The Child in Cinema

Karen Lury

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781844577248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

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

PART ONE

SPACE AND TIME

1 THE DREAM HOUSE

Amelie Hastie

The present tense is the one in which wishes are represented as fulfilled.

SIGMUND FREUD

Nights now I can sit in my living room alone, looking at the glass of the picture window, with the reflection of my body and the drink in my hand and the chair and the lamp beside me glaring flat and white back at me, and I am in no way as real in that room as I am in my memories of my wife and children.

BILLY, THE SWEET HEREAFTER¹

Inhabited geometry

I have always loved nooks and crannies. They are perfect places for both hiding and displaying things, whether sacred or ordinary objects, or children small enough to burrow into them. They are places of sanctuary: a kind of house within a house. As a child, I both explored the nooks and crevices of houses and sometimes made my own, whether through my cupboard of miniatures or through composing new corners in my own space. In my bedroom, for instance, I had a giant closet with three doors: I could open the doors and form them to make an enclosed triangle, multiplying myself across the mirrors. When I imagine doing this now, I don’t believe I stared at my own seeming infinite reflections for long but rather looked inwards, eyes almost closed, comforted by this tiny space where three corners met. I don’t exactly remember what I daydreamed in these moments of reverie, though today I rather believe that I imagined being somewhere else, transported in and by this tiny space.

Such imaginings and desires are hardly unusual for a child (and such acts of selective memory and forgetting are common for an adult). Children seek to duplicate or reimagine their own living spaces in other manners, sometimes in miniature and certainly in narrative form. The miniature object or the small space of a nook allow for both a means of possession and control as well as a projection of oneself into another world that’s physically impossible to inhabit, at least for long. Films are like miniature worlds in this way. While as viewers we cannot order them ourselves, we might unconsciously imagine ourselves controlling their universes.² But of course we also cannot inhabit a film. It enters us more than we enter into it.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard understands the house as a space for dreaming. Corners are particularly fertile spaces for the imagination, he tells us. ‘The corner is a haven that ensures us one of the things we prize most highly – immobility’, Bachelard writes; ‘We have to designate the space of our immobility by making it the space of our being.’³ This is a way of saying ‘I don’t want to leave here. Let me inhabit this space forever.’ Solitude also allows us, as ‘corner-readers’, the opportunity to see forgotten details – the things or dreams that might be overlooked or tucked away, lost in the crevices between the inside and outside, the past and the future.

Perhaps, then, cinema is more like a corner than a miniature world. The screen, after all, is made up of four corners – whether it’s in a movie house or whether we watch it on a small screen in another abode. Those corners register an inside and an outside, a space between imagination and physical reality – all the more blurred because film, in the strictest sense, has its roots in physical reality. I want to take advantage of these corners and of ‘corner reading’ to think about both physical and imaginary houses of childhood in three narrative films: Badlands, Ratcatcher, and The Sweet Hereafter. Via a controlled, even restrained, exposition, each film narrates a trauma, explicitly or implicitly, from a child’s point of view. Resonant moments in each also reveal a house that holds the child’s memories but that also incites the child’s imagination of the future. In this medium defined by mobility – the moving image – we can see how images of nooks and corners of houses invite us to dream of their own imaginary dwellers inhabiting those spaces forever. I want to home in on the details of the houses the children inhabit, paying attention to the crevices between reality, memory and fantasy in the films themselves.

Playing house

In Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands our protagonist and narrator, 14-year-old Holly, falls in love with the bad-boy Kit, and they decide to run away together. In an act of finality that begins their new life, Kit kills Holly’s father and sets fire to her house. He begins by dousing the piano, then wildly throws gasoline atop the furniture throughout the perimeter of the living room. We briefly watch him continue through a hall towards another room and then cut to see Holly leaving the house with a box of treasures while Kit sets up a record player, the album spinning, telling his tale for the District Attorney to find – ‘gamblin’ for time’, Holly tells us. He tosses a match to ignite the fire, then runs jig-jaggedly to the car. As Kit and Holly flee we stay with the burning house. The sequence in which her house burns haunts this essay, begetting my own reverie regarding the latter films.

