Childhood and Cinema (Reaktion Books - Locations)

childhood and cinema

L O C AT I O N S

VICKY LEBEAU

childhood and cinema

LOCATIONS series editors: STEPHEN BARBER AND BARRY CURTIS

examines contemporary genres and hybrids in national and international cinema. Each book contains numerous black and white images and a fresh critical exploration of aspects of film’s relationship with other media, major themes within film, or different aspects of national film cultures.

LOCATIONS

on release: projected cities STEPHEN BARBER

animals in film JONATHAN BURT

women, islam and cinema GÖNÜL DÖNMEZ-COLIN ‘injuns!’ native americans in the movies EDWARD BUSCOMBE

war and film JAMES CHAPMAN

childhood and cinema VICKY LEBEAU

REAKTION BOOKS

For Ella and Nin, Alfie and Anna Published by reaktion books ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2008 Copyright © Vicky Lebeau 2008 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Poland by Polskabook British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Lebeau, Vicky, 1963– Childhood and cinema. – (Locations) 1. Children in motion pictures 2. Motion pictures – History I. Title 791.4’36523 isbn-13: 978 1 86189 352 9

contents

introduction

7

1

the child, from life

21

2

cinema, infans

56

3

child, sexuality, image

86

4

the child, from death

135

conclusion

181

references

192

select bibliography

213

acknowledgements

215

photo acknowledgements

217

index

218

introduction

From its inception, cinema lays claim to the child – both on and off screen. There is no one place from which to start to explore such claims, but this book begins with the image of a child: a photograph, in fact, printed as one of the frontispieces to C. Francis Jenkins’s Animated Pictures: An Exposition of the Historical Development of Chronophotography, first published in 1898. One of the most unsettling images from the first decade of film production, it shows Jenkins, a pioneer of both cinema and television, trying to coax a young girl to appear before the camera. Her clothes lie in a heap towards the right of the frame; her boots are placed, neatly, before the strange contraption that dominates the scene. Doll in one hand, Jenkins is bent almost double, leaning towards her. Naked, she is turned away from him, her head buried in her hands. Such a picture of pro-filmic crisis – the young girl, refusing to be cajoled into taking up her place before the camera – suggests the level of connivance between (early) cinema and the spectacle of the child. Throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, the new phenomenon of the moving pictures moved in on the child

8

What does cinema want of the child? Frontispiece to C. Francis Jenkins, Animated Pictures (1898).

and the infant: with its pictures of ‘Child Life’, one of the most popular genres of Victorian film, cinema proffered its first contributions to the ongoing project of visualizing childhood, of giving image to the child. What happens when the analogical resources of the moving image are brought to bear on the figure of the child? Throughout this book, my focus is on cinema as a technology of vision and, later, of sound that offers new ways of seeing and showing the child: as spectacle, as subject. Emerging towards the end of the nineteenth century, the moving pictures were immediately embroiled in what has been described as the Victorian compulsion to represent the child: throughout the nineteenth century, as Carolyn Steedman has shown, the child was ‘watched,

9

written about and wanted’.1 ‘Baby’s Picture is Always Treasured’ announced an advertisement for the new hand-held Cyclone Camera in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1898, reflecting back on a century in which developments in visual technology had begun to converge on that watching and wanting. In particular, in the 1860s and ’70s improved exposure times guaranteed the status of the photograph as a means to capture and to contemplate the human face and body, including the faces and bodies of children. ‘It is easy to observe infants whilst screaming,’ wrote Charles Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, ‘but I have found photographs made by the instantaneous process the best means for observation, as allowing more deliberation.’2 Reproduced as a print under the name of ‘Ginx’s Baby’ (the title of a popular reform novel by Edward Jenkins), one image in particular from that book became a public sensation. Celebrated as the first naturalistic, or ‘momentary’, photograph of a crying

‘Ginx’s Baby’ (figure top left), as published in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).

10

infant, Oscar Rejlander’s ‘Ginx’s Baby’ sold 300,000 copies, a crucial example of Victorian interest in, and commodification of, the image of the child that, at the turn of the century, would help to secure the success of the ‘Child Pictures’, the ‘child facials’. Like animated versions of ‘Ginx’s Baby’, the ‘Child Pictures’ were one of the first encounters between cinema and childhood: as such, they are key to the work of thinking about the ties between the two. If, as Lesley Caldwell has suggested, the ‘myth of childhood actively shapes our epoch and ways of thinking’, then early cinema brings into renewed focus the visual dimension of that myth, or myths: our modern commitments to the idea of the child are inseparable from its representation in visual form.3 Often borrowing their themes from illustrations, paintings, newspaper cartoons and picture postcards, the first films drew on a broad range of visual and narrative forms to orient their audiences in the busy world of the moving pictures. In particular, the ‘Child Pictures’ would use the diverse iconographies of childhood that, from the mid-nineteenth century, had been emerging through the new markets in printed advertisements, greetings cards, children’s books, illustrated magazines and magazine covers. Released in 1903, for example, Cecil Hepworth’s Alice in Wonderland was one of the first attempts to use a classic of children’s literature to tell a story in cinema: no fewer than six versions of Lewis Carroll’s well-known book were made before the first ‘talking’ Alice, directed by Bud Pollard, was released in 1931. Similarly, William Hogarth’s Southwark Fair (1733) was one of the sources for the opening scene of Biograph’s popular ‘bad boy’ feature, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1905),

