture in contemporary French society – and accordingly plays on the dual meanings of the word ‘class’, which refers to both a group of students and to a person’s socio-economic status. The deliberate simplification evident in this title operates in contrasting fashion to the intended meaning of ‘To Be and To Have’, which is designed to be expansive and philosophical in its allusion to the manner in which education helps to bring children into being as subjects in the world. The Class calls this same education system into question, problematizing the role of teachers in inculcating hegemonic values. The film similarly questions the Romantic notion of the

136

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

innocent and vulnerable child through its representation of adolescent subjects as not only wilful and disobedient, but also seemingly powerless in the face of institutional power. Despite a title that implies a microcosmic focus only, The Class actually offers a macro-level analysis of a society in crisis – and its English title therefore functions as ironic understatement. One of the defining principles of Western citizenship is that it is based on the concept of equality. In contrast, categories of identity such as race and class are premised on what Patrick Wolfe calls ‘collective inequality’.7 What this means is that citizenship, according to Julia O’Connor, often implies ‘the subordination of particular identities, not only of class, but also of gender and race’.8 The two films discussed here take different approaches to the role that the education system can play in maintaining (or striving to eliminate) categories of otherness within the student body, and how such actions are conceptually linked to the construction of children as citizens within a nation. To Be and To Have, which centres on primary-school-aged children (approximately 6- to 12-year-olds), offers a liberal and utopian view of the French school system. The film uses Monsieur Lopez’s egalitarian classroom as a metonym for French society: education is the means through which children can learn to become active members of a community based on democratic principles of respect and equality (Figure 8.2). Within this model, however, ethnic identity is effectively effaced.

Citizenship in the Classroom

137

Henry Giroux classifies such educational paradigms as conservative because of the way in which they conceptualize ‘difference’ as non-threatening and non-disruptive. Instead, he argues that, within this paradigm, ‘difference’ has come to signal ‘an invitation for diverse cultural groups to join hands under the democratic banner of an integrative pluralism’. He sees the ideology that ‘defines the relation between difference and pluralism’ as central to this version of conservative educational thought insofar as ‘it legitimates the idea that in spite of differences manifested around race, ethnicity, language, values and life styles, there is an underlying equality among different cultural groups that allegedly disavows that any one of them is privileged’.9 Such an ideology is evident in To Be and To Have, which deals with the subjects of ethnicity and cultural difference primarily by demonstrating that they have little relevance in Monsieur Lopez’s classroom. In her analysis of To Be and To Have within the context of the genre of French documentary films, Isabelle Vanderschelden aptly categorizes it as a nostalgic vision of French society, an ‘old-fashioned vision of primary education, in contradiction with current education policies’. She therefore sees the film less as ‘a traditional documentary commenting on a standard social model’ than as ‘a record of the exception, a reality rapidly becoming a thing of the past’.10 Its representation of French society as culturally homogenous – an ideological gesture which accords with the film’s idealized view of education – is apparent in the way that it introduces the students of Monsieur Lopez’s classroom to the viewer. Although the first image of a child in To Be and To Have is the Asian pupil, Marie, her ethnic background is never explored. As Vanderschelden notes, To Be and To Have offers viewers an image of the French population as racially diverse, but – more importantly – culturally homogenous. This Asian student’s name – the typically French ‘Marie’ – serves to minimize any sense that she might be different from the other students. A select number of families of other children enrolled at the school are given time on screen throughout the film, but Marie’s family is never shown – and therefore her Asian background remains invisible. While this may be interpreted as reticence about confronting the subject of race directly – which is surprising given the prominence of Marie’s face in the film’s opening – ethnicity is again brought to the forefront of the viewer’s attention during the interview conducted with Monsieur Lopez that functions as the film’s halfway mark. The interview is preceded by a sequence of shots depicting the lush green fields surrounding the schoolhouse, which is where Monsieur Lopez also lives. The interview is the first shot in which Lopez is

138

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

shown interacting with another adult, even though this adult remains offscreen. It is highly significant that the interview begins with Lopez speaking about his father, who was a member of the rural working class and also of non-French ethnicity (Spanish). Interestingly, it is his father’s workingclass origins that Lopez mentions first, in a gesture that unites him with his pupils whose families similarly work on the land: ‘He was a farmhand for a long time. … Above all, he didn’t want me to do the same job as him.’ Lopez thus immediately constructs his father’s low socio-economic status as key to his subjectivity, rather than his cultural otherness. (‘My father was of Spanish origin,’ he says afterwards. ‘He was what’s known as an emigrant.’) Lopez also links class mobility specifically with education, as he states that his parents made substantial sacrifices in order to enable him to study. This link is made more specific when the director then asks Lopez, ‘What made you want to be a teacher?’ Lopez’s response is worth quoting in full, because it articulates the film’s themes and ideological attitude to education. ‘Even now, I realize, on the verge of retirement, that I love this work with the children,’ he says. ‘It takes time and personal involvement and the wonderful thing is [that] the children return it. They return it over and over.’ Lopez’s use of the word ‘love’ to describe his work is arresting, since he has just previously described his own father’s abhorrence towards his occupation. This sentiment must be interpreted by the viewer in the context of previous scenes, which depict students and their families involved in the tiring and difficult manual labour required to run a farm on a daily basis. Lopez’s obvious affection for his work distinguishes him from other adults within the community.

Teachers and students Lopez acknowledges that his role as teacher is demanding, since he is the only teacher in this primary school. Yet he describes as ‘wonderful’ the children’s response to his efforts. He perceives them to be similarly invested in their own education and future. His repetition of the words ‘return’ and ‘over’ stress his perception of the children’s recognition of, and gratitude for, his efforts. He sees himself playing an important role in the development of these children’s subjectivities – and consciousness of themselves as subjects in the world. He believes that they reward him for it. Whether or not this is actually true – and the rather joyful and comic scenes which feature the recalcitrant six-year-old

Citizenship in the Classroom

139

student, Jo-Jo, are a case in point – it is important that this is how Lopez views his relationship with his young charges. The relationship between teacher and students is dramatically altered in Cantet’s The Class, where the classroom and its adolescent students are emblematic of a more ambivalent attitude towards the education system and its potential for shaping the relationship between a nation state and its young subjects. Within this film, immigration takes centre stage and it is clear from the outset that issues such as ethnicity and cultural difference are responsible for producing a social context characterized by dysfunction and disarray. The film’s attempts to thematize immigration as a social issue are linked to the political situation in France at the time of its release in 2008. This marked the first year in office of President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had campaigned on a rightwing platform of limiting immigration to France. Sarkozy’s term in office also came to be associated with intégration, which Nicole Wallenbrock refers to as the process by which ‘an immigrant or a group of immigrants are incorporated into the larger French society’.11 The French term functions similarly to the concept of ‘assimilation’, which demands that ethnic minorities must discard their identification with their homeland and culture to become an accepted member of the dominant culture. This political context forms a backdrop to a film that examines the tensions produced in an educational context where the teachers represent the cultural majority, while the student body comprises minority groups. Cultural hegemony is an underlying theme throughout the film, especially in relation to Marin, who is presented as much more culturally sensitive than his fellow teachers yet still unwittingly reproduces normative and exclusionary behaviours in his classroom. Unlike the democratic and peaceful classroom presided over by Monsieur Lopez in To Be and To Have, The Class constructs the high school classroom as a battleground on which the dominant and minority cultures engage in power struggles. Marin, the schoolteacher, has none of the calmness and poise of Monsieur Lopez. Bégaudeau, who plays Marin, is considerably younger than Monsieur Lopez and his performance pivots on a perceptible sense of unease around his students and peer teachers. In the classroom this discomfort arises from the challenge of maintaining order – an order that is precarious because of the students’ rowdiness and general disdain for the content of his lessons. Marin strives to make his lessons relevant by attempting to relate them to the students’ everyday experiences – but he does so in a way that only serves to centralize his subject position as a white, French male. When Chinese student Wei stumbles

140

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

over the word ‘Austrian’, Marin tells him that the term is ‘not important’. The three hand-held cameras used to film each scene allow Cantet to construct scenes by cutting quickly from teacher to students at a lightning pace, which has the effect of destabilizing the point of view. This technique contributes to the confrontational atmosphere of Marin’s classroom and in this instance the composition is used to great effect. As Marin tells the class that ‘we can live without the word’ (in reference to ‘Austrian’), the camera cuts to a reaction shot of Wei, whose own Chinese ethnicity is so obviously ‘othered’ within the context of white French culture. Marin’s ostensible intention is to alleviate Wei’s embarrassment at not knowing the meaning of ‘Austrian’, but his dismissal of a word referring to nationality is made all the more poignant by the fact that the camera is turned on the face of an immigrant student. This is followed up by a tense exchange with two female students, Esmeralda and Khoumba, who object to the fictional names Marin uses in his language examples. ‘You always use whitey names,’ asserts Esmeralda defiantly. When asked to clarify what she means, she uses a series of derogatory terms (‘Honkies, Frenchies, frogs’) to identify white French culture. ‘You’re not French?’ Marin asks her, to which she instantly replies, ‘No I’m not French.’ A second later she modifies this comment, stating, ‘I am, but I’m not proud of it’. Esmeralda’s disavowal of French nationality is a precursor to the film’s thematization of immigration as it relates to citizenship. The high school functions as the site of a power struggle between normative French cultural values and the multicultural reality of urban Parisian society (where approximately 40 per cent of French immigrants reside, according to INSEE, France’s National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies). Within this social space, ‘being French’ is perceived as undesirable by Marin’s adolescent students – most of whom cling to their minority cultural identities rather than identify themselves with what they see as a repressive culture. The lack of social cohesion evident in Marin’s classroom is not only the result of the students’ culturally diverse backgrounds. Unlike the charming and charismatic children of To Be and To Have, these adolescent students are represented as wild, disruptive and rebellious. This positioning of adolescents as delinquents stems, according to Lydia Kokkola, from the Romantic construction of children as ‘innocent’. Such a construction is actually a manifestation of adult desires, as has been persuasively argued by Jacqueline Rose.12 Within this paradigm, adolescence is defined ‘as a period of sturm und drang precisely in order to bolster the Romantic view of the child, and to prevent it from crumbling

Citizenship in the Classroom

141

under the onslaught of counter-evidence’.13 Kokkola also points out that notions of children as innocent essentially act to protect children, while the negative stereotypes associated with adolescence (as a period of rebellion and trouble) more often act to punish and malign teenagers.14 The Class engages with such a view of adolescents in its opening scenes, representing its teenaged characters as nothing short of monstrous. Marin’s daily encounters with his students make Monsieur Lopez’s statements about the rewarding nature of teaching all the more striking. For Marin, whose students barely refer to him by name, let alone using the polite title ‘Monsieur’, each class is defined by conflict. His students are argumentative and rowdy, they have little respect for him, and they are uninterested in what he is trying to teach. The film also begins in a manner that would seem to confirm Kokkola’s suggestion that ‘the construction of adolescence as a period of strife, uncertainty, angst and fluidity all serve to support beliefs in the purity of childhood and the stability of adulthood’.15 The Class emphasizes the distinction between adulthood and adolescence in its opening, which focuses entirely on the adult teachers and the orderly processes by which the new school term begins (meetings, the welcoming of new colleagues, the distribution of timetables, etc.). The school is established as a stable and orderly community of adult teachers in these scenes, one that functions as an obvious contrast to the disorderly and hectic representation of adolescent students as they behave within Marin’s classroom. This binary construction of adult versus adolescent subject is both confirmed and undermined by the dynamic interplay of ethnicity in the film’s construction of adolescent subjectivity. Significantly, the subject Marin teaches is French. The students’ objections to the material covered in his lessons are thus more than a simple act of rebellion. They can also be framed as an implicit struggle over cultural capital and the question of why white French culture is privileged over the students’ other ethnic affiliations. Schools play a crucial role in students’ acquisition and use of language, and because language is closely associated with power, the classroom is a site where students learn about the hierarchical structures of social relations. The sociocultural function of language is significant in the classrooms represented in both films – although language and power dynamics are constituted differently in each film. To Be and To Have presents Monsieur Lopez’s schoolroom as an interactive and intersubjective space, where hierarchical distinctions between teacher/pupil and child/adult are minimal. Marin’s classroom is a confrontational space. His authority is constantly challenged by students who question his right

142

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

to instruct them in the language of a white culture which seeks to exclude them on account of their ethnicity. Lopez’s careful and deliberate use of language mirrors the discourse of civic responsibility: the individual students in his classroom have both rights and obligations to fulfil in their role as members of a productive community. He does not assert his authority by chastising the students for making mistakes – instead, he asks each child to show the others their work, then elicits a response from members of the group about whether the task has been performed properly. The students therefore actively participate in the process of evaluating each other’s work and the classroom forms a community that is involved in regulating itself. The democratic nature of Lopez’s classroom is accentuated by shots that frequently depict him bending down to the children’s height (or sitting next to or behind them at the communal table). More often than not, his face and body are off-screen so that the children remain the visual focus. Each scene is anchored, however, by Lopez’s calm and gentle voice as he questions, prompts and guides his young charges. In every sense, his role is metonymic of good governance because it is always premised on the principles of fairness, participation and democratic decision-making. Even when dealing with the spirited Jo-Jo, who would try most teachers’ patience, Lopez’s language is never that of a disciplinarian. In a scene where Jo-Jo attempts to leave the classroom before completing his colouring exercise, Lopez calls him back. In the exchange that follows, Lopez never specifically mentions punishment. Conversely, the discussion is framed in terms of obligation and mutual agreement: Lopez: Jo-Jo, don’t put your shoes on. Come here. Where have you got to with your fish? Jo-Jo: I’ll finish after playtime. Lopez: No, that’s not what we agreed. Jo-Jo: Tomorrow. Lopez: No, not tomorrow. Jo-Jo: There’s no school tomorrow. Lopez: Exactly. When are you going to do it? Jo-Jo: On a school day. Lopez: Today’s one! So you have to do it now. You said you would. You promised. Have you kept that promise? Have you finished?

This scene constructs the classroom as a site of civic engagement, where both Lopez and Jo-Jo have reciprocal roles and responsibilities. Lopez does not

Citizenship in the Classroom

143

simply point out that Jo-Jo needs to finish his work before he can leave. Rather, he involves Jo-Jo in a dialogue about what was agreed between them, then reminds the child that he has made a commitment he needs to keep. And while this discussion begins with them both standing in front of a doorway (they are shown in profile), which highlights Jo-Jo’s diminutive size, the scene then cuts to them inside the classroom where Lopez again adopts a sitting position which diminishes his height and enables him to meet Jo-Jo’s eyes more directly. This exchange between Lopez and Jo-Jo epitomizes the depiction of education in To Be and To Have. The language that Lopez uses to talk to this small child is not typical of the way in which adults usually speak to children: the tone is formal, the vocabulary sophisticated and the dialogic nature of the conversation belies the fact that Jo-Jo is actually in trouble for not completing his work. Lopez does not denigrate the boy but talks to him as an individual who is capable of understanding what is required of him in the school setting. Lopez treats Jo-Jo as a subject capable of making a contract and keeping it. Comparable scenes in which Marin deals with troublesome students in The Class are the antithesis of the calm, intellectual interactions of Lopez and his students. Marin’s attempts to deal with the disruptive behaviour of students such as Khoumba and Souleymane are much less successful. They are belligerent and disrespectful to him – indeed, the episode with Khoumba revolves around Marin trying to extract an apology from her. Marin’s frustration in this instance is made patently clear by way of the violent kick he gives to the desk after she leaves the classroom. The pointless violence of the gesture successfully conveys his seeming inability to make any kind of difference in his students’ lives.

The school An important distinction between the two films lies in how they represent school governance. Lopez is the only teacher in his small, rural school and it is apparent that the school functions in accordance with his own personal teaching philosophy. Marin, on the other hand, is but one of a large group of teachers. The Class regularly shows him as a member of this cohort – informally in the staff room, in staff meetings and also as a member of the disciplinary committee. These scenes enable viewers to see that Marin’s opinions concerning the handling of difficult students are actually much more liberal than his colleagues’, many of whom are in favour of punitive solutions. In an amusing scene during a staff

144

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

meeting, the teachers discuss implementing a demerit point system for disruptive students. Marin speaks out against such a system, but before the issue is resolved, the principal moves on to what he calls a ‘vital issue’: the price of coffee in the teachers’ vending machine has just increased. The scene effectively illustrates Marin’s impotence within a school system that is supposedly based on democratic principles but seems to function more like bureaucracy. A case in point is the school’s disciplinary committee. Marin is the elected teachers’ representative on this committee, which deals with students who have committed a serious offence  – and it is to this committee that Souleymane is eventually sent. The committee gives the impression of allowing students to receive a fair ‘hearing’ – and the teachers all use this judicial word to describe the proceedings. However, Marin is conscious that the process is not democratic, as all students brought before the committee are inevitably expelled. The committee is consequently symbolic of the power differential between teachers and students and also of the autocratic tendencies of this education system. While the language of Monsieur Lopez’s classroom is characterized by its egalitarian and inclusive nature, in The Class language functions as a discriminatory marker of cultural identification and socio-economic status. ‘If language is inseparable from lived experience and from how people create a distinctive voice,’ argues Giroux, ‘it is also connected to an intense struggle among different groups over what will count as meaningful and whose cultural capital will prevail in legitimating particular ways of life.’16 Marin’s students are highly critical of his grammar lessons. When confronted with verbs in the imperfect subjunctive case they retort: ‘That’s the way people talked in the old days!’ At the same time, it is apparent that many of them lack basic literacy skills – presumably because they come from migrant families and French is a second language. (In scenes involving Souleymane’s mother, it is evident that she does not speak or understand any French.) This conflict intensifies when Marin impetuously refers to two of his female students as ‘skanks’ in class. The term is slang for a low-class woman, usually a prostitute or someone who is otherwise sexually promiscuous, and Marin’s use of it undercuts his sensitive advocacy for the students in previous scenes. The ire it draws from the class deepens the division between teacher and students – in fact, the scene descends into chaos soon afterwards as teacher and students hurl abuse at each other – and further indicts the education system represented in the film as deeply flawed. The irony of the situation is that the students are outraged by what they see as an act of discrimination by an authority figure, but are blind to the fact

Citizenship in the Classroom

145

that Marin is actually one of their champions. Even his use of the word ‘skank’ can be interpreted as an act of trying to adopt adolescent colloquial discourse in a bid to be empathetic with his students. Of course the effect is just the opposite, showing how even the best-intentioned teacher can repeatedly use language which reinforces the marginality of his students’ subject positions. In an earlier scene (the staff meeting where the demerit system is addressed), one of the other teachers accusingly says to Marin, ‘You just want to buy social harmony’ – but what The Class emphasizes is how difficult this actually is to achieve. The opening sequence of To Be and To Have introduces viewers to a concept of childhood as innocent and as necessarily separate from the world of adults. The film begins by contrasting the harshness of the natural rural environment in which the film is set with the warmth, peace and tranquillity of Monsieur Lopez’s schoolhouse. To Be and To Have presents the schoolroom as a place of respite from the hardship of the outside world (both in terms of human labour and the geographical environment) and draws on Romantic conceptions of childhood in its depiction of Lopez’s students as the charming inhabitants of a seemingly Edenic educative paradise. Within this schoolroom the students are adeptly taught how to be members of a harmonious and participatory community – embodying the hopes of a nation for its would-be citizens. The idealism that pervades the representation of child subjects in To Be and To Have is absent from The Class, which focuses on adolescent high school students. The adolescent subject provides a nexus for the film’s social critique, a symbol of liminality in a world that is defined by a continuing struggle between the dominant cultural centre and those groups which reside on the periphery. Although the child subject possesses the potential to embody a nation’s citizenship hopes and ideals – and in many ways the immigrant dream of a better life is often focused on children as emblems of the future – the adolescent characters in this film are presented in a much less utopian light. Their refusal to be co-opted peacefully into the school system is a display of defiance and is indeed frustrating for teachers such as Marin. Nevertheless, it can also be interpreted as a railing against the homogenizing function of education: a demonstration of these pupils’ awareness of the school system’s desire to erase cultural difference through the promotion of elite cultural values. Unlike To Be and To Have, in which the education system cohesively and democratically enables children to access their citizenship rights, The Class uses the liminal figure of the immigrant adolescent subject to critique the exclusionary nature of French citizenship.

146

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Notes 1 James S. Williams, ‘Framing Exclusion: The Politics of Space in Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs’, French Studies: A Quarterly Review 65, no. 1 (2011): 65. 2 Ibid., 66. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Henry Giroux, Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture and Schooling – A Critical Reader (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 7. 6 Ibid. 7 Patrick Wolf, ‘Race and Citizenship’, OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 5 (2004): 66. 8 Julia O’Connor, ‘Gender, Class and Citizenship in the Comparative Analysis of Welfare State Regimes: Theoretical and Methodological Issues’, The British Journal of Sociology 44, no. 3 (1993): 505. 9 Henry Giroux, Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth (Houndsmill, England: Macmillan, 1997), 125. 10 Isabelle Vanderschelden, Studying French Cinema (Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2013), 160. 11 Nicole Beth Wallenbrock, ‘The Ideal Immigrant is a Child: Michou d’Auber and the Politics of Immigration in France’, in Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Debbie Olson and Andrew Scahill (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2012), 125. 12 Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan: Or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984). 13 Lydia Kokkola, Fictions of Adolescent Carnality: Sexy Sinners and Delinquent Deviants (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013), 36. 14 Ibid., 35. 15 Ibid., 37. 16 Giroux, Channel Surfing, 121.

9

Education, Destiny and National Identity in Raúl Ruiz’s Manuel on the Island of Wonders Stefan Solomon

Raúl Ruiz was born in 1941 in the coastal city of Puerto Montt in southern Chile. Before turning to film-making, he had managed to write over a hundred stage plays and worked on a number of Mexican telenovelas. His first film, Tres tristes tigres (Three Sad Tigers, 1968), was screened at the Locarno Film Festival in 1969. Further success would have to be discovered elsewhere, as the Pinochet coup in 1973 all but ended the Chilean film industry and forced Ruiz, among many other directors, into exile. His career continued in Europe until his death in 2011, with Ruiz dividing his time between productions for film and television, and working in a number of countries on the continent as well as making sporadic returns to his homeland. An extremely prolific director, Ruiz was never strictly aligned with a specific national cinema: from his early exploits in Chile, to his final features in Portugal, his is a portfolio that has continuously shifted across borders. Given the extensive and varied nature of his body of work, it is useful to separate Ruiz’s film-making into a number of phases, as Michael Goddard has recently done. First, between 1968 and 1973, Ruiz directed films in his native Chile. Second, during his time in Europe in the 1970s, he turned to statesponsored television, which offered the financial means for the continuation of his career in cinema. This chapter takes as its point of departure the third phase of Ruiz’s career, roughly spanning the 1980s, during which time his attention turned to a particular nexus involving transnational genre tales of seafaring and piracy, Portuguese coastal settings, and above all else, the figure of the child.1 Several of Ruiz’s films from this decade – such as La ville des pirates (The City of Pirates, 1983) and Treasure Island (1985), both of which featured the

148

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Ruizian child muse, Melvil Poupaud – take place at or near the sea, casting them adrift from any distinct national situations, even as their characters travel to various ports or islands on the coasts of Europe and Latin America. The children in these films live the paradox of a life both inside and outside a specifically Portuguese national identity, resisting the very state in which they are raised, acting in defiance of their elders, and refusing the inevitability of ‘adult’ national identities. In what follows, I focus especially on the relatively obscure Manuel on the Island of Wonders (1985), a work that encapsulates many important aspects of childhood and national identity, although by no means explicitly. In particular, I analyse the way in which this film filters questions of education and choice through the medium of cinema, and how it demonstrates the distinctive, transformative power of the film image, especially where the child is concerned. First, however, it is important to point out that children had been integral to Ruiz’s film-making at least as early as 1979’s Petit Manuel D’Histoire de France (Small Handbook of French History). Commissioned for INA Television’s Rue des Archives programme (1979–81), Petit Manuel was designed to educate French viewers about the contents of their country’s television archives, but not in any straightforward manner. Rather than presenting a traditional history of the nation, Ruiz sought to undermine such a narrative by utilizing child narrators, and revealing the way in which the nation’s children were educated: Everything that works for the centralized state, no matter what the means employed, is good, and everything against it is bad. … For that reason, I chose to work with the actual school-texts [four manuals running from the end of the nineteenth century to 1968] and to have them read by children of from eight to sixteen years old, girls. I adopted the idea of having them read these texts for the first time. … Then I played with these three elements: the double image, the maladroit readings of the schoolbooks, and the very stereotypical mise-en-scène of the history of the formation of the State.2

The result is an impossible accretion of material that discredits any monolithic history of France, even as it utilizes the approved texts that chart that very history. Ruiz’s approach is to return the state’s official messages with interest, reflecting a once-coherent history back on the nation by multiplying its perspectives, and accumulating the voices of its youngest citizens, who seem to misbehave by offering only ‘maladroit readings’. Petit Manuel is perhaps the first of Ruiz’s films in which the child is positioned against the nation state, and France, in particular. But once he began shooting in Portugal, Ruiz’s work engaged with mischievous and stubborn children in an even more sustained manner.

Education, Destiny and National Identity

149

Like the more recent Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) – a comparable mini-series and film also focusing on an adolescent boy, João – Manuel on the Island of Wonders is a film that is not one, but many. A series in both Portuguese (in four-parts, called Aventure au Madeira) and French (in three-parts, dubbed, and titled Manoel dans l’ile des merveilles), as well as a 140-minute feature film (Manoel na Ilha das Maravilhas in Portuguese; Les Destins de Manoel in French), the production of the non-identical works accords with Ruiz’s neo-baroque aesthetic, which thrives on the multiplication of narrative possibility. Shot on sixteen-millimetre film, this work shared its national allegiances, co-produced as it was by Les Films du Passage (Paris), Rita Filmes (Porto), and Radio Television Portugaise (Lisbon), in association with Revcom Television (France). This joint French and Lusophone production unfolds in various different directions, multiplying itself and opening itself out by free association, training spectators and characters alike in the serpentine habits of the film image. It is currently difficult to access the multiple versions of Manuel, and I have only been able to see the French series, which does not contain all of the scenes included in the longer Portuguese version. In this version, the first episode, ‘The Forbidden Garden’, multiplies destiny itself, as the seven-year-old Manoel, living on the Portuguese island of Madeira, experiences the same sequence three separate times. Upon waking to the news that a jewel thief has robbed the family home, Manoel ventures off to school, before being called by a strange voice along the way. The voice of the narrator (an adult version of Manoel) also explains the oddly repeated sequence of events. In the first instance, Manoel’s mother dies a stress-related death connected to her son’s truancy problems. In the second, his success as a student, and consequent school fees, inadvertently lead to his father’s suicide. In the third, Manoel ensures that neither parent dies but, in so doing, he dies himself. The second episode, ‘Picnic of Dreams’, which strangely takes place before the end of the first episode, sees Manoel on a school excursion to the forest, where he unwillingly swaps bodies with a woodcutter, before changing back once more. The third, ‘The Little Chess Champion’, begins with a trip to Manoel’s aunt’s house, and ends with an extended children’s birthday party, which scarcely follows any clear narrative logic, but instead delights in discussing perception and meaning, as the children decipher this strange fictional world for themselves. This summary hardly approximates the experience of viewing Manuel, a film that resists interpretation, and seemingly works less as a totality than as a series of tangentially connected fragments. It is difficult to locate any obvious

150

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

historical or political kernel to the film, or to gain any purchase on the real in this fantastical version of Portugal in the 1980s. And yet, there are enough hints throughout the three episodes of Manuel to give some indication as to the director’s concern for matters of historical and national importance. For instance, Ruiz periodizes his film in a deliberate manner. It takes place in a Portugal recovering from the authoritarian regimes of Salazar and Caetano, a Portugal beginning to open up politically (by joining the European Union in 1986) just as it was closed down imperially much later than other European nations, losing its provincias ultramarinas (overseas colonies) by 1975. Manoel’s home, Madeira, now represented the outermost limits of a former kingdom, the new border of a Portugal that once extended itself as far as Angola, Mozambique and East Timor. In the first episode, Manoel finds a strange fisherman in the forbidden garden, who takes him out to sea to ‘make a man’ of him. The fisherman is worried about the future of the country, and believes that the solution to its problems lies in a return to nautical exploration. His anxieties about remaining within the borders of the country certainly echo uncertainties in Portugal about the future of their shrunken homeland. Manoel’s encounter with the fisherman occurs at a time when Portugal as a nation seems ‘all at sea’, and uncertain of its position in the global arena. But instead of longing for a return to a colonial past, or the security of regional acceptance, Manoel refuses both, falling asleep on the boat. ‘We visited far-off countries, but you saw nothing,’ complains the fisherman. Even when Manoel resolves to stay awake, it becomes clear that he requires more than simply what is offered by the exploration at sea, and the opportunities of colonial exploration. Accounting for the instability of Portuguese identity in the years after 1974 – the year of the bloodless Carnation Revolution, which overturned the longstanding dictatorship of the Estado Novo (New State) – Carolin Overhoff Ferreira has pointed to the widespread interest in adolescent characters in films from the 1990s. In works by Teresa Villaverde and Pedro Costa, Ferreira argues, the adolescent comes to allegorize the uneasy transition in Portuguese national identity after dictatorship, one pitched ‘between its colonial legacy and an uncertain European future’.3 The same analysis might be extended to Manuel, too, although it was made in the decade before. When the film was released, a truncated version of Portuguese empire had yet to translate itself into a collective national identity, which was still intrinsically linked to the era of maritime expansion and colonial discoveries.4 However, not long after this process of

Education, Destiny and National Identity

151

deterritorialization had begun taking place, there was a subsequent move towards reterritorialization as Portugal was accepted into the European Union.5 While all of the political upheaval represented here – from military struggle to decolonization to electoral democracy – is barely visible in Manuel, Ruiz makes at least one attempt to map the coordinates of Portugal’s transition. In the first episode, Manoel meets a mysterious older boy, who turns out to be his future self. Manoel tells this future self the current date – 3 March 1978 – to which the other replies: ‘Strange, for me it’s 5 March 1983.’ Manoel the elder tells his junior all that will transpire if he takes the day off school, and then reappears to advise him of how to behave in class. His advice seems useful, but even the prescience of his future self cannot save both Manoel’s parents. In the six-year gap between the two Manoels, we see that not much has changed, or at least not much has been learned. Even with the benefit of hindsight, Manoel cannot properly advise his younger self on the correct course of action. The implication here – as elsewhere in the film – is that age does not necessarily beget wisdom. Although it might not seem to amount to much of a political comment, this scene helpfully instructs viewers in the film’s entirely unique mode of layering and patterning the various images and sequences that appear throughout. Initially, such a scene might be read as a simple doubling, whereby the older Manoel represents a more mature version of the younger Manoel, in the same way that the rising democratic and cosmopolitan Portugal will improve by transitioning away from its earlier status as waning colonial power. But there is more at play here, and gestures like this – which begin with a double – always point in more than two different directions, becoming not just mirrors, but mirrors reflecting mirrors, a recursive mise-en-abyme that refuses to close itself off. (This is one of Ruiz’s favourite tropes. He uses it to great effect in the final episode of Manuel, in which images of children running around inside a giant elephant bounce off a series of contiguous mirrors, and are not confined to any fixed position.) The non-identical manifestations of the same character in the film at different points in his life is matched in Manuel by an interest in the fractured narrative of the boy’s education – how he is inducted into the state, and into the world, and the effects that the embrace (or repudiation) of education might have on oneself, one’s parents and one’s nation. In the first instance, this has to do with Manoel’s truancy problems, and his preference for exploring the world, beginning with the ‘forbidden garden’ near his home. Manoel seems compelled by a mysterious voice, but insists that ‘I’m not skipping school because a voice is calling me, but because I choose to.’ Absconding from school is Manoel’s

152

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

prerogative, and he seems to do so in order to evade those voices (of his parents and teachers) that would tell him how to act, and how to think about the world. But in refusing to listen to those in authority, here the child becomes responsible for a series of unfortunate events. His disobedience in relation to his education has dire consequences for the family: Manoel’s mother becomes overstressed after learning of her son’s truancy problems, and dies. This tragedy necessitates Manoel’s repetition of his school day, this time with his determination to attend class. But, as Michael Goddard has observed, taking a different path does not necessarily mean that Manoel has made an autonomous decision about his life, as the various permutations of his day appear to overlap, rather than succeed one another.6 Manoel’s decision to act does not necessarily achieve a predictable outcome. Cause does not lead to expected effect: here it has completely unforeseen consequences. Although the breakdown of the sensory-motor schema in modern cinema touches all, the child is especially affected by an inability to act with any certainty. As suggested by the film’s title, Manoel is not able to choose for himself: he is destined to adopt a subject position that has, effectively, been mapped out for him.7 Always already subject to the desires of those in authority, the child also finds himself in a fictional world where discontinuous and aleatory cuts between images and landscapes create a series of uncertain, contingent situations. What Deleuze has famously written of the child in neorealist cinema may be of assistance here: ‘In the adult world, the child is affected by a certain sense of motor helplessness, but one which makes him all the more capable of seeing and hearing.’8 His ability to remain as a child, not intervening physically in the world but seeing and hearing keenly, cast Manoel in a position from which he might reflect – and allow viewers to reflect – on the pressures to conform to a prescribed national identity. Manoel is required to respond to a series of expectations from different sources, and his identity is formed as an accretion of these. Each of the three choices also speaks to different aspects of a Portuguese collective identity, and it is for Manoel to discover how each might be processed as he comes to know himself. The use of a Wellesian deep-focus is particularly noteworthy here. There are a number of shots of Manoel throughout the three episodes in which he is relegated to the background, but remains integral to the scene. As with similar scenes of the protagonist’s childhood in Citizen Kane, the viewer is forced to engage with multiple narrative planes at once, and made to consider the temporal and spatial gaps that open up between Manoel and the rest of his world. In particular, Ruiz

Education, Destiny and National Identity

153

makes use of the split-field diopter – a technology that he would employ until the very end of his career – but takes a technique mostly associated with Hollywood cinema and transforms it for different purposes. While the diopter traditionally performed a narrative function – simultaneously presenting multiple lines of narrative action – it could also execute more artistic manoeuvres on screen, focusing on objects and persons not wholly integral to the plot, while improbably relegating the movements of a lead actor to the background of the shot. Ruiz’s use of the diopter was even more experimental. Often daring to reveal the presence of the camera in such trick shots, the director even attempted diopter tracking shots, in Genealogies of a Crime (1997), and again in Manuel.9 In the first episode, Manoel’s second encounter with the fisherman differs from the first, in that the boy chooses to go to school rather than out to sea. The boy insists that he is attending school of his own volition, and is not being compelled to do so by anyone else. As Manoel runs along the coastline towards his school, the fisherman moves with him, improbably gliding along with the camera, which tracks the pair in equal focus at the front and back of the frame. Although the blocking of the two actors here affords the fisherman a close-up, allowing him to mime the movement of the camera and giving him the only dialogue in the tracking shot, Manoel is eventually able to outrun both the camera and the fisherman, who is left waving hopelessly after the boy. In this way, the cinematography practices what Lúcia Nagib has referred to as ‘scale reversal’, the manipulation of proportions that is native to photography and to cinema, and which is most obviously in evidence in the close-up.10 Here, as elsewhere in the film (and also in both City of Pirates and Treasure Island), the diopter’s reversal of scale is more often than not occasioned by the presence of a child. Over the three episodes of Manuel, the boy oscillates between the different planes of the image, in focus but always accompanied by enlarged authority figures and objects. While it certainly ironizes the relationship between the child and the world around him, the technique does not necessarily bestow agency upon Manoel. Rather, it casts him within a more complex system of visual signs to which he looks for his emerging identity. Manoel stands as a diminutive figure within this fictional world, completely dwarfed by objects and forces that circulate around him, yet through the image commanding an important place in the scheme of things. In the second of Manoel’s three destinies, he is made to consider the relation of the nation to its art, the distinction between rote learning and independent thought, and the act of reading, in particular. Like Jean-Luc Godard in his

154

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

essay series Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Ruiz made a literary turn in the 1980s, focusing on books and bookshelves in films such as The Return of a Library Lover. However, the Chilean’s bibliophilia was also intimately connected with childhood, especially notable in his adaptation of Treasure Island, and in Manuel, wherein a girl reads from O Maninho E O Maninha (Brother and Sister) by the Brothers Grimm. Ruiz has spoken favourably of Truman Capote as an influence on this phase of his career, remarking that his early stories, such as The Grass Harp and ‘Children on their Birthdays’ (much of which is structured around fantasies of Hollywood) are related to the worlds of his films.11 But Ruiz’s interest in the written word is mediated by the way in which children reconsider the meaning of written words with respect to their experience of the world. Thus, his reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s time-honoured novel Treasure Island constitutes, what Andreea Marinescu has referred to as, an ‘intervention’ rather than an adaptation. The source text is not faithfully reproduced on the screen, but is instead transformed in such a way that the familiar becomes strange once again.12 The surrealistic ambition of Treasure Island is to take a narrative that has been all but exhausted by its adaptations, and to present it in a way that renders its contents only vaguely recognizable.13 Crucially, this is achieved not just by the director, but is made possible by his child protagonist, as Stevenson’s narrative is filtered through the perspective of Jim Hawkins at the heart of the film. The lack of ‘fidelity’ to the original appears not simply as a decision on Ruiz’s part, but as the necessary intervention by the film’s child actor, who also narrates the story. This interest in written narratives (and narrative in general) is drawn out in the second of Manoel’s destinies, which interrogates the reproduction of written words for certain purposes, especially with respect to the child. In order to ‘solve the problems of daily life’, Manoel’s teacher explains to him, ‘the first thing to do is to overcome our natural laziness’. Like the fisherman, the proposed solution is a rather conservative one, and one in which Manoel has little say. To this end, he asks Manoel if he could use his leisure time to memorize the epic Portuguese poem Os Lusiadas, by Camoes. Manoel, having been told to agree to this request by his older self, delights his teacher: ‘This shows me, for the first time in ages, a gleam of hope in the darkness that seemed to grip our country forever.’ The recitation would have been no mean feat for Manoel, and his willingness to take on the task represents a positive future for a nation still consolidating its newly minted democracy.

