Module Content and Indicative Topics

This course will focus on the representation of children in film, with special attention to the kind of function the child fulfils in Latin American cinema. This will allow us to explore thematic questions of nationhood, politics, gender and sexuality, and the way childhood is used to envision the past and history, as well as the future and social change. We will also consider questions specific to cinematic and visual representation, such as whether, how and why filmmakers attempt to create a child’s view of the world through aesthetic means, and ethical questions arising around the representation of child suffering and death.

Teaching Delivery

This module consists of 10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars. For the latter, each student will be assigned a topic on which to deliver a short presentation. There will also be reading and sequence analysis preparation for each seminar.

Recommended Reading

Bazin, André. 1997 [1949]. ‘Germany, Year Zero.’ In Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, edited by Bert Cardullo, 121-24. London: Routledge.

Hemelryk Donald, Stephanie, et. Al., eds. 2017. Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinemas: Borders and Encounters. New York: Bloomsbury.

Henzler, Bettina and Winfried Pauleit, eds. 2018. Childhood, Cinema and Film Aesthetics, edited by Bettina Henzler and, 10-32. Berlin: Bertz and Fischer.

Holland, Patricia. 2004. Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery. London: I.B.Tauris.

Jones, Owain. 2007. ‘Idylls and Othernesses: Childhood and Rurality in Film.’ In Cinematic Countrysides, edited Robert Fish, 177-94. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Kelleher, Joe. 1998. ‘Face to Face with Terror: Children in Film.’ In Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood, edited by Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, 29-54. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kuhn, Annette. ‘Cinematic Experience, Film Space and the Child’s World.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 19, no. 2: 82-98.

Kuhn, Reinhard. 1982. Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature. Hanover: Brown University Press.

Lebeau, Vicky. 2008. Childhood and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books.

Lury, Karen. 2005. ‘The Child in Film and Television: Introduction.’ Screen 46, no. 3: 307-14.

---. 2010a. The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairytales. London. I.B. Tauris.

---. 2010b. ‘Children in an Open World: Mobility as Ontology in New Iranian and Turkish Cinema.’ Feminist Theory 11, no.3: 283-94.

Martin, Deborah. 2019. The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. New York: Palgrave.

Miller, Tyrus. 2003. ‘The Burning Babe: Children, Film, Narrative, and the Figures of Historical Witness.’ In Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, edited by Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler, 207-31. New York: Routledge.

Randall, Rachel. 2017. Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Nature, Gender, and Agency. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Indicative filmography (subject to changes)

Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998, Brazil)

Machuca (Andrés Wood, 2004, Chile)

La niña santa (Lucrecia Martel, 2004, Argentina)

El último verano de la boyita (Julia Solomonoff, 2009, Argentina)