11

George Albert Smith, The Sick Kitten (1903).

which cues its audience into the film by reference to a well-known nursery rhyme. ‘Of all the popular nursery rhymes’, runs the entry in the American Mutograph and Biograph Catalogue in 1905: there is probably none better known than ‘Tom, Tom,’ and to everyone, young and old, it at once suggests a lively and comical chase. We have carried out the idea in this production by reproducing, at great expense, the scenery and costumes of old England, using famous Hogarth prints as guides in our scene painting and following the details of furnishings, surroundings, etc., with the greatest care. Drawing on its origins in still photography, as well as a diverse history of screen practice, early cinema looks forward to a century in which the image of the child on film – whether still or moving – would become part of the experience of everyday life

12

. William Hogarth, Southwark Fair (1733), engraving.

(writing in 1998, for example, Anne Higgonet noted that about half the photographic film processed in the United States features young children).4 Whether in classic, ‘world’ or contemporary cinemas, children are everywhere on our screens, a ubiquity that turns cinema into an invaluable – in fact, potentially overwhelming – resource for reflecting on the cultural histories of childhood in the twentieth century. But what is the child for cinema? What does cinema want of the child? These questions are posed throughout Childhood and Cinema, part of my attempt to delimit a vast, and often wayward, field. This book is not, for example, a survey of images of children on screen, nor does it deal in any sustained way with film as one of the primary forms of children’s culture: almost as old as the medium itself, the idea of films for

13

children remains deeply implicated in professional and public debates on the emergence of new technologies of vision and their impact on the lives and minds of children (even, at times, on the very possibility of childhood).5 Rather, my focus is on the child as a figure – idea, image, narrative – through which to explore the formations of cinema in the field of visual culture. In this book, the image of the child on screen is an object to think with, an idea through which to encounter the institution of cinema – its historical and social placement, certainly, but also what has been described as its ‘mental machinery’, its forms of address to the spectators ranged before its screens. At the same time, as a new technology for locating the child in the field of vision, cinema can be a means to reflect on the significance of the drive to see, and to know, the child and her world (as a ‘machine of the visible’, to borrow Jean-Louis Comolli’s phrase, cinema may well have a unique role to play in that project).6 That double focus has determined the choice of both films and topics discussed in this book. Chapter One begins by looking at how the ‘Child Pictures’ introduced the genre of the child into cinema, vitalizing the claims of the moving pictures to document the spontaneity and immediacy of ‘life’ itself. Deeply implicated in the idea of the ‘animated photographs’ as a form of mime of both world and mind, that ‘from life’ depends on what can be described as the ‘life’ of the mind: its capacity for thought, dream, fantasy, imagination. The theme has run throughout the century of cinema, with its diverse approaches to film as a technique of illusion, as evidence of a human ‘passion for perceiving’ (the phrase is Christian Metz’s). In fact, the (sometimes elusive)

14

sense that the domain of the visual has a privileged relation to the mind of the child is fundamental to the study of the ties between cinema and childhood. ‘That is the cinema’, as Edgar Morin insisted in 1956. ‘What it is concerned with and what interests it is the mind in its infancy.’7 To push the point: it is through cinema that one persistent, and sometimes very anxious, vision of the child, captivated by the images passing before her eyes on screen, revelling in the very material of cinema – projector, celluloid, light, image – can take on a life of its own beyond the often polarized discussions of cinema as a risk to, or resource of, modern culture. Consider, for example, the following reminiscence of a young boy’s pleasure in the mechanics of delivering the moving pictures to their audiences, presumably towards the end of the 1890s or the beginning of the 1900s: There is nothing ‘apocryphal’ about the case of punters fleeing from the screen when they saw footage of an oncoming steam train . . . My father, as a boy, turned the handle of the projector at his father’s cinema, Cohen’s Penny Palace, in the East End. He told me many times of his delight as patrons started to flee round the screen, only to find the express looming up at them from the other side.8 An intervention in the long-standing discussion of the supposed naïveté of the first audiences for film, this is also a wonderful sketch of a child who knows cinema both as image –

15

what the living picture, quasi-hallucinatory in its realism, can do to its spectators – and as apparatus: turn the handle and the image moves on screen. Turn the handle, and make the audience run: this child is a delighted, and delightedly sadistic, spectator of both film and its audiences. In another world, he might grow up to be a director, like the young Toto in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1989), or like Enrique Goded in Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education (2004). That Toto, for example, is ‘mad’ for the cinema, that he revels in its material reality – the projector, the strips of celluloid film, the spaces of its projection – is central to how Cinema Paradiso tells the story of a boy who will grow up to be a director of film. Similarly, Bad Education, which opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, has been received as one of the most ambitious attempts to reconstruct the life of a filmmaker – notably, in its exploration of the transition from a young boy’s enthralled look at the spectacle of feminine sexuality on screen to the (adult) work of producing the image on film. With his childhood friend–lover, Ignatio, Enrique Goded, who will become the director of this film-within-a-film, makes his escape from the paedophilic coercions of a Catholic boarding school for boys to the sensual space of cinema: absorbed in the spectacle of cinema, but also using it, the boys masturbate one another, discovering their sexuality – an important moment in their selffashioning – through a complex miming, and displacement, of the image on screen.9 Such an insight is common enough in a cinema that explores the origins of visual and narrative creativity in childhood (Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, released in 1982,

