Film Season Preview: A Story of Mark Cousins and Children and Film

In his 18 hour documentary, The Story of Film, Mark Cousins offered cinema enthusiasts a comprehensive tour of the medium, tracing its journey from a novelty gimmick to a billion dollar global industry and the defining art form of its age. Refreshingly, both the series and the book it is adapted from avoid the Eurocentrism that so many film histories suffer from, and Cousins delights in highlighting as broad a sample of cinematic treasures as possible.

What Is this Film Called Love?, from 2012, saw Cousins return with a beautiful, dreamy docu-road movie, shot during a weekend in Mexico City. Among the film’s warmest and most enjoyable moments are those in which he meets children, and we see his kinship with them. Children have been a preoccupation for Cousins going back to 2009’s The First Movie, in which he visits Iraq and introduces a village’s youngsters to movies like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and The Singing Ringing Tree. His latest, A Story of Children and Film, is the climax of this fascination with the ways in which children interact with film, both as audiences and as filmmakers.

Cousins’ films, which he saturates with his knowledge and passion for world cinema, offer the casual cinemagoer an opportunity to become connoisseurs. The only problem is that many of the films glimpsed in both The Story of Film and A Story of Children and Film are not easy to see for UK audiences, even in the digital age. Helpfully, Cousins and Filmhouse Edinburgh have programmed a touring season of films featured in A Story of Children and Film, giving families and cineastes a chance to see films from China, Iran, Sweden, Senegal, Poland, Latvia, Japan and several other countries.

Collectively, the films illustrate some of the aspects of childhood that are universal, while also drawing attention to how greatly the experience of growing up differs from one part of the world to another. There is a film from each decade from 1930s onwards, so the season also invites us to compare different representations of children through the ages.

Bag of Rice – discover the films of Mohammed-Ali Talebi

In the season’s shortest film, Ten Minutes Older – a single take, in which an audience of young girls and boys are entranced by a puppet show (which we do not see) – we are reminded of the full range of emotions storytelling can induce among ‘those wonderful people out there in the dark,’ demonstrated most expressively by one particular child, who oscillates between terror, anticipation, revulsion, excitement, bewilderment and anxiety. Children have perhaps the most visceral reactions to what they see onscreen; since they generally have less to worry about in their lives than adults, they can commit more fully to the immersive process.

Many of the children in the season experience hardship at the hands of adults. In Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games), a little girl’s desperate attempt to rescue her dog during an air raid costs her parents their lives and leaves her completely vulnerable, ill-equipped to survive in a warzone. In Bian Lian (The King of Masks), another little girl has to masquerade as a boy in order to get by in a China that has no place for girls.

We also see the pleasures of being a kid, most joyously in Palle Alone in the World, in which a boy awakes to the glorious fantasy of complete solitude. While searching for his parents, or anyone for that matter, he basks in the freedom to do just as he pleases, helping himself to toys and sweets, and convincing himself that it surely can’t be that difficult to drive a tram, or a fire engine…

These pleasures take unexpected forms in Czech documentary The Unseen, which showcases the pictures of a group of young, blind photographers. Unlikely as it may seem, the children are keen photographers and collect the images, so that their sighted friends can describe them.

Of course, one of the chief joys of childhood is making friends, and the films illustrate some of the many ways in which this can happen – particularly those that hail from Iran. Director Mohammed-Ali Talebi’s Bag of Rice, The Boot and Willow and Wind emphasise the presence and absence of friendship. A boy excluded from school for accidentally breaking a window can only return to class once he has repaired the damage, but with his father refusing to pay he needs the help of his peers to resolve his problem. A girl who is also unable to go to school cultivates fleeting friendships during a cross-town odyssey in pursuit of a bag of rice.

The most amusing is a pleasant but mischievous young boy, with a knack for getting himself into trouble. Hugo and Josephine captures the poignancy of childhood friendships and how easily they can be struck between two completely different people – in this case a prim young girl and a wild little woodland dweller.

Inspiring and empowering moments arrive in those films that celebrate children’s resilience and capacity to overcome life’s challenges. The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun has a deliberately misleading and slightly cheeky title, reflecting how its Senegalese heroine is deceptively independent. To support her family, she takes a job in the competitive and masculine world of newspaper selling, but refuses to allow her gender or her disability to be barriers to success.