Education, Destiny and National Identity

155

For the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, in the years before Ruiz had filmed in the country, the poet Camoes was venerated as the voice of the nation. Os Lusiadas became synonymous with the myth of Portugal. A sixteenth-century work chiefly about Portuguese discoveries in the new world, Os Lusiadas had been historically mobilized for different reasons, but was prominently used to buttress the colonial empire of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.14 After the fall of the New State and the loss of Portugal’s colonies, however, Os Lusiadas came to reveal a tension between the nation’s historical accomplishments and its failures as an empire: the decline from the victorious arrival of Vasco da Gama in India to a nation of lost heroes, without purpose.15 Manoel’s reading draws out this contradiction in the reception of Camoes’s work during Portugal’s transitional period. The boy’s success as a student, which begins with reading the epic poem of empire, allows him to fulfil his father’s cosmopolitan hopes for the his future: ‘You’ll go to a good school on the mainland, then to high school in Paris. You’ll study medicine in London, and do your specialization in South Africa.’ Although this initially seems like a fruitful development in Manoel’s life, these international aspirations lead to his father’s death, which comes about – in part – when the associated school fees prove too costly. The worldly education of the child, while apparently enhancing his understanding of history, fails in this world because it represents another relic of the Portuguese colonial past. If Manoel is to extend himself outside the bounds of his own nation, then it will not be as a scholar, educated on behalf of the state and inspired to follow the southward route of da Gama, but instead as ‘a tourist’, his desired future profession. As a Portuguese citizen, Manoel appears to eschew all remnants of the homeland that are passed down to him, preferring to experience the world not by obeying the dictates of his parents or his teacher, but by embracing a cosmopolitan outlook of his own design and opening himself to the mystery of the world. ‘Mystery fabricates unique objects and Ministry tries to take them away,’ as Ruiz has it.16 In Manuel, there seems to be very little administration of the fictional world, which instead becomes more mysterious over the course of the three episodes. Part of this effect lies in the unpredictable nature of the images, which connect to each other by a montage of repetitive free association, and extract Manoel from the coherent world of state education, which attempts to narrate history in a less ambiguous fashion. On the island of Madeira, children are encouraged to repeat without question the literature of centuries past. In doing so, they are given no latitude for free play, no opportunity to discover ways in which they

156

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

might relate otherwise to their country of birth. Ruiz revisited rote learning in Life is a Dream (1986), in which the literature teacher, Ignacio Vela, is required to memorize Calderon’s play (from which the film’s title is taken) as a mnemonic to remember the names of 15,000 anti-junta resisters. When he forgets the play, and therefore the names, it is cinema that takes over. He goes ‘back to the cinema of his childhood in order to find images of the Chilean resistance that he has suppressed in his subconscious. The dominant images he finds, however, are of Flash Gordon, Mongo, Captain Marvel: North America B-serials which were the staple diet of Ruiz’s childhood film-going.’17 Something similar takes place in Manuel. The education of the young protagonist is achieved not through the rote learning of literature, but by way of the free association of images and symbols in the world around him. In this respect, Manoel and the viewer occupy a similar position, privy to a series of apparently disconnected images throughout the film, which resist interpretation that relies on external sources – history and literature both. The cinematic image, as opposed to the written word, is more agile with respect to memory, and makes different demands of young minds in the way that it presents itself and contributes to the world picture. There is a real sense here that the grammar of the cinema is privileged over that of the written word, which might habitually incline towards more coherent narrative forms. As such, the film in its entirety is far less concerned with narrative than images, ‘pure spectacle without the Oedipal trappings of plot’, as Jonathan Rosenbaum understands it.18 Here, Ruiz adheres to the technique outlined in his book, Poetics of Cinema: ‘Images come first, narrative must follow.’19 In keeping with this position, he opts for a system of visual signs that may or may not communicate with one another, but that are always difficult to apprehend as a totality. In the third episode, any semblance of a cohesive narrative breaks down before our eyes, as a boy explains to Manoel that the world is holding itself up for interpretation. Instead, he tells the protagonist: ‘We’re surrounded by codes and secret messages. Everything’s grammatical.’ Clouds in the distance are interpreted as messages from the CIA (a veiled reference to the US-sponsored coup in Chile), but they only say ‘Happy Birthday’. In the same way, the flight of birds brings news from the London stock exchange, and the Eiffel Tower is an iron code that transforms French body odour into perfume. In this final episode, Manoel ultimately eludes state education, and is praised for doing so. The ‘most intelligent girl in the world’, the chess champion

Education, Destiny and National Identity

157

Marylina, reminds Manoel that he is very lucky to avoid school, and lucky also that his mother is dead. When Manoel tells Marylina his age, she replies: ‘Seven! How fortunate! It’s the age of reason.’ Here, Manoel takes control of the narrative voice-over, telling his own story, one ‘that I made up in my distant childhood and that happens in the future’. Importantly, it is a story that is comprised of images, rather than words, allowing for a more open future. ‘Now, after all these years’, Manoel says, ‘when I remember my childhood, I think these things were just my imagination. Who knows? Children are like that. They believe whatever they see.’ This highly ironical note, on which the film ends, seems to assert Manoel’s authority over his own destiny once and for all – against his elders, against his education and against a fixed national identity. Yet a paradox remains. For however often Manoel tries to strike out on his own, against the nationalist traditions of his country and the generations that have come before him, there is something inextricably nationalistic in his gestures of refusal throughout the film. That is to say, if the film allegorizes Portuguese national identity, then that national identity is felt in the child protagonist’s resistance to it. In his reluctance to grow up and into an adult role as a citizen of the nation, Manoel is at the same time staking out a new kind of citizenship. The uncertainty about the future of Portugal was a kind of emergent national feeling in 1986, a strangely indeterminate mood that pervaded the country. And this is what attracted Ruiz to the Iberian nation – the paradox of Portuguese national identity that asserted itself in the very act of its self-effacement. This was, after all, the nation that produced the poet Fernando Pessoa, as well as the film-maker Manoel de Oliveira. Both were artists who were not only unconcerned with identity, but who ‘believe[d] that identity never existed’. That is to say, as Adrian Martin has pointed out, that there is no such thing as a personal identity, nor is there such a thing as a national identity for such artists. It is the non-existence of national identity that makes Portuguese national identity so fascinating for Ruiz.20 In Manuel on the Island of Wonders, Ruiz was intrigued by these questions of national identity, by the way that children could read the world and its symbols, and how narratives that revolved around children did not necessarily approximate the experiences of ‘ordinary childhood’. ‘I haven’t so much made films for children as with children and about children,’ he once stated in an interview. ‘Ordinary childhood doesn’t interest me.’21 Here then is a film with and about children, which is at the same time interested in the past and future of Portuguese national identity, and indeed in the very question of its existence.

158

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Notes 1 See Michael Goddard, The Cinema of Raul Ruiz: Impossible Cartographies (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2013), 1–7. 2 ‘Entretien avec Raul Ruiz’, Cahiers du Cinema, Television Supplement, 1981, quoted in Susan Boyd-Bowman, ‘Television Authorship in France: La Réalisateur’, in Making Television: Authorship and the Production Process, ed. Robert J. Thompson and Gary Burns (New York: Praeger, 1990), 55. 3 Carolin Overhoff Ferreira, ‘The Adolescent as Postcolonial Allegory: Strategies of Intersubjectivity in Recent Portuguese Films’, Camera Obscura 20, no. 2_59 (2005): 67. 4 See Fernando Arenas, Utopias of Otherness: Nationhood and Subjectivity in Portugal and Brazil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 10. 5 See Arenas, Utopias of Otherness, 17. 6 Goddard, Impossible Cartographies, 82. 7 In her analysis of Mysteries of Lisbon, however, Lúcia Nagib suggests at least a degree of sensory-motor capability for a Ruizian child: aided by the intermedial construct of a cardboard cut-out theatre, the young Pedro shifts from hapless spectator to emboldened participant, knocking down miniature figures in the diaroma that represent his antagonists in real life. See Lúcia Nagib, ‘Reflexive Stasis, Scale Reversal and the Myth of Modern Cinema’, in Inert Cities: Globalization, Mobility and Suspension in Visual Culture, ed. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Christoph Lindner (Bristol: Intellect, 2014), 195–6. 8 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3. 9 See Paul Ramaeker, ‘Notes on the split-field diopter’, Film History: An International Journal 19, no. 2 (2007): 187–8, 195. 10 Nagib, ‘Reflexive Stasis’, 193. 11 David Ehrenstein, ‘Raúl Ruiz at the Holiday Inn’, Film Quarterly 40, no. 1 (Autumn 1986): 5. 12 Andreea Marinescu, ‘The Dream of Memory in Raul Ruiz’s Memories of Appearance: Life Is a Dream’, Framework 55, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 21–2. 13 A year before the film was released in the United States, a star-studded version of Stevenson’s work premiered, starring Charlton Heston and a young Christian Bale (Frances Clarke Heston, 1990). 14 See Patricia Vieira, Portuguese Film, 1930-1960: The Staging of the New State Regime, trans. Ashley Caja (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 57–79. 15 Arenas, Utopias of Otherness, 12. 16 Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema (New York : Distributed Art Publications, 1995), 92.

Education, Destiny and National Identity

159

17 John King, Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 181. 18 Rosenbaum, Placing Movies, 232. 19 Fergus Daly, ‘Manoel dans l'île des merveilles (Manoel on the Island of Marvels [3 part French TV series], 1985)’, in Rouge 2, ed. Adrian Martin, http://rouge.com. au/2/manoel.html (accessed 18 February 2016) (no pagination). 20 Adrian Martin, ‘A Story is a Bridge Between Worlds: A Tribute to the Life and Work of Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011)’, http://vimeo.com/67624377 (18 February 2016). 21 Ehrenstein, ‘Raúl Ruiz at the Holiday Inn’, 5.

10

An Allegorical Childhood: Identity and Coming of Age in Terry Loane’s Mickybo and Me Jennifer R. Beckett

Children may live the psychosocial trauma of war for a moment, a month, a year, but they suffer it for the duration of their lives; they have been socialized under the conditions of war into societies themselves conditioned by its disruptive events. Eduardo Mendieta (1997)1 Writing on the issues of childhood and innocence, Anne Higonnet points to the underlying menace of images of Romantic childhood. ‘Every sweetly sunny, innocently cute Romantic child image’, she says, ‘stows away a dark side: a threat of loss, of change, and, ultimately, of death.’2 It is this dichotomy between innocence and the looming shadow of its loss that pervades Terry Loane’s 2005 film Mickybo and Me. If childhood is a time of innocence and discovery of self, the film asks, what of the childhood inevitably damned by the sociopolitical conditions under which it is played out? And, what are the ramifications for the ongoing landscape of the nation under such conditions? In this chapter, I examine how Mickybo and Me offers the viewer an allegorical rendering of the greater issue of identity politics in Northern Ireland. Using a framework drawn from trauma theory and the Liberation Psychology of Ignacio Martín-Baró, I show that the past–present nature of the coming-of-age film, in which history is viewed from a position of hindsight, works to interrogate the psychosocial conditioning of Northern Irish identity, moving, if tentatively, towards a position of post-Troubles3 that is able to reconcile the past and look towards a new sense of self.4

An Allegorical Childhood

161

Mickeybo and Me was released into an atmosphere of stagnation, mistrust and fragile political alliances following a breakdown in the peace process and the move towards home rule in 2003. It centres on the childhood friendship of Mickybo and the film’s narrator Jonjo (Me), two boys from the opposite side of the sectarian divide, over the course of summer 1970. It follows the familiar arc of the coming-of-age narrative – friendships formed, adventure undertaken, the culminating event that signals the end of childhood innocence, and the shift in the sense of self that a growing awareness of the adult world around brings – but it does so while unsettling the ‘innocence’ of the world Mickybo and Jonjo inhabit. Superimposing the Troubles on a background of the everyday, marking it as ‘separate to’ Northern Irish life – and by extension, identity – is the most common rendering of Northern Ireland on film. In Mickybo and Me, Loane instead depicts the city of Belfast as a playground in which the political and social realities of the Troubles are integrated into a world of childhood innocence and play. Although Loane has been adamant that this was not a Troubles film but rather a reflection of his own experience of Belfast as a child, it is nonetheless an exploration of the way in which sectarian identity, Catholic-versus-Protestant, rather than a shared national identity, ultimately becomes the defining feature in its young characters’ lives.5 Childhood in the film, then, becomes a metonym for wider discussions about identity and self within the landscape of Northern Ireland pre- and post-peace process. Bernard McKenna explains the responses to traumatic experience through a three-stage process: rupture (loss of identity), masking (the taking on of a fixed identity) and integration. It is this final phase that underscores the action in Mickybo and Me. Integration requires the subject to interact dynamically with the trauma, to come to terms with it and move through it.6 The ‘coming-ofage’ film, with its focus on the loss of innocence through a moment of rupture that breaks through the childhood construction of self, provides a perfect filmic trope in which to do this. One of the key aspects of the narrative structure of this genre is the conceit that, although the action is rendered as an experience of its child protagonists, the story is actually told from the perspective of one or more of their adult selves. This creates an active or aware remembrance of the events depicted rather than a ‘real-life’ rendering enabling the questing adultself to pinpoint the moment of lost innocence. From this position of childhood memory mediated by adult knowledge, the adult-self is able to rationalize experience and to integrate it fully into their identity.

162

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Such films, for example, Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me (1986) or even Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), are thus journeys of discovery from the future to the past, acts of hindsight. In this way the narrative structure of the coming-of-age film echoes the kind of active memorialization through storytelling that forms a central part of much trauma therapy, particularly within the sociotherapy model that is central to Liberation Psychology. While the coming-of-age film generally deals with a moment of closed trauma – a single, unrepeated traumatic event within non-traumatogenic conditions – the narrative of Mickybo and Me positions its action within the ongoing trauma of the Troubles. So, where the coming-of-age film is generally constructed within the closed timeframe of a summer with, perhaps, an adult voice-over at the end to tie up loose ends, Mickybo and Me must position its central narrative within the timeframe of the Troubles. Adapted by Loane from Owen McCafferty’s award-winning play Mojo Mickybo (1998), the film focuses its action in the summer of 1970 but drags its moment of memorialization into 2004. This elongated timeframe allows the film a double moment of hindsight. The first, following the classic coming-of-age tale, takes as its focus the film’s internal story of the friendship between Jonjo (aged nine) and Mickybo (aged eight), two boys from opposite sides of Belfast’s Ormeau Bridge and the moment of rupture that breaks through the innocence of childhood. The second, positioning the demise of the boy’s friendship as a cautionary tale, takes a wider perspective of the Troubles, framing 2004 as a time as politically fragile as the summer of 1970. The narrative of Mickybo and Me is thus constructed within the context of ongoing trauma and the modern peace process. This has significant implications for the way in which the film engages with the Troubles. While the ‘normal’ paradigm for a Troubles film positions the Troubles as something ‘separate to’ the ‘every-day of life’, interpreting the conflict as a series of closed events rather than as a continuing trauma, such an interpretation is not adequate to propel the narrative of Mickybo and Me forward into 2004 in order to frame the memory within the present social and political conditions. It is this movement that accommodates a reading of the film as a cautionary tale for 2004. In order to move the story between these two arenas, to create an understanding of how the implications of the loss of childhood innocence within the film’s narrative reach beyond the actions of its protagonists, within the timeframe of one summer – a requirement of the double moment of hindsight – Loane has had to integrate the Troubles into the fabric of his mise-en-scène. The opening

An Allegorical Childhood

163

sequence of the film, described below, thus acts as a bridge between the earlier ‘normal’ paradigm and Loane’s interpretation of the reality of Mickybo and Jonjo’s world. Filmed in a palette of cold blues and greys and cut to the recognizable upbeat tune of ‘Belle of Belfast City’, the opening vignette of Mickybo and Me appears to place us in the familiar world of the ‘normal’ paradigm. The camera opens on a mid-shot of a young boy walking along a street before opening to a shot, taken from the child’s perspective, of his mother walking beside him. Finally, it pans out to a wide, side-on view positioning the pair within the background of the scene. Mother and son then enter a shoe shop moments before it is bombed. Such an opening gambit is not uncommon in Troubles films, bomb blasts filmed in gritty realist styles open films such as Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s Nothing Personal (1995) and Jim Sheridan’s In The Name Of The Father (1993), but the way in which Loane locates the action in this scene is unusual. Rather than having the pair walk down a street that appears to show little evidence of the conflict, in this scene the Troubles have become deeply imbedded in the landscape. The mother walks her son briskly past burnt out storefronts; her discomfort is as evident in the strain on her face as it is in the way in which she clings to his hand. Here it is the ordinary act of buying shoes that is imposed upon a backdrop of the Troubles rather than the other way around. The bombing, which silences the folk-tune, one that now appears out of place as if part of a masquerade of the everyday, figuratively explodes through the fabric of the accepted ‘normal’ paradigm, radically altering the construction of the ‘sense of coherence’ in the film.7 By integrating the Troubles into the very fabric of the film in this way Loane’s ‘sense of coherence’ is instead predicated on a normalization of the conditions of conflict within which the boys live(d). Mickybo and Me thus offers us a picture of the way in which the social realities of the conditions created within the traumatogenic environment of the boys’ lives influence their understanding of, and adaptation to, the world around them. This leads, as John Hill notes, to an atmosphere closer to the ‘lived experience’ of children in Northern Ireland.8 It is this ‘lived experience’ that Loane explores through his construction and subsequent destruction of childhood innocence within the context of the conflict. This in turn informs the film’s mise-en-scène and the sometimes dark humour of the boys’ adventures. Loane’s mise-en-scène, with its placement of the Troubles as the backdrop, is unique in that it offers us a view that considers both the open and hopeful

164

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

philobatic and the closed and cautious ocnophilic prospect.9 The differences between these views allows Loane both to create a visual rendering of the psychological world within the environment in which the boys stage their play and to construct a sense of innocence within the traumatogenic society of Belfast in 1970. The interplay between these two essentially conflicting views of place creates an unsettling visual tension within Mickybo and Me that is absent from other Troubles films, forcing the viewer into active engagement. For the most part Loane’s mise-en-scène conforms to the idea of a ‘remembered scenery’, such as you would expect in a coming-of-age film, where verisimilitude is focused on the boys’ perception of their surroundings. There are, however, instances when he breaks this internal visual language of the film, deliberately drawing our attention to the film’s placement of the Troubles. These breaches in ‘memory’ are caused by the film’s retrospective placement of the causal elements of the demise of the boys’ friendship within the adult Jonjo’s guarded construction of hope around the success of the peace process. While the overarching narrative structure in Mickybo and Me follows the coming-ofage film, pulling the action of the future into the present requires Loane to offer a very different construction of memory. While the film generally integrates the Troubles into its fabric, the moments when the background breaks through, as if trying to force its way into the boys’ lives, indicate a construction of memory that takes into account later lived conditions of the conflict. In order to explain this, let us consider that in order to conform to the visual construction of ‘remembered landscape,’ as one expects to see in a coming-of-age film, the background should be entirely constructed from the remembered perspective of the child. In the case of Mickybo and Me, where the sense of innocence is based around the boy’s ability to ‘normalize’ their surroundings, one might expect that this would require the environmental implications of the conflict to be understated. In direct opposition to this, Loane superimposes aspects of the boys’ remembered story of adventure onto a sharply rendered backdrop of the Troubles. This creates a sense of visual disconnection between the childhood memory of what occurred and the adult knowledge of what was happening. By creating this disconnection Loane deliberately draws the attention of the audience to what the boys consider ‘normal,’ in effect re-alienating it. In these scenes the camera has a tendency to linger on the evidence of the encroaching violence, panning as it does in the opening scene to self-consciously place the action onto a backdrop that appears out of place within the context of remembered events. The boys’ initial escape is thus aided by the

An Allegorical Childhood

165

arrival of two tanks that block their pursuers’ path and to which the boys remain oblivious. One of the most notable scenes of this kind occurs midway through the movie as the boys dash around a corner, stealing fruit from a grocery stand as they go, tearing past a line-up of men spreadeagled against a wall being patted down by members of the army. The juxtaposition of this adult perspective and the superimposed adventures of Mickybo and Jonjo is unsettling, but it is this uneasy alliance of form and action that sits at the base of the film’s construction of childhood innocence.

Constructions of innocence The construction of childhood innocence within the film relies on the dynamic movement between three levels of awareness and understanding of the implications of the Troubles within that framework. These are: 1. That of the central characters Mickybo and Jonjo (children) who have little understanding 2. That of the older bullies (adolescents) who terrorize both boys and who have a more defined sense of understanding 3. That of the boys’ parents (adults) who completely understand the situation. Jonjo and Mickybo’s position of innocence, based on their lack of understanding of the implications of the sociopolitical environment in which they live, is thus figured through their interaction with concerned adults and their misunderstanding of the older boys’ hostility towards their friendship. It is their movement from position one to position two, from one sense of coherence to the next by the end of the summer, that marks the boys’ ‘coming of age’. The three positions above produce, in turn, corresponding internal senses of coherence within the narrative of the boys’ adventures. The idea of the film as a cautionary tale within the context of the peace process in 2004, set up through the narrative arc of the boys’ coming of age, relies on a further sense within the film that the boys’ last summer of innocence is also, as McCafferty notes, ‘the last summer of innocence for Belfast’.10 To this end the adult and, arguably, the adolescent ‘sense of coherence’ within the film is based not on a ‘normalization’ of the Troubles, as it is for Mickybo and Jonjo, but rather on the kind of heightened awareness that an increase in violence produces.

166

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

While the adult viewpoint in the film comes from a position of active engagement with the reality and implications of the Troubles, the position of childhood innocence within the film is one of inactive participation. By this I mean that the children in the film are aware of their surroundings but without any direct sense of the impact it has on their lives. We find a good example of this in a scene that recalls the movie’s opening sequence to emphasize the ‘untouched’ psyche of Mickybo and Jonjo. Having come across a fake leg, Jonjo mentions that there is a boy at his school who has a fake leg as a result of being caught in a bombing. While the audience is immediately thinking back to the child from the beginning of the film, the boys remove the sense of serious reflection thus: Jonjo: Yeah, he doesn’t have to do PE anymore. Mickybo: Lucky git.

Mickybo and Jonjo, however, exhibit differing abilities to normalize violence within the film – a result of the way in which their socio-economic backgrounds provide a different framework in which each boy constructs his own ‘sense of coherence’. The ‘love across the barricades’ dynamic of the boys’ friendship within the film thus takes on a dual role, operating not only in its usual manner to show the socially destructive powers of the Troubles based on sectarian division but also to explore how differences in socio-economic conditions contributed and indeed, continue to contribute to this ‘lived experience’. The boys’ different lived environments necessarily create this variation between each boy’s idea of normal. This leads to differences in their initial perception of events, producing moments of both high comedy and pathos in the film. A telling example is a scene in which Jonjo, worried for Mickybo after hearing a bomb explode across the bridge in the night, searches for his friend the following morning. Having come across the bombed-out remains of a local pub (an eerie precursor to the events that will alter the course of the boy’s friendship) Jonjo stands shocked while Mickybo nimbly picks his way across the debris to him, appearing oblivious to his surroundings, and the following exchange place: Mickybo: You should’ve seen the place burning pardner. Nearly burnt down the whole street. It was pure class. Jonjo: Was anyone hurt? Mickybo: Don’t know but I got us a souvenir. (produces a finger from his handkerchief) Lucky treasure (pulls a ring from the finger and tosses the ring away). (In an American ‘Western’ accent) Do you think I used enough dynamite there, Kid?

An Allegorical Childhood

167

Mickybo’s ability to disconnect the dismembered finger he has found in the rubble from Jonjo’s enquiry points to a difference less in the boys’ understanding of what has occurred than in their ability to rationalize their surroundings. Here we can see how Mickybo’s greater exposure to the destructive aspects of the Troubles enables him to maintain his sense that, even within this environment, he is secure. Jonjo, with less immediate experience of the aftermath of events such as bombings, is both concerned for the safety of his friend and appears uneasy when he comes across the bomb site. In effect this plays out Jonjo’s opening line: ‘In 1970 the whole world knew Belfast was a divided city. Neighbourhoods were turning into ghettos; but I knew nothing about that … until I met Mickybo.’ The scene also demonstrates the adaptive capability of children for once Jonjo is reassured as to Mickybo’s safety within this environment he too is able to shrug off his earlier fear and resume play. This follows the thinking of both Aaron Antonovsky and Ignacio MartínBaró concerning the construction of ‘health’ within extremely stressful environments. For both theorists there is an emphasis on ‘the psychosocial factors that make it easier for people to perceive their lives are consistent, structured and understandable’.11 In the case of Jonjo and Mickybo, there are two elements at play within this scene that enable them to render their environment understandable and promote psychological salutogenesis (health); these are that violence forms a consistent part of their lives and that they have structured their play around a film genre (the Western) that takes into consideration difficult and often violent conditions.12 The interplay between Mickybo and Jonjo across these social barricades enables Loane to bring into play his second internal sense of coherence within the film, that of the adolescent boys whose identity follows the ‘closed’ sense of self associated with McKenna’s second stage of ‘masking’. In the scene at the bomb site, the boys’ exchange is observed by one of the adolescent bullies. Having previously been warned to stay away from their Catholic area, Jonjo’s presence within the bombed remains of the pub provides a further marker of Mickybo and Jonjo’s innocence and a sense of the inevitable impact the Troubles will have on them. Despite their ability in this scene to neutralize the impact of the Troubles, this period of innocence is bound to be short-lived. Even without the direct impact of personal trauma to rupture the child’s understanding of self, Donna Lanclos’s research into schoolyard games of children in Belfast indicates that there is a natural transition of understanding about the nature of the Troubles from stage one to stage two (as outlined above) over time.

168

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

This transition also involves a certain narrowing of identity cues and occurs as children move from the early self-centred stage of development to a more active engagement with the world.13 In accordance with the findings of Martín-Baró, who indicated that societal conditions are in large part responsible for identity adoption, Lanclos also found that the level of sectarian tolerance expressed by children is environmental; in other words, the higher the levels of tolerance they are exposed to at home and school, the more tolerant they are.14 The adolescent bullies in Mickybo and Me are a good example of this function. Their aggressive and negative attitude towards the younger boys’ friendship can be seen as a natural progression within a sense of coherence framed by the more divisively sectarian viewpoint that was more common within working-class areas of Belfast. Within the film, then, they offer a glimpse of what is to come in a world in which identity politics within the community play a central role in the construction of ‘self ’. In Northern Ireland these identity politics are inextricably tied to place. Despite the fact that the Mickybo and Jonjo appear to be able to integrate and normalize the Troubles into their everyday lives, their innocence is still marked by a sense of awareness that stems from this knowledge of place-me(a)nt within the sociopolitical sphere of Belfast.15 In fact, it is Mickybo’s awareness of place, in combination with a sense of coherence not yet framed by immediate experience of sectarian violence, that enables him to escape from his tormentors. As Mickybo dashes across the Ormeau Bridge, his older pursuers, painfully aware of the barrier the bridge represents and the potential danger of entering into ‘enemy territory’, are unable to follow. Nevertheless, Mickybo’s apparent lack of concern at crossing the bridge does not come without a sense of wariness towards those he encounters on the opposite side. For both children, an awareness of the importance of geographical belonging in Belfast, even the Belfast of 1970, is evident at their first meeting. Again, this accords with Lanclos’s findings.16 After stealing apples from the yard of an old man, Mickybo knocks over the unsuspecting Jonjo, exhorting him to run. When the boys finally come to a stop in the lee of a wall, they are tightly framed, drawing attention to the way that they have turned slightly away from each other in deliberate defensive positions and appear on guard. Conditioned to be suspicious of people they do not know, the boys are quick to ascertain their places of origin: Mickybo: Where are you from? Jonjo: Up the road. Where are you from? Mickybo: Over the bridge.

An Allegorical Childhood

169

Both boys’ answer in this exchange is an indication of their knowledge of place as a geopolitical marker. The ‘up’ of Jonjo’s reply refers to him being from the Upper Ormeau Road, meaning that he is Protestant, while Mickybo’s answer ‘over the bridge’ indicates that he is from a Catholic area. Immediately following this exchange, there is a weighted pause as the boys size each other up with the new knowledge of each other’s geographical belonging in mind. The sense of comradeship their shared escape gives them, however, appears enough to confirm for each that there is no danger to be had from their interaction and it is from here that their friendship takes root. It is worth noting at this point that despite his willingness to befriend Mickybo, Jonjo appears more conscious of the tyranny of place-me(a)nt. Shortly after their first meeting Mickybo casually invites Jonjo over to his house after tea. When Mickybo informs Jonjo that his house is on Palestine Street it is clear from the expression on Jonjo’s face that he is a little apprehensive. Mickybo, who is unfazed by the Ormeau Bridge, issues the invitation offhandedly and seemingly without any concern for the potential implications it may hold for his new friend. While Jonjo does make the trip to Palestine Street, unlike Mickybo, he hesitates on the Ormeau Bridge, his voice-over informing us of the obstacle it represents: The Bridge was the dividing line between us and them; the Protestant and the Catholic. I’d been told a million times not to cross it. The other side might as well have been the other side of the world.

A more developed awareness does not, however, mean that Jonjo has a greater understanding of the full ramifications of place than Mickybo. We see this most clearly in Jonjo’s encounters with the bullies. Despite direct encounters with the older boys in which they violently reinforce the sectarian nature of place and belonging in Belfast, Jonjo still does not appear to understand the reasons behind their threat and remains undeterred, continuing to cross the bridge to see his friend. Indeed, in what is a poignant moment after the last ‘innocent’ encounter he has with the bullies, Jonjo tells Mickybo: ‘It’s not fair. I’ve never done nothin’ to them. They’re just out to get me.’ The statement ‘I’ve never done nothin’ to them’, with its emphasis on the causal nature of violence, throws up questions about the nature of sectarian violence in Belfast, particularly with its connections to organized groups such as the IRA or the UVF. Gang identity and the sense of belonging and protection that it engenders is an essential element in Mickybo and Me, not only in understanding

170

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

the dynamic of the boys’ friendship but also as a mechanism by which they are able to cross the sectarian divide of ‘Us and Them, the Protestant and the Catholic’. The correlation between gang membership and protection is emphasized repeatedly during the film. Loane introduces Mickybo to the audience in the act of running away from the adolescent bullies, from whom he has stolen a ball in retaliation for their theft of his new chopper bike. When he befriends Jonjo, Mickybo immediately exclaims that they can now be ‘a gang’ and that this will mean that the older boys will have to leave them (meaning him) alone. In subsequent encounters with the bullies, both boys state their affiliation as a means of defence against the older boys’ threats. In this understanding, personal safety is measured as the willingness and capacity of the other boy to offer protection. Mickybo and Jonjo’s sense of protection is, however, grounded in their understanding of violence as a universal element of stress; that is, violence not situated within any defined social or political milieu. In the absence of any context, they are unable fully to comprehend the underlying causes of violent expression within their environment. Thus, both boys perceive the older boys’ behaviour as no more than schoolyard bullying and fail to understand the implications of the more sinister undertone to their treatment of Jonjo, despite the greater level of violence directed towards him. The death of Mickybo’s father at the end of the summer contextualizes the sectarian animosity of the older boys for him. The rupture that this represents for Mickybo’s construction of himself and the world around him in turn brings about an irrevocable change in each boy’s understanding of their ability to protect one another. Indeed, at this point the older boys emphasize the shift in social dynamics when they proclaim: ‘We’re lookin’ after him now’ – thus shutting out Jonjo. The demise of the boys’ friendship signals a closing down of previously open identity cues, particularly in the case of Mickybo. This contrasts with the point at which the boys form their gang, when social fluidity informs their sense of belonging, a result of their more open ‘sense of coherence’. It is this that enables them to construct a gang dynamic that bridges the sectarian divide. This, in turn, displaces the territorial modality of protection – the policing of movement across borders that encourages a focus on place-me(a)nt – rendering all geographical space ‘safe’. For Mickybo and Jonjo the protective focus is on personal rather than geographical protection.With their more rigid social boundaries, by contrast, the bullies have a narrower range of cues, all of which place a stronger emphasis

An Allegorical Childhood

171

on geographical belonging, within which they frame their sense of self. The extension within Belfast of identification with religious groups to carefully delineated territories is thus central to the protective modalities within their group. The intrusion of the Protestant outsider, Jonjo, into their bordered ‘safe’ space prompts them to put aside their animosity towards Mickybo and offer him a place in their gang, indicating that community belonging takes precedence over internal loyalty groupings. This offer is directly framed as a means of protection: ‘But he’s one of them, we can protect you.’ Coming from a sectarian contextualization of enmity of which Mickybo has no direct experience, the offer appears absurd. Indeed, experience has taught Mickybo that it is protection from these two that he requires, rendering ineffective the intrinsic emphasis on protection based on geographical loyalties. At the end of the summer, however, Mickybo’s personal experience of sectarian-based violence through the death of his father serves to emphasize the need for a bounded safe space and its subsequent policing. In the absence of identifiable perpetrators, it is the Protestant Jonjo, now othered through the strict imposition of territorial boundaries, who becomes the scapegoat for Mickybo’s father’s death: ‘You killed my Da, you bastard. You fucking killed my Da.’ In these conditions Mickybo’s need to protect his safe space renders it unsafe for Jonjo. Without his friend to protect him, Jonjo is forced into an understanding of what the Troubles will mean for him. It is this that marks his coming of age. Looking back at the time later, the adult Jonjo refigures the opening lines of dialogue his child-self spoke as a coda to the boys’ story, his adult voice taking over the narrative to deliver the changed qualifier: In 1970 the whole world knew Belfast was a divided city. But I knew nothing about that … until it hit me like a freight-train.