16

is another case in point). But, like Morin’s comment, such films are also embedded in the explorations of childhood and language, childhood and the visual, that have helped to guide my thinking throughout this book. ‘Small children’, wrote Henry James, in the well-known Preface to What Maisie Knew in 1897, ‘have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary.’10 It is a recurring theme: children and childhoods as forever fading within, falling between, the words that might attempt to describe them. ‘The writer dares not dwell too long on the child himself ’, warned Reinhard Kuhn in his influential Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature, published in 1982, ‘because at best he can recapture only the disappearing echo of his faint voice.’11 Closer to the state of infancy, or infans (literally, without language), the small child tends to be discovered at the limit of what words can be called upon to tell, or to mean – a limit that then generates the questions of how to convey the child’s experience in language, of what in that experience, of what in the image, falls outside of, and so resists, the world of words. By contrast, when it comes to the representation of the child, cinema, with its privileged access to the perceptual, its visual and aural richness, would seem to have the advantage: closer to perception, it can come closer to the child. In particular, the impulse and capacity to see continue to be invested as primary modes of discovering the world for infants and young children. Grounded in the disciplines of psychoanalysis and child psychology, this is an approach

17

to childhood and vision that begins to map the so-called predominance of the visual in modern Western culture, its resolute ocularcentrism (to borrow Martin Jay’s phrasing), onto the psychophysiological development of the child: the notion that cinema, with its excitement of sight and sound, thrusts its audience back into the world of childhood haunts public and critical reception of the medium – revealing, I would suggest, as much about our views on childhood as about our understanding of film.12 As we will see, James’s description of the young child’s engagement with the world, the strength of her perception and apprehension when compared to her means to ‘translate’ them, recalls the challenges faced by the first filmmakers who had to make this new medium tell as well as show (to establish the importance of the image of the child to that challenge is one of the aims of the first chapter). Chapter Two takes up these issues as a means to reflect further on the privileged role of looking in cinema, the importance of that privilege to the figure of the child on film. That my discussion begins with Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) may seem far-fetched: Herzog’s decision to cast a 40-year-old man, Bruno S., in the role of the adolescent Hauser caused much comment. But it is central to the argument of this book that the topic of cinema and childhood is reducible neither to the theme of childhood nor to the representation of the child on screen. At once a moment in the emergence of psychic life, and a state of being that never goes away, the concept of the infans is vital to the exploration of the coincidence between the fascination, the charm, of the image on screen and the emergence of the

18

human mind, human creativity, through the play, as well as the anxiety, of looking. What does the structure of looking in cinema have to do with that infans, with what slips away, as well as towards us, in the image? This chapter explores the work of the infans across the field of vision, its elusive ties to an otherness within central to modern constructions of children and childhoods. But, then, what price the image of the child on screen? The photograph with which this book began was one of the first prompts to that question. So, too, was John B. Watson’s now notorious Little Albert, filmed in 1919. Recording his behavioural experiments, designed to test conditioned emotional responses – notably, fear – in a nine-month-old boy, Watson’s film is not, in any straightforward way, an example of cinema. Nonetheless, still commercially, if not readily, available, it fulfils one of Jenkins’s ambitions for the animated photographs: a ‘permanent record’ (Watson’s description of his motion-picture study) of the changing expressions on a young child’s face. It is a record that accumulates through the twentieth century. Think, for example, of John Schlesinger’s Terminus, hailed as a new masterpiece of British documentary on its release in 1961. Presenting a day in the life of Waterloo Station, one of the film’s most memorable, and uncomfortable, sequences shows a young boy, abandoned in the middle of the main concourse, frantically trying to find his mother. The scene, as reviewers at the time pointed out, was staged – but only from the point of view of the director and the child’s mother who had agreed to ‘lose’ her son for ten minutes. That Jenkins published that photograph of himself, coaxing a young girl to stand naked in front of his camera, is,

19

amongst other things, evidence of our uneven, and changing, sensibilities towards childhood – childhood and sexuality, childhood and suffering – throughout the century of cinema. Beginning with John Ruskin’s well-known attachment to drawings of little girls, chapter Three explores the impact of cinema on the themes of sexuality, visuality and childhood. What is sexuality for a child? What does the image have to do with the ties between sexuality and childhood? In dialogue with the history of the sexualized child on screen, as well as recent legislation on pornography and child protection, this chapter works towards the conclusion that, when it comes to the image of the child, the adult sexual imaginary has become one of the dreads of modern cultural life. Can a child survive the sexual? The question haunts us, suffusing sexuality with the threat of death towards children and childhoods. If cinema has a long history of investing the child as a figure for the instability of sexuality and sexual identity, it has also produced a remarkable archive of the image of the child in pain, in death. Chapter Four explores that archive in the context of the apparent commitments of post-war international society to the rights of the child – and, in particular, the rights of the child to life. As an institution that pleasures the eye, cinema has a complex, often fraught, relation to images of suffering – images to which, from its very origins, it is deeply indebted. How do you film the death of a child? What wishes are at work in the visual archive of the child in pain? Starting from the idea of the child as a privileged subject of fellow-feeling, this chapter looks at the collusion between horror and pleasure, politics and pain, in the various uses of a child’s suffering on screen.