First we see the flames beginning to engulf an old photograph of a child, and then we move through the house to see the fire surround other objects and furniture. The camera itself doesn’t move: instead, our gaze shifts with each slow cut. The image holds still on various objects as the flames take flight around them: fallen dolls, Holly’s bed, the doll’s house in her room, her father dead on the floor. The space which contained her childhood and those things which measured and, indeed, constrained her age now topple, melt and burn.

It is the burning doll’s house that particularly haunts me (Fig 1.1). At once terrifying and beautiful, it signifies the end of Holly’s childhood, quite literally and doubly refusing a sense of immobility that would allow anyone to dwell in it forever. The burning house is liberating in its signal to start anew whilst simultaneously terrifying in the sense of loss that it invokes. The coincidence of beauty and terror and of loss and liberation is uncanny; in fact, its coincidence is in some ways definitive of the very essence of the term, itself based in a paradox. In his essay on ‘The uncanny’, Sigmund Freud traces the etymological origins of heimlich and unheimlich, ultimately noting that the former ‘becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it finally merges with its antonym’.⁴ Thus, in its act of destruction, the home begins its act of haunting the film, its characters and, as I suggest above, my own reading. Perhaps this is inevitable; as Freud tells us, ‘in some modern languages the German phrase ein unheimliches Haus [an uncanny house] can be rendered only by the periphrasis “a haunted house”’.⁵ As the flames engulf Holly’s house, we stand in the moment of the present, between the past and future: we catch a glimpse both of what might have been and the possibility for something else, even as we know that something-else is also surely doomed. But at first, of course, this possibility persists; or at least the characters try to insist on a new possibility as the story goes on.

FIGURE 1.1 ‘The burning dollhouse’. Badlands directed by Terence Malick © Warner Bros. 1973. All Rights Reserved.

The loss of Holly’s home and her house-within-a-house initiates a series of attempts for our characters to play house in other unheimlich spaces. First – and most elegiac – is the treehouse the runaways build. A fantastic structure fitted with pulleys and booby traps, Holly and Kit occupy it like storybook children and, perhaps inevitably, like an old married couple (as our narrator tells us). Such dual roles are not surprising. In ‘The creative writer and daydreaming’, Freud asserts that ‘the child’s play is governed by its desires, in fact by the one desire that contributes to its upbringing – the desire to be big and grown up’.⁶ In their treehouse in the woods, they begin their days by coming up with a new password between them – a childish game of playing captives and spies – yet Holly also dons ladies’ curlers and Kit shaves before a makeshift bathroom mirror as part of their morning ritual (Kit, after all, has entered adulthood, even as he acts impulsively like a child).⁷ After their hideaway in the forest is discovered, the runaways first head to Kit’s friend Cato’s shack, and then they briefly take over a wealthy man’s house, Kit stealing the man’s hat and seersucker jacket, so that he is now dressing as well as performing the part of a grown-up.

The performance of adulthood resonates within Holly’s narration, which throughout the film pointedly has the earnest sophistication of an adolescent who imagines herself older than she is. Her narration is therefore also like that of the children in Carolyn Steedman’s study of children’s storytelling in The Tidy House. Remarking on a fictional story that a group of schoolchildren wrote collaboratively, Steedman claims:

The children’s text is a dramatisation of the circumstances they describe, not to be confused with the narration of a particular event. For the children, the text asserted that they were not there, were not witnesses. It is as if, projected onto a screen, the events of the story take place out there, out of real time; and the children briefly watch them, involved and fascinated, considering them and perhaps denying that this will be their future, that they will have children they don’t really want, and spend their days in irritation and regret.⁸

Steedman’s remarks might also apply to Holly’s narration throughout the film, but especially to one of the film’s most poignant scenes, in which she looks at a series of images through her father’s stereopticon. Over photographs of famous sites or of anonymous figures, which narrate the possibility of other spaces or events, she says,

Where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me, or killed anybody – this very moment – if my mom had never met my dad, if she’d never died? And what’s the man I’ll marry gonna look like? What’s he doing right this minute? Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face?

