The Child in World Cinema

515 Pages·2018·3.768 MB·English

by  Debbie Olson (editor)

The Child in
World Cinema
Children and Youth in Popular Culture
Series Editor:
Debbie Olson, Missouri Valley College
Children and Youth in Popular Culture features works that interrogate the
various representations of children and youth in popular culture, as well as the
reception of these representations. The series is international in scope, recog-
nizing the transnational discourses about children and youth that have helped
shape modern and post-modern childhoods and adolescence. The scope of the
series ranges from such subjects as gender, race, class, and economic condi-
tions and their global intersections with issues relevant to children and youth
and their representation in global popular culture: children and youth at play,
geographies and spaces (including World Wide Web), material cultures, adul-
tification, sexuality, children of/in war, religion, children of diaspora, youth
and the law, and more.
Advisory Board
LuElla D’Amico, Whitworth University; Markus P.J. Bohlmann, Seneca
College; Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic, Rutgers University; Adrian Schober,
Australian Catholic University, Melbourne
Titles in the Series
The Child in World Cinema
Edited by Debbie Olson
Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives: Animalizing the Native, 1830–1930
By Shilpa Bhat Daithota
Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings
Edited by Markus P. J. Bohlmann
The Rhetorical Power of Children’s Literature
Edited by John Saunders
Children in the Films of Steven Spielberg
Edited by Debbie Olson and Adrian Schober
Girl Talk: The Influence of Girls’ Series Fiction on American Popular Culture
Edited by LuElla D’Amico
Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity: Disciplining
the Child
Edited by Magdalena Zolkos and Joanna Faulkner
The Américas Award: Honoring Latino/a Children’s and Young Adult Literature
of the Americas
Edited by Laretta Henderson
The Child in
World Cinema
Children and Youth in
Popular Culture
Edited by
Debbie Olson
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Olson, Debbie C., 1961- editor.
Title: The child in world cinema / Debbie Olson [editor].
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2018. | Series: Children and youth in
popular culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Includes filmography.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058880 (print) | LCCN 2017056674 (ebook) | ISBN
9781498563819 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498563802 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Children in motion pictures. | Motion pictures—Developing
countries—History and criticism. | Motion pictures—Asia—History and
criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.C45 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.C45 C3725 2018
(ebook) | DDC 791.43095—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058880
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction ix
PART I: SOUTH AMERICA
1 “Girls on the Big Screen: Gender in Contemporary
Argentine Film” 3
Carolina Rocha
2 “Children in Brazilian Cinematography” 19
Fabiana de Amorim Marcello
3 “From the Countryside to the City: A Boy’s Journey and the
World to Know” 43
Lucia Rabello de Castro, Paula Uglione, and
Adelaide Rezende de Souza
PART II: AFRICA
4 “Turning the Page: Memories of French/Algerian
Childhoods on Screen” 63
Christa Jones
5 “Forms and Variations of Children’s Relationship to Space
in Francophone African Fiction Films” 79
Caroline Lardy
6 “Surfing to Adulthood: Childhood, Coming of Age, and
National Transitions in the South African Fiction Film
Otelo Burning (2011)” 97
Christine Singer
v
vi Contents
PART III: MIDDLE EAST
7 “Children’s Groups in the Young State of Israel: Simplicity
and Complexity in the Cult Movie Ḥasamba & the Black
Handkerchief Gang (1971)” 125
Einat Baram Eshel
8 “‘Stolen/Lost Childhood’ and the Inherent Failures of
Cinematic Representations: The Case of Palestinian Child Labor” 149
Yoad Eliaz, Omri Grinberg, and Walaa Ghanayim
9 “The Representation of Urban Female Teenagers in
Iranian Cinema” 169
Mina Rezaei, Negin Golravesh Fekry, and Seyyed Mohsen Habibi
PART IV: SOUTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPE
10 “Lost Boys of the Franco Regime: Childhood, Masculinity, and
Memory in Recent Spanish Film” 195
Jessica Davidson
11 “The Figure of the Child as a Contradictory Signifier in
Contemporary Russian Cinema” 215
Michael Brodski
12 “Through a French Lens: Romanian Kids and the Western
Narrative of Childhood” 237
Onoriu Colăcel
PART V: INDIA
13 “Kaakka Muttai: Cow’s Egg (dir. M. Manikandan, 2015):
Tamil Children in World Cinema” 259
Swarnavel Eswaran
14 “‘Cracking’ Nations/Notions: A Study of Little Lenny in
Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth” 275
Paromita Deb
PART VI: JAPAN
15 “Westernization, Identity, and Emerging Notions of Childhood
in the Films of Ozu Yasujirō” 295
Kelly J. Hansen
16 “Kiku and Isamu: Beyond the Shitty Realism of Mixed Race
Orphans in Postwar Japan” 311
Kaori Mori Want
Contents vii
17 “Abandon the Young in Tokyo: Yoshitarō Nomura’s
The Demon and Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows” 333
Kenta McGrath
PART VII: CHINA
18 “The Abducted Child Movie in Chinese Cinema” 355
Kobe Chan Yan Chuen
19 “The Child as a Viewfinder of History: Vision and
Blindness in Chinese Cinema” 375
Belinda Qian He
20 “‘We Are All Useful People’: Useful Children and the
Notion of Guai in Transnational Chinese Cinema” 409
Shih-Wen Sue Chen, Sin Wen Lau, and Lennon Yao-chung Chang
21 “Parable of the Lost Child: Zhang Yimou’s Not One Less” 431
Juanita C. But
PART VIII: NEW ZEALAND
22 “‘Talking Back’ to the Mainstream—Pop Culture and the
Child in the Cinema of Taika Waititi” 451
Caroline Grose
Appendix: Children in World Cinema Selected Filmography 475
Index 481
About the Contributors 489

Introduction
Childhood
Debbie Olson
Often when people talk about “children” in general there is an assumption
of a type of child to which they refer—that “child” is frequently visualized
as white, blonde, and blue eyed, plump and angelic in the Western Europe
Romantic tradition. Innocence and notions of purity also play a key role in
Western beliefs about children, as André Bazin demonstrates: “A child’s face
elicits from us conflicting responses. We marvel at it because of its already
unique yet specifically childlike characteristics . . . We are thus seeking to
contemplate ourselves in them: ourselves, plus the innocence, awkwardness,
and naiveté we lost. This kind of cinema moves us.”1 Children should have
no knowledge about things like war, betrayal, death, and, particularly in the
United States, sex. The notion of childhood innocence, which has become
integral to a child as such, gained ground during the transition into the mod-
ern age when a child’s purpose began to shift. No longer were children ex-
pected to work to help the family, they were not just little humans anymore,
but rather, as Viviana A. Zelizer explains, children became “sacralized” in
response to changing social conditions: “properly loved children, regardless
of social class, belonged in a domesticated, nonproductive world of lessons,
games, and token money.”2 The notion of innocence and protection from
adult knowledge and experiences is a fundamental part of this sacralization
of children. Spurred in part by works from American depression-era pho-
tographers like Dorthea Lange and Lewis Hine, who visually documented
poverty in rural agricultural areas and the horrendous conditions for children
working in factories, respectively, the usefulness of a child to his or her fam-
ily diminished as their emotional worth to the ideological family unit rose in
importance.3 And while it is true that children all over the world are important
to their parents, and to the futurity of a society, the ways in which childhood
evolved within the West has had global influence on the notion of childhood
ix