20

How does cinema refract the image of the child across different genres, across national borders, across moments in time? This book can only begin to broach that question, and to acknowledge its own trajectory: as the image of the child persists on screen, cinema often reveals that its preoccupations lie elsewhere, with itself, its form, its significance (not least, in fact, its difference: from painting, from literature, from photography). What is cinema? What is a child? The questions recur throughout this book, reflecting on cinema and childhood as two distinct, but converging, institutions of modern cultural life.

1

the child, from life

So the hand of the child, automatic, Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay. 1 I could see nothing behind the child’s eye. On 28 December 1895, at the Grand Café in Paris, Louis Lumière’s Repas de bébé was one of the first public demonstrations of what this new form of visual technology, the Cinématographe Lumière, could do. Less than one minute in length, Lumière’s brief view of a baby, sharing a meal with her mother and father, carves out its place at the complex origins of cinema: Repas de bébé was among the earliest, and now canonical, films produced by the Lumière brothers to promote their Cinématographe, a combined camera-projector designed to record, and to project on screen, a sequence of images imprinted on a strip of celluloid film. To look at Repas de bébé today is to encounter both the difference of early cinema – the flickering image, the static shot, its visual ‘flatness’ – and an uncanny sense of the familiar. Lumière’s film (of his brother Auguste, in fact, together with his

22

Louis Lumière, Repas de bébé (1895).

wife and child) resembles a Victorian family photograph, those faded sepia prints that, as André Bazin has suggested, register the ‘disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration’.2 Capturing a few brief, but successive, moments in the life of a bourgeois French family, Repas de bébé both repeats and extends the technology of the photograph, its apparently naturalistic depiction of the world; as the film critic Noël Burch observed, Repas de bébé was ‘probably the first film to catch faces “from life”’: the unique ‘presence’ of the photographic

23

image combined now with the illusion of movement – the shuddering into motion of the still photograph, the flow of images across the screen – so vital to the innovation, and commercial attraction, of early film.3 ‘Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen, and the picture stirs to life’, wrote Maxim Gorky on first viewing the film at the Nizhni Novgorod fair on 4 July 1896. ‘I doubt my ability to describe it.’4 With its companion piece Enfants aux jouets (part of the Lumière programme at the Polytechnic Institution in London in 1896), Repas de bébé was one of cinema’s first depictions of the child as a form of public spectacle: this ‘idyll of three’, ‘a young couple with its chubby first-born’, as Gorky continued.5 At least four of the ten films on the Lumières’ programme at the Grand Café featured babies or children (Repas de bébé, La Pêche aux poissons rouges, Le Jardinier, La Mer). In fact, the films produced and shown in Europe and the United States in the first decade of cinema suggest how far this new technology was caught up, immediately, in the project of visualizing the child: Babies Playing (1895), Boys Scrambling for Pennies under the West Pier (1896), Children Paddling and Playing on the Sands (1896), Babies Quarrel (1896), Scrambling Urchins (1896), The Twins’ Tea Party (1896), A Pillow Fight (1897), Washing the Baby (1897), Nursing the Baby (1897), Premiers pas de bébé (1897), Children Paddling at the Sea Side (1897), Children in the Nursery (1898), The Babies’ Quarrel (1899), La Petite Fille et son chat (1899), Boys Sliding (1900), An Over-Incubated Baby (1901), Baby’s Meal (1901), Children Bathing (1901), Babies Rolling Eggs (1902), Baby’s Bath (1902), Crying for his Bottle (1902), The Sick Kitten (1903), The Baby

24

(1903), La Petite Alma, Baby Acrobat (1903), Annual Baby Parade (1904), The Baby and the Puppies (1904), Cry Baby (1905). The list could go on, and on. With its pictures of ‘Child Life’, cinema locates the child in a new and moving field of vision. Babies eat, drink, crawl, walk, smile, and cry on screen; children play, run, bathe, quarrel. Often shown in the course of a variety programme, the genre, it seems, was quickly established. ‘This is the most famous children’s picture ever made’, declared the American Mutoscope and Biograph Catalogue, introducing A Pillow Fight in March 1897: In the opening of the scene, four little tots are shown in bed. One of them awakes, and bent on mischief, starts a pillow fight; in the course of which two of the pillows break allowing the feathers to fly in every direction.6 Encored until re-shown on its release in Boston, A Pillow Fight was an immediate success, helping to sustain what appears to have been a minor craze for pictures of small groups of children – typically, two to four young girls – fighting one another with pillows (pillow fights, it should be said, were generic in early cinema). Two months later, on 24 May 1897, rival film company, Edison responded by copyrighting Pillow Fight. ‘A comic subject, clear, bright and characteristic’, runs the Edison Catalogue entry for this film. ‘Shows four girls in their night dresses, engaged in an animated pillow fight.’ Featuring three little girls, New Pillow Fight, also released in 1897, was one of Sigmund Lubin’s first films: ‘This is a very amusing scene, showing three little girls