Trauma This brings me to a discussion of the way in which the boys’ development within the entire narrative arc of the film, extending through the comingof-age trope, follows McKenna’s stages of trauma.17 As discussed above, Mickybo and Me commences with the boys able to build a sense of coherence that focuses not on the trauma of the events occurring around them, but rather on their sense of personal safety within that environment. For both children, this sense of coherence is predicated on family stability and on an

172

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

absence of personal experience of direct trauma brought about by the Troubles. The Troubles are thus normalized and disempowered as an affective aspect of their sense of self. As we have seen, this enables the boys to choose from a broader range of sociopolitical identity cues. This ‘open identity’ within the context of the Troubles is demonstrated in the film by pitting the boys against a duo of bullies who exhibit the more closed identity that is associated with McKenna’s second stage, that of masking.18 It is not, then, the Troubles that figure as the main reason for Mickybo and Jonjo’s adoption of the heroic figures of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Susan Lynch, who plays a cinema usher and the lover of Jonjo’s father, has suggested that the lack of strong adult figures amounts to an absence of heroes and that it is this absence that leads the boys into adopting the personas of their Western heroes.19 Her reading, with which I am inclined to agree, along with the position of both boys as outsiders, locates the appeal of the Western narrative form for the boys in its emphasis on comradeship, natural justice and the construction of personal identity outside the constriction of social norms (as outsiders). The Western ideal of comrades-in-arms, which features so heavily in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Hill, 1969), thus informs the imaginary vehicle that provides the locus for the boys’ friendship, their stand against the bullies and the central part of the ‘escape’ narrative of the film. This escape is not, as the boys would have it, an escape from the law (‘the peelers’), after they are seen in the house of a dead man whose gun they have stolen. Rather, that excuse is projected onto their desire to escape from the constrictions and perceived failings of their family lives. Interestingly, once the boys have their ‘riding into the sunset’ moment in sight  – their escape to Australia – their discussions turn to superheroes, specifically whether Superman could stop the bombings in Northern Ireland. While this indicates that the boys are aware of the growing conflict, it also reiterates that the Troubles occupy a more removed (if not more worrisome) space within the boys’ consciousness. Their Western heroes, after all, remain men, and an escape from their familial situation is within the sphere of ordinary humans. The Troubles and their effects, by contrast, can only be solved through superhuman means. This conversation is touchingly recalled at the scene of Mickybo’s Da’s death, symbolizing the moment at which Mickybo loses his innocence. As we see below, this moment occurs after the boys are forced to surrender their escapist Western narrative and return, both literally and allegorically, to their ‘real’ lives.

An Allegorical Childhood

173

The boys’ thwarted escape from their family lives, their figures frozen as they jump in homage to the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, provides an emotional and visual turning point for the film. Loane draws upon the realities of the North–South divide to create a nexus point between the world of innocence the boys are leaving behind and what is to come on their return. Taking a subtle cue from the transition from sepia to colour in The Wizard Of Oz, the Guard who accompanies them to the border informs the boys that they have crossed over into the Republic, with the question, ‘Did you not notice the grass that bit greener, the sky a little bluer?’ The car in which they are travelling is also more open, there is no grille between the Guard and the boys and the blankets they are wrapped in are brightly coloured. Mickybo’s assertion that the absence of a firearm renders the Guard ‘not a real peeler’ enhances the feeling of fantasy. The Guard’s comments in this scene about what the boys will face once back in the North, lost on the dazed boys, presage the events that will alter the course of their friendship. The handing over of the boys at the border post  – ‘Checkpoint Charlie’20 – brings their adventure to a close. Leaving behind the Guard’s coloured blankets, swapped for institutional grey at the border, signals an end to the ‘fantasy’ narrative of the Western. The final action of this sequence of transition within the film centres on Mickybo, arriving home to the bombed-out pub his father frequented. Dashing into the pub Mickybo’s relation of his adventure to his father occurs within a complete fantasy in which his father is still alive at the bar. The exchange the pair have is a poignant indictment of the Troubles, and as such it is worth transcribing in full. Mickybo: Are you dead Da? Da: I am that son; every square inch of me. Mickybo: Why Da? Da: It all happened dead quick. Just sitting, having a pint; thinking about the world ... in all its glory. Then some joker just came in, started shootin’ all around. Mickybo: Was it sore Da? Da: No, not really. Mickybo: But there was lots of blood. When you’re shot there’s tonnes of blood isn’t there? Da: Any God’s amount of it son. Mickybo: If Superman was there, he would have stopped the bullets, wouldn’t he Da?

174 Da: Mickybo: Da: Mickybo: Da:

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema Oh Superman would have stopped the bullets – no bother. Are you gonna buy me a drink Da? No son, you’ll have to buy your own. You’re the big man now. Did your horse ever win Da? No son – it never did.

It is in this moment that Mickybo is brought into the very adult world of the Troubles. The sudden shift in position from innocence to adulthood that this marks is visually translated in a seamless cut that sees Mickybo turn from the fantasy into the slow motion reality of his surrounds as he walks out into his new world. The film’s return at this point to the aesthetic and emotional outlook found in its opening scenes with the mother and child underlines the harsh reality of the boys’ situation. The rupture between the fantasy world of the conversation with his father and the reality of the situation as he walks out of the bar also indicates the internal ‘rupture’ of trauma that Mickybo undergoes at this point. The thematic ‘separation’ caused by the trauma is underscored by Jonjo’s recollection that the Ormeau Bridge was closed for days upon their return and ‘[he] could not get to [his] partner’. Upon Jonjo’s return to Palestine Street, Mickybo’s Ma neatly sums up the ‘loss of identity’ that the trauma of the death of her husband has caused for her son: ‘Mickybo’s gone … there’s nothing left for you here now.’ Indeed, this is the case and Mickybo’s treatment of his old friend from within his newly adopted mask of sectarian hatred further proves the point. Coming full circle, the boys’ story ends where it started – on the Ormeau Bridge. The transformation of the Ormeau Bridge at the end of the film from barren no-man’s land to bustling thoroughfare, however, can be seen as an allegory for the breaking down of barriers at both the external level of place and within the internal psyche of the North. In this new place, Northern Irish identity, like the flow of traffic on the bridge, can be seen to be more fluid, less constrained by notions of ‘us and them’. Within this space it is possible for Jonjo’s adult recollections of childhood adventure, through his letter to Mickybo ‘back home’, to act as the agent by which the initial trauma is re-narrativized and, thus, broken down. Significantly, the film makes a point of indicating that Jonjo, without the depth of trauma experienced by Mickybo, retains his youthful moniker, whereas the Mickybo of the present has become Mick. Through this narrative conceit Mickybo and Me is able to bring the past into the present. The film’s rendering of 1970 as ‘the last summer of innocence’

An Allegorical Childhood

175

and that year’s correlation with the potential fragility of the modern peace is achieved through the retrospective movement of the coming-of-age narrative from position three to a fourth level of awareness: 4. That of the adult Mickybo and Jonjo who are able to understand the fragility of the current peace from a position of lived experience.21 Jonjo’s expression of hope in the letter, that peace will ‘let children be children a while longer’, tails off, giving no clear finality to the success of the peace process. Although critics such as Padraic Whyte found this ending ‘over sentimentalised’, to my mind it is an extension of the film’s allegorical motif that renders the position of the current peace process on the same precipice that the protagonists within a coming-of-age narrative find themselves.22 Thus, the film’s final construction of the landscape of Belfast, and by extension Northern Ireland, is one that straddles both the hopeful world of the philobat and the restrained one of the ocnophil, echoing the sense of cautious optimism that informed discussions around the success of the peace process at the time of its release. Indeed, I would argue that Mickybo and Me is only able to take this position because it comes from a place of fully integrated identity in which it is the traumatogenic environment, rather than any specific group, that is to blame for its continuation. The film’s emphasis on childhood innocence thus echoes Martín-Baró’s contention that the solution to breaking the cycle of violence rests in systemic social change.23 It does so by following Mickybo’s own journey through the traumatic structure outlined by McKenna: rupture, masking and, finally in modern times, integration.

Notes 1 Eduardo Mendieta, ‘Writings for a Liberation Psychology’, Cross Currents 47, no. 1 (1997): 134. 2 Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames Hudson, 1998), 28–9. 3 ‘The Troubles’ refers to the violent conflict over the constitutional status of Northern Ireland that lasted from 1968 to 1998. Put simply, unionists were determined to remain part of the United Kingdom, while nationalists and republicans aspired to become part of the Republic of Ireland. Although these two positions aligned with a division between Protestant and Catholic, this was

176

4

5

6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema primarily a territorial conflict. Paramilitaries on both sides, such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and UK security forces were responsible for over 3,600 killings and the injuring of over 50,000 people. For the purposes of this chapter, the ‘post-Troubles’ period refers to the transitional phase commencing with the signing of the Stormont/Good Friday agreement on 10 April 1998 and ending on 31 July 2007, when the British Military campaign in the North, Operation Banner, officially ended. Ignacio Martín-Baró, Adrianne Aron and Shawn Corne, ed., Writings for a Liberation Psychology: Ignacio Martín-Baró (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Not a Troubles film, see: ‘Mickybo and Me: Film director Terry Loane’s first feature’, culturenorthernireland.org: http://www.culturenorthernireland.org/features/ film/mickybo-me (accessed 8 May 2009). On experience of Belfast as a child, see: Donald Clarke, ‘Leave your Troubles behind’, Irish Times, 18 March 2005, 7. Bernard McKenna, Rupture, Representation and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama from the North of Ireland, 1969-1994, in the series Contribution in Drama and Theatre Studies, Volume 102 (USA: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 1. Bengt Lindström, ‘Contextualizing Salutonegenisis and Antonovsky in Public Health Development’, Health Promotion International 21 (2006): 241. John Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics (London: British Film Institute, 2006), 242. Phil Cohen, ‘Landscape after Ruins’, in Culture and the Unconscious, ed. Caroline Bainbridge, Susannah Radstone, Michael Rustin and Candida Yates (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 127. Maureen Dezell, ‘Butch and Sundance with an Irish Accent: “Mojo” Recalls Times of Troubles’, The Boston Globe, 2 April 2004, C.15. Lindström, ‘Contextualizing Salutonegenisis’, 241. Ibid. Donna Lanclos, At Play in Belfast: Children’s Folklore and Identities in Northern Ireland (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 135–8. For Martín-Baró on societal conditions and identity, see Mark Burton, ‘Viva Nacho! Liberating Psychology in Latin America’, The Psychologist 17, no. 10 (2004): 584–7. Lanclos, At Play in Belfast, 17. This wording is inspired by the artist Gerard Mannix Flynn’s work ‘State Meant’, an indictment of the role of the Irish Government in the placement of children in the care of religious orders where they suffered abuse. I am using a similar style here to indicate the way in which geographical location functions as a semiotic indication of religious affiliation and identity – the inherent meaning of place in Belfast during the Troubles.

An Allegorical Childhood 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

177

Lanclos, At Play in Belfast, 37–8, 126, 127. Mckenna, Rupture, Representation, 1. Ibid. Sarah Caden, ‘Learning to Inhabit Imaginary Worlds’, Irish Independent, 13 March 2005, see www. Independent.ie/entertainment/film-cinema/learning-to-inahabitimaginary-worlds-465427.html (accessed 9 May 2009). This is a colloquial reference to the checkpoint between Northern Ireland and the South. Dezell, ‘Butch and Sundance’. Padraic Whyte, ‘Mickybo and Me and the Mighty Celt’, Estudios Irlandeses 1 (2006): 178–80. Burton, ‘Viva Nacho!’, 586; Michael Hanna, Misconceptualizations of Trauma (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2003), 20.

178

Part Four

Performance

180

11

Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake: Child Labour and Commodity Culture in the Bollywood Adaptation of New Iranian Cinema’s Children of Heaven Michael Lawrence

The child’s significance for the transnational distribution and reception of certain kinds of cinema – the presence of so many films on the international festival and art house circuits that feature children in prominent roles – would suggest that the child might also enjoy a particularly productive relationship with the transnational adaptation of cinema. In such adaptations, the representation of the child would inevitably expose how the cultural and material specificities of childhoods are asserted or obscured during the indigenization of particular feature films across national borders. This chapter seeks to demonstrate not only the value of the transnational remake for understanding images of children in global film cultures, but also the value of the child for understanding images of globalization in transnational remakes. The contemporary Bollywood remake illuminates these complex transnational cultural dynamics. ‘In our current era of globalization’, writes Radia Washna Richards, ‘there is an urgent need to investigate cinematic border crossings and explore how cultures embrace and resist, borrow from and interact with each other.’1 To explore the relationship between childhood and globalization in the transnational adaptation, I focus on the representation of child labour and commodity culture in the Bollywood film Bumm Bumm Bole (Priyadarshan, 2010), an official Hindi-language remake of the Academy Award – winning Iranian feature Children of Heaven (Majid Majidi, 1997). I examine the transnational adaptation process by addressing, first, the two films’ representation of child labour, considering the significance of the Bollywood film’s introduction of a subplot concerning local terrorism,

182

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

and, second, the remake’s representation of commodity culture, tackling the implications of that film’s official partnership with the global sports goods company Adidas.

Contexts While children are often prominent in the New Iranian Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, they are rarely privileged in the popular Hindi cinema known today as Bollywood. In several significant films produced in the decade following Indian independence in 1947, children were certainly prioritized as characters, but since then children have been peripheral characters, usually the younger relations or companions of the adult protagonists, whose marginal status reflects the centripetal logic of the cinema’s supposed multi-generational address and appeal. And as Corey Creekmur has noted, the popular cinema associated with the period following liberalization, although it is aimed at more youthful audiences, has largely dispensed with the historical convention of presenting the protagonist as a child in the film’s opening act.2 Whereas the socialist realist Bombay cinema of the 1950s, represented by such films as Boot Polish (Prakash Arora, 1954) and Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (Amar Kumar, 1957), featured orphaned and abandoned children living and working on the city streets, contemporary Bollywood popular cinema seldom presents childhoods that appear difficult or dangerous. Meheli Sen reminds us of ‘the massive number of children who live amidst poverty in the subcontinent’, and that in India ‘child labour laws are openly flouted, and a large number of these children also participate in unorganized sectors such as domestic labour and in hotels, spas, small-scale restaurants, tea-shops and so on’.3 At the same time, middle-class and affluent children bear a different burden: ‘As India pursues its global economic policies aggressively, children come to be seen as baton bearers for the nation’s shining future. This fervent ambition translates into brutal school curriculums and sadistically demanding institutions of higher education.’ Hindi popular cinema, notes Sen, ‘has remained indifferent to these predicaments’.4 It is surprising, then, that a Bollywood film-maker should choose to remake Majidi’s Children of Heaven, since this film, while not usually regarded as a children’s film, focuses almost exclusively on the experience of two young children, and specifically their daily life attending school and then balancing

Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake

183

their homework with the work they are expected to do for their parents. What is even more surprising is how little Bumm Bumm Bole differs from Children of Heaven, particularly when compared with other popular Hindi adaptations of foreign films. Almost nothing has been changed at the level of narrative incident, with the exception of the addition of the subplot involving local terrorists. Bumm Bumm Bole is also unusual in that, rather than the Bollywood norm of half a dozen songs, it includes only one song sequence, an animated daydream fantasy that also reflects the film’s close connections with post-liberalization commodity culture in India. Sangita Gopal has identified in recent Bollywood films the projection of a ‘possible India’ characterized by an all-encompassing embrace of the consumerist lifestyles associated with global capitalism.5 While preserving the Iranian original’s interest in what Appadurai has called ‘the social life of things’, the Bollywood film emphasizes and ultimately endorses the child’s participation in a global commodity culture.6 Both films concern a brother and sister who secretly share the boy’s shoes after the girl’s are lost, until their father buys them both new shoes. In the Iranian film, the shoes that the children share are generic plimsolls, but in the Bollywood film, the shoes that the children share, that the boy dreams about during the song sequence, and that their father buys them at the end, are all a specific brand of shoe. They are Adidas trainers (Figures 11.1 and 11.2). Bumm Bumm Bole adapts the universal humanism for which Majid Majidi’s film – like much international film festival friendly Iranian cinema of the 1990s – was celebrated and offers audiences an equally sentimental fable that nevertheless reflects its national specificity as a remake. The degree to which it was successful in doing so was a focus for its reception in India. In the Hindustan Times (10 April 2010), its director, Priyadarshan, suggested that Bumm Bumm Bole may well not be a children’s film, given its focus on ‘the problems of a

184

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

family’ against a backdrop of terrorism and politics, but that it is nonetheless ‘a film that children will enjoy a lot as it’s a clean family entertainer’. For the critic of the Times of India (13 May 2010), moreover, the film offers ‘a heartening picture of a destitute family’ living in ‘the ULFA-infested terrain of Assam,’ in which ‘the two kids … spend most of their time with school, homework and housework, with almost no time to play.’ For this critic, the terrorism subplot seemed ‘totally unwarranted and ends up as a jarring note in what could have been an idyllic portrait of family bonding’, but the review concludes that the film is ‘fine vacation fare for the family’. Such responses indicate a defining tension in Bumm Bumm Bole and its Bollywoodization of New Iranian Cinema. The terrorist subplot is designed to exploit the recent histories of violence in India related to regional separatism, while through its partnership with Adidas the film functions to endorse the transformation of Indian society associated with global capitalism. Although this is the primary context for understanding the representation of child labour and commodity culture in Bumm Bumm Bole, it is illuminating also to situate the remake in the history of such transnational adaptations by noting the privileging of the child in post-independence popular Hindi cinema of the 1950s. Like the post-revolutionary New Iranian Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, this was directly inspired by post-war Italian neorealist cinema of the 1940s, and specifically by the films of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. Well-known examples that gave central and significant roles to children include De Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us (1943), Shoeshine (1946) and The Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1947) and Germany, Year Zero (1949). For Robin Wood, these films are notable for the way ‘the precarious, shifting balance of despair and hope for renewal is repeatedly poised

Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake

185

in the lives (and deaths) of children’.7 And for Marcia Landy, in neorealism’s exploration of ‘social misery’, the child ‘becomes a window, a witness to and an actor in, economic and social suffering’.8 The Bollywoodization of the New Iranian Cinema, I suggest, presents the child as an actor in the economic and social renewal associated with global capitalism. Italian neorealism is widely and routinely understood as an important precursor for the New Iranian Cinema.9 Bicycle Thieves is seen as particularly influential. Abadanians (Kianush Ayari, 1993), about a father and his son looking for a stolen car in Tehran, is directly inspired by De Sica’s film, and in Marzieh Meshkini’s Stray Dogs (2004), a young girl and her brother in Kabul actually attend a theatrical screening of Thieves. Several critics have focused on common characteristics of the representation of children in both Italian neorealism and New Iranian Cinema.10 But Karen Lury reminds us that, although the children in these cinemas have been ‘understood as symbols of the nation, representing the changes and (literally) embodying the uneven and troubled development of their homelands’, it remains important ‘to allow them to resist a categorical sameness in which they are made alike (to each other, to other children, to what we know)’.11 Transnational adaptations of films about children, in which the characters might or might not be ‘made alike’ across particular national borders, thus reveal how childhoods can be determined by cultural contexts. Tracking the changes made during the Indian adaptation of the Iranian film allows us to see the children in the Bollywood remake as embedded within the material particularities of time and place, as embodying specific yet certainly uneven developments to do with India’s relationship with global commodity culture. Children appear as central characters in several of Majidi’s films, beginning with his first film Baduk (1992), about Afghan refugee children in Iran, as well as later works such as The Colour of Paradise (1996), The Father (1997) and The Song of Sparrows (2008).12 Children of Heaven is thoroughly representative of the Iranian cinema which has been embraced by film festival and art house audiences in the West but which represents only a small portion of Iran’s national film culture. Indeed, the original Iranian New Wave (sinema-ye motefavet, or alternative cinema) is often said to begin with A Simple Event (Shahid-Sales, 1973), which deals with a ten-year-old boy in a fishing village. After the revolution, children returned as central figures in the non-mainstream cinema. Amir Naderi’s The Runner (1985) is often regarded as the first Iranian film to move onto the international film festival circuit, where it was compared to Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, Mexico, 1950) and Pixote (Hector Babenco,

186

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Brazil, 1980). Other notable films include Where is the Friend’s House? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987), Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bahram Baizai, 1985/9), Water, Wind, Dust (Naderi, 1989), Snake Fang (Masud Kimiai, 1989), The Need (Alizera Davudnezhand, 1991), The Key (Ebrahim Foruzesh, 1986), The Jar (Foruzesh, 1992), The Little Man (Foruzesh, 1994), The Adult Game (Kambozia Partovi, 1993), Bag of Rice (Mohammad-Ali Talebi, 1998), Willow and Wind (Talebi, 2000), The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi, 1995), The Mirror (Panahi, 1997), The Silence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1998), The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998), The Girl in the Sneakers (Rasul Sadr Ameli, 1998) and Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (Hana Makhmalbaf, 2007). In these films, children are often orphaned or homeless or both, and therefore have to depend on themselves. Even when they do live with their parents, they are presented as engaged in some kind of work, whether homework and housework or paid or unpaid work outside the house. The prominence and significance of children in the New Iranian Cinema have been discussed and debated by a range of scholars. Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad has suggested that the Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents was since the 1960s the primary source of financial support for more experimental directors such as Kiarostami and Naderi and, following the Islamic Revolution, the only funding body not strictly controlled by the government.13 However, as other critics have suggested, it was also generally easier for directors working in post-revolutionary Iran to make films about children because of the various restrictions on depicting adults.14 In his account of the New Iranian Cinema’s transnational success, Zeydabadi-Nejad notes that appearances (and prizes) increased from 52 (and four) in 1985, to 540 (and twenty-two) by 1990, and thence to 1,155 (and 114) by the end of that decade.15 ‘Once a few films about children had won awards in the late 1980s and the early 1990s,’ he also observes, ‘a trend began with numerous films with child protagonists emerging from Iran. Understandably, film-makers tried to emulate the earlier films, knowing that such films would be easy to promote internationally.’16 For Hamid Dabashi, Children of Heaven exemplifies the kind of derivative and formulaic cinema made for international audiences, and its success in the United States ‘indicates that there is no critical apparatus to distinguish between a major Iranian film and a mediocre imitation’.17 Hamid Reza Sadr, on the other hand, claims the film ‘offered an opportunity for international audiences to observe characters whose lives might be very different from their own but whose concerns are ultimately universal’.18 For some critics, then, the children represent an instrumental and even cynical strategy to attract international audiences, while

Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake

187

for others the universal appeal associated with such children facilitates and even forges those transnational empathies that Charles Acland has described as ‘felt internationalism’.19 The prominence of children in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has resulted in readings that emphasize the child’s allegorical function as an oppressed yet resilient subject. Hamid Naficy, for example, suggests that Iranian directors used children in order to examine authoritarianism and resistance in films such as Scabies (Abolfazl Jalili, 1986), set in a reformatory, and The School We Went To (Dariush Mehrjui, 1989), and he suggests that Naderi’s Water, Wind, Dust, about a young boy searching for his family following a severe drought, ‘creates an allegory not only for Iranian people but also for third-world people everywhere who must fight both their fate and their oppressors’.20 Hamid Reza Sadr has claimed that these directors ‘not only changed Iranian cinema but also altered the vision of Iran from the outside’: ‘the pretty, idealized, innocent and hardworking child was used to convey certain abstract ideas, such as lost innocence in a politicized world’ and thus ‘provided a contradiction of the view of an uncivilized Iran promoted by the foreign media over the previous two decades’.21

Child labour and commodity culture While the Bollywood remake of Children of Heaven can be connected to Italian neorealism via the Iranian film it adapts, it is important to recall an earlier transnational exchange between Italian and Indian cinema in the 1950s. Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn remind us that the representation of children in New Iranian Cinema reflects ‘important crosscurrents between Iranian and Indian film’, and suggest that ‘the impact of neorealism in Iran undoubtedly bears the influence of Satyajit Ray’.22 Although the Bengali director of Pather Panchali (1955) may be the best-known Indian film-maker to be inspired by De Sica and Rossellini, post-independence popular Hindi cinema from Bombay also reflected a transcultural dialogue with the neorealist cinema from post-war Italy, examples of which were screened in India in the early 1950s.23 As Basil Wright recalled in 1974, when he had screened Bicycle Thieves to his students in India, ‘They recognized and understood it at once, for it could have taken place in Bombay, Calcutta or a hundred other cities.’24 The child was very often privileged in these more realist films. Examples include Munna (K. A. Abbas,

188

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

1954), Jagriti (Satyen Bose, 1954), Boot Polish, ‘Ferry’ (Hemen Gupta, 1954), Do Bigha Zamin (Bimal Roy, 1954), Ab Dilli Dur Nahin and Do Phool (Abdul Rashid Kardar, 1958), an adaptation of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi influenced by Luigi Comencini’s German language version of 1951. ‘The birth of child-centric cinema derives from the Italian neorealist cinema’s commitment to make contact with “reality”,’ notes Nandini Chandra in her discussion of these films, which she believes ‘pioneered visions of childhood that have haunted Hindi cinema ever since’.25 Although the films of the 1950s routinely depict children who must work to survive, school is nevertheless presented as ‘the only legitimate place for the child’.26 When they appear in films, we are invited but also obliged to watch children work. We see and inevitably judge the results of their active and effortful participation as performers in the production, even if we prefer to imagine that such work is closer to play as far as the children are concerned. The child actor represents the most spectacular form of child labour because her work involves the production of representations. If films are commodities that circulate around the world in which the labour of children is so clearly visible, then they should be understood in relation to those other commodities whose production also depends on children’s labour but in which that labour is not easily visible to the consumer. In the West, anxiety or ambivalence about children working in the film industry can be discerned in the media’s fascination with the child star’s exploitation and eventual ruin. Even so, the child actor is rarely, if ever, linked to the broader issue of child labour per se. We are more likely to associate child labour with the failure of ‘other’ parts of the world to provide for their children a ‘universal’ standard of childhood that developed in the West in very specific historical and cultural conditions. As Viviana A. Zelizer has argued, ‘The social construction of the economically “worthless” but emotionally “priceless” child’ thoroughly redefined the child’s ‘value’ (as primarily sentimental) in most industrialized societies by the beginning of the twentieth century. The mutable meaning of the child is evidence that the concept of childhood is but ‘the cultural outcome of specific social relations’.27 The archiving of child labour by the cinema becomes much more complicated when the characters that children ‘play’ must ‘perform’ various other kinds of work, as is the case with Children of Heaven and Bumm Bumm Bole. In both films, a young boy and his younger sister attend school but must also work for their parents, caring for younger children, running various errands, shopping for food, preparing meals and cleaning

Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake

189

the house. Throughout both films, the children are not only active members of the household economy, they are also too busy to have any time actually to play. When the boy is unfairly accused of neglecting his chores to play football with his friends, he is scolded by his father, who tells him that he is now old enough (he is nine) to understand that he is ‘no longer a child’ and must help his parents. In both films, children who must work in this way are presented initially to provoke pity (they are deprived something, possibly ‘childhood’) and subsequently to inspire admiration (they are nevertheless, as children, both resourceful and resilient). When children work on films in which useful and important work is part of the daily life of the children they are playing, and when play is not a part of the daily life of the children they are working to represent, analogies emerge between the immediate value of that child as a participant in the household economy represented in the film and the eventual value of that child as a participant in the production of the film for its circulation and success in the global marketplace. Both Children of Heaven and Bumm Bumm Bole explore the various ways in which commodities are acquired and exchanged. At the beginning of the Iranian film, we watch the little boy buying first bread from the baker and then potatoes (on credit) from the grocer. While the boy is filling his bag with potatoes, an old man stops outside and bundles some packing material from the grocer’s stall onto his cart, and in so doing unwittingly takes the boy’s parcel containing the little pink shoes. The boy is distraught to discover that his younger sister’s shoes have disappeared, but has to return home without them. Later that night, the boy bribes his sister with a new pencil to stop her telling their father; he also warns her they would both be beaten if their father found out, because he can’t afford to buy new shoes. So the brother and sister agree that she will wear his shoes to her school in the morning, and then he will wear them to his school in the afternoon. The sister decides her brother’s shoes are too dirty, and so the children clean them. She finds it difficult to run in them, and so the boy is often late for school. When his sister threatens to tell their father what has happened, the boy gives her a gold pen he has won at school. The little girl notices another girl at her school is wearing her old pink shoes, but discovers (and decides) that this girl’s family is more deserving. When she loses her gold pen, the other girl finds it and returns it to her; she sees that this girl now has new shoes, and learns that the pink shoes have been thrown away. The father cycles with his son to a wealthy neighbourhood where he gets occasional work as a gardener, using the tools he was given by a friend from the mosque. Cycling back, the father

190

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

is excited about the things he will now be able to buy – a motorbike, an iron, a fridge and new shoes for the children – but then he crashes the bicycle, ruining it in the process. Eventually, the boy enters a children’s marathon, hoping to come third and win a new pair of trainers that could then be exchanged for a new pair of shoes for his sister, but he accidentally comes first place. Without finding out what his children have been up to, the father buys them both new shoes, presumably with the money he has earned from gardening. The Bollywood remake preserves virtually all the narrative incidents presented in the original: the summary of the Iranian film’s plot would require only minor corrections to describe the Indian remake. Throughout both films, then, the characters come into the possession of various things in numerous ways. They are either purchased with cash or provided on credit; they are offered as gifts or as prizes or even as bribes. Characters also tend to lose or break things, and only sometimes are they returned or mended or replaced. While the Bollywood film reproduces the Iranian film’s interest in the characters’ relations with forms of labour and the acquisition of commodities of various kinds, there are significant differences. Bumm Bumm Bole adds a more explicitly moral or pedagogical episode in which the boy steals some shoes from outside the mosque, and then guiltily returns them. More significantly, as I discuss in more detail below, in the Bollywood film the kind of work a child might do includes participating in terrorist activities, and the Bollywood film advertises Adidas trainers as something a child might reasonably expect to own.28 Bumm Bumm Bole’s particular representation of child labour and commodity culture in India is especially pronounced in its first and last moments. The Bollywood remake’s explicit insistence that terrorism might involve the exploitation of children who need and want to work is established in its opening scene, which is very different from the beginning of Children of Heaven. And in the only slightly different endings of the two films, the impact of the Bollywood film’s brand partnership with Adidas nevertheless determines the presentation of the narrative resolution. The Iranian film begins with a close-up image of a little pink shoe, which is being mended before our eyes and for the duration of the opening credits. The second shot shows a young boy, Ali, waiting patiently for the old cobbler to finish his work. The Bollywood remake, however, begins with a shocking sequence in which a young boy, apparently selling balloons in a bustling market district, but actually working for a terrorist organization, is suddenly killed when a bomb

Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake

191

explodes. He dies, along with the target, and several other civilians. The fate of this young boy provides the basis for the remake’s original incorporation of suspense, when the protagonist, Pinu, desperately looking to earn the money required to replace his sister’s shoes, is engaged by the same terrorist organization to carry out a similar job as the young balloon seller. While Children of Heaven begins with a child patiently observing an adult at work, the Bollywood adaptation emphasizes that the child’s relationship with work can be destructive and deadly. The addition of this subplot connects Bumm Bumm Bole to other popular works that deal with terrorism in India. As Clelia Clini has suggested, from the 1980s onwards, ‘the internal tensions that have troubled India since independence acquired a central position in film narratives, and films began to portray India as a nation living under the menace of fragmentation, terrorism and war’.29 The film’s representation of children working for terrorist organizations functions in tandem, and in tension, with the film’s representation of children as active participants in a global commodity culture. In her discussion of the resurgence of diverse separatist movements based on religious, ethnic or regional affiliations, Sumita S. Chakravarty observes: ‘At a time when the world seemed to be entering an era of full-blown globalization, it is localization in all its varied forms that has thrust itself centre-stage.’30 In Bumm Bumm Bole, the child is presented as the target of both the separatist terrorist organization (as potential worker) and the global commodity culture (as potential consumer). Bumm Bumm Bole reflects a growing trend in contemporary Bollywood cinema to reduce in number, or remove entirely, the traditional lip-synced songdance sequence. (Critics have suggested that this may indicate the industry’s reorientation towards non-diaspora audiences outside India, for whom the convention remains alienating.) The film’s single song sequence occurs when the boy and his father are cycling home after spending the day gardening in the wealthy neighbourhood, and it is presented as the boy’s daydream fantasy. After Pinu asks his father to spend his earnings on some new shoes for his sister, the film cuts to a wholly CGI world in which the children are presented for the entirety of the song. (Neither of the children is shown singing.) Pinu is sitting on a doorstep waiting for his sister, who soon arrives with his trainers, but then before he can put on the second trainer, it suddenly hops away of its own accord, out of his reach, and skids along the road on its toe, and the two children give chase through streets lined by houses that appear to be giant shoes. The trainer tries to hide behind some shoes hanging up inside a shoe-shaped shop, but the children discover it and give chase again, before the shoe climbs

192

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

over a fence and flies away. The two children follow in a huge flying trainer, which then becomes a boat on which they sail towards a desert island. The children climb a mountain, also apparently made out of trainers, and then discover at the summit their trainer, which sits sparkling on a sort of pedestal. Pinu gently picks the trainer up, but it suddenly turns to dust and disappears, at which point the film cuts back to reality: Pinu’s father has lost control of their bike and they careen into a tree. It is perhaps productive to consider the animated Adidas trainer in the Bollywood film’s song sequence in relation to the celebrated image of the dancing table offered by Marx at the beginning of his explanation of commodity fetishism in Capital. The table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing, but as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.31

The fantasy song sequence functions as an index of the remake’s national and cultural specificity as Bollywood entertainment. The animated (in both senses of the word), Adidas trainer reveals the impact of the introduction of specific brands of commodities into a simple and apparently universal story of children and their shoes. In both films, the boy enters a marathon, hoping to win a pair of trainers that might be exchanged to replace his sister’s lost shoes, and in both films the boy is unsuccessful. Following the marathon sequences in Children of Heaven, there is a brief scene showing that the father has bought new shoes for his children (they are bound to the back of his bike), after which we see Ali wearily walking home, and then bathing his blistered feet in the well. The film ends with an underwater shot of the goldfish in the well and the sun spangling the water’s surface. In Bumm Bumm Bole, the climactic marathon sequences function as a showcase for the Adidas brand, with many shots showing contestants dressed in Adidas clothing. The marathon in the film is clearly sponsored by the sports goods company, just as the film itself is made in partnership with it. Significantly, in Bumm Bumm Bole the two final scenes of the Iranian original are reversed. First, we see Pinu walking home and then bathing his feet, and are provided with an equivalent underwater shot. Then we see his father purchasing two new pairs of trainers in an Adidas outlet.

Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake

193

In both films, the sister sees that her brother has failed to win the trainers and disappears inside the house without saying a word. In neither film, however, do we watch the children receiving the new shoes from their father. Whereas the Iranian film ends underneath the water, where the goldfish swim around the boy’s feet, the Bollywood film ends inside the immaculate Adidas store, where rows of trainers are displayed on the white walls. Discussing the final scene of Children of Heaven, Bert Cardullo asserts that the two children ‘move us by their nascent humanity’ and notes ‘the juxtaposition of their pathetic beauty with the happy obliviousness of goldfish swimming in a courtyard pool’. The Bollywood remake replaces this final image with one showing the father in the Adidas store. This change may well reveal the degree to which the Bollywood film’s collaboration with the sports goods company has determined its ultimate emphasis. An explicit endorsement in the Indian film displaces the more open or ambiguous image offered by the Iranian original. While Children of Heaven stops after plunging its audience into the mysterious world of the goldfish, Bumm Bumm Bole instead ushers its audience into the cool contemporary spaces of commodity culture. Bumm Bumm Bole’s brand partnership with Adidas reflects its status as a Bollywood production of the post-liberalization era. It exemplifies Coonoor Kripilani’s observation that popular media in India provide ‘the ideal space to market goods that promote a certain lifestyle which reflect the aspirations of its audience’, and that Bollywood cinema in the twenty-first century is characterized by ‘a deliberate display of branded goods and products’.32 Film-makers offset the costs of production and promotion via in-film brand promotion and corporate sponsorship: ‘Given the wide reach of corporations, as well as the ability of their muscle and financial power to create excitement around a movie, producers are increasingly willing to accommodate brands in films in exchange for the promotion of their films.’33 Bumm Bumm Bole indeed functions in certain sequences as an extended advertisement for Adidas products. Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber has shown how in India’s post-liberalization period ‘commoditized, branded clothing has multiplied in the marketplace, and is increasingly featured in films’; there have subsequently developed ‘increasingly symbiotic relationships between film producers, advertising agencies, retailers and fashion houses’.34 Drawing on the work of Ranjani Mazumdar, she suggests that ‘in the absence of the orderly development of the architectural and spatial landscapes of consumer capitalism, film actually is the shop window through which viewer-consumers can see the wares on sale’.35

194

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Liberalization’s children The relationship between Bumm Bumm Bole and Adidas demonstrates the recent turn to cinema by companies looking for alternative platforms with which to increase their brand visibility. As part of the ‘360-degree marketing plan’ to advertise their association with the film, Adidas integrated promotion for the film in its retail outlets and organized various events to launch the ‘Impossible is Nothing’ children’s clothing range that is featured so prominently during the marathon sequences. According to an Adidas spokesperson, ‘Bumm Bumm Bole is a film about hope, dreams, and the belief that “Impossible is Nothing”. The film is a reflection of our brand values and offers the perfect platform to promote our kids’ range.’36 Like many of the leading Bollywood stars, Darsheel Safary, the actor who plays the young boy in Bumm Bumm Bole, and who was the highest-paid child star in Bollywood at the time, is also a brand ambassador for several companies. He is the public face of Adidas, of course, but also of the drinks company Horlicks (hence the scene in which his character drinks Horlicks before the marathon). The star of the film, like the character he plays, is thus aligned to global commodities in an apparently positive and productive relationship that cancels out the film’s presentation of Pinu’s potentially fatal involvement with local separatist terrorist organizations. The mass media in India routinely refer to the children of the contemporary period as ‘liberalization’s children’, to distinguish them from an earlier generation known as ‘midnight’s children’. The latter term was derived from Salman Rushdie’s celebrated novel of 1981 and, as Ritty A. Lukose explains, ‘intertwines the lives of those born in the immediate aftermath of independence with the life of the nation, a nation shaped by the socialist-inspired understanding of national development represented by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister’. ‘Liberalization’s children’, on the other hand, reflects the widespread belief that the opening of the Indian economy to global market forces and the subsequent spread of consumerism have led to an irrevocable ‘eclipsing of the Nehruvian vision of the Indian nation’.37 The child-centric popular Hindi films of the 1950s were in effect propaganda for Nehru’s reform agenda, offering audiences sentimental fables about the lives of ‘midnight’s children’. Bumm Bumm Bole, by contrast, offers images of the children of a ‘possible India’ to come. (Incidentally, two years after Bumm Bumm Bole, Darsheel Safary played the protagonist Saleem Sinai as a young boy in Deepa Mehta’s British-Canadian film adaptation of Midnight’s Children.) ‘Liberalization’s children’ belong to what marketers have identified

Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake

195

as the ‘global generation’, those children who, despite ‘living in different parts of the world, know and consume the same international brands of goods and media narratives’. As Jyotsna Kapur suggests, this development is often assumed to reflect and foreshadow ‘the convergence of the world into one international consumer culture’.38 Although multinational brands are widely advertised on television, so that Indian children are familiar with ‘Reebok or Nike shoes, Coke and Pepsi’, it is of course ‘only the upper middle-class child who is integrated into this globalized consumer culture’.39 The impact of globalization on children and childhood has been diverse and divisive. ‘Relatively affluent children, participating in new forms of consumerism, differed greatly from the children newly pressed into work roles in India,’ concludes the historian Peter N. Stearns – while adding that even the latter, too, ‘might aspire to some consumer lures’.40 Writing in the 1950s, the screenwriter and theorist Cesare Zavattini stated that neorealism ‘recognized that the cinema should take as its subject the daily existence and condition of the Italian people’.41 For Zavattini, the most ordinary of everyday situations might provide a wealth of material for the film-maker to explore: ‘If we analyze the purchase of a pair of shoes, we see before us a complex and vast world, rich in scope and possibilities, rich in practical, social, economic and psychological motifs.’42 Reflecting the felt connections between the New Iranian Cinema and Italian neorealism, Bert Cardullo has suggested that Children of Heaven ‘does for shoes what De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) did for bikes: make us see them less as podiatric ornament or accessary, vehicular recreation or diversion, than as absolutely necessary to human transportation’.43 In the Bollywoodization of the Iranian film, however, we are made to see not only what the shoes are but what brand they are. However inadvertently, the transnational adaptation of Children of Heaven thus proves Zavattini’s point that even the purchase of a pair of shoes might reveal the complexities of the social and economic relations in which daily lives are lived. Preserving the Iranian film’s focus on the child, Bumm Bumm Bole offers radically divergent versions of the child, all embodied by its protagonist-star: the child as an active participant in a household economy (the character’s relation with work in the narrative) and the child as an active participant in a global commodity (the star’s participation in the production of the film itself); the child as a potential participant in local terrorism (in the narrative’s most explicit departure from its source material) and the child as both consumer of, and ambassador for, global brands (Pinu’s/ Darsheel’s relationship with Adidas). The universal children of heaven have here become the children of India’s liberalization.

196

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Notes 1 Radia Washna Richards, ‘(Not) Kramer vs. Kumar: The Contemporary Bollywood Remake as Glocal Masala Film’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 28, no. 4 (2011): 344. 2 See Corey Creekmur, ‘Bombay Boys: Dissolving the Male Child in Popular Hindi Cinema’, in Where The Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, ed. Murray Pomerance and Frances K. Gateward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 350–76. 3 Meheli Sen, ‘Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes: Undoing Modernity in Recent Bollywood Cinema’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 22, no. 3 (2011): 200. Sen examines the centrality of ‘malevolent’ children in contemporary Hindi horror, recently resuscitated in the post-liberalization era for affluent bourgeois audiences, and which registers ‘the less celebratory aspects of the nation’s determined efforts to participate as an economic and culture force on the global market’, 198–9. 4 Sen, ‘Terrifying Tots’, 200. Sen mentions Taare Zameen Par (Aamir Khan, 2007), starring Darsheel Safary as a dyslexic schoolboy, which ‘invokes a different kind of child labour – the enormous burden put on children by the arguably harsh scholastic systems in India’, 215 n6. 5 Sangita Gopal, Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 10–11. 6 Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7 Robin Wood, ‘Images of Childhood’, in Personal Views: Explorations in Film (London: Gordon Fraser, 1976), 155. 8 Marcia Landy, ‘A Cinema of Childhood’, in Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 237. 9 Stephen Weinberger, ‘Neorealism, Iranian style’, Iranian Studies 40, no. 1 (2007): 5–16; Hamid Naficy, ‘Neorealism Iranian Style’, in Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, ed. Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 226–39. 10 Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn, ‘The Open Image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema’, in Genre, Gender, Race, and World Cinema, ed. Julie F. Codell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 45–6; Anna M. Dempsey, ‘Telling the Girl’s Side of the Story: Heterotopic Spaces of Femininity in Iranian Film’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 2 (2012): 174–5. 11 Karen Lury, ‘Children in an Open World: Mobility as Ontology in New Iranian and Turkish Cinema’, Feminist Theory 11, no. 3 (2010): 286.

Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake

197

12 In 2007 it was widely reported that Majidi was planning to make a film in India for SpotBoy Motion Pictures, a subsidiary of UTV, but the project stalled at the development stage. 13 Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 144. 14 Hamid Reza Sadr, Iranian Cinema: A Political History (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 230. 15 Zeydabadi-Nejad, Politics of Iranian Cinema, 141. 16 Ibid., 145. This has led to the use of disparaging labels such as film-e jashvareh’i (festival film) and film-e sefareshi (film to order), 152. Majidi admits there is a popular misconception about Iranian cinema: ‘Sixty to seventy films are made each year in Iran and only four or five are about children. Since these go to film festivals, the West has … the impression that most of our films are about children.’ Cited in Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from Iran and Turkey, 2nd edn (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2012), 73. 17 Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 276. 18 Sadr, Iranian Cinema, 229. 19 Charles Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 229–45. 20 Hamid Naficy, ‘Iranian Cinema under the Islamic Republic’, American Anthropologist 97, no. 3 (1995): 550, 555, 558. 21 Sadr, Iranian Cinema, 228, 223–4. 22 Chaudhuri and Finn, ‘Open Image’, 46 n25. 23 Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947-87 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 80–118; Moinak Biswas, ‘In the Mirror of an Alternative Globalism: The Neorealist Encounter in India’, in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, ed. Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 72–90; Neepa Majumdar, ‘Importing Neorealism, Exporting Cinema: Indian Cinema and Film Festivals in the 1950s’, in Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, ed. Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 178–93. 24 Basil Wright, The Long View (London: Secker and Warburg, 1974), 228. 25 Nandini Chandra, ‘Merit and Opportunity in the Child-Centric Nationalist Films of the 1950s’, in Narratives of Indian Cinema, ed. Manju Jain (Delhi: Primus Books, 2009), 124–5. 26 Chandra, ‘Merit and Opportunity’, 124. Paradoxically, as Chandra notes, ‘the child actors themselves, who articulated this notion of childhood, whether from the

198

27

28

29 30

31 32

33 34

35

36

37 38

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema working class or the bourgeoisie, never went to school and never accessed this model life’, 124. Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), x; Bruce Bellingham, ‘The History of Childhood Since the “Invention of Childhood”: Some Issues in the Eighties’, Journal of Family History 13 (1987): 356. In 2011 it was announced that Adidas were planning to ‘sell its trainers for less than a pound a pair throughout rural India to capitalize on the country’s soaring population’: the Telegraph reported that the company perceived ‘an opportunity to persuade aspirational Indian villagers to trade their plastic chappals or flip-flops for one of the world’s most iconic brands’. See Dean Nelson, ‘Adidas launches $1 trainers in India’, Telegraph, 23 November 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/asia/india/8909786/Adidas-launches-1-trainers-in-India.html (date accessed 26 January 2016). Clelia Clini, ‘International Terrorism? Indian Popular Cinema and the Politics of Terror’, Critical Studies on Terrorism 8, no. 3 (2015): 342. Sumita S. Chakravarty, ‘Fragmenting the Nation: Images of Terrorism in Indian Popular Cinema’, in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (London: Routledge, 2000), 223. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 163–4. Coonoor Kripalani, ‘Trendsetting and Product Placement in Bollywood Film: Consumerism through Consumption’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 4, no. 3 (2006): 198, 202. Kripalani, ‘Trendsetting and Product Placement’, 211. Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber, ‘From Commodity to Costume: Productive Consumption in the Making of Bollywood Film Looks’, Journal of Material Culture 15, no. 1 (2010): 3, 11. Wilkinson-Weber, ‘From Commodity to Costume’, 8–9; Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 95. Seema Sindu, ‘Brands in Films Gain More Footage in Slowing Economy’, Business Standard, 9 February 2009, http://www.business-standard.com/ article/management/brands-in-films-gain-more-footage-in-slowingeconomy-109020900066_1.html (date assessed 26 January 2016). Ritty A. Lukose, Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 5. Jyotsna Kapur, ‘A Small World After All: Globalization and the Transformation of Childhood in India’, Visual Anthropology 11, no. 4 (1998): 387.

Terrorism and Trainers in a Transnational Remake

199

39 Kapur, ‘A Small World After All’, 389. 40 Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 153. 41 Cesare Zavattini, ‘A Thesis on Neo-realism’ (1954), trans. David Overbey, in Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism, ed. David Overbey (London: Talisman Books, 1978), 72. 42 Zavattini, ‘A Thesis on Neo-realism’, 75–6. 43 Bert Cardullo, In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 74.

12

The Child as Hyphen: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah Dimanche Hannah Kilduff

In 1974, in the wake of the oil crisis of the preceding year and as a consequence of the resulting economic downturn, France’s newly elected president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, changed French immigration policy. The waves of post-war North African immigration that had accompanied France’s post-war economic successes were brought to the end. Single, male workers were invited to return to their homelands, or else were offered financial and logistical help to bring their family to join them in their new life in France. This regroupement familial (familial reunification), in which wives and children were brought over from North Africa to France, is the subject of Yamina Benguigui’s first full-length fictional feature film, Inch’allah Dimanche. Around 2001, the year of the film’s release, France was deeply involved in controversies about multiculturalism and the integration and assimilation of immigrants, especially those from North Africa. The place and space given to French citizens of North African origin were in question and the limits and limitations of the French identity model were being explored. The year 2004 saw the banning of headscarves in French public schools, following lengthy debate about the compatibilities of different markers of identity and the state. One of Benguigui’s earlier documentaries, Mémoires d’immigrés: l’héritage maghrébin (1997), considered the heritage of Maghrebi immigration through the generations and among fathers, wives and children in France.1 The nascent political implications of Benguigui’s work became evident in the debates that she animated following screenings across the country, a political engagement that later assumed a different form as she took on roles in local and national government. Cinematic creation was also important for Benguigui personally. She has explained the important restorative role that the process of directing

The Child as Hyphen: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah Dimanche

201

others’ stories had for her: ‘Cinema lent me an identity – as a director – so that I could reconstruct the one I was neglecting – as a daughter of immigrants.’2 For Benguigui, it is the medium of the film that has allowed a reconstruction and restoration of her own identity as a child, while also enabling her to carve out a space in which many different stories of immigration and integration in France can echo and be told. Inch’allah Dimanche tells the story of one particular family reunion.3 It does so through a family portrait in which the historical narrative intersects with the personal. Ahmed lives and works in a small town in Northern France. His wife Zouina, his three children and his mother leave Algiers and join him in Picardie. Ahmed adapts to family life, having lived in a worker’s foyer throughout his time in France, and Zouina adapts to life with her husband and mother-in-law, and the daily rhythms and encounters of life in a French village. The protagonists’ three children – Malika, Rachid and Ali – speak only rarely, have little autonomy and are seldom seen alone. Yet the presence of these children is central, both within the film, but also more widely, in terms of social and transnational networks within which they can be seen to function. Brought from Algeria to France as part of the family’s reunification, the children literally enact the crossing of cultures that they symbolically come to embody. As children of Algerian origin raised in France, the three characters represent the hyphenated identity of immigration: negotiating, synthesizing and resisting national and transnational questions. But do they do more than simply act as symbols within the narrative? And what role might they play for the spectator?

The historical child: Postmemory and the figure of the child When watching Benguigui’s film, the spectator is struck by the richness of the mise-en-scène. Throughout, shots are carefully dressed with small details and objects: the suitcases piled on top of the wardrobes, the sheepskin rug that Aïcha deploys, or Zouina’s clothing. Many of these have, as we learn from the director’s commentary, intensely personal connections for both the film-maker herself and for the people who collaborated with her to make the film. Obviously, these extra-diegetic links are not directly discernible from the diegesis itself, and yet, upon viewing the film, what is nonetheless appreciable is the emotive import that certain objects carry and the ways in which they appear invested with meaning.

202

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Representing places, people, desires and connections, the camera seems to linger on them, foregrounding their colour, their texture, their importance. This importance is echoed through the role they play in the narrative. What ultimately makes the inclusion of such objects so powerful is that this symbolic investment and interpretation is operative on two levels, both extra-diegetically – through the people that have worked on the film – and within the narrative itself. The red and cream scarf that Zouina wears knotted over her hair, à la parisienne as Benguigui describes it, is one such example. Although Benguigui explains in her commentary to the film that this scarf is the same one as was worn by the costume designer’s mother the day that she left Algeria – and thus a highly personal memento – it is also transformed, within and by the diegesis, into something of a leitmotif: a marker of identity, belonging and renewal. Holding within it, as the commentary reveals, the lived fact of one woman’s departure from Algeria, the scarf is elevated, through event and mise-en-scène, from the status of historical artefact to that of symbol. In particular, it is interesting to consider the way in which this object seems to trace a certain evolution for Zouina, as child and as mother. Worn upon her departure from Algeria, the scarf retains for Zouina a link to homeland, the motherland, and, thus, by extension, to her mother. This can be seen in the way in which she wears this red and cream scarf, touches it, and holds it close to herself. Upon her arrival in her new home, she is upset; she uses this scarf to wipe away her tears. This same scarf is used by Zouina to comfort her own daughter, who, with the combination of the excitement of the arrival, the fatigue of the journey and the playful aggression of her brothers, also finds herself in tears. The transmission of consolation and maternal soothing that this scarf seems to symbolize reminds us of the (at least) double position that she occupies: she is both mother and daughter. Zouina imitates and replicates the tenderness and scope of her own mother’s maternal gestures as we saw in the opening, poignant scenes of goodbye. Separated by the fence at the Port of Algiers, Zouina and her mother try to touch through the metal bars, breaking down in emotion and clawing, grasping, struggling to maintain a tactile link. In this way, the tactile investment in this fragment of scarf recalls Zouina’s mother, while shoring up the actuality of her own role as mother. Mother and daughter: a mother-daughter? The use of the hyphen here emulates the argument that Hélène Cixous puts forward regarding her collection of newly coined, hyphenated nouns that reflect the complexity of intersubjective relationships, the multitude of ties that weave and bind us together and the ever-changing unfixed nature of them. The use of

The Child as Hyphen: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah Dimanche

203

such terms, Cixous argues, would encourage us to remain ‘sensitive to the presence of several kinds of mother in a mother’.4 The hyphen avoids simplification but rather emphasizes plurality. Instead of simplifying identity, such hyphenated terms describe rather than circumscribe. Enabling the juxtaposition of terms, the hyphenated child becomes an embodiment of plurality. Hyphenation works on many levels, not only of familial or interpersonal relationship but also across national and cultural borders. The sequencing of these terms allows multiplicities to coexist, and enable the hyphenated child to act as a point of articulation, joining and linking but also mobile and malleable. However, if the red and cream scarf provides a tactile link, an imaginary ‘umbilical cord’ that connects Zouina to her mother, and her motherland, to the prospect of eventual return associated with the tethered and symbolic investment of cultural objects from the place of origin, then, the end of the film sees Zouina cutting herself free. Zouina uses the scarf to bandage her hand, which is bleeding as a result of the actions that finally enable Zouina to assert her own presence in the face of her husband and domineering mother-in-law: this wound, and this self-incorporation of the umbilical scarf, mark Zouina’s separation from her mother (and Algeria), her transition from the muted subservience of her childlike position – this state of infans, her pre-linguistic silence – to a position of vocal, liberated adulthood in France. While Zouina has begun to negotiate her position in France, reconciling her bicultural heritages, her children still have this task in front of them, and this despite the optimistic signs already identified. If it is childhood that provides the coordinates for adult identity, the children of immigrants, born into a state of forced exile, have to confront, from the outset, what we could term a congenital Otherness, or, as Nada Elia puts it, an ‘involuntary minority status’.5 What is difficult for the children of immigrants is that their experiences, their motivation and their allegiances are at once removed from those of their parents. Referring to iconic Beur author, Azouz Begag, Samia Mehrez succinctly articulates what is at stake in the remapping of bicultural territory. ‘Whereas the immigrants live their culture of origin as if it were history, their children live in a state of rupture with that space of origin,’ she writes. ‘For them, their parents’ culture is prehistory.’6 This invocation of a notion of prehistory is reminiscent of Marianne Hirsch’s phrasing when she describes the conditions from which postmemory is explored; namely, those situations that are dominated by narratives that preceded the birth of the subjects in question. What characterizes postmemory is its particular connection to its object. Instead of straightforward recollection,

204

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

it is ‘imaginative investment and creation’ that mediates our representation of the past.7 With this in mind, might not Malika represent the young Yamina? Indeed, does not the actress Amina – complete with the echoes of the director’s own first name – offer the means for a creative reimagination, and re-embodiment, of Benguigui’s personal history and that of her family?

More than just a symbol? Viewing as children More than simply reimagining the director’s own imaginative investment in the narratives that precede her birth, might not the figure of the child open these very stories to spectators more generally? They act as a foil to the slightly laboured didacticism of the adult characters in Benguigui’s film: Madame Donze, the resolutely xenophobic neighbour who, somewhat stereotypically, represents a form of traditional French identity; Mademoiselle Briat, the make-up-wearing divorcee who symbolizes a challenge to patriarchal values, embodying a more emancipated French/Western female identity; and Aïcha, the overbearing Algerian matriarch, for example. In contrast to these figures, the three children offer a more pliable contact, a point of empathetic entry into the specific sociohistorical context that subtends the narrative. But beyond the associations of innocence and malleability with which we readily link the figure of the child, what specifically about their presence and the viewpoint that they offer us enables them to function in this different manner? It is perhaps instructive to turn to Phil Powrie’s concept of ‘heterospection’ in order to think about the role of the child in Benguigui’s film. Elaborated as a theoretical frame from the examples of two films about children from 2002, Être et avoir (see also Flanagan, this volume) and Les Diables (Christophe Ruggia), Powrie coins the term heterospection in order to describe the real power of the child in film, which is capable of catalysing a particular reaction for the (adult) viewer. Synthesizing, on the one hand, the nostalgic hue offered by the space-time of childhood within contemporary cinema with, on the other, the transitional or threshold spaces gestured to by heterotopia as used, albeit differently, by Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, heterospection enables an identification with a feeling of a different space-time. For Powrie, what is key in the case of the presence of a child protagonist is the way in which they can offer the adult spectator a challenging view that ‘defamiliarises the world’.8 This defamiliarization enables the adult spectator to inhabit two space-times: ‘Heterospection is being-adult

The Child as Hyphen: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah Dimanche

205

while also being-child.’9 While this concept of ‘heterospection’ is employed in the context of two specifically chosen films (which correspond to Foucault’s definition of ‘heterotopia’ – contestatory or deviant spaces, cemeteries, prisons, etc., in a variety of ways, as Powrie convincingly outlines), I would like to suggest that it is with the help of this theoretical framework that part of the appeal of the children’s presence in Benguigui’s film can be elaborated upon. From the opening scenes of Inch’allah Dimanche, familial ties are foregrounded: the narrative that dramatizes a specific socio-historical moment in the histories of France and Algeria is underpinned from its outset by more fundamentally human and relational questions of both filiation and affiliation, belonging and identity. The broader historical narratives, with which Benguigui somewhat provocatively engages, frame the personal and individual stories of families and relations, while simultaneously being informed by them. The black information screens that briefly recap the history of the Maghrebian immigration, contextualizing the diegesis, cut to an extreme close-up. The shot is filled with a passport, an inkpad and the authoritative stamping action of a hand. The way in which these few objects are unnaturally enlarged to fill the screen demonstrates their overwhelming importance for the viewer of the scene, reinforcing the significance of the moment. The focus upon them overshadows all surrounding detail. The framing of this shot foregrounds a position of subordination: the relative sizes of the objects suggest a reliance on authority that is metonymically represented by the sanctioning hand, and its symbolic and performative gesture. Moreover, the enlargement of the hand and of the passport also suggests a distorted sense of scale. It is this lack of actual perspective that is reminiscent of the way in which childhood memories often bear little or no resemblance to the actual physical proportions of the places and spaces recalled. In this way, the inflated size of the hand and passport might seem to invoke a childlike perspective. The status of this image as recollection, or at the very least, historicized, seems to be confirmed by the sepia tones that tint both this shot and those that follow, including, most prominently, the final views of Algiers from the boat to France. In addition, the almost mesmeric captivation with which the camera lingers on these staccato movements by the official help further to align the viewer with a position of dependence. This sense of captivation imbues this image with a distinct sense of importance, especially since, as we later see, this image is of the official stamping the passports passing before Zouina’s family, the source of this childlike gaze: the gaze of the family and of the viewer are fixed upon this scene of symbolic importance in advance, from a distance and in anticipation.

206

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Such a point of view seems further strengthened by the positioning of the shot that follows. Dark and claustrophobic, it shows knees and feet, and a hand pushing a suitcase along the ground. This low-level camera positioning corresponds to the eye-line of a child – such as the young boy, Rachid, whose face we see in the next shot; as an adult viewer, we are invited to share the viewpoint of a child, or perhaps, more accurately, a childlike viewpoint. According to Powrie’s theory of ‘heterospection’, this doubling of viewpoints places the spectator in a position of both ‘looking back (‘I was once that child’), while at the same time looking forward (‘that child will be what I am now’).10 However, despite the universal experience of the heterotopic space of the ‘abstract spectatorial space’ that Powrie defines, with its dislocation in time and space, its displacement from present to past, this doubling of viewing perspectives – this overlapping of prospection and retrospection – is not experienced in the same way by every viewer. Such is the specificity of the experience of exile; only a particular audience would be able to ‘look back’ in exactly the way that Powrie describes. For others, it will be a process of projected identification in which the viewpoints offered by the film are merged with the viewer’s own experience (I was once a child like that child). Indeed, the beauty of Powrie’s argument lies in his elaboration of this threshold space. Instead of simply a space between two binary positions – the retrospective and the prospective – it is a space which ‘looks backwards and forwards, but also sideways, outwards, escaping centrifugally into multiplicities, while at the same time coalescing in a specific moment, a specific place’.11 Instead of using the child as a tool of nostalgia or as a space of wistful withdrawal, Powrie’s notion of ‘heterospection’ helps to elucidate the impact of the childlike viewpoint that Inch’allah Dimanche asks us to adopt from the outset. Moreover, it helps to articulate the emotion of the highly individual narrative that it seeks to recount, which in turn functions to illustrate a particular, although often occluded, historical moment. The children in Inch’allah Dimanche offer an entry point into the appreciation of the trauma and difficulties of family reunification, and therefore open up a questioning of the consequences that this has had for French society more generally. By drawing on the viewer’s own embodied experience as a child, the contemporary adult viewer is encouraged to reflect (creatively) on and invest (emotionally) in the viewed image and the experience of exile depicted. This creative investment recalls the notion of postmemory conceptualized by Hirsch which, as I have already suggested, provides a wider framework through which film-makers such as Benguigui, themselves children of immigration, may be understood.

The Child as Hyphen: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah Dimanche

207

The embodied viewpoint of this child(like) perspective is also open to a more  symbolic interpretation. For example, the restricted, childlike view of knees and hands discussed previously is inflected with a sense of threat. Vulnerability can be, of course, linked to the figure of the child, but in a broader sense it must be considered as a potential universal experience: in this respect, the gloomy colourings of the shadowy low-level space that fills our field of vision imbues the scene with a sense of intimidation while the harsh noises sound threatening. The intensity and menacing nature of the sensory cues that frame these opening scenes evoke the threatening aspect of new experiences or, to put it more simply, the perennial fear of the unknown. The emphasis on our embodied experience as spectator now leads us to look more closely at the role of the child’s body on screen.

Acting out: The child’s body on screen The most immediate way in which children and childhood can be detected in cultural objects is through the physical presence of real children. While the literary child might be embodied textually, the indexicality of the film image offers up a more privileged link to the real. The presence of children, in the form of child actors or children as non-professional extras, means that the particularity of the child-as-being is present on the screen. This particular presence remains despite the roles in which the child may be cast, and despite the symbolism that he or she may be asked to embody. This particularity can be detected through gestures, gazes, or, indeed, tensions that emerge between the role that the child is asked to play and the emotional responses and reactions that their physical presence elicits, an ‘actuality’ in Joe Kelleher’s terms – a tension between the effect and the affect of the child’s presence.12 Each of these, however masked or codified by the roles that the child represents, seems almost to exist beyond the frame of the image, furnishing an additional, or perhaps secondary, quality of signification that at once supplements and disrupts the narrative goals and objectives. This additional signification occurs between the viewed image and the viewer’s reaction to it. The specificity of the child’s presence then is a result of the particularities of this interaction. Criticism tends to focus on the figure of the ‘real’ child in films, fiction, and other examples of cultural production, that are designed for a predominantly child-centred audience, or, at the very least, that are destined for family viewing.