And after this revelation, Holly tells us, she lived in dread, fantasizing about being taking away to a ‘magical land, and this never happened’. As Barbara Jane Brickman notes, ‘In this one small interlude, we see the female teen simultaneously as spectator and as storyteller’⁹ tying her further to the children in Steedman’s work.¹⁰

But while Steedman suggests that the children had a sense of the function of narrative (which arguably Holly does here, too) – to ‘objecti[fy], deny, and transmut[e]’ – I want to consider these remarks as pertinent not just to children’s written stories but also, as Steedman herself directs us here, to film: ‘projected onto a screen, the events of the story take place out there, out of real time’. And here, of course, the corners return, as in this moment in Badlands, when Holly’s daydreams over the images we share with her take us to another place and time. In the ‘tidy house’ of film, we are left to imagine that which seems possible, because it has its ontological foundation in the real, physical world. It is possible not just because we have lived in that world in some way, too, but also because through it we dream in and of another world.

Escape hatch

Lynne Ramsay’s 1999 Ratcatcher lures us back into Malick’s world. It takes place in 1973 during the garbage workers’ strike in Glasgow, the year that Badlands was released, and it is also set in a similar aesthetic and emotional landscape as Malick’s 1970s films (both of which, like Ramsay’s work, are themselves placed in an earlier historical period). Like Badlands, Ratcatcher is grounded in a traumatic experience and the attempt to escape from it. The film begins with a staggeringly beautiful image: a white lace curtain is wrapped about a body that twists around slowly in the light of the window. But within a few minutes, this child, Ryan Quinn, drowns in the canal near his home, pushed in rough play by his friend James Gillespie. We remain with James for the rest of the film, silent witnesses to his part in his friend’s death and, implicitly, to his own quiet guilt and grief.

James’s family lives in council housing, garbage building up all around them, but they dream of a new home. It is on that dream that I wish to focus here. About a third of the way into the film, James hops on a bus, with the intention of finding out where his older sister secretly goes. Instead of finding her, he simply rides to the end of the line, where he almost magically comes upon a modern estate under construction. The ride itself is a kind of daydream, the film cutting between shots of the outside world passing by (the garbage beginning to recede as he gets deeper into the countryside), close-ups of James seated (doubled by his faint reflection in the window), and long shots of James standing in the aisle, as if he were not on a city bus but rather on a ferry, looking out at the sea before him. The bus enables a kind of immobility for its lone passenger, even as it moves through space itself. The inside of the bus appears perfectly still; this is, indeed, a safe passage.

Reality and imagination converge throughout the following scenes. In her BFI Film Classic volume on Ratcatcher, Annette Kuhn comments on just this convergence: as it integrates stillness and movement, the film ‘draws on the indexical qualities of the photographic image to conjure a world that resembles the one we normally inhabit, and yet is at the same time self-evidently virtual’.¹¹ She notes shortly after that the film ‘weaves together […] several realities in an extraordinarily complex manner [… to] bring together and explore the relationships and rifts between outer and inner worlds, worlds of external reality and worlds of imagination and fantasy’.¹² These relationships are particularly resonant in those moments when James – and the film – encounters his dream house. Thus, when the bus finally stops and James disembarks, he walks away from it and towards us; the scene cuts mid-action, and suddenly James appears again, coming around a gate towards a building. He enters into what appears a kind of make-believe world but one, like the film, that is clearly grounded in reality.¹³ In an act of play, the objects of this construc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE SPACE AND TIME
• PART TWO SCREEN PERFORMANCE
• PART THREE HISTORIES
• PART FOUR BEYOND CINEMA
• Index
• Imprint