25

indulging in a pillow fight’ (one of the girls featured was Lubin’s daughter, Emily). By January 1903 Lubin was able to market Pillow Right, Reversed, in which, as the title suggests, the ‘popular subject’ is shown backwards, beginning with the fight in progress and concluding with the children ‘finally reposing in their downy couch fast asleep’. Forging its visions of the child in motion, cinema also began to forge itself through its images of babies and young children. One of the most popular, and commercially successful, genres of early film, what are described variously as ‘child pictures’, ‘children’s pictures’, or pictures of ‘Child Life’ were caught up into the work of making meaning, of fashioning a story – albeit rudimentary – from the movements of bodies and faces projected on screen. As the experience of watching an image that moves became more or less naturalized over the course of the twentieth century, so it has become increasingly difficult to grasp the challenges that confronted the first film-makers in their attempts to use cinema as a narrative form. By contrast with the now familiar experience of watching mainstream cinema, beyond the announced subject of the film, what did the spectators of early cinema look at, what did they look for, in the busy pictures displayed before them? Contingency, detail, visual ‘noise’ are part of what the camera, the photograph, whether still or moving, brings with it; in fact, as far as the emergence of film as a medium for telling stories is concerned, the problem was how to turn that excess of the visual to the purposes of narrative (of knowing where to look, as it were). Cue the child. On the initial evidence of the child pictures, Victorian cinema began to bind that excess of the visual

26

through the image of the child, investing the child as spectacle at the same time as it drew on the stories, and values, attached to children and childhoods. ‘The baby is so amusing,’ Gorky reflected, probably ironically, on Repas de bébé, a picture he found very much at odds with the excited, eroticized context of its exhibition at the Nizhni Novgorod fair: ‘Has this family scene a place at Aumont’s?’7 In the child pictures, in other words, the shock of the new – the ‘“living picture” craze’, as it quickly became known – arrived through the image of a child: it was as cultural icon – or, perhaps, cultural stereotype – that the genre of the child entered cinema, helping to make the first films available, or recognizable, to their audiences (marketing the child pictures through the late 1890s and early 1900s, film producers and exhibitors could take it for granted, clearly, that the image of a child was a source of both amusement and interest to their prospective audiences). But if the visual archive of the child in motion begins in these pictures, that archive is now largely lost to public view. In general terms, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct the diverse forms of exhibition and reception of early cinema (on some estimates, fewer than 20 per cent of films made during the first two or three decades of cinema is extant). In the case of the child pictures – frequently mentioned but not much discussed in classic histories of film – what we know of them is often derived from trade papers as well as the commercial catalogues printed by the rival film companies – Edison, American Mutoscope and Biograph, Lubin, amongst others – during the first decade or so of film production. In fact, anticipating the

27

audiences for these short films, the catalogues are an invaluable resource for thinking about how children were represented – imaged, narrated – at the origins of cinema. The brief promotional descriptions of the features available to exhibitors for hire or purchase indicate how and why, beyond the immediate novelty of the ‘animated photographs’, spectators were expected to want to look at particular films, or film genres. ‘A group of seven children gathered about a tub of soap suds, pushing and jostling for preference’ was how the Edison Catalogue introduced Making Soap Bubbles in April 1897: This is an exterior scene, full of animation and free from artificiality. The figures are clearly defined, well in the foreground, and the group well composed. The familiar scene of children blowing soap bubbles from clay pipes is here shown under natural conditions. It was another popular theme. Biograph’s Soap Bubbles, in which ‘four little girls have a merry time blowing soap bubbles’, was released a few months later (Charles Vernon Boys’s study Soap Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces which Mould Them, first published in 1890 and still in print today, also suggests the pull of this notoriously transient topic). In this instance, one of the points of comparison for both Edison and Biograph may well have been John Everett Millais’s well-known painting Bubbles (1886): the ‘most exquisite and dainty child ever dreamed up, with the air of a baby Poet as well as of a small angel’, as Marie Corelli insisted to Millais in 1895, protesting Pears’ use of

28

his painting as an advertisement for soap.8 By contrast, not withstanding the careful composition of its small crowd of children, Edison’s Vitascope offered the pushing and shoving between children, the animation of their play, as part of its natural, and familiar, domain: the camera as uninhibited by the child, it would seem, as the child is by the camera (and by the presence of the adults wielding it). ‘A pretty and natural picture’, runs the description of Children Bathing in the Edison Catalogue of 1901, ‘in which the principal actors are two tiny tots . . . The water effects are splendid, and this is a beautiful subject of “Child-life.”’ Promoting the innovations of early cinema – the ‘magnificent reproduction of living forms’, to cite an advertisement for the Vitascope in 1896 – the film companies also market the difference of the moving image of the child on film, its intervention in the already well-established market in images of children and childhood.9 More generally, in common with other genres of early film, the child pictures participated in the fascinated study of movement that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, had become inseparable from the use of visual technologies to supplement observations made by the human eye. Like Edison’s early kinetoscope film Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894), for example, and George Demenÿ’s Demenÿ Making a Grimace, Louis Lumière’s Premiers pas de bébé, shot in 1897, or Lubin’s Baby’s First Step, distributed in 1903, would not be out of place in Eadweard Muybridge’s well-known studies of human and animal locomotion undertaken during the 1880s. Using multiple instantaneous cameras, Muybridge had produced hundreds

29

In 1887, Messrs A. & F. Pears bought the copyright to Millais’s Bubbles (1886). The advertisement may have guaranteed the familiarity of Millais’s painting to early audiences for film.

of photographs of men, women and children ‘in motion’. ‘Child running’; ‘Child crawling on hands and knees’; ‘Child crawling up stairs’ are typical of the sequences to appear in ‘Females (SemiNude & Transparent Drapery) & Children’, the sixth volume of his Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases Of Animal Movements, published in 1887.10 Notably, Muybridge was also able to animate his photographs by projecting them through the zoopraxiscope he had developed for

30

that purpose – to the delight, and astonishment, of both professional and public audiences. In its attempts to recreate the effects of lifelike movement, Animal Locomotion has been described as an immediate precursor of cinema. Muybridge stopped and started his photographs to reveal what in motion the human eye cannot see, making movement as such more visible, at the same time as he made the pleasures of the moving image available to his audiences (in this instance, as Linda Williams has pointed out, the ‘desire to see and know more of the human body underlies the very invention of cinema’).11 Recalling his first sight of the Cinématographe at the Grand Café, the filmmaker Georges Méliès

An advertisment for Edison’s Vitascope, April 1896.