208

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

However, children often appear as peripheral characters or individuals in their own right in contexts that seem to dramatize adult concerns and experience, or narratives in which the protagonists are adults. The question that arises from this concerns the specificity of the child protagonist or character: How does the presence of a child on screen impact upon the viewer? To identify the exact consequences that this peculiar child presence might have is not necessarily straightforward, and it is important not to idealize it. And yet it has remained a phenomenon that has long fascinated film-makers, who discuss the peculiarities of filming children in a variety of terms. François Truffaut is perhaps most celebrated for his inclusion and exploration of the figure of the child in his cinema. Truffaut’s musings on the child in cinema also seem to resonate with the idea of the actuality and of the specificity of the presence of the child discussed so far, since he assigns a poetic quality to the presence of the child. What he considers poetry is a natural quality that emerges at its best when unfettered by artifice or emotional fabrications: ‘The poetry arises of its own accord, on top of everything else, like the end not the means, and not even as a desired goal’ (la poésie naît d’elle-même, comme de surcroît, comme un résultat et non comme un moyen, ni même comme un but à atteindre).13 It is the marginal and yet irrepressible and compelling quality of this poetry that is interesting to consider further. Many of the responses of the children that we see, and hear, in Inch’allah Dimanche are similarly evocative of the spontaneity and uninhibited expression that we would seem to associate with children, and childhood. The cries of delight from the children playing in their new bedroom, for example, appear as something quite natural. However, these are also evocative of the fragility of emotion that may accompany such spontaneity and uninhibited reactions, and it was this transience that, as Vicky Lebeau explains, fascinated the makers of the earliest films.14 The youngest child seems to be taken totally unawares by the sudden change in rhythm; for example, when the dog that he and his siblings are playing with is run over by an army convoy, in the commotion and panic that follows, he did not, as Benguigui notes, want to let go of the tissue that he is clutching. The real disorientation of the child heightens the feelings of disorientation that the arrival in France and the confrontation with the traces of the French involvement in the Algerian War of Independence that this scene evokes are designed to produce. Similarly, when the children bring back a young classmate because he knows the Bouira family, an Algerian family in the area that Zouina is desperate to contact in order to celebrate Eid with them, he was

The Child as Hyphen: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah Dimanche

209

so genuinely scared by Aïcha’s gruesome storytelling, with tales of ogresses and child-eaters, that he, as Benguigui puts it again, ‘ran off, for real’ (s’est réellement sauvé). Although many of these gestures, looks or attitudes are barely noticeable, they help to point towards the child as an individual, rather than the ‘welltrained monkey’ (singe savant) that contrived puppeteering may all too readily imprison on screen.15 It is perhaps illuminating to consider comments made by Neil Sinyard on the way in which certain directors use children in film, especially those films destined for child audiences. Sinyard suggests a parallel between the work and attitude of producers of films for children and that of a toy manufacturer: both show proof not of a particularly privileged proximity to a child’s imagination, but reflect instead the adult’s conception of what it must, or perhaps even should, be.16 While there is nothing inherently wrong with this filmic, or textual, use of a child – or, indeed, of an adult as an equally malleable character – the impact of the child on screen is altogether different when employed in a more realistic, and indeed realist, context. It is within this frame of reference that the three children involved in Benguigui’s film can be considered. These three children have few roles to play. However, as Karen Lury reminds us, children should ‘be understood as agents as well as subjects’: their very ‘childlikeness’ remains constantly present in their desire to play, react or respond.17 One of the most revealing examples of this – albeit one that it is almost imperceptible – occurs while Zouina and her children wait patiently in the doorway of the living room upon their arrival in their new home. Aïcha proudly occupies the central space, pacing back and forth, adopting a position of spatial mastery. This reflects the way in which she seeks to occupy, or perhaps, more aptly, take possession, of all positions of power within the household, frequently usurping Zouina’s role as mother. While Aïcha asserts her presence in the room, Zouina and her children are huddled, almost motionless on the threshold. A split second before the cut to the next scene, we see the young girl, Amina, make an impatient hand gesture. From the rigidity of their poses and of the stillness of their gaze, the children had obviously been asked to remain motionless: their grouping resembles a photographic pose. It is in contrast to this choreographed stillness that Amina’s spontaneity appears all the more compelling; she breaks out of her enforced position of stillness, of waiting, and impatiently gestures to Ahmed, her father, or perhaps to Benguigui herself, that it is time to move on, time to break out of their positions. This spontaneity of reaction with which Amina responds to the extra-diegetic reality of the moment

210

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

(in this case, boredom or impatience?) re-emerges in a later scene, when, anxious to show his children his newly discovered musical skills, Ahmed has got out his guitar and attempts a small recital. Amina is asked to get the music stand ready, and the three children are sat together cross-legged at his feet. Midway through Ahmed’s tentative chords, the youngest boy gets up to move the sheet music; Amina immediately responds, although rather discretely, and urges him to leave it alone. Her injunction to let it be – laisse! – cuts across Ahmed’s hesitant strumming and seems less like a piece of scripted dialogue than the spontaneous reaction of an elder sibling, trying to control a situation. Regardless of the exact conditions that provoked or contextualize these two examples, the fact that they are retained – or, perhaps more simply, remain – in the final version is interesting, for it is here that they function as a catalyst to the interaction between the viewer and the viewed image, mobilizing both affect and effect, even on this almost imperceptible level. These intriguing yet tiny traces of childlikeness emerge on the periphery of the children’s scripted roles. The children are shown to be learning to navigate both their cultural heritage, through Zouina’s desire to celebrate Eid, and the spaces of the French Republic – both literal and symbolic – dressed in school uniform or in the streets of their new home. And yet alongside this embodiment of hyphenated identity, as children of immigration and future French citizens, they remain children on screen and embody, this time literally, their childishness. Karen Lury has commented that children on screen ‘balance precariously on the divide between seeming and being’ and it is precisely in scenes such as those described that the children’s performances foreground their very childishness.18 Here they are not acting to be childlike, they are children in their childishness. Amina’s impatient gesture is perhaps the most symbolic: occurring literally a split second before the cut, it was either retained deliberately (reflecting a conscious decision to safeguard an element of the pure actuality that characterize the children’s presence) or its inclusion in the final version is only accidental. If this is the case, its liminal location – literally before a cut – reveals the marginal quality of this poetic presence, this peculiar actuality: Amina’s gesture escapes the discourse of the diegesis, the constraints of role, of decorum, of authority, and emerges, making itself visible, at the very edge of the frame. This apparent naturalness on screen provides an additional quality that moves beyond the frame, exceeding the more straightforward narrative concerns of the diegetic signification. Indeed, what is perhaps particularly remarkable about such gestures and responses – which, in themselves, are

The Child as Hyphen: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah Dimanche

211

perhaps unremarkable – is the way in which they offer up to us a child-in-being, and not a child-as-becoming. Writing about France, the aptly named child protagonist from Claire Denis’s Chocolat (1988), Joe Kelleher comments that as a witness to the various power imbalances of the colonial family in which she lives, her presence ‘serves as site for the marking of what remains repressed, or uncomprehended, in the yet-tobe-narrativised colonial situation’, and her young age and immaturity prevent her speaking of what she sees.19 While located in a different social, historical and geographical moment to Denis’s film – and most importantly in one that is marked by the postcolonial, not the colonial – Benguigui’s film nonetheless offers a space in which the children can be seen to play a similar role; and it is within the film that the child’s very individuality – this peculiar actuality that Kelleher speaks of, this child-in-being – becomes perceptible. Unlike the fictional character France in Denis’s narrative, condemned to silence until a later scene, the very young children whom Benguigui cast, as she explains in the director’s commentary, were not always aware of the distinction between extra-diegetic reality and the onscreen motivations of the characters. Instead, they tended to respond ‘naturally’ – however a problematic term this might be – to the events that they were witness to. Oblivious to the plot-driven reasons for the behaviour of the adults that surrounded them, the children would react naturally to the injustices that they saw; here, however, the acts of ‘ocular witness’ that Kelleher identifies are transformed into testimony and resistance.20 In one scene in particular, the older boy, Rachid, deviates from the script in response to the dialogue that he witnesses. This occurs when the salesman, who had previously misled Zouina by telling her that she had a won a prize in a competition not unlike the Mille Francs (a cult radio quiz show of the period), returns with the signed contract in order to collect the first payment for the vacuum cleaner. Aïcha takes this opportunity to further victimize Zouina, and, provoking Ahmed’s anger against his wife, threatens: ‘I’m going to get you a new wife … she opens the door to just anyone’ (je vais te ramener une autre femme … elle ouvre la porte à tout le monde). Such examples of incitement and of unfair statements are not uncommon from Aïcha, and it is this – and perhaps the fact that the film has been filmed non-chronologically, as the director’s commentary reminds us – that means that, as Benguigui explains, the children were fed up with Aïcha’s maliciousness, even by this relatively early point in the film. The oldest boy, Rachid, breaks the silence to protect his mother, denouncing Aïcha’s accusations as unjustified untruths. Benguigui comments that this intervention

212

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

had not been planned, and Anass (the young actor who plays Rachid) had to be warned that he was not supposed to speak at this juncture; the comments were, however, retained because of Anass’s insistence that Aïcha’s behaviour was unfair. Although this may appear a simple case of childlike incomprehension on the set of the film, it attests, I would argue, to the comparatively heightened sense of perspicacity that the figure of the child embodies, both symbolically and practically. Anthologist of children’s films, Jacques Chevallier, speaks of the child as a ‘carrier of truth’ (porteur de vérité).21 Although his comments are made more in relation to the diegetic roles that the child may be asked to embody, it is useful to note the extent to which such an epithet appears fitting in order to describe the real interaction of children on film. Less aware of the distinction between the diegetic roles, the interactions of the characters off-screen, and the particularities of the film-making process, there is a certain spontaneity of reaction that emerges on screen. Although, on the one hand, children may be asked to play roles which tally with this conception of the child as innocent and truthful, thus reflecting the adult’s desire to preserve the mythical institution of childhood, it also becomes apparent that the child, regardless of the role in which he or she is cast, seems to bring to the screen something that goes beyond the diegetic space that the character inhabits. In the case of Benguigui’s film, the children are cast as innocent and yet, as has been suggested, they are mobilized as the articulations of two national identities, positioned as the product of immigration. Alongside these symbolic expressions, however, our attention is drawn back to the body of the child on screen. What becomes key here is the way in which the viewer is sensitized to the presence of the child, on the basis of his or her own emotional link to the condition of that child. The presence of the child enables, perhaps more so than other objects or people, a particular interaction between the viewer and the viewed image. In the case of Benguigui’s film, the children enable a sensitive engagement with the very specific historical moment of family reunification by allowing the adult spectator to remember and invest in the child he or she was.

Child as hyphen Part of the power of the message offered by the presence of children, both literal and symbolic, is that it can accommodate paradox. As Ala A Alryyes

The Child as Hyphen: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’allah Dimanche

213

puts it, children offer at once the ‘promise of and resistance to continuity’.22 While the presence of the children in films such as Inch’allah Dimanche, or others that depict inter-generational relations, serve to show the prolongation of familial and, in particular, gender roles, their presence also succeeds in flagging up the potential for change and recuperation – Anass’s defence of his mother showing a refusal to accept the gendered injustices he perceives, for example. If Anass emblematizes a potential for change, Amina reminds us of the director’s own investment in the film: the children reconcile past and future, both imagined and hoped for. The personal project of postmemory that Benguigui undertakes is thus inflected with a wider appeal. The figure of the child negotiates between the universal and the specific, the historical and the personal, and the past and the present. Acting as a privileged site of understanding for the spectator, the child, as symbol but especially through his or her bodily presence, continues to call for plurality, avoiding time and again the ‘most incessant discursive and institutional attempts to contain and control it’.23 Indeed, the child that hyphenates France and Algeria in Benguigui’s film does not offer a fixed perspective, and instead encourages us to view afresh, reminding us of the elements of powerlessness and disorientation experienced by the children but which find their echo in the trauma of migration. The enduring childlikeness of the child on screen draws us beyond an understanding of the child as cipher. Instead, the child as hyphen ceases to be a space of separation and rather embodies synthesis, juxtaposition and, most importantly, mobility.

Notes 1 Yamina Benguigui, Mémoires d’Immigrés, L’héritage Maghrébin (1997, Paris: Canal+Editions), DVD. 2 Cited in Sylvie Durmelat, ‘Transmission and Mourning in Mémoires d’Immigrés, L’héritage Maghrébin: Yamina Benguigui as “Memory Entrepreneuse”’, in Women, Immigration and Identities in France, ed. Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 173. 3 Yamina Benguigui, Inch’allah Dimanche (2001, Gaumont Columbia), DVD. 4 Hélène Cixous, ‘Mamãe, disse ele, or, Joyce’s Second Hand’, Poetics Today 17, no. 3 (1997): 339–66, 348. 5 Nada Elia, ‘In the Making: Beur Fiction and Identity Construction’, World Literature Today 71, no. 1 (1997): 47–54, 47.

214

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

6 Samia Mehrez, ‘Azouz Begag: Un di Zafas di Bidoufile (Azouz Begag: Un des enfants du bidonville) or The Beur Writer: A Question of Territory’, Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 25–42, 29. 7 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22. 8 Phil Powrie, ‘Unfamiliar Places: “Heterospection” and Recent French Films on Children’, Screen 46, no. 3 (2005): 341–52, 350. 9 Ibid., 352. 10 Ibid., 348. 11 Ibid., 352. 12 Joe Kelleher, ‘Face to Face with Terror: Children in Film’, in Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood, ed. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1998), 41. 13 François Truffaut, ‘Réflexions sur les enfants et le cinéma’, in L’Enfance au cinéma: Deuxièmes rencontres cinématographiques de Dunkerque, [réd. par Eric Miot]; préf. de Jacques Deniel. - [S.l.] ed. Eric Miot (Dunkerque: Editions A Bruit Secret, 1988), 102. 14 Vicky Lebeau, Childhood and Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2008), 39. 15 Gérard Lefèvre, ‘Les enfants: point de mire’, in L’Enfance au cinéma, 103. 16 Neil Sinyard, Children in the Movies (London: B.T. Batsford, 1992), 18. 17 Karen Lury, ‘The Child in Film and Television: Introduction’, Screen 46, no. 3 (2005): 307–14, 308. 18 Ibid., 307. 19 Kelleher, ‘Face to Face with Terror’, 48. 20 Ibid., 35. 21 Jacques Chevallier, Kids: 50 films autour de l’enfance (Paris: Centre national de documentation pédagogique, 1986), 5. 22 Ala A. Alryyes, Original Subjects: The Child, The Novel and The Nation (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 15. 23 Dimitris Eleftheriotis, ‘Early Cinema as Child: Historical Metaphor and European Cinephilia in Lumière & Company’, Screen 46, no. 3 (2005): 315–28, 328.

13

Beiqing, Kuqing and National Sentimentality in Liu Junyi’s Left-behind Children Zitong Qiu and Maria Elena Indelicato

Over the past decades, rapid economic growth has led to extensive internal rural-to-urban migration in China. As a consequence of this radical social transformation, the children of migrants are often left under the care of relatives, or even by themselves. These ‘left-behind’ children are exposed to many forms of psychological trauma and educational problems. There has been a great deal of media attention to the phenomenon. In one case, in March 2015, for example, a boy and his three sisters, aged between five and fourteen, committed suicide in a rural village in the Guizhou province by drinking pesticide.1 The children had been living by themselves in a decrepit house after their father had left them to find work in the Guangdong province a few weeks earlier. Their mother had run away from the family the year before to escape domestic violence.2 Distressing news stories like this one have focused an enormous amount of media debate, as well as scholarly attention, on the phenomenon of left-behind children. So far, most of the research has concentrated on what Aihwa Ong calls ‘biowelfare’3 – that is, the children’s basic needs in terms of healthcare, safe housing, education and psychological well-being.4 Within this research framework, many scholars have provided what we define as a ‘remedy paradigm’: a complex array of measures designed to deal effectively with the emotional and psychological difficulties that left-behind children accrue as a result of being abandoned.5 The consequent interpretation of left-behind children’s feelings in terms of depression, anxiety and loneliness has been deployed by psychologists, social scientists, social workers, educators and policy makers at various levels of government. In spite of the media hype and scholarly interest, very little research has been conducted so far on the representation of left-behind children in Chinese

216

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

cinema. This chapter examines one film addressing the issue, Liushou haizi (Left-behind Children) (2008), directed by Liu Junyi and produced by Beijing Nanhai Pictures Corporation – a state-owned film studio affiliated with the China News Service  – in association with the Hubei Provincial Office of the Committee for Building Spiritual Civilization. In its portrayal of left-behind children, the film draws on two converging traditions of melodramatic narration which are very common in post-socialist Chinese television dramas and cinema: kuqing (bitter emotions or pathos6) and beiqing (misery and wounded emotions). In concert with each other, these traditions characterize what we refer to as ‘compassionate cinema’. The first part of this chapter traces the emergence of kuqing and beiqing in Taiwanese cinema, while also illustrating the causes of their success in mainland Chinese television drama and cinema since the late 1980s. The second section focuses on the representation of the pain of children specifically in Left-behind Children. Our argument is that the positioning of left-behind children as objects of national compassion constitutes an expression of a national sentimental fantasy that their living conditions can be ameliorated without questioning the unfair redistribution of economic resources between rural and urban areas of China.

Beiqing, kuqing and national sentimentality In post-socialist China, beiqing and kuqing have been strongly influenced by Taiwanese cinema and television drama.7 Although both traditions use individual suffering, psychological hardship and everyday trials as both the focus and engine of their storytelling, they differ significantly from each other in terms of their contextualization and purpose. The beiqing tradition has typically been employed in cinema in relation to dramatic historical events and changes. It invites viewers to reflect on the impact of the past on the present by telling stories about the suffering of common people. In Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989), for instance, the beiqing tradition is evident in the way that ordinary people’s lives and everyday choices are linked to the February 28 Massacre, which was ordered by the Kuomintangled government in 1947 because of its distrust of local Taiwanese people. The recent history of Taiwan is replete with similar instances of collective trauma. From the Japanese colonization of the island from 1895 to 1945, to the establishment of the Kuomintang’s rule in 1945, to the enforcement of Martial

Beiqing, Kuqing and National Sentimentality

217

Law from 1949 to 1987, Taiwanese people have suffered greatly as the result of historical events over which they had no control.8 In this sense, beiqing’s storylines and artifices lie at the core of Taiwan’s New Cinema and New Wave Cinema from the late 1980s to 1990s,9 and together, they can be considered as an allegory of the postcolonial melancholia that appears to characterize Taiwan as a soft sovereignty instead of a strong, independent nation state in the twentieth century. In contrast to the beiqing tradition, kuqing storytelling typically makes the everyday hurdles confronted by subaltern members of a society its main motif. The focus tends to be on the trials and tribulations of maids, the urban poor, laid-off women and migrant workers from the rural countryside: their money troubles, their inadequate housing, their unaffordable medical bills and their dysfunctional families. Kuqing drama presents a ‘world of victims’, who are not in control of their own fate and who are unable to turn their suffering around. By displaying this desperate ‘world of victims’, kuqing narratives often elicit strong emotional responses. They are tearjerkers. (The character for ‘bitter’ [ku] happens to be the same as the character for crying [ku], with the latter being understood as a response triggered by the former.) Films and television dramas structured around the kuqing tradition, whether imported from Taiwan or inspired by Taiwanese examples, have been popular in mainland China since the late 1980s. The success enjoyed by both reached a peak in 1990 with the lowbudget Taiwanese family melodrama film Love Me Again Mom (Mama zai ai wo yi ci), a story of the unending misfortunes suffered by of a poor rural woman abandoned with a son by her lover.10 Whether deployed separately or together, the beiqing and kuqing traditions have enabled both Chinese films and television dramas to deal directly with people’s everyday struggles, overdetermined by the larger economic restructuring of the nation. In this sense, both traditions resonate with what can be translated as ‘scar literature’ (shanghen wenxue) or ‘the literature of the wounded’, a literary genre depicting the suffering of cadres and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution that emerged shortly after the Revolution ended in 1976.11 Like scar literature, beiqing and kuqing’s storylines tap into the psychological trauma inflicted upon individual citizens by historical events such as the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and the Tiananmen Square incident in June 1989. During the Cultural Revolution, ‘petty’ personal emotions were largely excluded from mainland Chinese films, which were characterized instead by the revolutionary euphoria and collective optimism of the socialist era.12

218

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Since the 1980s, personal emotions have once again become a staple of cinematic representations of the nation and its people. As Weihua Wu and Xiying Wang have observed, ku has now become a symbol of common people’s feeling of growing autonomy and their use of emotions as a means to defuse the rigidity and homogeneity characterizing the past political era.13 In this sense, the conventions of beiqing and kuqing can be understood as indexical of yet-to-be social and political changes. In her examination of the representation of laid-off women workers as tearful subjects in kuqing drama produced by state-controlled television,14 Shuyu Kong makes the argument that the display of weeping not only operates as a cultural representation of complex contemporary social formations, but also drives home at an affective level the party–state neo-liberal message that citizens now have to rely on themselves to thrive. At the same time, the image manufactures a highly ambivalent and complex representational space in which the psychological and emotional dimensions of common people’s struggles are spotlighted. Ultimately, argues Kong, the kuqing conventions underlying the images of crying workers lay bare the social crises underpinning the transition of China into a new economic era. So manufactured, it is in this fictional affective space that subtle social critiques to party–state-led economic decisions come into life. Beiqing and kuqing’s films and television dramas have made room for the reiteration of personal feelings that were not encouraged in the socialist era. By doing so, they are able to confront and challenge their audience with a panoply of post-socialist and class overdetermined social realities. What is of interest to us, however, is less the restoration or return of personal emotions that beiqing and kuqing have allowed, than their excessive use as narrative devices in the cinematic representation of left-behind children. Kuqing dramas are already associated with ‘the urban poor, unemployed, retirees, maids and migrant workers from the rural areas’.15 More specifically, when focusing on the cinematic representations of subaltern children over the past couple of decades – films about ethnic children, migrant children and leftbehind children16 – beiqing and kuqing narrative conventions have operated in ways that are more problematic than critical, insofar as they disseminate what Lauren Berlant calls ‘national sentimentality’.17 National sentimentality is ‘a liberal rhetoric of promise’, argues Berlant, which ‘avows that a nation can be best built across fields of social differences through channels of affective identification and empathy’.18 When operating at the national level, sentimentality transmutes the duty of acting as an ‘ethical citizen’ into a matter of ‘proper feelings’ through a

Beiqing, Kuqing and National Sentimentality

219

process of reductive identification.19 Beiqing and kuqing’s narrative conventions perform just this function. They attribute the suffering of subaltern children to structural inequalities less in the realm of rights than in the sphere of feelings. Through their representation of bare suffering, they compel citizen-viewers into feeling the correct way towards this suffering. In other words, they elicit compassion.

Left-behind children in ‘compassionate cinema’ Our argument is that the excessive use of beiqing and kuqing narrative conventions in the representation of left-behind children runs the risk of further embedding the socio-economic divisions that they attempt to ameliorate, rendering them not as subjects of citizenship rights but, rather, as objects of national compassion.20 The film Left-behind Children depicts the everyday life of a group of children attending primary school in the Hubei province. It has three main childprotagonists. The eldest, Xiaofu, is ten years old. He lives with his grandmother and has to take care of his two sisters. His classmate Yueyue lives with a distant relative, who abuses her with continuous demands for housework, and takes care of her two-year-old brother. The third child, Xiaowei, lives with her physically disabled grandfather and takes responsibility for his care. Their teacher, Fang Xiaoqin, and her boyfriend, the policeman Sun Dayang, are the only adults who really look out for them. When the children fail in their scheme to rent a truck and travel to the city in search of their parents, it is teacher Fang and policeman Sun who decide to set up a ‘home for left-behind children’ (liushou ertong zhijia) with the help of the local government. The director Liu Junyi uses verbal, visual and acoustic techniques such as monologues and dialogue, cross-cutting and soundtrack to capitalize on beiqing and kuqing narrative devices and artifices. He does so to such an extreme degree that the film precludes any response other than compassion. Beiqing and kuqing reach their climax in a scene in which Fang’s students, one after the other, read aloud loud their homework: letters written to their absent parents. This three-minute sequence captures each of the students reading among copious tears. Xiaofu, who is late for the class, momentarily interrupts the affectively tense atmosphere when he initially refuses to read his letter. Fang interprets his refusal as a sign that he has not completed the homework. However, with tears

220

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

rolling down his face, Xiaofu then expresses his feelings without the support of a written letter. Dad and Mum, do you know that I hate you? You only come home every two years. You give me a beating when you come back and leave some money afterwards. Where are you when my study goes well? Where are you when I am sick? Where are you when I am bullied? I hate the money you send back. If you had not gone away for money, would I have become an orphan, a wild child, a bullied child? It is the same as not having parents. I would rather live depending on myself. Dad and Mom, I am like a cactus that nobody cares for. I have thorns all around my body. Ugly. Stinging.

After hearing this emotional outpouring, teacher Fang realizes that she misunderstood Xiaofu and regrets her previous attitude towards him. She resolves to take more care of her pupils’ emotional well-being, instead of focusing just on scholastic development. This lengthy scene is key to the impact of Leftbehind Children. It depicts teacher Fang as a subject of feeling that displays a proper affective response to others’ expression of pain: compassion. How is this affect achieved? The sequence starts with a long shot. The camera pans from the left to the right side of the classroom, establishing the space in the actions that follow take place. A series of shot/reverse shots, cutting between the crying children reading their letters and teacher Fang, is complemented by a low-angle frame. Zooming slowly forward, the camera transitions from a medium shot to a close-up of the children’s crying faces. The visualization of the children’s pain is designed to tug at the viewer’s heartstrings. Moreover, this mise-en-scène highlights the intensification of Fang’s affective attachment to her heartbroken students, her transformation into a teacher who cares about her students as a mother cares for her children. Sounds as well as images are deployed to guarantee that spectators do not miss the emotional pathos of the moment. On the soundtrack, the children’s heart-wrenching words are reinforced by the film’s quietly melodramatic theme song. On Douban,21 some film viewers have described Left-behind Children as a cuilei dan, or tearjerker bomb, that tries to elicit a profound compassionate identification with the children’s affective turmoil.22 Others have questioned this interpretation. ‘Does the setting up of the “home for left-behind children” by their compassionate primary teacher, the principled policeman, and the party secretary of the village’, one sceptic asks, ‘really meet the needs of left-behind children?’23

Beiqing, Kuqing and National Sentimentality

221

Echoing that question, we might ask what is actually achieved by beiqing and kuqing’s demand for compassionate identification with the pain of others? Wanning Sun’s critique of ‘compassionate journalism’ in China suggests one possible answer.24 Sun defines accounts of migrant women workers that make excessive use of narratives of love and sympathy as ‘compassionate journalism’.25 She reads compassionate journalism as the ‘manufacture of love’; that is, as an ‘ingenious act of social engineering’ that conceals the exclusionary nature of contemporary social dynamics while mobilizing ‘an array of cultural technologies to imagine the nation as a country full of compassionate people’.26 Sun poignantly highlights how these journalistic accounts fuse social inequalities between different classes with a moral discourse of universal love that effectively conceals the unfair redistribution of economic resources that engendered social inequalities in the first place. Sun’s critique, like Berlant’s, unsettles the fantasy of a national community affectively bound together by means of empathetic cross-class identification: middle-class employers with impoverished urban dwellers. Sun’s analysis of compassionate journalism allows us to rethink the problematic nature of the affective representational space opened up by beiqing and kuqing’s narrative conventions. Like the mode of ‘main-melody films’ (zhuxuanlü dianying),27 this representational space creates an affective cross-class (or cross-ethnic in some cases) identification in order to project an imaginary unity onto a nation that is in reality increasingly divided materially and culturally. The importance that this form of affective nationhood has come to play in contemporary China is exemplified by the conspicuous replacement of forcefully displaced biological parents with surrogate ones. Left-behind Children ends with a local party official announcing the opening of the ‘home for left-behind children’ against a soundtrack of celebrative firecrackers. The scene consists of one extremely long shot featuring children lining up in a row before – on the command of policeman Sun – running together towards the horizon. The deployment of the students’ bodies and the choreography of their movements, under the supervision of teacher Fang in the classroom and of policeman Sun in the field, contrast dramatically with the depiction of these children on other occasions. The ending suggests that the coalition between educational institutions and the national security apparatus, under the supervision of local political representatives, can function as surrogate parents for left-behind children. Individual virtues of compassion and concern can provide a solution to the predicament faced by left-behind

222

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

children, besides offsetting the losses that the nation as a whole is registering as a result of neo-liberal economic restructuring.

Imagined unity Drawing on Berlant’s definition of national sentimentality, we conclude that the cinematic representation of left-behind children by means of beiqing and kuqing’s storylines and artifices should be understood as symptomatic of a nation’s desire to recreate unity in the face of growing social divisions. The intensified use of beiqing and kuqing’s narrative modalities in such films position left-behind children as objects of national compassion. In promoting the individual virtues of compassion and care as a solution to left-behind children’s traumas, this strategy of affective identification seals the representation of social inequalities within a moral discourse that conceals the current state of inequitable redistribution of economic resources between rural and urban areas of China, thereby running the risk of intensifying the structural violence that it attempts to ameliorate.

Notes 1 Tom Phillips, ‘Chinese Police “Find Suicide Note” in Case of “Left Behind” Children Deaths’, Guardian, 14 June 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/jun/14/chinese-police-investigating-deaths-of-left-behind-childrenfind-suicide-note (accessed 16 April 2016). 2 Ibid. 3 Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 211–12. 4 Such biowelfare-centred research is also an issue in Wanning Sun’s study of domestic workers in the People’s Republic of China. See Wanning Sun, Maid in China: Media, Morality and The Cultural Politics of Boundaries (London: Routledge, 2009), 62. 5 See Zhang Zongkui, Sun Xiaojun and Fan Cuiying, ‘Nongcun liushou ertong xinli fazhan wenti yu duice’ (The Development Problems and Strategies of Rural Left-behind Children), Huanan shifan daxue xuebao (Journal of South China Normal University), no. 6 (2007): 119–25. 6 As distinct from its meaning in English, the adjective ‘bitter’ in Chinese connotes profound emotional suffering and hardship.

Beiqing, Kuqing and National Sentimentality

223

7 Chen Danhong, ‘Zhongguo neidi kuqing ju xushi yanjiu’ (Research on Kuqing drama in Mainland China) (Masters thesis, Zhejiang Normal University, 2011), 4. 8 Ru-Shou Robert Chen, ‘Walking Out of Sadness: The Other Side of Taiwan Cinema’, The Journal of Literature and Film (Korea, The Association of East Asian Film Studies) 14, no. 1 (2013): 61–79. 9 Chialan Sharon Wang, ‘Brotherhood of No Return: A Queer Reading of Niu Chen-Zer’s Monga’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, no. 3 (2015): 273. 10 Shuyu Kong, Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China (London: Routledge, 2014). Weihua Wu and Xiying Wang, ‘Cultural Performance and the Ethnography of ku in China’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 2 (2008): 412. 11 See David Der-wei Wang, ‘Introduction’, in Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century, ed. Pan-Yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), xxiv. 12 Wu and Wang, ‘Cultural Performance’, 420. 13 Ibid., 427. 14 Shuyu Kong, Popular Media. 15 Ibid., 135–6. 16 For example, films such as Guangzhou lailege xinjiang wa (1994) (A Uyghur Boy in Guangzhou), Nima de xiatian (2010) (Nima’s Summer), Wo xiangyao baba mama huijia (2012) (I Want Mum and Dad To Come Home) all deploy beiqing and kuqing narrative conventions intensively to depict (differently) marginalized children on the cinematic screen. 17 Lauren Berlant, ‘The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics’, in Cultural Studies and Political Theory, ed. Jodi Dean (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 44. 18 Ibid. 19 Lauren Berlant, ‘Uncle Sam Needs a Wife: Citizenship and Denegation’, in Visual Worlds, ed. John R. Hall, Blake Stimson and Lisa Tamiris Becker (London: Routledge, 2005), 26. 20 Our argument is in part inspired by Sara Ahmed’s work on the circulation of emotions within public discourses. See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 1–19, 20–4. 21 Douban is a Chinese social networking service website that allows users to produce and share content particularly in relation to books, films, radios and music. 22 Lu Zhefeng, ‘Liushou haizi duanping’, Douban, 19 January 2012, https://movie. douban.com/subject/2224971/comments?start=0&limit=20&sort=new_score (accessed 16 April 2016). 23 Mu Ziyou, ‘Liushou haizi duanping’, Douban, 12 September 2013, https://movie. douban.com/subject/2224971/comments?start=0&limit=20&sort=new_score (accessed 16 April 2016).

224 24 25 26 27

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema Wanning Sun, Maid in China. Ibid., 58. Ibid. According to Florian Schneider, ‘main-melody’ drama is a theme rather than a genre that conforms to the party–state’s criteria of ideological and artistic expression. See Florian Schneider, Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 147.

14

Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness in Albertina Carri’s Barbie Gets Sad Too and Néstor F. and Martín C.’s Easy Money Jordana Blejmar

This chapter analyses two stop-motion short films – Barbie Gets Sad Too and Easy Money – that are ‘acted’ almost exclusively by toys, objects taken back from the world of childhood. Through that gesture the films explore the discourses of national identity and memory that are attached to both local and imported/ transnational playthings in Argentina.1 The films were screened together in 2003 at the historic Buenos Aires cinema Cosmos, and both either suffered or were threatened with censorship as a result of lawsuits brought by the Mattel Company and representatives of the footballer Esteban Cambiasso, who was the inspiration for the main character in Easy Money. Barbie Gets Sad Too, a short pornographic animation directed by Albertina Carri, one of the most talented Argentine film directors of her generation, is explicit, melodramatic, denunciatory and anti-sexist. It tells the story of a sexually unsatisfied and aristocratic Barbie doll, the symbol of Western female beauty, who leaves the sadistic and masochistic Ken and falls in love with her maid, the Latin Barbie of the collection. Easy Money, a film virtually unknown both in Argentina and abroad, is a tragicomic story about a naïve toy boy, Cuchu, ‘the little blond star’, born in a shantytown during the 1978 World Cup, at a time when Argentina was still living under a cruel military dictatorship. Although Cuchu is abandoned by his father and exploited by those around him, he harbours no feelings of resentment towards them. Instead, he spends his lonely life dreaming of playing football for the Argentine national team and hoping, in vain, that things will soon get better.

226

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

By using toys as texts and exploring the various narratives attached to them, these films not only explore a politics of adulthood, but also reflect on a frequently forgotten aspect of childhood, namely children’s status as consumers (whether directly or via adults), targets for marketing strategies and receptors of the ideologies that are inscribed in industrialized goods. In a world increasingly shaped by the laws of global markets and capitalist values, it is important to reflect on what children’s inorganic playmates are teaching them about the world. These films prove that toys are a privileged medium for understanding children’s relation to mass and multimedia markets, examine the processes of identification between children and their toys (particularly their anthropomorphic ones), and, subsequently, show how adults draw on those objects of childhood to reimagine the social and racial constructs that are engrained into us from the moment that we start playing with toys. Both films have achieved something of a ‘cult’ status in Argentina. The directors of Easy Money have reinforced the mystery around their film by keeping their surnames secret, ‘working clandestinely’ as Martín C. describes it in an interview with the I-SAT channel, and by showing up to interviews wearing masks. Given the relatively small circulation of their film and the fact that they are practically unknown in the mainstream film circuits, these precautions are more like playful parodies of 1970s clandestine/guerrilla art than safety measures against any real danger. The directors have also explained that they decided to hide their identities to avoid ‘stealing’ the limelight from the film. This principle is one of the tenets of Dogma 99, the European cinematic approach that the directors adopted when making Easy Money. The film was going to be one of eleven pieces centred on different football players, all ‘acted’ by toys, but the project was never completed. In addition to adapting European and Hollywood genres (animated/stopmotion films, pornography, epic sport films, MTV videoclips), the directors of both films combine them with typically Latin American ones (soap operas, costumbismo, etc.). Furthermore, both films also turn an Argentine and Latin American gaze on genres normally thought to be inaccessible to directors from underdeveloped countries. Animation or stop-motion films require large production teams and special effects, all of which imply significant costs. Producers in Latin America are often reluctant to invest in them because they cannot compete with US productions, even though this situation is slowly changing in Argentina, with the appearance of such films as Mercano, The Martian (Antín, 2002) and Underdog (Campanella, 2013).2

Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness

227

The films addressed here are, strictly speaking, not animation films like the ones mentioned above, but rather stop-motion films made with toys. The directors have both mentioned Captain Scarlet and The Mysterons (Gerry and Sylvia Anderson) as an inspiration. This 1967 stop-motion film with toys was very popular during the 1980s in Argentina, when Carri, Néstor F. and Martín C. were growing up. Aware of the financial limitations that they were facing, instead of attempting to make high-quality productions, the directors chose to accentuate the ‘amateur’ nature of the films, producing deliberately untidy or unfinished aesthetics, evoking the experience of creating this type of film in countries such as Argentina. It is this experimental use of (cinematic) genres, together with the counter-hegemonic discourses on race, gender and childhood, which give both Easy Money and Barbie Gets Sad Too their subversive status. In this chapter I focus on this last aspect of the films. I argue, first, that both films playfully use the ‘blondness’ of their protagonists to tackle issues of race, xenophobia, class struggle and the dominant classes’ historical aspirations to ‘europeanize’ Argentina. Carri’s film, for example, brings to light the racist elements that underlie Barbie culture and the ways in which this famous doll has shaped girlhoods all over the world from the 1960s onwards, as well as the class struggles, gender violence and xenophobia that rule social relations of power in Argentina, a country that has one of the highest rates of Barbie consumption in the world and one of the least inclusive policies for immigrants and Indigenous people in Latin America. It is also worth remembering that Carri’s first film, called precisely The Blonds (2003), an internationally celebrated docu-fiction on the disappearance of her Montonero parents during the 1976–83 dictatorship, also connected the fair skin and hair of her parents, their ‘blondness’ (even though they were not really blond) to the way they were perceived as outsiders by the inhabitants of the working-class neighbourhood where they had gone to do militant work. A stop-motion sequence in The Blonds that reconstructed the abduction of the director’s parents during dictatorship with Playmobile figures sparked controversy among critics and academics. Some argued that Carri’s use of toys to address disappearance trivialized and depoliticized the most violent period of Argentine history. Others defended the way Carri toyed with trauma by arguing that this episode redirected our gaze away from the experiences of the adult survivors and towards those of their heirs, offering a new, childlike perspective on the dictatorial period. In Easy Money, Cuchu’s phenotype also determines his destiny. He is discriminated against by his father and his fellow players for being blond and

228

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

‘too pretty’ to be a footballer in a country where most players have dark skin and hair. Ironically, the same people who reject Cuchu for his blondness also make fun of black people (for example, some Brazilian footballers) for being ‘too dark’. The film also reveals the machista culture and the nationalist and exploitative nature of the business. These prejudiced discourses surrounding the culture of football in Argentina are particularly important for reflecting on the issue of nationhood, not least because the sport plays a central role in the definition of ‘patria’ (nation/people) and Argentinidad (Argentineanness), especially after the dictatorship and the 1978 World Cup, when Argentina won the title. Finally, the choice of a toy child as the protagonist of a story of nationhood, violence and lost identity in the context of the dictatorship reminds us of how the ghostly figures of the ‘disappeared’ and stolen children of the so-called ‘Process of National Reorganization’ still dominate discussions and imaginaries of post1980s Argentina. The blondness of both Barbie and Cuchu triggers all sorts of prejudices, and is often opposed to the cabecita negra (little black head), a term used pejoratively in the 1940s by the middle and upper classes to describe the workers loyal to Juan Domingo Perón and the inhabitants of the shantytowns. Overall, then, my argument is that subversive play and guerrilla toy films make it possible to discuss apparently unrepresentable, ‘sacred’ or taboo subjects, such as sexual violence, xenophobia and forced disappearance, in ways that more realist or documentary accounts cannot.

