Childhood and Youth in Cinema

Catalog description

We look at a wide range of films that offer different cultural and historical representations of children, childhood, and youth, paying close attention to how they manifest certain themes both aesthetically and narratively. The figure of the child in cinema may simultaneously convey crude realism and romantic nostalgia; but, beyond this tension, children in films also stand for tropes of innocence, dependence, inaptitude, sexuality, desire, and suffering, among others. We consider several questions: Why and how do filmmakers focus on child characters in their critiques of society, history, power, and discrimination? How do children on screen convey realism and/or nostalgia, future and/or past? Is the thematic rigidity of “childhood in cinema” a productive or a reductive analytical framework? We explore a range of visual and written texts from around the globe as a means of questioning and understanding changing notions of childhood and its representation in cinema.