31

described how the Lumières demonstrated the novelty of their invention by projecting a still photograph of the Place Bellecour in Lyon before cranking up the projector. ‘They got us all stirred up for projections like this?’, Méliès complained to his neighbour. ‘I’ve been doing them for over ten years.’ But, he continued: I had hardly finished speaking when a horse pulling a wagon began to walk towards us, followed by other vehicles and then pedestrians; in short, all the animation of the street. Before this spectacle we sat with gaping mouths, struck with amazement, astonished beyond all expression.12 A powerful story, this, reflecting the thrills of the ‘living pictures’ as well as the practices of exhibiting film at the end of the nineteenth century. Said to be the very standard of the reproduction of the real, the photograph was at once contained and surpassed by the movement that so captivated the spectators of early film. In this instance, the transition from the still photograph to the moving image, from photography to cinema, becomes a feature of the exhibition of film as such, its claims to animation – ‘all the animation of the street’, in Méliès’ terms – to life. ‘You’ve seen pictures of people in books, all frozen stiff ’, cried a showman a few years later, enticing passers-by into a derelict London shop, transformed into a temporary cinema. ‘Well, go inside and see for yourself, living pictures for a penny.’13 In fact, it may be that one of the initial effects of the cinematograph was to recast the stillness of the inanimate image –

32

illustration, painting, photography – as a form of artifice, or, more strongly, lifelessness. ‘Now life is collected and reproduced’, runs an article in Le Radical, also in response to the Lumière première. ‘[I]t will be possible to see one’s loved ones active long after they have passed away.’14 It is a comment that, as Burch has pointed out, introduces a certain ‘mortuary note’ in the reception of the Cinématographe: the reproduction of life, life-like representation, is significant because we, and our loved ones, are going to die (‘death will have ceased to be absolute’, wrote a journalist for La Poste on 30 December 1895).15 Or, reproducing movement, cinema aligns itself with the basic sign of life: animation, a symbolic quality, as much as a biological fact. ‘Movement is life’, as Robert Herring put it, succinctly, in 1928, ‘and the cinema is the only art that can preserve this quality in its expression.’16 Reproduction of life, preservation of life: the elision between the two belongs to the long, and diverse, history of naturalistic portrayal to which, as a technology of the moving image, cinema began to make its unique contribution. Far exceeding the domain of cinema, such an elision is deeply entangled with the intangible sense that what the audience is looking at in the image is life, the life embedded in the image, be it still or moving.17 ‘Animated pictures of baby at play and baby in his bath’, announced The World’s Fair in January 1910, ‘are likely to become more popular with fond mothers than posed photographs of their infants.’18 Describing the new ‘home cinematograph’, this brief advertisement recalls the scenes canonic to the child pictures, as well as the perceived challenge

33

of the cinematograph to the markets in still photography: ‘[S]cenes in the present-day nurseries, of children romping together, can be transferred with all their living movement to photographic reproduction, and kept for the happy youngsters, to be shown to their own children in the days to come’ (my italics). In this instance, the promise of the cinematograph – its movement, its animation – is oneself as a child, captured in the form of a moving image to be revisited, and passed on. ‘It will be possible’, runs one striking claim, ‘for the octogenarian of 1990 to see himself laughing or crying in his cradle, taking the first tottering steps of his life.’ The uncanny effect of this image, its doubling and compression of moments in time, depends on that ready equation between the moving image and life, its capacity to support the possibility of seeing oneself young and old at the same time. Nearing the end of his life, an 80-year-old man gazes back at himself laughing, crying, walking (as a fond, and now dead, mother might have done). In this sense, part of the novelty of the cinematograph is its capacity to bring the end of a man’s life into renewed and mobile contact with its beginning: the infant self, the child self, such an elusive and yet such a passionate object of investigation throughout the modern period. Captured ‘from life’, ‘in life’, as life, the child on screen is a child whose life, whose ‘Child Life’, passes on beyond the moment of passing before the camera (assuming, of course, that the film survives). Inviting its audiences to marvel at its capacity to show the living world, to project its image life-size and moving on screen, cinema derived that life in a new, and powerful, way.

34

Laura Muscardin, Children of Rome, Open City (2005). ‘I’ve got the tape!’ exclaims an elderly man, interviewed about his role as an extra in Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta. ‘When you come out of here, there’s a close up of me.’ A poignant claim, reflecting on the cherished image of the child self on film.