Queered doll play in Barbie Gets Sad Too There is still no consensus about who created the Barbie doll, which was publicly launched for the first time at the American Toy Fair in 1959. Ruth Handler, founder and former president of Mattel Inc., and Jack Ryan, an eccentric designer hired by Handler and her husband, both claim to be the original inventor. That uncertainty was just the first of many controversies that have surrounded the famous plastic doll. Right from her birth, Barbie was accused of reinforcing hegemonic narratives of gender, race and national power among children. Originally designed as a fashion doll for adults, she is said to be the ‘perfect icon of the late capitalist construction of femininity’, ‘The Blond’ par excellence and the plastic embodiment of beauty from a Western/American point of view.3 She is blond, pale skinned, slim, glamorous and hyper-feminine. She is always smiling and

Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness

229

never protests. She has no children and therefore has an ideal, and proportionally unrealistic, body. Finally, Barbie is not only a consumer but is said to disseminate the idea that woman themselves are for sale, ‘dollifying’ and commodifying the female sex. Hoping to sell more dolls to the growing number of middle-class black and Hispanic girls in the United States, Mattel announced in the 1990s that Barbie would ‘go ethnic’ by launching black and Hispanic versions of the doll.4 Years before that, Mattel had already introduced a series of collections that attempted to sell a progressive and multicultural image of Barbie. Yet, as several critics have argued, these new dolls ended up reinforcing, rather than fighting, racial and ethnic stereotypes. Mattel has always been reluctant to release information about Barbie’s origins, place of birth, family history or ethnicity. This silence has been taken to imply that Mattel assume Barbie’s looks to be the standard norm, needing no explanation, and the ethnic versions of the dolls to be simply deviations on that norm.5 Moreover, as when the company introduced its Shani dolls in 1991 – a line of black Barbie-like dolls – it used the same moulds as they had for white Barbies and only dyed the colour of their skin, and made their noses broader or their hips slightly wider, implying a very reductionist idea of what race is. The idea that ‘ethnic features’ like skin colour or the size of their hips make the Shani dolls more authentically African American, argues Ann DuCill, reinforces racial stereotypes, encourages a superficial pluralism and is a ‘metaphor of the way multiculturalism has been used as a kind of quick fix by both liberal humanism and late capitalism’.6 Other ‘ethnic’ Barbies, such as those from the Dolls of the World series (1999), that are supposed to represent different nationalities and ethnic groups, do so from a patronizing tourist or colonialist gaze, which is fascinated by the exotic looks of the ‘other’ but reluctant to engage meaningfully with their culture.7 In these collections, Barbie ‘visits multiethnicity as she visits museums’.8 When Mattel produced three Native American Barbies between 1993 and 2000, they depicted them as mothers with babies, as opposed to the childless white Barbie. In doing so, it has been objected, they reinforced a folklorized and racist vision of Native American women as naturally inclined towards motherhood and so, by implication, delivering as promiscuous and economically unproductive.9 If Natives sell, concludes Erich Fox Tree, it is less because there is a niche market of Native American girls than because ‘children and adults apparently love both buying Indians and playing Indians’.10

230

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

As all these studies have shown, Mattel understands race and ethnicity as hot commodities in late capitalism and has transmitted (post)colonialist ideas of race, class and gender.11 The key point is that the advertising metanarrative Mattel uses to sell Native American, Black and Ethnic Barbies is one of peaceful encounters between cultures, which erases the presence of violence, class, race and gender struggles from colonial and postcolonial history. Fortunately, Mattel’s scripts and ideas of gender, race and ethnicity are rarely received passively. Instead, they are contested and parodied both by children in play and by adults who use the dolls in artistic works where Barbie ‘offers a site of queer identity and pleasure though resistance to the heteronormative ideas she is said to represent’.12 From being the vehicle of dominant ideologies, Barbie is deployed in these works an instrument for challenging social and cultural practices, values and norms. Some examples of these subversive uses of Barbie are Drag Queens who parody Barbie’s stereotyped representation of femininity, Dina Goldstein’s photographs of unhappily married Barbie and queer Ken recreated with live models (In the Dollhouse, 2012), and Polish artist Zbigniew Libera’s Ken’s Aunt (1995), a doll-sized version of an overweight woman that exposes the ageism that rules contemporary society. In 1989, the so-called Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO) switched the voice boxes of three hundred talking (and now transgendered) Barbies with those of the action figure GI Joe in an attempt to subvert gender stereotypes. With this action the BLO made the point that gender, as Judith Butler has famously argued, is a performance, a simulation and an act rather than something fixed in stone – or, in this case – in plastic.13 The actions of the BLO could be thus seen as a paradigmatic example of the way that Barbie is being queered in contemporary non-mainstream art and culture. Albertina Carri’s Barbie Gets Sad Too forms part of this subversive trend. In her film, Carri has indeed queered Barbie both in the sense of questioning the gender stereotypes that she represents and in the sense of finding unusual and unorthodox uses for the doll. In particular, Carri’s film brings to light all the ‘regimes of silence’, corporate ideologies and omissions that lie at the heart of Mattel’s discourses on gender and race and the company’s understanding of both girlhood and womanhood.14 The film is thus explicit not only because it is sexually graphic, but also because it reveals what Mattel elides. Barbie Gets Sad Too addresses, for example, the racism that permeates both Barbie culture and Argentine society. On the one hand, by presenting a middleclass Caucasian couple, Barbie and Ken, with a mestizo servant, Teresa (the

Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness

231

Hispanic doll introduced by Mattel in 1988), the film exhibits ‘a postcolonial dynamic that underlines the whole Barbie-Hispanic Barbie relationship’ in the United States.15 On the other hand, Teresa has dark hair, dark skin and a Paraguayan accent and she therefore represents the thousands of immigrants from surrounding countries who arrived in Buenos Aires during the 1990s in the hope of financial and political stability. Instead of finding a better future, as Karen Goldman rightly points out, they were largely unwelcome in the Argentine capital and ended up working as maids, manual labourers or other equally poorly paid jobs. Whereas ‘Mattel would never display Shani [the black Barbie] working in a factory’, Carri chooses to display the Hispanic Barbie precisely where the toy company probably thinks she should be; that is, in the kitchen of an aristocratic house, serving the blond, European-like and ‘authentic’ Barbie.16 The two socially opposed scenarios in which the story unfolds also illustrate the contrast between different social classes in Argentina. In Barbie’s mansion, where Ken is almost always absent, spending time with his lover, there is wealth but there is also sadness and suffering. Conversely, Teresa lives with a butcher called Keno and a transvestite hairdresser called Trabie in the humble suburbs of the city. They do not have much money but, unlike Barbie, the three of them are happy and enjoy a sexually satisfying and loving relationship. The miserable image of the blond and aristocratic Barbie in Carri’s film is in sharp contrast to the positive image that Mattel inscribed on the doll. ‘Barbie wasn’t a doll, she was an aspiration,’ writes Sandra Petrignani in The Toy Catalogue.17 If this is true for any girl, the idea that Barbie was a figure to aspire to was even more potent for Argentine girls. In Argentina, Blond Barbie represented not only wealth and beauty, but also the ability to cast off being Latin American and take a step closer to a European ideal of success and femininity. It is not by chance that the majority of Argentina’s divas and top models are blond. Many of them, both old and young, are also plastic ‘beauties’, whose many surgical operations have left them not so much with a doll-like face as with an air of monstrosity. Barbie’s figure is also something many Argentine women, and especially porteñas (women from Buenos Aires), aspire to in a society with very high rates of bulimia and anorexia. It is estimated that, since the doll was first commercialized in the country in 1987, more than 1,180,000 Argentine girls have at least two Barbies each, making it the favourite doll of 70 per cent of girls between nine and ten years old.18 Given its obsession with Barbie and what she symbolizes, it is not surprising that Argentina was the first country in the world to have a thematic pink room

232

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

dedicated to Barbie in a hotel (the Hilton) and a store devoted exclusively to Barbie products. The shop has a section for girls to have their make-up done and a café where they can celebrate their birthdays. Tito Loizeau, founder of the Barbie Store, explained to BBC World that ‘Argentina’s obsession with the Barbie doll’ is, precisely, aspirational: ‘Through Barbie Argentines access a first world that is far away from them.’ Gustavo Averbuj, director of the agency that had the idea of the Barbie room, suggested in the same piece that it is because ‘we Argentines come from the ships, we are poor immigrants’ children’ that many people in the country ‘still have that necessity of European approval’.19 In Barbie Gets Sad Too there are numerous references to Argentines’ obsession with blondness, the ‘European/American look’, and what being blond represents in the collective imaginary of the nation. In one scene, in which Ken and his lover Arbie are having sex, he plays at being He-Man, a fictional character from a children’s cartoon known not only for being extremely strong but also for having long blond hair. In another scene, Barbie is watching an animated drawing of the blond talk show host Susana Giménez on television. In a parallel sequence, Teresa is watching the same show in her house with Trabie and Keno. ‘Look at those legs. I envy her! And look at us,’ says Trabie, making explicit the desire to be like Giménez, to possess her body, and probably her hair too. Carri’s choice of actress and singer Juana Molina to voice the character of Arbie voice pays homage to her role in the popular 1990s comedy show Juana y sus hermanas (Juana and her sisters). Molina played the character of Marcela Balsam, a made-up, dumb, blond diva who was, in turn, a parody of real Argentine divas like Susana Giménez. ‘I chose Juana because she used to play the character of Barbie in her show,’ Carri explained in an interview.20 Strictly speaking, Molina never played Barbie, but Balsam. Carri conflates the characters and in that confusion she demonstrates how, in the Argentine imaginary, Barbie, Balsam and Giménez have almost lost their individual attributes to represent general stereotypes (the ‘dumb blond’) and aspirations (wealth, beauty and fame). The three of them are indeed expressions of what in 1983 iconic singer Luca Prodan famously called la rubia tarada (the dumbass blond) in a song that was an instant hit and which remains one of the most popular songs in Argentine rock history. For Prodan, la rubia tarada represented the mercantilist, shallow and frivolous society of Buenos Aires, the caras conchetas, miradas berretas (posh faces, cheap looks). Her target was women who lived in wealthy neighbourhoods like Belgrano or Barrio Norte and who were ideologically and politically opposed to la gente despierta (the people who are awake) who, as

Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness

233

far as Prodan was concerned, represented ‘authentic’ Argentines. Esto sí que es Argentina (this is real Argentina), concludes the song. As well as addressing the social and racial tensions in both Barbie culture and Argentina, Carri’s film denounces sexism and gender violence, and looks at how children often learn about such issues by playing with their dolls. These issues have become more visible in recent years in Argentina, particularly since the disappearance in 2002 – the year Barbie Gets Sad Too was released – of Marita Verón at the hands of a human trafficking mafia, a case that exposed a hidden weft of complicities between cafishios, politicians and the police force. More recently, the massive Ni una menos demonstration in 2015 organized by Carri’s wife, Marta Dillon, together with other female writers and journalists, further highlighted the alarming increase of gender violence in the country. In contrast to the reality of these victims, in Barbie’s world men and women live together in harmony. Barbie ‘never has to confront sexism’, argues Erica Rand. Nor does she displace men: ‘There is no suggestion that men must give up power in order for woman to gain power, no suggestion that the social structure needs to be changed.’21 Unlike those who argue that Barbie’s entrepreneurial nature is a sign of Mattel’s feminism, Rand sees her ‘success’ as proof that patriarchy has room for exceptions that confirm the rule. The presence of a strong patriarchal ideology in Mattel is also evident in the absence of queer dolls. When Dubbed Earring Magic Ken was launched in 1993, for example, People magazine wondered whether Ken had come out of the closet. Mattel quickly rebuffed the suggestion by stating that many heterosexual men wear earrings. In a humorous artistic intervention, the ‘zine P.C. Casualties have protested against the absence of non-normative dolls in Mattel’s collections by creating a Lesbian Barbie and an ‘SM Barbie’, which comes with ‘leather restraints, paddles, and three tribal tattoos. All models complete with genitals’. They have also offered a ‘Battered Barbie – Burdened with small children. No marketable skills and no assets. Self-esteem sold separately.’ The magazine finally added that, unfortunately, the Native American Barbie is ‘no longer available since white Barbie has pushed her on the floor, stolen her belongings and killed her’.22 In a similar playful spirit, Barbie Gets Sad Too protests against sexism in contemporary society, a ‘disease’ that Barbie culture has, at worst, helped to disseminate and, at best, failed to challenge, particularly among girls. Mattel’s concern about the traumatized effects of Ken’s (absent) genitalia in children and the company’s presumptions that girls would not worry about the sight of a doll

234

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

without vagina, for example, is a clear sign of that sexism.23 In the film, Carri overturns Ken’s asexual appearance by giving him a huge penis and by including it in several hyperrealist close-up shots. In addition, Carri highlights Argentina’s sexism, which is subtly evoked, for example, in the posters of naked women that Keno has in his shop, a common feature of butchers and auto repair shops in the country. The film not only speaks out against a strong and historically patriarchal and machista culture in Argentina, it also exposes its most dangerous consequences. Indeed, if Barbie’s worst dramas are ‘broken legs or broken tennis rackets’, Carri’s Barbie is always suffering.24 Her husband Ken, who spends his days and nights with his lover Arbie, constantly mistreats her. In addition, Ken physically and psychologically abuses Arbie. When they are making love in his office, for example, he screams at her: ‘Will you shut up, bitch, slut, bitch, can’t you wait?’ Later, tyrannical Ken beats Arbie so badly that she abandons him in an act that places her not in the role of the victimizer (that of ‘the other woman’), but in the role of the (other) victim of the story. The presence of a bisexual Ken(o), a transsexual Barbie and two lesbian dolls in the film also exposes Mattel’s omissions. Just as with racial discourses, in the gender and sexual terrain Carri brings to light what Mattel was hiding: not only Ken’s genitalia but also non-normative ways of (making) love. In contrast to conservative and traditionalist models of ‘happy families’ (that very line appears in one title in Barbie’s collection) or to the prototypical idea of a happy Caucasian couple (Barbie and Ken), Carri’s film celebrates a family/partnership of four (Keno, Teresa, Trabie and Barbie, who joins them later), who live and love together paying no attention to bourgeois and conformist ideas of what a family or a relationship needs to be. In this respect, Barbie Gets Sad Too inaugurates Carri’s exploration of queer and non-normative models of families that will later mark her entire oeuvre. In Geminis (2005), for example, the director addresses the incestuous love of a brother and sister, and in both The Blonds and the television series 23 pares (2012, co-written with Dillon), Carri commends families made by friends or adoptive relatives. Her own family is an example of a queer lineage: together with her wife, and artist Alejandro Ros (Dillon and Carri’s son’s biological father), she was the first person in Argentina to register her son, Furio, as having three parents, thanks to a change in the law introduced in 2015. Despite the director’s open-minded motivations, one of the main paradoxes of Barbie Gets Sad Too is that, although it intends to be an anti-establishment

Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness

235

and anti-sexist film, it might, unwittingly, end up being the cinematographic materialization of many men’s fantasies about Barbie (or Barbie-like woman). The film, says journalist Pablo Plotkin, is the ‘incarnation of a sexual fantasy that goes around the head of many people’.25 Carri herself has confessed, in the same article, that she chose Barbie as the star of her film because she is intrinsically pornographic. Perhaps we are so submerged in our own prejudices that it is impossible to create a completely subversive play scene with Barbie. And yet, as Erica Rand insists, it still matters that artists and film-makers identify Mattel’s silences and dubious claims and subvert the company’s narratives in their artworks to expose not only her (queer) sexuality but also all the obsessions that this ostensibly innocent plastic doll represents for children. Among all the subversive Barbies created by artists and studied by scholars, Carri’s Barbie has the additional value of making us reflect on the way girls and artists from peripheral countries and cultures consume and contest narratives of race, childhood and gender that reinforce (post)colonial dynamics and discourses. Carri used the voice of a Spanish actor, Eusebio Subiela, to give Ken the accent that many US porn films have in Argentina when they are dubbed, a gesture that points to the impact of globalization in cultural products other than toys. Ultimately, her film calls for a critical consumption of the business of entertainment, for both children and adults, especially in countries like Argentina where the effects of neo-liberalism have been, and still are, devastating.

The little blond crack, an Argentine passion and the dictatorship Like Barbie in Carri’s film, Cuchu, the child protagonist of Easy Money, is a blond, beautiful, and dreamy doll, too nice and noble for this cruel world. The directors created him by using the head of Ken’s little brother, Tommy, and placing it on the body of one of the miniature football players that Coca-Cola distributed as part of an advertisement campaign related to the 1998 World Cup in France. ‘We saw Tommy and we didn’t think twice: he had the simplicity and beauty of Cuchu,’ explain the directors.26 They also used a doll from the Cabbage Patch Kids collection to represent Cuchu as a baby. The opening sequences of this animated film locate the story in the darkest episode of Argentine history: the 1976–83 dictatorship, a regime that resulted in more than thirty thousand disappeared people and around five hundred

236

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

children stolen from their families and illegally adopted, sometimes by the very murderers of their parents. To date, 119 of these children have been found by the human rights organization Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. The film starts with archival footage of the dictators Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Massera and Orlando Ramón Agosti at the opening ceremony of the 1978 Soccer World Cup. The competition was appropriated by the military to improve its image and to refute claims made by the international community, especially human rights organizations such as Amnesty, that the regime was responsible for running clandestine concentration camps in which political opponents were being tortured and disappeared. In Easy Money the voices of the dictators have been digitally altered. We hear Videla saying, ‘We need to win this cup, Emilio,’ to which Massera responds, ‘Argentines support us, Jorge.’ Next comes an official advertisement about the competition that was broadcast on television at the time and that stated, via a catchy song, that ‘25,000,000 Argentines will play in the World Cup’. These images are juxtaposed against others of military tanks and planes flying over Buenos Aires. The next sequences show images of one of the many shantytowns in the city, a reminder of the harsh background to the fiesta de todos (everybody’s party), an expression that the military used when referring to the competition, and of the neo-liberal policies introduced by the dictatorship. In one of the modest houses in this shantytown, Cuchu’s father (‘played’ by a hunchback doll) is watching a football match. Behind him, on one of the flimsy walls of the house, there is an Argentine flag and a blue-and-white sticker that the military distributed at the time that stated: Somos derechos y humanos – a play on the term ‘Human Rights’ that translates into English as ‘We Argentines are honest and humane.’ Later in the film, in the house of Cuchu’s adoptive father, we also see a badge of Malvinas Argentinas, the other national cause that the dictatorship embraced to build collective consensus around the regime. Next to Cuchu’s father is his mother giving birth. His father, however, is more interested in the match than in the arrival of his son. At one point he screams at the woman, without taking his eyes away from the television: ‘Come on you woman, I want an Argentine son that plays football!’ Argentina then scores a goal and Cuchu is finally born. ‘He is blond,’ exclaims his father when he finally sees him; ‘this son of mine is un golazo [a victory].’ When the little blond babytoy starts crying, however, he quickly changes his mood: ‘Don’t cry, son. We’re still winning. What are you? Dutch?!’ Holland, Argentina’s opponents in the match, then score a goal and the father takes the baby and throws him through

Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness

237

the window, into the river. ‘Why did he have to be blond and a sissy?!’ laments the father, visibly disappointed. We then see Cuchu floating in the river while the commentator’s voice-over describes the celebratory spirit in the stadium: ‘This is the image that we want to give to the world, an Argentina that stands up and screams: Here we are!’ He is, of course, referring to the match, but the image of a body floating in the river reminds us of the real Argentina at the time, when victims were thrown from aircraft into the enormous watery cemetery of the River Plate, their bodies never to be found. These opening sequences highlight Cuchu’s drama and bad luck: he was born with the wrong hair colour for this place. Those around him see blondness as a sign of delicacy and even femininity, a poor fit for the harsh life in the shantytown and, most importantly, for being a footballer. Like Carri’s parents in The Blonds, he is thus perceived as a foreigner in a neighbourhood where the majority of people are dark skinned and have dark hair. It matters little that, unlike the Carris, he is not an outsider. Later in the film, when people start seeing him and his blond hair as an opportunity to earn ‘easy money’, he goes from being rejected to being exploited. Like Barbie Gets Sad Too, Easy Money is a denunciatory film that offers a humorous and playful take on serious issues: the manipulation of poor children in the business of football, the dictatorship’s use of entertainment to gain civil support, and the culture of machismo, racism and xenophobia in Argentina. Interestingly, most of the characters who exploit Cuchu are themselves marginal. They both despise and envy Cuchu’s blond hair. As in Barbie culture, blondness symbolizes for them the aspiration to higher social and economic status and access to a more privileged life. But who are all these adults who want to keep Cuchu and make ‘easy money’ with him? While floating in the river, Cuchu is rescued by a Paraguayan man, one of the two human actors in the film. (The other is a boy filmed only from behind who plays the role of Cuchu when he starts training for the national team.) The Paraguayan man is listening to ‘music from my land’, and fishing next to a doll dressed as a gaucho named, precisely, Gaucho Alvarez. When the Paraguayan sees the boy, he gets excited about what he can do with him: ‘He is a young blond boy. If you feed one of these boys for two years you can then send him to clean cars in the street and you know what? … It’s easy money! I’m saved, Alvarez!’ Gaucho Alvarez, however, has other plans. He wants the boy for himself, and so he gets rid of the Paraguayan and takes Cuchu home, not to look after him (as Cuchu naïvely believes), but to set him to work.

238

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

Cuchu’s father, the Paraguayan and Alvarez are not the only ones who see in Cuchu’s blondness more than just phenotype. When Moshe DT, an Orthodox Jewish coach, introduces him to the national football team, a miniature replica of the real Argentine player Ariel Ortega does not believe that Cuchu can play the sport because of his looks: ‘With this little Blondie we won’t win anything,’ he complains. In the same dressing room, another player, Verón, sings a song that proves how, if being blond is a sign of weakness in Argentine football culture, footballers and fans also use words such as ‘black’ or ‘gay’ as insults: ‘They’re all black and they’re all homos, Brazil’s in mourning’ (Son todos negros, son todos putos, ya saben que Brasil esta de luto.) Later, even Cuchu makes a racist remark about a Brazilian player when he explains to Verón: ‘He is black but he’s a good man. He likes playing football just like us.’ Thus, the film suggests that racism is so deeply engrained in Argentine society that nobody can escape its curse. Indeed, in Easy Money the poor exploit the poorer, and the dark-skinned players make fun of those whose skin and hair are even darker, as if to remind us that in the jungle of modern life only the strongest – and the blondest – survive. Cuchu is, indeed, a survivor. At one point in the film – the year is 1982, indicated by the sticker supporting Raúl Alfonsín´s presidential campaign in Cuchu’s new home – an expensive car arrives in the shantytown. It is Ken Russell, a footballers’ agent, and his partner, Barbie, both ‘played’ by Mattel’s iconic doll couple. They have come to take Cuchu away and to become rich at his expense. Alvarez imagines living the ‘good life’ with the money that Ken is prepared to pay for the boy: he dreams of sleeping with Barbie and of having ‘free internet access’. Ken suggests closing the deal by proposing a toast with imported wine. But Alvarez is too clever to let Cuchu go. He takes the money, sets the house on fire and escapes with the boy to the big city. There Cuchu cleans cars while Alvarez spends his money on prostitutes until the neo-liberal 1990s are ushered in with the arrival of President Carlos Menem. His infamous statement that ‘Argentina is already a first-world country’ is the headline in the Clarín newspaper that Alvarez is reading. Menem’s words expressed a common illusion in Argentina at the time, when one Argentine peso was equivalent to one US dollar and the middle classes used to travel to Europe and Miami. Spending vast amounts of money, they failed to realize that the cost of their lifestyle was an alarming increase in the external debt, which would eventually bring about the economic and political meltdown of 2001. Néstor F. and Martín C.’s film addresses and contests different myths and narratives linked to the idea of Argentinidad present in popular culture and

Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness

239

the collective national imaginary: the idea that Argentina is more European (blonder) than other Latin American countries like Brazil or Paraguay, that we Argentines are derechos y humanos, or that we have the best sportsmen in the world. The film also demonstrates how football in Argentina is much more than just an innocent national passion. Football is an exploitative business that provided a cover-up for the mass murders of the 1976–83 dictatorship while also perpetuating discourses of racism and xenophobia. The directors had already explored these issues in their previous film, Marcelo G., sólo un hombre (1999), based on the life of the footballer Marcelo ‘el muñeco’ Gallardo. These images and discourses on nationhood are present not only in the newspapers or the chants sung in the stadium, but also in the stickers and toys that were circulated during the World Cup. Just as the Barbies in Carri’s film were used because they have certain race and gender narratives attached to them, the toys used in Easy Money point to the often hidden relationships between the material culture of childhood, politics and the market in Argentina. There are many references, for example, to the Gauchito del Mundial, an Argentine child cowboy that was used to represent the country as the 1978 World Cup mascot. Not only does this little toy appear on several occasions during the film and on stickers, it is also evoked in the character of Gaucho Alvarez, a humansize incarnation of the Gauchito. Cartoonist Manuel García Ferre designed the Gaucho mascot at the request of the military Junta. Gauchito merchandising came in all sorts of forms and shapes as a sticker, a key ring, a toy and so on. The military made the careful decision to use a child as a symbol of ‘innocence’, a sort of response to those international human rights commissions that were visiting the country at the time to investigate the violations perpetrated by the Junta. In some of the versions of the Gauchito, he also carries a whip, perhaps a subtle threat to the international community if they kept sticking their noses into other people’s business. Finally, like Barbie Gets Sad Too, Easy Money too brings to light images of womanhood silenced by the doll industry. One of the most hilarious sequences depicts Alvarez inviting a prostitute to his house only for him to discover that she is a transvestite. The directors used a Ken doll for this scene and called it Trabiesa. (The word means naughty in Spanish, though here it is used with a ‘b’ instead of a ‘v’.) Even the name is similar to Trabie, the transvestite in Carri’s film. Alvarez explains to Cuchu that she is his cousin, Roberta, who lives in the countryside. When Trabiesa/Roberta sees Gaucho Alvarez she exclaims: ‘Wow, your ethnic look is very cool!’ Both Roberta and Alvarez, this encounter

240

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

suggests, occupy marginal positions within society, places that are constructed and reinforced by certain trends in the doll and toy industry. Towards the end of the film, Cuchu’s dream comes true and he ends up playing for the national team. Now triumphant and on top of the world, all his ‘fathers’ and tutors – the hunchback, Gaucho Alvarez, even Ken and the Paraguayan – reappear in the stadium to take advantage of the situation once again. In the middle of a fight to keep the boy, the Paraguayan’s weapon goes off and Cuchu is fatally wounded. Before he dies the boy forgives everyone and reassures them that he is now happy because Argentina has finally won the World Cup. One of the final images synthesizes the dramatic, critical and yet playful spirit of the film: a single, brief shot of the shield of the Argentine Football Association hanging on the wall, now stained with Cuchu’s (fake, tomato sauce-like) blood.

Subversive play and guerrilla toy films Both Barbie Gets Sad Too and Easy Money subvert the scripts, discourses and images attached to certain toys and miniatures, exposing the economic or political motives behind the toy industry’s discourses of ethnicity and sexuality, its fake pluralism and multiculturalism, and its implicit support for heteronormative/ conservative ideals of family, gender and race. Barbie Gets Sad Too, for example, exposes Mattel’s silences on the long history of European colonial encounters that underpin racial categories in Latin America. Anthropologist Peter Wade has argued in this vein that racial categories do not describe objective realities but are created to dominate the work force more effectively. Certain groups are categorized by dominant sectors of society as being ‘naturally’ inferior and therefore only good for manual work.27 In contrast to Mattel’s preference for using the word ‘ethnic’ for its merchandising, a term less loaded than ‘race’, Wade notes the importance of keeping both terms. Denying a specific role to racial identification is ‘to blur the particular history by which these identifications come to have the force they do’.28 Ultimately, these multimedia films highlight how children first learn about gender, race and national issues through toys and the marketing narratives used by the toy industry to sell their products. Both films turn to dolls to talk about human (rights) issues. The same films made with live actors would probably have been more violent, more upsetting and more uncomfortable; in other words, more solemn and less playful and

Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness

241

profane. The use of dolls, these directors have found, has allowed them to break the barriers of what can be said and what can be shown in cinema, even when the topics they address are, in no way, child’s play. Furthermore, in contrast to criticism of foreign toys and popular culture in the 1970s, such as the canonical 1972 essay ‘How to read Donald Duck’ by Argentine-Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and Belgium sociologist Armand Mattelart, the denunciatory gesture of these films is addressed not only towards European or US imperialist ideologies, but also towards local expressions of nationalism, sexism and racism in Argentina. In particular, both films focus on the symbolism that hair colour and skin colour have in social and power relations in a country in which being white, blond and blue-eyed is often perceived as entitling the bearer to a symbolic tie to both European and local bourgeoisies. In the 1940s, for example, blondness/ whiteness was opposed to what middle-class inhabitants of Buenos Aires termed cabecitas negras (‘negros’, ‘grasas’ or ‘gronchos’), meaning the dark-haired and dark-skinned members of the working classes, mainly Peronist supporters, who had migrated to the capital from the north of the country or from the neighbouring countries of Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru. It is worth remembering, however, that, during the 1970s, ‘blackness’ also acquired positive attributes for left-wing militants in Argentina, some of whom used to wear ‘Afro’ hairstyles as a sign of resistance to capitalism and as a gesture of solidarity with the struggles of African Americans in the United States.29 When they wanted to work undercover, brown-haired guerrilleras – famously, Norma Arrostito – used to wear blond wigs to denote bourgeois superficiality and to undertake militant missions without being noticed. Hair colour in Argentina is much more than just a frivolous physical attribute. It can say a great deal about our identities, alliances and ideologies. The directors of Barbie Gets Sad Too and Easy Money draw on objects of childhood and insert them into adult film worlds in order to question race, gender and ethnicity. At the same time, they are implicitly exploring the universe of childhood. Rather than offer spectators representations or figurations of the child, they use objects of play to reflect on the way racial, gender and ethnic narratives are consumed and internalized from the moment that children first engage with toys. The films view the world with a childlike gaze that has been stripped of its innocence, constructing a knowledge of Argentine history and politics, gender and racial stereotypes, that could only have been achieved through a dialogue between adulthood and childhood. It is this gaze – one eye

242

Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema

in the world of childhood and another in the adult world – that makes these films so effective in tackling issues of identity and nationhood.

Notes 1 Albertina Carri, Barbie también puede eStar triste (Barbie Gets Sad Too), stop motion, 22 minutes (2002; Buenos Aires: NQVAC), vimeo. Néstor F. and Martín C., Plata Segura (Easy Money), stop motion, 40 minutes (2001; Buenos Aires: Videofilms), DVD. 2 Juan Antín, Mercano, el marciano (Mercano The Martian), animation, 87 minutes (2002; Buenos Aires: Universidad de Cine, 2005), DVD. Juan José Campanella, Metegol (Underdogs), animation, 106 minutes (2013; Buenos Aires: Universal, 2014), DVD. 3 Kim Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 60. 4 Ann DuCille, Skin Trade (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 36. 5 Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 84. 6 DuCille, ‘Toy Theory’, 38. 7 Karen Goldman, ‘La Princesa Plástica: Hegemonic and Oppositional Representations of Latinidad in Hispanic Barbie’, in Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Critical Reader, ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington, DC: SAGE, 2011), 375–82. 8 Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, 69. 9 Erich Fox Tree, ‘The Secret Sex Lives of Native American Barbies, from the Mysteries of Motherhood, to the Magic of Colonialism’, in Dolls Studies. The Many Meanings of Girls’ Toys and Play, ed. Miriam Forman-Brunell and Jennifer Dawn Whitney (New York: Peter Lang, 2015), 242. 10 Ibid., 231. 11 On Mattel, see DuCille, ‘Toy Theory’, 30. For ‘almost without words’, see Fox Tree, ‘Secret Sex Lives’, 253. 12 Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 63. 13 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, London: Routledge, 2007). 14 Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, 156. 15 Goldman, ‘La Princesa Plástica’, 25. 16 Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, 84.

Children’s Toys, Argentine Nationhood and Blondness

243

17 Sandra Petrignani, Toy Catalogue (London: Boulevard Books, 1990), 11. 18 Josefina Licitra, ‘Barbie, muñeca pop’, La Nación revista, 24 September 2000, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/213178-barbie-muneca-pop. 19 Macarena Gagliardi, ‘La obsesión argentina con Barbie’, BBC Mundo, 8 October 2014, http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2014/10/140930_obsesion_arg_barbie_mg (accessed 22 January 2016). 20 Pablo Plotkin, ‘Barbie, la pornostar triste’, Pagina/12, 1 March 2011, http://www. pagina12.com.ar/2001/01-03/01-03-11/pag37.htm (accessed 22 January 2016). 21 Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, 84. 22 Ibid., 158. 23 Ibid., 45. 24 Fox Tree, ‘The Secret Sex Lives’, 237. 25 Plotkin, ‘Barbie, la pornostar triste’. 26 Nalaia Scali, ‘¡Qué muñecos!.’ Olé, 21 April 2000, http://old.ole.com.ar/ diario/2000/04/21/r-01601d.htm (accessed 22 January 2016). 27 Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 22. 28 Ibid., 20. 29 Alan Pauls, Historia del pelo (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2010).

