I published four months ago a post about my new MA subject on children in Anglophone cinema, which I have taught this semester under the umbrella label Gender Studies. This is somehow a continuation of a subject I taught three years ago, which resulted in the publication of the e-book by the students Gender in 21st Century Animated Children’s Cinema (check please my post on the task of editing this book). The new e-book, Beautiful Vessels: Children and Gender in Anglophone Cinema, my twelfth collaboration with students, is now available online and it is now time to present it. I’m shamelessly recycling my previous post here, as I anticipated much of what I need to say today.
I have been publishing students’ work since 2014, when I edited two volumes with essays written for my course on Harry Potter. Since then I have turned my BA and MA electives into project-oriented courses, with the e-book at their centre. I am extremely proud of the twelve volumes, and surprised at how differently they are performing. The top performer is Reading SF Short Fiction: 50 Titles, published in 2016 by BA students, which has so far 12,380 downloads. This is a reading guide and my guess in view of this figure is that many readers are indeed finding it useful. What I fail to understand is the situation of the two more recent volumes. Songs of Empowerment: Women in 21st century Popular Music (2022, BA students) is now at 8,224 downloads, but its twin volume, Songs of Survival: Men in 21st Century Popular Music (2023, MA students) only has 206 downloads. Believe me, please, when I say that I find both equally exciting.
As I commented back in March, whereas in the previous subject the focus fell on animated films addressed specifically to children, this time I have focused on the presence of children in 21st century Anglophone live-action films of all types, with no distinction between children’s and adults’ films. I proposed to my eleven students a list of 58 films, of which they selected a total of 44 (four films and, thus, four essays per student); a kind auditor decided to participate in the volume with one essay and I added my own contribution, which is also the sample essay the students used as their model (on the film Nowhere Special). I usually add a few more essays of my own to the students’ work, and I would have liked very much the e-book to cover 50 films, but I have just been too busy, among other things finishing a new book. I am not going to reproduce here the full list, which you can now check from the e-book but will just comment that we started with Billy Elliot (2000) and have ended with The Wonder (2022). The chronological order is intended to guide the reader throughout the 21st century, hoping that the gender issues raised give an impression of progress (in fact, the treatment of children in cinema seems to be stuck, using a rather conventional model).
The book carries an image of Billy Elliot on the cover following the students’ vote for the film they believed to be of the greatest importance (or impact) in our selection. I think this is possibly the case, though Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) is a bigger film in terms of box-office takings and as the start of an extremely popular series. The Harry Potter film series, in fact, might be the last one ever made for cinema, now that the fashion is for TV series (HBO is preparing a series based on Rowling’s heptalogy, to the horror of most Potterheads, myself included). What is more important to me is that we have learned about children in a variety of film genres, from the dramatic pseudo-musical that Billy Eliot is to the gentle satire of Little Miss Sunshine, passing through horror (The Babadook, to mention one example), dystopia (The Road) or drama (Room), apart from the genres closer to children represented by the first Harry Potter film but also others such as Peter Pan, Hugo, Where the Wild Things Are, or Diary of a Wimpy Kid. We have studied children in charismatic leading roles (Whale Rider, Kick-Ass) but also children in secondary roles navigating as well as they could the decisions made by adults (Minari, Logan). I cannot name all of these child characters, each has been part of a wonderful learning experience about our limitations in dealing with them.
The focus of the subject has been gender, but not as intensely as I initially expected in relation to children. As I wrote back in March, discussions of children tend to group them into a homogeneous class without much discussion of gender. This is why I wanted to explore with my students the dynamics of gender representation in the characterization of the children represented in Anglophone film. After just discussing a handful of films, on the basis of the students’ presentations and the bibliography I brought to class, we quickly noted, however, that the gender issues in the selected films affect not just the representation of the children but also of the adults surrounding them. In fact, as we hypothesised then, the films addressing adults (including the family-oriented films) take the child as an excuse to explore adult concerns, placing the children in secondary positions even when they appear to be the protagonists.
I have called the volume Beautiful Vessels, then, because we have been quite disappointed to find out that the child is used in cinema as an empty signifier to pour the adult concerns, related to gender and other matters. In her introduction to The Child in Cinema (BFI 2022), key scholar Karen Lury frontally attacks both the use of children in live-action cinema and its study in academic film criticism precisely because the child appears to be used rather than focused on. We were initially resistant to her thesis but have come to the conclusion that Lury is absolutely right. A major problem is that, logically, children cannot self-represent and are thus subjected to the whims of adults, sometimes nostalgic of an innocent childhood that never existed, sometimes appalled by the naughtiness of real children which they may even (mis)read as evil. Children cannot contest their (mis)representation on the screen, so what we have is a rather large collection of child characters often played by exploited (or even traumatized) child actors that, on the whole, generate quite a distorted view of childhood. Gender, as we have proven, is treated is a rather conventional fashion, though it is evident than little girls are gaining ground as strong, solid characters while the interest in boys is waning. Cinema is most likely losing boys to videogames and social media, but it still retains the interest of girls, fueled by more and more women directors.
Children have now in their hand smartphones to make films with and many devoted teachers willing to initiate them in the path of filmmaking. Social media like TikTok have prompted children to make their own tiny little films, and to learn thus the basics of editing even when they don’t even know the word. Children, likewise, draw and paint, and write poetry though more rarely fiction or essays. We are, however, still very far from considering their productions artistically worthy, with the exception of a handful of children who grew up to be geniuses. In cinema the concept of a child director or script writer is totally out of the question, even though child actors are abundant. Since, logically, children do not have sufficient critical training and, anyway, nobody bothers to ask for their opinion, their representations are extremely biased by the adults’ own impression of childhood. At the same time, as we know, cinema has been shaping childhood since its very beginning, not just since Disney’s Mickey Mouse hit the screens, in ways we barely understand.
Our joint work in class and our joint publication, then, is a call for scriptwriters and directors to pay much more attention to children, beyond the experience of their own childhoods and what other adults, from fiction writers to psychologists (or parents) say. We agreed that the more successful films where those in which the child’s point of view was integrated into the film with respect and sincere interest. The least successful films where those in which the child was simply present as an object to be carried about or discussed without any kind of participation or agency. We ended up very much worried about the careers of child actors, often started by ambitious or frustrated parents putting too much pressure on poor little things who had no idea about what acting mean. If anyone is listening, we would like directors to never again ask a child to have their first kiss before a camera, or any other significant interaction which might be crucial in private personal life. We came to the conclusion, of course, that never using child actors would result in a radically impoverished cinema, but ideally they should not be employed in horror films or in films depicting situations of abuse for entertainment (and not for criticism). We tried to be, by the way, as inclusive as possible, but, as happens with adults, there are not many roles for non-white children; the roles played by Asian or Black children, besides, tend to be dramatic, with few films celebrating them in positive ways.
I thank my students, once more, for their willingness to engage in the intense adventure of exploring the presence of children in Anglophone cinema. I hope they feel inclined to continue the exploration and that our kind readers find much of interest in our book.