‘The changes in the human, say the changing animation of a growing baby’s face’, wrote C. Francis Jenkins in 1898, ‘could be followed and recorded.’19 Emphasizing the impulse towards an

35

experimentalization of life at the origins of cinema, Jenkins could be describing any number of views of babies and young children in the first decade of film production; in other words, there is a certain experimentalization of the child taking place through the genre of the child pictures in so far as they are said to reveal the ‘life’ that, until now, had been beyond the threshold of the visible. ‘The droll gestures of two children at a nursery tea-party evoke much merriment’, ran the commentary in The Era on Robert Paul’s The Twins’ Tea Party, included in his hugely successful programme at the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square, London, in 1896. Distributing the feature in the United States in May 1902, the Edison Catalogue promoted Paul’s one-shot film as ‘one of the prettiest pictures of child life we have yet offered’: Two pretty children are seated in their high chairs playing ‘Tea Party’ with their dishes arranged about them. They become engaged in a dispute over the possession of a piece of cake and one of them cries, giving the most perfect and child-like facial expressions we have yet had the pleasure of seeing.20 This is another telling account that, by taking for granted the visual pleasures of seeing a child cry, draws our attention to the curious scrutiny of that child – in particular, the expression, the mobility, of her face – made possible by early film (although it is worth noting that, on this trade description, even a child can be only ‘child-like’). Cinema, asserted Béla Balázs at the beginning

36

of the 1920s, was a ‘new discovery’, a ‘new machine’, designed to give men ‘new faces’; certainly, early films revel in the human face: smiling, crying, sneezing, kissing, grimacing – and, in James Williamson’s unforgettable The Big Swallow (1901), devouring the camera there to record it.21 ‘A human face shown the full size of the screen’, according to the English film company owned by Cecil Hepworth in 1902, ‘is always a comic and interesting sight.’22 The comedy, or entertainment, and the interest went hand in hand. Michael Brooke underlines the point in his brief commentary on The Twins’ Tea Party as one of the first ‘facials’ in British cinema to exploit what he describes as ‘the astonishing novelty of being able to see moving images of recognizable people in medium close-up’ – a novelty that made the ‘facial’ akin to that other popular genre, the ‘local view’, in which people were filmed and then invited, by travelling cinemas as well as cinema owners, to watch themselves and their everyday environment on screen.23 ‘is it you?’ demanded an advertisement in the Yorkshire Evening Post in August 1904, offering the sum of £1 to any member of the audience to recognize his, or her, photograph on screen (a half-price family voucher was also part of this offer).24 The child pictures, and in particular the sub-genre of the ‘child facial’, belong to that cinematic novelty of looking at the face: up close, enlarged, in motion (even, as seems likely from studies in the exhibition of early film, speeded up). With audience recognition of themselves, of other people and of places, a vital element in the marketing of early cinema, part of the success of the child pictures – and their continued interest for us – derived

37

from their regular portrayal of scenes from everyday life (domestic comedy was a mainstay of the genre). ‘A pretty little fat baby boy is seated in a high chair’ was how Edison marketed Cry Baby, a relatively late example of the genre, in 1905: The expression on his little round face shows that he is expecting something very good to eat. When he finds out he is not going to get it, his expression quickly changes from disappointment to grief. As he cries, he rubs his eyes with his chubby hands and the big tears roll down his cheeks. Very realistic. The language may be cloying, but it does not distract from the taunt – more strongly, the sadism – written into the very title of this short film, its acclaimed realism. The motion picture catalogues routinely described the children shown in these features as ‘pretty’, ‘very pretty’, ‘pleasing’, a quality then transferred to the films themselves: ‘a pretty and natural picture’ (Children Bathing); ‘a very pretty and pleasing picture’ (Dolly’s Toys, 1901); ‘a very pretty picture’ (the last example comes from the Lubin Catalogue entry for Happy Childhood in 1903). But again, like The Twins’ Tea Party, the success of Cry Baby depends, at least in part, on soliciting and showing a baby’s tears – tears that, in their spontaneity and transience, so often appear to guarantee the technical achievements of early film. ‘Two very small babies playing with blocks’ was how American Mutograph and Biograph Catalogue introduced When Babies Quarrel in 1899. ‘One steals the blocks, and the other cries. One of the “hit” pictures of the Biograph.’

38

Louis Lumière, Babies Quarrel (1896).

The ‘hit’, I think, comes through that moment of sudden transition from playing to quarrelling, from pleasure to grief, from smiles to tears. ‘Now, for the first time’, declared Bazin in 1945, ‘the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.’25 If there is, as historians of Victorian cinema have pointed out, a common, but mistaken, impression, that, loading 50 feet of film into a camera, early filmmakers simply shot until the film ran out, that impression remains, nonetheless, fundamental to the phenomenology of film, its promise to deliver raw reality. Premiers pas de bébé, for example, looks like a spontaneous record of a young child’s faltering steps as, sheltered by her nursemaid, she walks from background to foreground of the image towards her doll, lying at the front edge of the frame. In fact, in common with other Lumières’ actualités, the scene of Premiers pas de bébé has been manipulated to conclude before, or as, the film runs out: the camera, like the baby, only just ‘makes it’, in less than one minute, or 50 feet of film. The drama is vital to the play – with the child, with the