244

Bibliography Acland, Charles. Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Aitken, Stuart C. ‘Poetic Child Realism: Scottish Film and the Construction of Childhood’. Scottish Geographical Journal 123, no. 1 (March 2007): 68–86. Alryyes, Ala A. Original Subjects: The Child, The Novel and The Nation. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Altman, Jon and Susie Russell. ‘Too Much “Dreaming”: Evaluations of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Intervention 2007–2012’. Evidence Base 3 (2012), https://journal.anzsog.edu.au/publications/3/2012Issue3Final.pdf. Arenas, Fernando. Utopias of Otherness: Nationhood and Subjectivity in Portugal and Brazil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Back, Les. The Art of Listening. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Basu, Sanjay and David Stuckler. The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2013. Bednařík, Petr. ‘Jews in Czech Film and Television Production during Normalization’. In The Representation of the Shoah in Literature and Film in Central Europe: 1970s and 1980s, edited by Jiri Holý, 207–16. Prague: Akropolis, 2012. Bégaudeau, François. Entre Les Murs. Paris: Editions Verticales, 2006. Bellingham, Bruce. ‘The History of Childhood Since the “Invention of Childhood”: Some Issues in the Eighties’. Journal of Family History 13 (1987): 347–58. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, edited by Marcus Bullock, Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Penguin, 2014 [1976]. Biswas, Moinak. ‘In the Mirror of an Alternative Globalism: The Neorealist Encounter in India’. In Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, edited by Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, 72–90. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Boyd-Bowman, Susan. ‘Television Authorship in France: La Réalisateur’. In Making Television: Authorship and the Production Process, edited by Robert J. Thompson and Gary Burns, 51–64. New York: Praeger, 1990. Breillat, Catherine. Romance: Scenario. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma [Petite bibliothèque des Cahiers du cinéma], 1999.

246

Bibliography

Brooks, Karen. ‘Nothing Sells Like Teen Spirit: The Commodification of Youth Culture’. In Youth Cultures: Texts, Images and Identities, edited by Kerry Mallan and Sharyn Pearce, 1–16. Westport: Praeger, 2003. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary. London: Routledge, 2006. Bryant, Chad. ‘The Language of Resistance? Czech Jokes and Joke-Telling under Nazi Occupation, 1943-45’. Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 1 (2006): 133–51. Bryant, Chad. Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Budryte, Dovile. ‘Experiences of Collective Trauma and Political Activism: A Study of Women “Agents of Memory” in Post-Soviet Lithuania’. Journal of Baltic Studies 41, no. 3 (2010): 331–50. Burton, Mark. ‘Viva Nacho! Liberating Psychology in Latin America’. The Psychologist 17, no. 10 (2004): 584–7. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, London: Routledge, 2007. Caputo, Raffaele. ‘Coming of Age: Notes Toward a Re-appraisal’. Cinema Papers 94 (1993): 12–16. Cardullo, Bert. In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. London: Penguin Books, 1998 [1865 and 1872]. Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981 [1979]. Chakravarty, Sumita S. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947-1987, 80–118. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Chakravarty, Sumita S. ‘Fragmenting the Nation: Images of Terrorism in Indian Popular Cinema’. In Cinema and Nation, edited by Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 222–37. London: Routledge, 2000. Chandra, Nandini. ‘Merit and Opportunity in the Child-Centric Nationalist Films of the 1950s’. In Narratives of Indian Cinema, edited by Manju Jain, 123–44. Delhi: Primus Books, 2009. Chaudhuri, Shohini and Howard Finn. ‘The Open Image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema’. In Genre, Gender, Race, and World Cinema, edited by Julie F. Codell, 388–407. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Chevallier, Jacques. Kids: 50 films autour de l’enfance. Paris: Centre national de documentation pédagogique, 1986. Chun, Heeran, Kwon Jin-Won and Cho Sung-Il. ‘A Closer Look at the Increase in Suicide Rates in South Korea from 1986–2005’. BMC Public Health 9, no. 1 (2009): 72. Chute, Hillary. ‘Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative’. PMLA 123, no. 2 (2008): 452–65. Cixous, Hélène. ‘“Mamãe, disse ele,” or, Joyce’s Second Hand’. Poetics Today 17, no. 3 (1997): 339–66.

Bibliography

247

Clini, Clelia. ‘International Terrorism? Indian Popular Cinema and the Politics of Terror’. Critical Studies on Terrorism 8, no. 3 (2015): 337–57. Clouzot, Claire. Catherine Breillat: Indécence et pureté. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma/ auteurs, 2004. Cohen, Phil. ‘Landscape after Ruins’. In Culture and the Unconscious, edited by Caroline Bainbridge, Susannah Radstone, Michael Rustin and Candida Yates, 123–40. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema After Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Cooper, Andrew and Julian Lousada. Borderline Welfare: Feeling and Fear of Feeling in Modern Welfare. London and New York: Karnac, 2005. Creekmur, Corey. ‘Bombay Boys: Dissolving the Male Child in Popular Hindi Cinema’. In Where The Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, edited by Murray Pomeranc and Frances K. Gateward, 350–76. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Cuming, Emily. ‘Private Lives, Social Housing: Female Coming-of-Age Stories on the British Council Estate’. Contemporary Women’s Writing 7, no. 3 (2013): 328–45. Cummings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History. New York: Modern Library Press, 2010. Cunningham, Hugh. The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood Since the Seventeenth Century. 1991. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1992. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Dabashi, Hamid. Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future. London and New York: Verso, 2001. Darke, Chris. ‘ “Les Enfants et les Cinéphiles”: The Moment of Epiphany in The Spirit of the Beehive’. Cinema Journal 49, no. 2 (2010): 152–8. Daly, Fergus. ‘Manoel dans l’île des merveilles (Manoel on the Island of Marvels [3 part French TV series], 1985’, in Rouge 2, ed. Adrian Martin. http://rouge.com.au/2/ manoel.html (accessed 18 February 2016). Darrieussecq, Marie. Bref séjour chez les vivants. Paris: P.O.L., 2001. Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. Trans. Rosette C. Lamont. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Continuum, 2000 [1985]. de los Ríos, Valeria and Catalina Donoso. El cine de Ignacio Agüero: El documental como la lectura de un espacio. Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2015. Dempsey, Anna M. ‘Telling the Girl’s Side of the Story: Heterotopic Spaces of Femininity in Iranian Film’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 2 (2012): 374–90. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

248

Bibliography

Dolgopolov, Greg. ‘Beyond Black and White: Indigenous Cinema and the Mainstream’. Metro Magazine, no. 181 (2014): 78–83. Dönmez-Colin, Gönül. Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from Iran and Turkey. 2nd edition. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2012. Douglas, Ray M. Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. DuCille, Ann. Skin Trade. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996. Durmelat, Sylvie. ‘Transmission and Mourning in Mémoires d’immigrés: l’héritage maghrébin: Yamina Benguigui as “memory entrepreneuse” ’. In Women, Immigration and Identities in France, edited by Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr, 171–88. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Ehrenstein, David. ‘Raúl Ruiz at the Holiday Inn’. Film Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1986): 2–7. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. ‘Early Cinema as Child: Historical Metaphor and European Cinephilia in Lumière & Company’. Screen 46, no. 3 (2005): 315–28. Elia, Nada. ‘In the Making: Beur Fiction and Identity Construction’. World Literature Today 71, no. 1 (1997): 47–54. Feierstein, Daniel. Genocide as Social Practice: Re-organizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Junta. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Ferreira, Carolin Overhoff. ‘The Adolescent as Postcolonial Allegory: Strategies of Intersubjectivity in Recent Portuguese Films’. Camera Obscura 20, no. 2_59 (2005): 34–71. Ferreira, Carolin Overhoff. ‘Identities Adrift – Lusophone Encounters in Portuguese Cinema’. In Polyglot Cinema: Migration and Transcultural Narration in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, edited by Verena Berger and Miya Komori. Wien: Lit Verlag, 2010. Foot, Michael. Aneurin Bevan. London: Indigo, 1999. Fox Tree, Erich. ‘The Secret Sex Lives of Native American Barbies, from the Mysteries of Motherhood, to the Magic of Colonialism’. In Dolls Studies: The Many Meanings of Girls’ Toys and Play, edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell and Jennifer Dawn Whitney, 227–56. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. Fradley, Martin. ‘Shane Meadows’. In Fifty Contemporary Film Directors 2nd Edition, edited by Yvonne Tasker, 280–8. London: Routledge, 2010. Frankl, Michal. ‘The Sheep of Lidice: The Holocaust and the Construction of Czech National History’. In Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Perception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, edited by John-Paul Himka and Beata Michlic, 166–94. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Giovacchini, Saverio and Robert Sklar, eds. Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.

Bibliography

249

Giroux, Henry. Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth. Houndsmill, England: Macmillan, 1997. Giroux, Henry. Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture and Schooling: A Critical Reader. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Glassheim, Eagle. ‘National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945’. Central European History 33, no. 4 (2000): 463–86. Goddard, Michael. The Cinema of Raul Ruiz: Impossible Cartographies. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2013. Goldman, Karen. ‘La Princesa Plástica: Hegemonic and Oppositional Representations of Latinidad in Hispanic Barbie’. In Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Critical Reader, edited by Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez, 375–82. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington, DC: Sage, 2011. Gopal, Sangita. Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Gottschall, Kristina. ‘Coming-Of-Age’. In Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand, edited by Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand, 176–80. Bristol: Intellect Publishers, 2010. Gottschall, Kristina. Cultural Representations of Indigenous Childhood and Poverty in Australian Cinema. London: Routledge, 2015. Grierson, John. Grierson on Documentary, edited by Forsyth Hardy. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1979. Hanley, Lynsey. Estates: An Intimate History (New Edition). London: Granta, 2012. Hanna, Michael. Misconceptualizations of Trauma. Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2003. Hemelryk Donald, Stephanie. ‘Children, Media and Regional Modernity in the Asia Pacific’. In International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture, edited by Kirsten Drotner and Sonia Livingstone, 299–313. London: Sage, 2008. Higonnet, Anne. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. Hill, John. Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics. London: British Film Institute, 2006. Hill, John. Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia, 2012. Hjort, Mette. Small Nation, Global Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Public Worlds Series, 2005. Hjort, Mette and Scott MacKenzie. Cinema and Nation. London: Routledge, 2000. Hodkinson, Stuart, Paul Watt and Gerry Mooney. ‘Introduction: Neoliberal Housing Policy – Time for a Critical Re-appraisal’. Critical Social Policy 33, no. 1 (2013): 3–16.

250

Bibliography

Jeffrey, Laura and Matei Candea. ‘The Politics of Victimhood’. History and Anthropology 17, no. 4 (2006): 287–96. Jenkins, Henry. The Children’s Culture Reader. New York: NYU Press, 1998. Jirgens, E. Karl. ‘Fusions of Discourse: Postcolonial/Postmodern Horizons in Baltic Culture’. In Baltic Postcolonialism, edited by Violeta Kelertas, 45–82. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006. Judt, Tony. Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Vintage Books, 2010. Kaprāns, Mārtiņš, Olga Procevska and Laura Uzule. ‘Persistence and Transformation of Cultural Trauma: Commemoration of Soviet Deportations in the Media of PostSoviet Latvia (1987-2010)’. In Trauma Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice, edited by Catherine Barrette, Bridget Haylock and Danielle Mortimer, 245–52. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011. Kapur, Jyotsna. ‘A Small World After All: Globalization and the Transformation of Childhood in India’. Visual Anthropology 11, no. 4 (1998): 387–97. Kelleher, Joe. ‘Face to Face with Terror: Children in Film’. In Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood, edited by Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, 29–54. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1998. Kendall, Tina. ‘“The In-between of Things”: Intermediality in Ratcatcher’. New Review of Film and Television Studies 8, no. 2 (2010): 179–97. Kim, Joon-yang. ‘Critique of the New Historical Landscape of South Korean Animation’. Animation An Interdisciplinary Journal 1, no. 1 (2006): 61–81. Kim, Young-Shin, Koh Yun-Joo and Leventhal Bennett. ‘School Bullying and Suicidal Risk in Korean Middle School Students’. Pediatrics 115 (2005): 357–63. King, John. Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America. London and New York: Verso, 1990. Kish, Karsie A. ‘Protectionism to Promote Culture: South Korea and Japan. A Case Study’. University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Economic Law 22, no. 1 (2001): 153–84. Kokkola. Lydia. Fictions of Adolescent Carnality: Sexy Sinners and Delinquent Deviants. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013. Koo, Hyojin, Keumjoo Kwak and Peter K. Smith. ‘Victimization in Korean Schools: The Nature, Incidence, and Distinctive Features of Korean Bullying or Wang-Ta’. Journal of School Violence 7, no. 4 (2008): 119–39. Kriapalani, Coonoor. ‘Trendsetting and Product Placement in Bollywood Film: Consumerism through Consumption’. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 4, no. 3 (2006): 197–215. Kristeva, Julia. The Severed Head: Capital Visions. Trans. Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Kural, Václav. Místo společenství – konflikt! Češi a Němci ve Velkoněmecké říši a cesta k odsunu (1938–1945). Praha: Ústav mezinárodních vztahů, 1994. Lanclos, Donna. At Play in Belfast: Children’s Folklore and Identities in Northern Ireland. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Bibliography

251

Landgren, Karin. ‘The Protective Environment: Development Support for Child Protection’. Human Rights Quarterly 27, no. 1 (February 2005): 214–48. Landy, Marcia. Italian Film, 234–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lazda, Mara. ‘Women, Nation, and Survival: Latvian Women in Siberia 1941–1957’. Journal of Baltic Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 1–12. Lebeau, Vicky. Childhood and Cinema. London: Reaktion, 2008. Lebeau, Vicky. ‘“Stick that Knife in Me”: Shane Meadows’ Children’. Journal of British Cinema and Television 10, no. 4 (2013): 878–89. Leclerc, Annie. Clé. Paris: Grasset, 1989. Lee, Joonkoo. ‘Animating Globalization and Development: The South Korean Animation Industry in Historical-Comparative Perspective’. PhD Thesis, Department of Sociology, Duke University, 2011. Lee, Seungha, Peter K. Smith and Claire P. Monks. ‘Meaning and Usage of a Term for Bullying-Like Phenomena in South Korea: A Lifespan Perspective’. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31 (2012): 342–9. Lefèvre, Gérard. ‘Les enfants: point de mire’. In L’Enfance au cinéma: Deuxièmes rencontres cinématographiques de Dunkerque, 102, 46-48. Dunkerque: Editions A Bruit Secret, 1998. Lequeret, Elisabeth. ‘Barbe bleue, ma soeur et moi’, ‘Breillat dans les chaumières’. Cahiers du Cinéma (Les) 649 (2009): 46–8. Leslie, Esther. ‘Animation and History’. In Animating Film Theory, edited by Karen Beckman, 25–36. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Lindström, Bengt. ‘Contextualizing Salutonegenisis and Antonovsky in Public Health Development’. Health Promotion International 21 (2006): 238–44. Lu, Sheldon, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. Lukose, Ritty A. Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009. Lury, Karen. ‘The Child in Film and Television: Introduction’. Screen 46, no. 3 (2005): 307–14. Lury, Karen. The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010. Lury, Karen. ‘Children in an Open World: Mobility as Ontology in New Iranian and Turkish Cinema’. Feminist Theory 11, no. 3 (2010): 283–94. Majumdar, Neepa. ‘Importing Neorealism, Exporting Cinema: Indian Cinema and Film Festivals in the 1950s’. In Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, edited by Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, 178–93. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Marinescu, Andreea. ‘The Dream of Memory in Raul Ruiz’s Memories of Appearance: Life Is a Dream’. Framework 55, no. 1 (2014): 7–31. Martin, Adrian. ‘A Story is a Bridge Between Worlds: A Tribute to the Life and Work of Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011)’, http://vimeo.com/67624377 (accessed 18 February 2016).

252

Bibliography

Martin-Jones, David. Deleuze and World Cinemas. Continuum: London, 2011. Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1990. Mazumdar, Ranjani. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994. McKenna, Bernard Rupture, Representation and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama from the North of Ireland, 1969-1994, in the series Contribution in Drama and Theatre Studies, Volume 102 (USA: Praeger Publishers, 2003). Mehrez, Samia. ‘Azouz Begag: Un di Zafas di Bidoufile (Azouz Begag: Un des enfants du bidonville) or The Beur Writer: A Question of Territory’. Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 25–42. Mendieta, Eduardo. ‘Writings for a Liberation Psychology’. Cross Currents 47, no. 1 (1997): 132–4. Millet, Catherine. Riquet à la houppe Millet à la loupe. Paris: Stock, 2003. Mills, Jane. ‘Bordering Activity in Ivan Sen’s Film Toomelah (2011)’. Screening the Past, no. 6 (2015), http://www.screeningthepast.com/2015/06/bordering-activity-in-ivansen%E2%80%99s-film-toomelah-2011/. Moffat, Suzanne, et al. ‘A Qualitative Study of the Impact of the UK “Bedroom Tax”’. Journal of Public Health, 15 March 2015: 1–9, http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/ content/early/2015/03/13/pubmed.fdv031. Morris, Frances, ed. Louise Bourgeois. London: Tate Publishing, 2007. Murray, Jonathan. The New Scottish Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2013. Naficy, Hamid. ‘Iranian Cinema Under the Islamic Republic’. American Anthropologist 97, no. 3 (1995): 548–58. Naficy, Hamid. ‘Neorealism Iranian Style’. In Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, edited by Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, 226–39. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Nagib, Lúcia. ‘Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema’. In Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, edited by Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, 30–7. London: Wallflower Press, 2006. Nagib, Lúcia. ‘Reflexive Stasis, Scale Reversal and the Myth of Modern Cinema’. In Inert Cities: Globalization, Mobility and Suspension in Visual Culture, edited by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Christoph Lindner, 187–202. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. Nagib, Lúcia. World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism. London: Continuum, 2011. Naimark, Norman M. Fires of Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. North, Michael. The Baltic, A History. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2015. Nothomb, Amélie. Barbe Bleue. Paris: Albin Michel, 2012. Nowlan, Bob and Zach Finch. Directory of World Cinema: Scotland. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2015.

Bibliography

253

O’Connor, Julia. ‘Gender, Class and Citizenship in the Comparative Analysis of Welfare State Regimes: Theoretical and Methodological Issues’. The British Journal of Sociology 44, no. 3 (1993): 501–18. Onken, Eva-Clarita. ‘Memory and Democratic Pluralism in the Baltic States – Rethinking the Relationship’. Journal of Baltic Studies 41, no. 3 (2010): 277–94. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Mary M. Innis. London: Penguin, 2012 [1955]. Pauls, Alan. Historia del pelo. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2010. Petrignani, Sandra. Toy Catalogue. London: Boulevard Books, 1990. Pierce, Peter. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pollock, Griselda. After-effects, After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Powrie, Phil. ‘Unfamiliar Places: “Heterospection” and Recent French Films on Children’. Screen 46, no. 3 (2005): 341–52. Rabinowitz, Paula. ‘Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory’. History and Theory 32, no. 2 (1993): 119–37. Ramaeker, Paul. ‘Notes on the Split-Field Diopter’. Film History: An International Journal 19, no. 2 (2007): 179–98. Ramsay, Lynne. Ratcatcher. London and New York: Faber and Faber, 1999. Rand, Erica. Barbie’s Queer Accessories. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. Ravetz, Alison. Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment. London: Routledge, 2001. Richardson, Michael. Surrealism and Cinema. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan: Or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rothkirchen, Livia. ‘Czechoslovakia’. In The World Reacts to the Holocaust, edited by David S. Wyman, 156–99. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Royds, Kelly. ‘Listening to Learn: Children’s Experiences of Participatory Video for Global Education in Australia and Timor-Leste’. Media International Australia 154, no. 1 (February 2015): 67–77. Ruberto, Laura E. and Kristi M. Wilson, eds. Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema. New York: Distributed Art Publications, 1995. Sacco, Joe. Palestine: The Special Edition. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2007. Sadr, Hamid Reza. Iranian Cinema: A Political History. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006. Said, Edward. ‘Homage to Joe Sacco’. In Palestine, edited by Joe Sacco, i–v. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2001.

254

Bibliography

Salzani, Carlo. ‘Experience and Play: Walter Benjamin and the Prelapsarian Child’. In Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice, 175–98. Melbourne, Australia: re.press, 2009. Sen, Meheli. ‘Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes: Undoing Modernity in Recent Bollywood Cinema’. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 22, no. 3 (2011): 197–217. Shim, Doobo. ‘South Korean Media Industry in the 1990s and the Economic Crisis’. Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation 20, no. 4 (2002): 337–50. Sinyard, Neil. Children in the Movies. London: B.T. Batsford, 1992. Skultans, Veida. ‘Looking for a Subject: Latvian Memory and Narrative’. History of the Human Sciences 9, no. 4 (1996): 65–80. Smith, Paul Julian. ‘The Emotional Imperative: Almodóvar’s Hable con ella and Televisión Española’s Cuéntame cómo pasó’. MLN 119, no. 2 (2004): 363–75. Sniegon, Tomas. Vanished History. The Holocaust in Czech and Slovak Historical Culture. New York: Berghahn, 2014. Son, Chang-hee. Haan of Minjung Theology and Han of Han Philosophy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003. Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. London: Penguin Books, 1987. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, 271–313. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Stearns, Peter N. Childhood in World History. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Stenberg, Marc. ‘Realism in the Animation Media Environment: Animation Theory from Japan’. In Animating Film Theory, edited by Karen Beckman, 287–300. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Tilley, Elspeth. ‘The Lost-Child Trope in White Australian Narrative’. Cross/Cultures 152 (2012): 21. Timmins, Nicholas. The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001. Toffoletti, Kim. Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Trotter, David. ‘Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher: Towards a Theory of Haptic Narrative’. Paragraph 31, no. 2 (July 2008): 138–58. Truffaut, François. ‘Réflexions sur les enfants et le cinéma’. In L’Enfance au cinéma: Deuxièmes rencontres cinématographiques de Dunkerque, [réd. par Eric Miot] ; préf. de Jacques Deniel. - [S.l.], edited by Eric Miot, 103. Dunkerque: Editions A Bruit Secret, 1998.

Bibliography

255

Vanderschelden, Isabelle. Studying French Cinema. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2013. Vega, Alicia. Taller de cine para niños. Santiago, Chile: Ocho Libros, 2011. Vieira, Patricia. Portuguese Film, 1930-1960: The Staging of the New State Regime. Trans. Ashley Caja. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Vitols, Z. Maruta. ‘Investigating the Past, Envisioning the Future: An Exploration of Post-1991 Latvian Documentary’. In A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, edited by Anikó Imre, 325–43. Oxford, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Wade, Peter. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press, 1997. Wallenbrock, Nicole Beth. ‘The Ideal Immigrant is a Child: Michou d’Auber and the Politics of Immigration in France’. In Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Debbie Olson and Andrew Scahill, 123–50. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2012. Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. London: Vintage, 1995. Weinberger, Stephen. ‘Neorealism, Iranian Style’. Iranian Studies 40, no. 1 (2007): 5–16. Weissm, Gail. Body Images: Embodiment and Intersubjectivity. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Whyte, Padraic. ‘Mickybo and Me and the Mighty Celt’. Estudios Irlandeses 1 (2006): 178–80. Wilkinson-Weber, Clare M. ‘From Commodity to Costume: Productive Consumption in the Making of Bollywood Film Looks’. Journal of Material Culture 15, no. 1 (2010): 3–29. Williams, Garrath. ‘Dangerous Victims: On Some Political Dangers of Vicarious Claims to Victimhood’. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (2008): 77–95. Williams, James S. ‘Framing Exclusion: The Politics of Space in Laurent Cantet’s Entre les Murs’. French Studies: A Quarterly Review 65, no. 1 (2011): 61–73. Wilson, Emma. Cinema’s Missing Children. London: Wallflower Press, 2003. Wilson, Emma. ‘Children, Emotion and Viewing in Contemporary European Cinema’. Screen 46, no. 3 (2005): 329–40. Wolfe, Patrick. ‘Race and Citizenship’. OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 5 (2004): 66–71. Wood, Robin. Personal Views: Explorations in Film, 155–72. London: Gordon Fraser, 1976. Wright, Basil. The Long View. London: Secker and Warburg, 1974. Wright, Sarah. ‘Noli me tangere: Memory, Embodiment and Affect in Silvio Caiozzi’s Fernando ha vuelto (2005)’. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia 21, no. 1 (2012): 37–48. Wright, Sarah. The Child in Spanish Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

256

Bibliography

Wright, Sarah. ‘Spectral Voices and Resonant Bodies in Fernando Guzzoni’s Carne de perro (2012)’. In Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Practices, edited by Tom Whittaker and Sarah Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming). Yang, Su-jin, Kim Jae-min, Kim Sung-wan, Shin Il-seon, Yoon Jin-sang. ‘Bullying and Victimization Behaviors in Boys and Girls at South Korean Primary Schools’. Journal of American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry 45, no. 1 (2006): 69–77. Yoon, Ae-Ri. ‘The Inbetweeners: The Korean Animation Industry Negotiates the Global and the National’. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2010. Zahra, Tara. Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands 1900-1948. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Zavattini, Cesare. ‘A Thesis on Neo-realism’. Trans. David Overbey. In Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism, edited by David Overbey, 67–78. London: Talisman Books, 1978. Zelizer, Viviana A. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Zeydabadi-Nejad, Saeed. The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Zipes, Jack. The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films. New York and London: Routledge, 2011.

Filmography Ab Dilli Dur Nahin. 1957. India. Amar Kumar. R. K. Films Ltd. Abadani-ha (Abadanians). 1993. Iran. Kianoush Ayari. The Adult Game (Bazi-e bozorgan). 1992. Iran. Kambozia Partovi. Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer). 2004. France. Catherine Breillat. Flach Film. The Apple (Sib). 1998. Iran. Samira Makhmalbaf. Hubert Bals Fund/MK2 Productions/ Makhmalbaf Productions. The Arrival of a Train at a Station (L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat). 1895. France. Auguste and Louis Lumière. Back of Beyond. 1954. Australia. John Heyer. Shell Film Unit Australia. Baduk. 1992. Iran. Majid Majidi. Art Bureau of Islamic Propagation Organization. Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj). 1998. Iran. Mohammad-Ali Talebi. Balance Sheet of Siberia (Sibīrijas bilance). 2011. Latvia. Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. Barbie Gets Sad Too (Barbie también puede eStar triste). 2002. Argentina. Albertina Carri. NQVAC. Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bashu, Gharibeh-ye Kuchak). 1985. Japan/Iran. Bahram Baizai. Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. The Battle of Chile (La batalla de Chile). 1975, 1976, 1979. Chile. Patricio Guzmán. Icarus Films. Beneath Clouds. 2002. Australia. Ivan Sen. Australian Film Finance Corporation (AFFC). Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette). 1948. Italy. Vittorio De Sica. Produzioni De Sica. The Blonds (Los rubios). 2003. Argentina, Albertina Carri, Marcelo Céspedes and Barry Ellsworth. Bluebeard (Barbe Bleue). 2009. France. Catherine Breillat. Flach Film. Boot Polishi. 1954. India. Prakash Arora. R. K. Films Ltd. Bran Nue Dae. 2009. Australia. Rachel Perkins. Robyn Kershaw Productions, Mayfan, Film Victoria. Bronco Bullfrog. 1969. Barney Platts-Mills. Maya Films. Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (Buda az sharm foru rikht). 2007. Iran/France. Hana Makhmalbaf. Makhmalbaf Film House/Wild Bunch. Bumm Bumm Bole. 2010. India. Priyadarshan. Percept Picture Company/Sanjay Ghodowar Group. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. 1969. USA. George Roy Hill. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp/Campanile Productions/Newman-Forman Corp. Cathy Come Home. 1966. UK. Ken Loach. BBC.

258

Filmography

Childhood Land of Siberia (Bērnības zeme Sibīrija). 2013. Latvia. Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. The Children are Watching Us (I bambini ci guardano). 1944. Italy. Vittorio De Sica. Invicta Film/Scalera Film. The Children of Siberia (Sibīrijas Bērni). 2001. Latvia. Dzintra Geka. SB Studio. Children of Heaven (Bacheha-Ye aseman). 1997. Iran. Majid Majidi. Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Cinema Paradiso (Nuovo Cinema Paradiso). 1988. Italy/France. Giuseppe Tornatore. Cristaldifilm, les Films Ariane, Rai 3. Citizen Kane. 1941. USA. Orson Welles. RKO/Mercury Productions. The City of Pirates (La ville des pirates). 1983. Portugal/France. Raúl Ruiz. Metro Filmes/ Les Films du Passage. A City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi). 1989. Taiwan. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 3-H Films, ERA International. The Class (Entre Les Murs). 2008. France. Laurent Cantet. Sony Pictures Classics. The Colour of Paradise (Rang-e khoda). 1999. Iran. Majid Majidi. Varahonar Company. Cuckoo in a Dark Forest (Kukačka v temném lese). 1986. Poland; Czechoslovakia. Antonín Moskalyk, Filmové studio Barrandov; PRF Zespol Filmowy. Defense Against Invasion. 1943. USA. Jack King. Office of the Co-ordinator of InterAmerican Affairs. Walt Disney Productions. Desert Echoes (Ecos del desierto). 2013–present. Chile. Andrés Wood. Chilevisión, Wood Producciones. Do Bigha Zamin (Two Acres of Land). 1953. India. Bimal Roy. Bimal Roy Productions. Do Phool (Two Flowers). 1958. India. Abdul Rashid Kardar. Silver Wings. Easy Money (Plata Segura). 2001. Argentina. Néstor F. and Martín C. Videofilms. The Eighties (Los Ochenta). 2008–14. Chile. Boris Quercia. Canal 13/Woods Producciones. Family Guy. 1999–2016. USA. Pete ShinFuzzy Door Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. The Father (Pedar). 1996. India. Majid Majidi. Center of Documentary and Experimental Cinema. Ferry. 1954. India. Hemen Gupta. Film Trust of India. Fish Tank. 2009. Andrea Arnold. BBC Films/UK Film Council/Limelight Communication/ContentFilm/Kasander Film Company. Forbidden Dreams (Smrt krásných srnců). 1987. Czechoslovakia. Karel Kachyňa. Filmové studio Barrandov. Gemini (Geminis). 2005. Argentina/France. Albertina Carri. Matanza Cine, NQVAC, and Fireball Pictures Inc. Genealogies of a Crime (Généalogies d’un crime). 1997. Portugal/France. Raúl Ruiz. Madragoa Filmes/Gemini Films. Germany, Year Zero (Germania anno zero). 1948. Italy/France/Germany. Roberto Rossellini. Tevere Film/SAFDI/Union Générale Cinématographique/Deutsche Film.

Filmography

259

The Girl in the Sneakers (Dokhtari ba Kafsha-ye Katani). 1999. Iran. Rasul Sadr Ameli. Milad Film. The Golden Eels (Zlatí úhoři). 1979. Czechoslovakia. Karel Kachyňa. Goodbye First Love (Un Amour de jeunesse). 2011. France. Mia Hansen-Løve. Les Films Pelléas. Greetings from Siberia (Sveiciens no Sibīrijas). 2004. Latvia. Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. Fantasmagoriei. 1908. France. Émil Cohl. Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont. Heidi. 1951. Switzerland. Luigi Comencini. Praesens-Film. Here I Am. 2011. Australia. Beck Cole. Scarlett Pictures, Screen Australia. Histories of Cinema (Histoire[s] du Cinéma). 1988–98. France. Jean-Luc Godard. Canal +/JLG Films/Gaumont/Sonimage/Peripheria/FEMIS/Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC)/La Sept/FR 3/Vega/RTSR. Inch’allah Dimanche. 2001. USA. Yamina Benguigui. Gaumont Columbia. Innocence. 2004. France. Lucile Hadzihalilovic. Ex nihilo. In the Crosswind (Risttuules). 2014. Latvia. Martti Helde. Tallinn: Allfilm. In the Name of the Father. 1993. Ireland/UK/USA. Jim Sheridan. Hell’s Kitchen Films/ Universal Pictures. I Want Mum and Dad to Come Home [Wo xiangyao baba mama huijia]. 2012. China. Zhang Qingchen and Tao Zi. Beijing qingcheng yunuo guoji yingyin wenhua chuanmei youxian gongsi. Jagriti (The Awakening). 1956. India. Satyen Bose. Filmistan/Sasadhar Mukherjee Productions. The Jar (Khomreh). 1992. Iran. Ebrahim Forouzesh. Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. The Key (Kelid). 1987. Iran. Ebrahim Forouzesh. Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. The King of Pigs (돼지의 왕). 2013. South Korea. Sang-Ho Yeon. Studio Dadashow. The Lady Vanishes. 1979. UK. Anthony Page. Rank Organisation/Hammer Films. The Last Mistress (Une vieille maîtresse). 2007. France. Catherine Breillat. Flach Film. Left-behind children (Liushou haizi). 2008. China. Liu Junyi. Beijing Nanhai Pictures Corporation. Letter from a Filmmaker, or The Return of a Library Lover (Lettre d’un cinéaste ou Le Retour d’un amateur de bibliothèques). 1983. France. Raúl Ruiz. Antenne 2. Life is a Dream (Mémoire des apparences). 1986. France. Raúl Ruiz. Maison de la Culture du Havre/INA. Like Stars on Earth (Taare Zameen Par). 2007. India. Aamir Khan. Aamir Khan Productions/PVR Pictures. The Little Man (Mardan-e Kuchak). 2000. France/Iran. Ebrahim Forouzesh. A Long Journey (El largo viaje). 1967. Chile. Patricio Kaulen. Naranjo-Campos Menendez. Love Me Again Mom (Mama zai ai wo yi ci). 1988. Taiwan. Chu Huang Chen. Fuxiang Film Company.