This unique retrospective complements A Story of Children and Film beautifully. It is to be hoped that Cousins’ work will inspire the release of more of these hidden cinematic treasures. A more diverse movie diet for young audiences can only be healthy, and help to create a generation of discerning, demanding moviegoers that knows what film is and what it can be. Films from different periods and different cultures cry out to be shared and discussed, acting as stimulus rather than diversion. For families who want to experience films together, this is as good as it gets. [BH]

Some of the Cinema of Childhood highlights:

Moving (Shinji Sômai, 1993)
Shinji Sômai is one of Japan’s great unsung directors, with few of his films receiving distribution in the West. Moving is one of his finest works and an ideal introduction point. As her parents propose divorce, young Kenko spars with her tempestuous mother and is stranded from her father who now lives elsewhere. Acting out, she hatches increasingly desperate plans to reunite her parents, only to pursue her own path to maturity amid a seemingly irreconcilable, fragile situation. In a dream-like final act at a fire festival, Moving veers into quasi-fantasy territory, and the beautiful film feels like a live-action counterpart to many Studio Ghibli efforts, particularly Only Yesterday. [JS-W]

Willow and Wind (Mohammad-Ali Talebi, 1999)
Prolific Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, Certified Copy) penned the screenplay for this elemental and suspenseful gem. A transfer student from an arid country marvels at the rain pelting through a broken window pane in a rural Iranian classroom. Transfixed by nature's brute force and simple beauty, he cannot concentrate on the lesson at hand. As he is sent out by his frustrated teacher, he passes in the corridor luckless innocent Kuchakpour, a classmate tasked with fixing the window he's broken or else face imminent expulsion. Shifting from childhood's joys and playfulness to its burdens and sorrows, Willow and Wind documents the great responsibility that society, poverty and misfortune can place on little shoulders. [RB]

Little Fugitive (Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin; 1953)
Cited as a major influence on the French New Wave, particularly François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, the DNA of the low-budget Little Fugitive can be found in much more that followed, from American independent cinema at large, of which this is one of the earliest examples, to the cinéma vérité mode of documentary filmmaking. Outside of its historical value, Little Fugitive, made with non-professional actors, remains a riveting watch that resists easy interpretation. Following a seven-year-old’s odyssey through Coney Island after he runs away from home, having been tricked into thinking he has shot his brother dead, the film is a vividly alive, immersive work, both distinct New York time capsule and timeless portrait of childhood’s various contradictions. [JS-W]

The King of Masks (Wu Tian-Ming, 1997)
Mapping China's riches of culture and myth through a social realist lens, Wu Tian-Ming's spectacular The King of Masks is both a gripping Dickensian modern fairytale and a damning indictment of China's treatment of women. In 30s provincial China, ageing Wang is a deceptively humble street performer. A master of Sichuan change opera, Wang can change masks with deft speed, as if by magic, impressing passersby and the operatic elite alike. According to Chinese custom, he must find a male heir to pass his knowledge and skills on to, lest his ancient illusions become a lost art form. Buying a young boy to become his apprentice, Wang is overjoyed to have a grandson to teach, but all is not as it seems. [RB]  

Long Live the Republic (Karel Kachyna, 1965)
Some of the greatest war films have been those in which terrible events are interpreted by those too young to fully comprehend what is happening. The oft-extraordinary Long Live the Republic sees director Karel Kachyna filter his own childhood experiences of the Second World War through a poetic surrealist filter. Set in the Moravian area of Czechoslovakia near the end of the conflict, as Russian forces are due to arrive as the Germans retreat, the misadventures and tribulations of imaginative outcast Oldrich are presented as a hallucinogenic patchwork of daydream fantasies and desires mixed in with depictions of harsh realities. [JS-W]

Children in the Wind (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1937)
In Children in the Wind, master auteur Hiroshi Shimizu details the lives of brothers Zenta and Sampei as they struggle with the false imprisonment of their father. Typical of Japanese cinema of the period, narrative is revealed through space and stillness, the camera peering from afar on to the brothers’ idyllic Japanese village and its quiet labyrinths. Here we see Zenta and Sampei’s youthful antics: their reticent moments of reflection and boredom, their clandestine struggles and juvenile acts of rebellion. Deceptively simple, Shimizu’s film manages to capture on screen the playful nature of filial love and its clashes with rigid Japanese social mores. [RB]