260

Filmography

Mad Bastards. 2010. Australia/USA. Brendan Fletcher, IFC Film Distribution. Manoel on the Island of Wonders (Manoel dans l’îsle des merveilles). 1985. Portugal/ France. Raúl Ruiz. Rita Filmes/INA/Les Films du Passage/RTP/Revcom. Marcello G., Just a Man (Marcello G., sólo un hombre). 1999. Argentina. Néstor F. and Martín C. Dos Reis Entertainment Group. Mémoires d’immigrés, l’héritage maghrébin. 1997. France. Yamina Benguigui. Canal+Editions. Mercano, The Martian (Mercano, el marciano). 2002. Argentina. Juan Antín. Universidad de Cine. Mickybo and Me. 2005. UK/France. Terry Loane. Universal Pictures/StudioCanal/ Working Title Film. Midnight’s Children. 2012. Canada/UK. Deepa Mehta. David Hamilton Productions/ Hamilton Mehta Productions/Number 9 Films. The Mirror (Ayneh). 1997. Iran. Jafar Panahi. Rooz Film. Munna (The Lost Child). 1954. India. K. A. Abbas. Muriel’s Wedding. 1994. Australia. P. J. Hogan. CiBy 2000/Film Victoria/House & Moorhouse Films. Mysteries of Lisbon (Mistérios de Lisboa). 2010. Portugal. Raúl Ruiz. Clap Filmes. Mystery Road. 2013. Australia. Ivan Sen. Mystery Road Films/Screen Australia. Nástup. 1952. Czechoslovakia. Otakar Vávra. Ceskoslovenský Státní Film. The Need (Niaz). 1992. Iran. Alizera Davoudnejad. Facets Multimedia Distribution. Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard). 1955. France. Alain Resnais. Argos Filmes. Nima’s Summer (Nima de xiatian). 2010. China. Jiang Hua. Beijing huaren tiandi yingshi cehua youxian zeren gongsi. No. 2012. Chile/France/Mexico/USA. Pablo Larraín. Fabula/Participant Media/Funny Balloons/Canana Films. Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz). 2010. Chile/France/Spain/Germany/USA. Patricio Guzmán. Atacama Productions/Blinker Filmproduktion/Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)/Cronomedia. Nothing Personal. 1995. UK/Ireland. Thaddeus O’Sullivan; British Screen Productions/ Bórd Scannán na hÉireann/Channel Four Films/Little Bird. One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (Cien niños esperando un tren). 1988. Chile. Ignacio Agüero. Channel Four/Ignacio Agüero & Asociados/Valcine S.A. One Night the Moon. 2001. Australia. Rachel Perkins. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australian Film Commission. Padre Padrone. 1977. Italy. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Rai 2/Cinema S.r.l. Paisan (Paisà). 1946. Italy. Roberto Rossellini. Organizzazione Film Internazionali. Palindromes. 2004. USA. Todd Solondz. Extra Large Pictures. Pather Panchali. 1955. India. Satyajit Ray. Government of West Bengal. Pixote (Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco). 1981. Brazil. Hector Babenco. Embrafilme/HB Filmes.

Filmography

261

Pororo The Little Penguin. 2003–15. South Korea Iconix Entertainment, EBS, OCON, SKBroadband. Puberty Blues. 1981. Australia. Bruce Beresford. Limelight Productions/2012. Australia. Imogen Banks. Southern Star Entertainment. Rabbit Proof Fence. 2002. Australia. Phillip Noyce. Rumbalara Films/Australian Film Commission/Australian Film Finance Corporation (AFFC). Ratcatcher. 1999. UK. Lynne Ramsay. Pathé Pictures International/BBC Films. A Real Young Girl (Une Vraie Jeune Fille). 1976. France. Catherine Breillat. Artédis. CB Films. The Red Balloon (Le ballon rouge). 1956. France. Albert Lamourisse. Films Montsouris. Redfern Now. 2012. Australia. Rachel Perkins. Blackfella Films, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Remember or Forget (Atcerēties vai aizmirst). 2006. Latvia. Dzintra Geka. Studio SB. Rocky. 1976. USA. John G. Avildsen. Chartoff-Winkler Productions/United Artists. Romance X. 1999. France. Catherine Breillat. Flach Film. Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta). 1945. Italy. Roberto Rossellini. Excelsa Film. A Room for Romeo Brass. 2000. UK/Canada. Shane Meadows. Alliance Atlantis Communications/Arts Council of England/Big Arty Productions/BBC/Company Pictures/October Films. The Runner (Davandeh). 1984. Iran. Amir Naderi. Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Samson and Delilah. 2009. Australia. Warwick Thornton. CAAMA Productions, Scarlett Pictures. The Sapphires. 2012. Australia. Wayne Blair. Goalpost Pictures. Satellite Boy. 2012. Australia. Catriona McKenzie. Satellite Films. Scabies. 1987. Iran. Abolfazl Jalili. The School We Went To (Hayat-e Poshti-ye Madreseh-ye Adl-e-Afagh). 1980. Iran. Dariush Mehrjui. Shoah. 1985. France, UK. Claude Lanzmann. BBC/Historia/Films Aleph/Ministry of Culture (France). Shoeshine (Sciuscià). 1946. Italy. Vittorio De Sica. Societa Cooperative Alfa Cinematografica. The Silence (Sokout). 1998. Iran/Tajikstan/France. Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Makhmalbaf Productions/MK2 Productions. The Silent Barricade (Němá barikád). 1949. Czechoslovakia. Otakar Vávra. Československý státní film. A Simple Event (Yek Ettefaq-e Sadeh). 1973. Iran. Sohrab Shahid-Sales. Central Film Office of the Iranian Ministry of Culture. The Simpsons (‘MoneyBART’ Season 22, Episode 3). 2010. US. Nancy Kruse 20th Century Fox. Sleeping Beauty (La Belle Endormie). 2010. France. Catherine Breillat. Arte France.

262

Filmography

Small Handbook of French History (Petit manuel d’histoire de France). 1979. France. Raúl Ruiz. FR 3/INA. Snake Fang (Dandan-e-mar). 1989. Iran. Masud Kimiai. Kadr Film. Somersault. 2004. Australia. Cate Shortland. Red Carpet Productions/Australian Film Finance Corporation (AFFC). The Song of Sparrows (Avaze gonjeshk-ha). 2008. Iran. Majid Majidi. Majid Majidi Film Production. The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena). 1973. Spain. Víctor Erice. Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas S.L./Jacel Desposito. The Spring of Life (Pramen života). 2000. Czech Republic, Finland. Milan Cieslar. Česká televize; Happy Celluloid. Stand By Me. 1986. USA. Rob Reiner; Columbia Pictures Corp. The Stolen Border (Uloupená hranice). 1947. Czechoslovakia. Jiří Weiss. Státní půjčovna filmů. Stone Bros. 2009. Richard Frankland. ScreenWest/Australian Film Finance Corporation (AFFC)/Golden Seahorse Productions. Strangerland. 2015. Kim Farrant. Worldview Entertainment/Dragonfly Pictures/Fastnet Films. Stray Dogs (Sag-haye velgard). 2004. Iran/France/Afghanistan. Marzieh Meshkini. Makhmalbaf Productions/Wild Bunch. Tell Me How It Happened (Cuéntame qué pasó). 2001–present. Spain. Miguel Ángel Bernardeau. La 1. This is England. 2006. UK. Shane Meadows. Warp Films/Big Arty Productions/EM Media/Film4/Optimum Releasing/Screen Yorkshire/UK Film Council. Three Sad Tigers (Tres tristes tigres). 1968. Chile. Raúl Ruiz. Los Capitanes. To Be and To Have (Ětre et Avoir). 2002. France. Nicolas Philibert. Maia Films. Toomelah. 2011. Australia. Ivan Sen. Bunya Productions/David Jowsey Films. The Train of Childhood and Expectation (Vlak dětství a naděje). 1984, 1988 (TV. 1989). Czechoslovakia. Karel Kachyňa. Československá televize. Treasure Island (L’îsle au trésor). 1985. USA/France. Raúl Ruiz. Cannon/Les Films du Passage. Underdogs (Metegol). 2013. Argentina/Spain. Juan José Campanella. 100 bares/Antena 3 Films/Catmandu Branded Entertainment/JEMPSA. A Uyghur Boy in Guangzhou (Guangzhou lailege xinjiang wa). 1994. China. Wang Jin. Zhujiang dianying zhipian gongsi. The Virgin Suicides. 1999. USA. Sofia Coppola. American Zoetrope/Eternity Pictures/ Muse Productions/Virgin Suicides LLC. Water, Wind, Dust (Aab, khak va bad). 1989. Iran. Amir Naderi. Channel One/Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting Channel. The Way I Feel Like It (Como me da la gana). 1985. Chile. Ignacio Agüero. Ignacio Agüero y Asociado.

Filmography

263

Where is the Friend’s House? (Khaneh-ye Dust Kojast?). 1987. Iran. Abbas Kiarostami. Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. The White Balloon (Badkonak-e sefid). 1995. Iran. Jafar Panahi. Ferdos Films/I.R.I.B. Channel 2. Willow and Wind (Beed-o baad). 2000. Iran/Japan. Mohammad-Ali Talebi. Cima Media International/NHK. The Wizard of Oz. 1939. USA. Victor Fleming, George Cukor (uncredited). MGM. The Young and the Damned (Los olvidados). 1950. Mexico. Luis Buñuel. Ultramar Films.

Index Ab Dilli Dur Nahin and Do Phool (Abdul Rashid Kardar)  188 Adidas  183–4, 190, 192–4, 198 n.28 adolescence  133–4, 141, 145 The Adult Game (Kambozia Partovi)  186 adulthood  122 After-effects, After-images (Griselda Pollock)  112 Agüero, Ignacio  114. See also One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (Ignacio Agüero) Como me da la gana  110 documentary style of  103, 109–10, 112 images of trauma  111 performativity  110 presence of the children in  108 relationship between children and cinema  111 scenes of protestas  110 Algerian-French children  9 Alice in Wonderland  49 A ma soeur (Breillat)  45 Amnesty International  16, 236 Animal Kingdom (Michôd)  33 animation  121–5, 128, 225–7 anti-Vietnam War campaign poster  4 Appadurai, Arjun  183 The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf)  186 archive  21, 105–8, 114 The Archive and the Repertoire (Diana Taylor)  105 Argentine dictatorship  225, 227–8, 235–7, 239 Argentine films  225. See also Barbie Gets Sad Too (Albertina Carri); Easy Money ‘cult’ status  226 The Martian (Antín)  226 Mercano  226 Underdog (Campanella)  226 Argentinidad (Argentineanness)  228, 238

Arnold, Andrea  21 The Arrival of a Train at a Station (Lumière)  104 assimilation  139 Auschwitz  76, 95 Australian cinema  5–6, 32. See also Indigenous children in Australian cinema background  3 Back of Beyond (John Heyer)  34 Baduk (Majidi)  185 Bag of Rice (Mohammad-Ali Talebi)  186 Balance Sheet of Siberia  82–4 Barbie doll  225–43 Barbie Gets Sad Too (Albertina Carri)  225 exploration of queer and nonnormative models of families  234 paradoxes  234–5 protests against sexism  233–4 racist elements  227, 230–3 references to Argentines’ obsession with blondness  232 bare life  67, 84, 107 Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bahram Baizai)  186 Bégaudeau, François  132 beiqing  215–19, 221–2, 223 n.16 beiqing tradition  216–19, 222 Belfast  7, 161–5, 167–9, 171, 175, 176 n.15 belonging  3 Beneath Clouds (Sen)  38 Benguigui, Yamina Inch’allah Dimanche (see Inch ’ allah Dimanche (Yamina Benguigui)) Mémoires d  ’immigrés: l ’héritage maghrébin  200 Berlant, Lauren  218, 221–2 Bettelheim, Bruno  47 The Bicycle Thieves  184–6

Index biowelfare  215 The Blonds (Albertina Carri)  227 blood  47, 54–6 The Bloody Chamber  43 Bluebeard (Breillat)  8, 46 aesthetic style  51–2 attic scenes  49–50, 55–6 Breillat’s adaptation of Carter’s story  43–4 Breillat’s visual points of fascination  50–1 fairy-tale thread  49–50 feminist agenda  45–7 image of Marie-Catherine  52–4 Leclerc’s reading  45–6 metamorphosis of girls into women and codes of behaviour  48 naive fascination of children  45–6 reflection on departure and refashioning  44–5 severed head scene  52–4 sexuality and roles for women  47 sexual politics in  48–9 social and historical concerns in  48 spatial artworks  55–6 themes of the films  45 The Bohemian Lands  90–2 Bollywood  8, 181 Bombay cinema of the 1950s  182 Bollywoodization of the New Iranian Cinema  184–5. See also Bumm Bumm Bole (Priyadarshan) Boot Polish, ‘Ferry’ (Hemen Gupta)  188 Boot Polish (Prakash Arora)  182 border  39, 90, 92, 98, 135, 147, 150, 170, 173, 181 border crossings  2, 181 relationship  32 borders  3, 9 of imagination  9 of murder and survival  46 Bourgeois, Louise  55–6 Bran Nue Dae (Perkins)  33 British politics, critical period of  20, 29 n.26 Bronco Bullfrog (Platts-Mills)  22 Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (Hana Makhmalbaf)  186

265

Bumm Bumm Bole (Priyadarshan)  181–3, 190–3, 195 brand partnership with Adidas  193–4 ending  192–3 representation of child labour and commodity culture in  184, 190 song sequence  191–2 terrorism subplot  183–4, 191 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid  173 Cannes Film Festival  123 Cantet, Laurent The Class  132–7 construction of scenes  134 unconventional use of filmic space  132–3 Capote, Truman  154 Captain Scarlet and The Mysterons (Gerry and Sylvia Anderson)  227 Cardullo, Bert  34 Carnation Revolution  150 Carri, Albertina  225–43 cartoons/animation, relationship to realism  123–5. See also The King of Pigs (Sang-Ho Yeon) Catholic-versus-Protestant issue  161. See also Mickybo and Me Cathy Come Home (Ken Loach)  21–2 Chandra, Nandini  188 Chevallier, Jacques  212 child actors  8 child-as-being  207–12 as ‘carrier of truth’  212 child/childhood  1–2, 121–2, 124, 128 as ‘bare life’  107 of Chilean slums  110 (see also One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (Ignacio Agüero)) cinematic politics of  2 citizenship and  132–4 impact of globalization on children and childhood  195 indigenous child  4, 6 (see also Indigenous children in Australian cinema) modern conceptualizations of  131 nation state and  131 as potent protagonist  4

266

Index

ragpickers  111 rights of the child  2, 15 Romantic ideologies of  131 spatialized marginality of  8 suicide rate among school-age children  7 childhood innocence  74 Childhood Land of Siberia  74–8, 80 The Child in Film (Karen Lury)  126 child labour  6, 9, 181–2, 184 commodity culture and  187–93 The Children are Watching Us (De Sica)  184 Children of Heaven (Majidi)  181–3, 186, 189–93, 195 ending  193 The Children of Siberia (Geka)  64, 80–1, 84 ‘child seer’  108–12 child sex abuse  32–3 child soldiers  16 Chilean film industry  147 Chinese films beiqing and kuqing traditions  216–19 left-behind children (see Left-behind Children (Liu Junyi)) Chocolat (Claire Denis)  211 Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore)  106 Citizen Kane  152–3 citizens  136 citizenship  131–2, 134, 136, 140, 145 A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)  216 class  121–2, 128, 134 The Class (Laurent Cantet)  132–7 analysis of a society in crisis  136 representation of child subjects in  145 classrooms  4, 9, 64, 106, 122. See also The Class (Laurent Cantet); school system; To Be and To Have (Nicolas Philibert) To Be and To Have, featured in  133–7 The Class, featured in  134–6 Marin’s classroom  134–5, 139–41 Monsieur Lopez’s classroom  136–43 Clé (Leclerc)  46 The Colour of Paradise (Majidi)  185 comics  121–2, 124

coming-of-age film  7, 30 n.37, 161–2 narratives  34 commodity culture  181–5, 190–1, 193 communist rule  89, 94, 99 compassionate cinema  216 compassionate journalism  221 complicity  65 Convention on the Rights of the Child  15 Cooper, Andrew  21 cross-border encounter  2 Cruikshank, George  51 Cuckoo in a Dark Forest (Antonín Moskalyk)  89, 92–4, 96–7, 99 Cuéntame qué pasó (Tell Me How It Happened)  103 Cultural Revolution (1966–76)  217 Czech film  6 Czech-German conflict, Czech films of  89 context  90–1 fairy-tale dimension  96–7 fate of Jews during the war  91 narration of children’s experiences  94–100 narrativization of children’s removal and Germanization  92–4 Czech nation  98, 100 Czechoslovakia  94, 99 Bohemian lands  90–1 Dalhuisen, John  16 Defense Against Invasion (Walt Disney)  110 Delbo, Charlotte  76 deportations  6 Soviet  63, 70, 72, 74, 77, 86 n.16 deportees  64–5, 68, 70, 72–3, 75, 77–8, 80, 82 desire  9 disappearance  6–7 Do Bigha Zamin (Bimal Roy)  188 documentary cinema  64–5, 103–4, 106–7, 109–10, 112–13, 132, 137 dolls in films  7, 20, 53, 229–30, 233–4, 240–2. See also Barbie Gets Sad Too (Albertina Carri); toys Dolls of the World series  229 Doré, Gustave  51

Index dream/dreaming  24–6, 30 n.43, 45–6, 131, 133, 145, 183, 191, 194, 225, 238, 240 Dulac, Edmund  51 Easy Money  225, 235–40 machista culture  227–8 opening sequence  235–6 Ecos del desierto (Desert Echoes)  113, 117 n.41 educational paradigms  137 The Eighties  113 embodied memory  106 The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Mary Ann Doane)  105 emotional appeal  1, 73 emotional growth  122 emotional impact and identification  3 emotional loss  107 emotions  43, 45–67, 99, 202, 206–8, 212, 215–16 The Enchanted Screen (Zipes)  48 Entre les murs  132 Estates: An Intimate History (Lynsey Hanley)  21 Estonia  63 ethnicity  136–7 European Jews  78 European Union (EU)  74 exile  9, 44, 66, 68, 72, 83, 147, 203, 206 fairy tale adaptation  8, 45, 47–50. See also Bluebeard (Breillat) familial reunification  200 Family Guy  123 Fantasmagorie (Emil Cohl)  110 fantasy  1, 3, 8–9, 24–6, 45, 47, 49, 125, 173–4, 183, 191–2, 216, 221, 235 The Father (Majidi)  185 Feierstein, Daniel genocide and post-genocidal phase  72 Ferreira, Carolin Overhoff  150 Fisher, Jaimey  34 Fish Tank (Arnold)  22 Forsyth, Bill  21 Frank, Anne  71 French film industry  8 French high school  132

267

friendship  7 funa  111 futurity  2 Geka, Dzintra  64–6. See also Latvia; lost child of Latvia, films on childhood testimony and postmemory for  70, 73–81 on collective experience of remembering the traumatic event  74–5 ethno-religious ceremonies  83–4 memorialization practices  82–4 memory and place  78, 82–4 semiclad women in a Latvian massacre, images  71–2 gender  213, 227–8, 230, 233–5, 239–41 Genealogies of a Crime  153–4 genocidal tragedies  4 genocide  65, 67, 72, 82 German-Czech disputes  89–1 Germanization  89, 92, 98, 100 Germany  74 Germany, Year Zero  184 The Girl in the Sneakers (Rasul Sadr Ameli)  186 Giroux, Henry  134, 137 globalization governance  143 Goddard, Michael  147, 152 The Golden Eels  91 Gopal, Sangita  183 Guerrilla art (and subversive play)  226–8, 235, 240 Haan of Minjung Theology and Han of Han Philosophy (Chang-Hee Son)  126 han, idea of  126 Henrichsen, Leonardo  112 Here I Am (Cole)  33 heterospection  204–6 Heydrich, Reinhard  92 Higonnet, Anne  160 Hill, John  22 Hirsch, Marianne  66, 71 Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard)  154 Hitler, Adolf  90 Hodkinson, Stuart  19

268

Index

The Holocaust  66–8, 82, 84 Horner, William George  104 Hou, Hsiao-hsien  216 housing, British housing policy  17–18. See also Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay) All-Party Parliamentary Group for Housing and Planning  19–20 bedroom tax  20 Bevan’s plan  19 conditions of housing and homelessness, 1960s  22 Housing Act 1980  19 housing shortage debate 1945  18, 27 n.16 Margaret Thatcher’s plan  19 percentage living in council housing 1981 and 2013  19 privatization of public housing  19 reality of working-class experience  17, 19–22, 26 social experiment of  17–18 ‘well-built houses for all’  18–19 immigration  134–5, 139–40 Inch’allah Dimanche (Yamina Benguigui)  8, 200 children in  206–13 complexity of intersubjective relationships  202–3 inter-generational relations  213 mise-en-scene  201–2 opening scenes of  205 red and cream scarf, significance of  202 responses of the children  208–9 story  201 three children involved in  209–11 Indigenous children in Australian cinema  32 lost children  32–3, 35–7 narrative about childhood  33 redemption stories  40–1 representations of  32–3 Satellite Boy (McKenzie)  33, 37–8 Toomelah (Sen)  33–4, 38–40 transnational connections  34 Indigenous cinema  32. See also Indigenous children in Australian cinema

indigenous films  5–6 festival culture  6 innocence  74 innocence-childhood  74, 96, 161–3, 165–6, 175 The Innocents  3 integration  161 In The Name Of The Father (Jim Sheridan)  163 intimacy  6, 53 Italian neorealism  185 Jagriti (Satyen Bose)  188 The Jar (Ebrahim Foruzesh)  186 Jedda (Chauvel)  34 Jewish memory  70 Jews  6, 68, 78, 90–1, 93, 100 Jirgens, Karl E.  77 Kachyňa, Karel  94 Kaprans, Martins  72 Kelleher, Joe  211 The Key (Ebrahim Foruzesh)  186 Kidnapped Souls (Tara Zahra)  89 The King of Pigs (Sang-Ho Yeon)  121–8 animated child of  126–8 comic format  124 cycle of abuse in  125–6 ‘dogs’  122 effects of childhood violence and of growing up  122 opening scene  121 violence in  128 Kokkola, Lydia  140–1 Korean melodramas and works of literature  126 Korean War (1950–3)  126 Körner, Vladimír  92–3 Kristeva, Julia  52–4 kuqing  215–19, 221–2 La batalla de Chile (Patricio Guzmán)  112 The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock)  108 Landgren, Karin  15 Landy, Marcia  185 Lanzmann, Claude  68, 78 testimony of SS footage and post-liberation footage  78

Index The Last Mistress (Breillat)  50 Latvia agrarian tradition  64 childhood innocence  74 diaspora and  64 EU and  74, 77 Germany and  74 Home Guard  70 independence  63–4, 68–9 inter-generational national identity  65 language  73 legion  70 national identity  72 religion and  83–4 rural–urban divide between Russia and  78 Russia and  78–82 selfhood of Latvians  82 Soviet occupation and  69–70 survivors’ memoirs  72–3 victimhood  64–5, 68, 80 war crimes  70 Latvian deportations, films on. See lost child of Latvia, films on Latvian identity  74, 77 Latvian National Independence Movement  63 Latvian victims  68 Latvian wartime sufferings  7 Lazda, Mara  72 Lebensborn programme  99 Leclerc, Annie  45–6 left-behind children  9, 215–16, 218–22 in Chinese cinema  215–16 Left-behind Children (Liu Junyi)  216, 219–22 beiqing and kuqing narratives  219, 222 compassionate identification of pain  221 as a cuilei dan  220 ending  221 visual and acoustic techniques  219 Leslie, Esther  124 liberalization’s children  194–5 Lidice  92–3 Life is a Dream  156 Lincoln, William F.  104 Lithuania  63 The Little Man (Ebrahim Foruzesh)  186

269

Liu, Junyi  216, 219 Liushou haizi (Left-behind Children) (Liu Junyi)  216 ‘lived experience’ of children  163 Loach, Ken  21 Lo Hermida slum  110 Lopez’s schoolroom  133 Los Ochenta (The Eighties)  103 Los Olvidados (Luis Bunuel)  185 loss  7, 44, 47, 64–6, 74, 80, 107, 155, 160–1, 174, 222 lost child narratives in Australian cinema. See Indigenous children in Australian cinema lost child of Latvia, films on  4, 63–84 cinematic representations  73–81 deportations of Latvian citizens  63–4 documentaries  64–5 equation between innocence and victimhood  65 films on childhood deportation experiences  73–81 reading Geka’s lost children  68, 72 remembered pain of parents and grandparents  66–7 stages of memory and postmemory actions  65–73 transmission of the trauma experienced  82–4 violence and dehumanization condition  67–8 Lousada, Julian  21 Love Me Again Mom  217 Lury, Karen  33, 51, 59 n.53, 99, 126, 185, 209–10 machista culture in Argentina  227–8, 234 Mad Bastards (Fletcher)  33 Made in Britain (Trevor)  22 Majidi, Majid  182–3, 185, 197 n.16 Manuel on the Island of Wonders  148 cinematography practices  153 education of the young protagonist  156 episodes  149–57 final episode  156–7 grammar of  156 irony in  157 Manoel’s destinies  153–4

270

Index

Manoel’s encounters with the fisherman  150, 153 non-identical manifestations in  151 period  150 protagonist’s childhood  152–3 tropes  151 use of a Wellesian deep-focus  152–3 versions  149 Marinescu, Andreea  154 Martín, C.  225–43 Marx, Karl  192 masking  161 Mattel  229–30, 233, 240 Maus (Art Spiegelmann)  66, 124 Mazumdar, Ranjani  193 McCloud, Scott  124 McKenna, Bernard  161 Meadows, Shane  21 memorialization  78, 82–4 active  162 memory consciousness  65–73 multidirectional  67 post  65–6, 68, 70, 72–3, 201, 203, 206, 213 memory actor  65 Metamorphoses (Ovid)  44 metamorphosis  48–9, 53, 56, 112 Mickybo and Me  7, 160–1 aesthetic and emotional outlook  174 backround  161 construction of childhood innocence  165–71 construction of memory  164 context of ongoing trauma and modern peace process  162 correlation between gang membership and protection  169–70 depiction of city of Belfast  161 experience of sectarian-based violence  171 expression of hope  163–4, 175 opening vignette of  163 political and social realities of the Troubles  161–3, 165–6, 171–2, 175 n.3 rendering of 1970  174–5 ‘riding into the sunset’ moment  173 social realities of the conditions  163

transformation of the Ormeau Bridge  168–9, 174 trauma in  171–5 visual tension within  164 Mills, Jane  32 The Mirror (Jafar Panahi)  186 Molina, Juana  232 monster  46, 52–3, 56, 96, 121, 126–7 Mooney, Gerry  19 Moskalyk, Antonín  89, 93, 99 mother  44 mourning  7, 9, 52–3, 74, 126, 238 multiculturalism  134, 140 multidirectional memory  67 Munna (K. A. Abbas)  187 murder  6 Muriel ’s Wedding (Hogan)  33–4 Mysteries of Lisbon  149 Mystery Road (Sen)  33 Nástup  91 the nation  1 national and cultural borders  2, 185, 203 national borders  2 national cinema  1 national identity  7 national sentimentality  218, 222 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children  16 nationhood  131 Nazi ‘Germanization’ of Czech children  89 nazism  95, 100 The Need (Alizera Davudnezhand)  186 Němá barikada  91 Nestor, F.  225–43 New Documentaries (Stella Bruzzi)  109 New Iranian Cinema  184, 190–1 prominence and significance of children in  186–7 No (Pablo Larraín)  113 Northern Irish identity  160, 174 Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán)  103 Nothing Personal (Thaddeus O’Sullivan)  163 O’Connor, Julia  136 ogre  44–5, 48, 50, 54, 209

Index O’Hagan, Andrew  17 One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (Ignacio Agüero)  103 censorship classification  113–14 children’s drawings in  112 ‘child seer’  108–12 class and racial division  114 dialectic of absence and presence in  108 images of children in  106–8 opening scene  104 pedagogical value of cinema  104, 114 performativity  110 relationship between children and cinema  111 representation, inscription, temporality  105 ‘soft’ theme of cinema workshops  112–13 traumas of children  111–12 vision, theory of the persistence of  104–5 One Night the Moon (Perkins)  33 Onken, Eva-Clarita  65–6 Optional Protocol  15 Os Lusiadas (Camoes)  154–5 Ovid  54, 56, 59 n.47 Padre Padrone (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani)  104 Paisan  184 Palestine (Joe Sacco)  124 Paris, J. A.  105 participation  65 Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray)  186 Pavel, Ota  91 Perkins, Rachel  32 persistence of vision  104–5, 107–9 Petit Manuel D’Histoire de France  148 Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir)  34 Pinochet regime  107–8, 110, 113, 147 Pixote (Hector Babenco)  185 Platts-Mills, Barney  21 Poor Cow (Loach)  30 n.37 Pororo the Little Penguin  123 Portuguese national identity  148 postmemory  65–73, 201, 203, 206, 213 Poupaud, Melvil  148 Priyadarshan  181, 183

271

psychoanalysis  6, 52 Puberty Blues (Beresford)  33 Queer Barbie  228, 230, 233–5 Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce)  36 Rackham, Arthur  51 Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay)  5, 16–26. See also housing, British housing policy child’s lived experience of home and housing  25 Easterhouse  25 final sequence  24 image of James  23–4 lived experience of slum living and slum clearance in 1970s  20–1 material dimensions of James’s environment  21 opening sequence  17 plot  17 Ramsay’s reputation  16–17 reality of working-class experience  22–3 representation of space  23–5 as a social experiment of British housing policy  17–18 tradition of British social realism  21–3, 25–6 readings  112, 155, 162, 172, 187, 220, 238 Breillat’s film  45–8 of film texts  2, 6, 8, 24, 30 n.43 Geka’s lost children  68 maladroit  148 ‘real’ child in films  207–8 A Real Young Girl  46–7 recognition  65 The Red Balloon (Lamourisse)  104 Redfern Now (Perkins)  34 Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag)  51 remembered scenery  164 representation  3, 65 resistance  9 The Return of a Library Lover  154 Richards, Radia Washna  181 rite of passage  5, 49 Romance X (Breillat)  46, 51 Romantic child image  160 Romantic construction of  131, 140 Rome, Open City  184

272

Index

A Room for Romeo Brass (Meadows)  22 Rose, Jacqueline  140 Rothberg, Michael  67 Rouch, Jean  111 Ruiz, Raúl  147. See also Manuel on the Island of Wonders Estado Novo regime in Portugal  155 La ville des pirates  147 narrative by utilizing child narrators  148 phases of film-making  147 Poetics of Cinema  156 Portuguese national identity  157 rote learning  156 Treasure Island  147 Tres tristes tigres  147 on Truman Capote  154 use of diopter  153 The Runner (Amir Naderi)  185 rupture  161 rural-to-urban migration in China  215–16, 222 rural–urban divisions  77–8 Sacco, Joe  124 Said, Edward  124 Samson and Delilah (Thornton)  33 Santiago’s slums, life in  114 The Sapphires (Blair)  33 Sarkozy, President Nicolas  139 Satellite Boy (McKenzie)  5, 33–4, 37–8 schools  131, 133–4 governance  143 school system. See also The Class (Laurent Cantet); To Be and To Have (Nicolas Philibert) concepts of ‘child’ and ‘citizenship’  132–4 language of Monsieur Lopez’s classroom  144 Marin’s impotence within  143–4 relationship between social class and  134–8 relationship between teacher and students  138–43 school governance  143–5 The Second World War  18, 27 n.16, 89, 91, 94, 99, 110, 126 The Secret Life of 4 Year Olds  3

Sen, Ivan  32 Sen, Meheli  182 senses  46, 112, 165, 192 separation  6 severed head  52–4, 56 The Severed Head: Capital Visions (Julia Kristeva)  52 sexuality  46–9, 235, 240 Shelter  19 Shoah (Claude Lanzmann)  68–9, 78 Shoeshine  184 Shuyu Kong  218 Siberia  63–4, 66–7, 73–6, 78–4 Siberian Russian lives  74 The Silence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)  186 The Simpsons  123, 129 n.4 sisters  18, 45, 48, 52, 215, 219, 232 Skultans, Veida  72 Sládková, Vìra  92 Sleeping Beauty  46 Snake Fang (Masud Kimiai)  186 social realism in British cinema  17–18. See also Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay) ‘soft’ theme of cinema workshops  112–13 Somersault (Shortland)  33 The Song of Sparrows (Majidi)  185 South Korea  121–3, 125, 127–8 Asian financial crisis of 1997 and  125 suicide rate in  125 work ethic  125 South Korean animation  122–3. See also The King of Pigs (Sang-Ho Yeon) Soviet deportations of Latvian citizens  63–4 children and  73–81 crossing to Siberia  78–80 The Soviet Union  63, 72, 90–1, 99 space  44, 49, 52, 55–6 spectatorship/spectator  1, 3, 71, 75, 109, 149, 158 n.7, 201, 204, 206–7, 212–13, 220, 241 Spiegelman, Art  124 The Spring of Life (Milan Cieslar)  89, 92–4, 96, 98–9 Stalin  64 Stand By Me (Rob Reiner)  162 Starman, Hannah  82 Stenberg, Marc  123 Stolen Generations  6, 11 n.10, 42 n.14

Index Stone Bros (Frankland)  33 Strangerland (Farrant)  33 Suicide  121, 125–7 Sun, Wanning  221, 222 n.4 surrogacy  9 Survivors of the Shoah Visual History (Steven Spielberg)  68 Taiwanese cinema  216 Tatar, Maria  47 teenagers  33, 74, 96, 131, 133, 141 terrorism  181, 184, 190–1, 195 thaumatrope  104–5 Third Reich  92 This is England (Shaun)  22 Thornton, Warwick  32 Tiananmen Square incident  217 Tiger Economy  125 To Be and To Have (Nicolas Philibert)  132–7 exploration of social issues  135 ideological approaches to education  135 image of a child in  137 opening sequence of  145 primary-school-aged children  136 relationship between ethnic minorities and dominant culture  135 representation of child subjects in  145 Toomelah community  38–40 Toomelah (Ivan Sen)  5, 33–4, 38–40 toys  7, 104, 225–9, 231, 233, 235–6, 239–43 optical  105 as texts  226–7 The Train of Childhood and Expectation (Karel Kachyňa)  89, 92, 94–6 transnational adaptation of cinema  181, 185. See also Bumm Bumm Bole (Priyadarshan) trauma  5, 66–7, 72–5, 77, 82–4, 99, 106–9, 111–12, 162, 167, 215–17, 222 trauma on screen  5, 30 n.45, 82. See also The King of Pigs (Sang-Ho Yeon) after-effects of  112 ephemerality of  106 Mickybo and Me  171–5 three-stage process  161

273

Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)  154 The Troubles  161–3, 165–6, 171–2, 175 n.3 Truffaut, François  208 The Turn of the Screw  3 Uloupena hranice  91 uncanny  3–4 Vanderschelden, Isabelle  137 Vega, Alicia  104, 106, 108, 110–11, 113 Velvet Revolution  94 Vietnam War  126 violence  67 The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola)  162 vision, theory of the persistence of  104–5 Waffen SS  70 Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg)  34 Wallenbrock, Nicole  139 war  4–5 Second World War  18, 27 n.16, 89, 91, 94, 99, 110, 126 Warner, Marina  47 Water, Wind, Dust (Naderi)  186 Watt, Paul  19 Weihua Wu  218 Western citizenship  136 Where is the Friend’s House? (Abbas Kiarostami)  186 The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi)  186 Williams, James S.  133 Willow and Wind (Mohammad-Ali Talebi)  186 The Wizard Of Oz  173 Wolfe, Patrick  136 world cinema  2 ‘world’ cinema  1 Xiying Wang  218 Yang Ik-june  128 Yeon, Sang-Ho  121–3, 125–7 Zahra, Tara  89 Zavattini, Cesare  195 Zeydabadi-Nejad, Saeed  186 Zipes, Jack  47–8 zoetrope  104

274