39

camera – at the heart of this short film feature: child, camera, stand or fall together in the experience of a ‘first time’ (as such, Lumière’s short has become a powerful metaphor for the origins of cinema).26 What does cinema, its arts of movement, of life, want of the child? To capture the child as child is perhaps the first response, the child in all its ‘child-likeness’, its ‘Child Life’. As if happening upon scenes canonical in the lives of babies and young children, part of the promise of the child pictures was to capture the quintessentially transient time of early childhood in real time: the abrupt changes of mood, gesture, expression, for which the child is (so justly) renowned. This is, you might say, one of the first uses of the young child on screen. By the same token, cinema will use the image of the child to secure its appeals to verisimilitude, to the uncontrived, even haphazard, recording of life as it passes before the camera. ‘Life’, or live time, the perception of the ‘familiar scene of children’ – children as they are, children living in time – is one of the first, and fundamental, mystifications of the new technologies of the moving image. Bringing the resources of the moving image to bear on the figure of the child, then, cinema began to embody its claims to the reproduction of life in the ever more lifelike, and so ever more childlike, image of the child (‘the most perfect and child-like facial expressions we have yet had the pleasure of seeing’, to recall the description of The Twins’ Tea Party). It was a claim that would be pursued, variously, through the twentieth

40

century and beyond. ‘The simple illusionism that motion pictures seemed to afford’, as Tom Gunning has pointed out, ‘could also be experienced as a new mode of perception’ – a mode of perception that, while helping to reconfigure the field of vision through the first decades of the twentieth century, took up, and revitalized, the Victorian compulsion to see and know the child.27 ‘This is the age of the child’, declared the poet and critic Sadakichi Hartmann in 1907, reflecting on a period absorbed by images of and for children.28 Part of the ‘“living picture” craze’, the child pictures also belonged to that ‘Age’; in fact, as a ‘machine of the visible’ (to borrow Comolli’s phrase again), as a quintessentially modern medium, cinema began to institute itself with and through the child, bringing into renewed focus the visual dimension of the ‘myth’ of the child, that modern commitment to the difference of childhood as a time and space apart. One of the first encounters between cinema and childhood, the child pictures announce the ongoing adventure of the child on screen – an adventure inseparable from a continually renewed desire to discover and document the ‘truth’ of childhood, to recover from life, as life, the being of the child. Child as spectacle, child as subject: cinema can appear to offer unprecedented access to both, its impression of reality combined with its capacity to deliver the points of view that help to put the (adult) audience back in the place of the child. Trained on the face and body of the child, that is, the camera can also take the position of that child to show us what he or she sees: in 1900 George Albert Smith’s ground-breaking Grandma’s Reading Glass, in which a young boy looks at various magnified objects, was one of the first

41

films to demonstrate the capacity of cinema to deliver a child’s point of view (visual empathy, as Fritz Lang was to suggest in 1926, may well be one of the enduring gifts of cinema).29 Looking as, and with, the camera was one of the conditions of looking in cinema as such – a condition that, with the establishment of conventional modes of representation in film during its first two or three decades, would be used to support the psychologization of, and potential for audience intimacy with, characters on screen. In particular, the point-of-view shot, or

What does Filipe see? Carol Reed, Fallen Idol (1948).

42

sequence, was decisive to the development of cinema as a medium capable of conveying the perceptions and reactions of characters within a complex narrative – characters, of course, that include children, even very young children. Released in 1948, for example, Carol Reed’s now classic Fallen Idol remains one of the most sustained efforts in cinema to see through the eyes of a child: during the first half of the film, what the audience is shown coincides to a large extent with what the young protagonist, Filipe, can, in principle, see and hear (the limit of that is our look at Filipe himself). In the emblematic first image of the film, Filipe gazes through the bars of a banister, his eyes fixed on . . . What? A reverse shot reveals the bustle of an ambassador’s residence, a hectic activity delivered through Filipe’s look and, in particular, his looking for Baines – the butler-idol of the film’s title – which frames the opening sequences of the film. But if Fallen Idol so often marks its image as belonging to Filipe, the tension of this film depends on the fallibility of the child’s perception. That sexuality and death mark the limit of what Filipe comprehends – and, in the latter case, the limit of the film’s attachment to his point of view – is not, I think, coincidental. The everyday misery of an unhappy marriage, and Baines’s romance with the young typist, Julie, are part of what Filipe is perceiving but not comprehending: more precisely, what Filipe sees and hears in the exchange between Julie and Baines in the tea-shop is not what an adult audience ‘sees’ and ‘hears’. Sexuality, like the crisis of the film in the accidental death of Mrs Baines, is marked by a confusion of tongues between adult and child – a confusion that Fallen Idol exploits in its remarkable depiction of

43

Felipe’s view of the final quarrel between Baines and his wife (who is desperate to discover her husband’s infidelity). In a shot that repeats the opening image of the film, Filipe peers down through the banisters, gripping the bars with his hands, as Baines struggles with his wife at the top of the stairs. As Mrs Baines staggers backwards, Filipe runs to an open window and climbs out. Rushing down a flight of iron stairs on the outside of the house, Filipe, and the audience, can hear the increasingly violent quarrel taking place indoors. What we do not see is what is happening between the couple – at least, not until Filipe takes up his position on the outside of a window (on the same floor, now, as Baines and his wife). For the second time, Mrs Baines staggers backwards at the top of the stairs, the cue for Filipe to take flight again, down another staircase. It is at this moment that Reed breaks away from the child’s point of view; with Filipe still running, the camera goes back inside the house to show Mrs Baines standing on the top step; Baines, no longer struggling with her, is walking back towards the room in which Julie is concealed. As soon as he is out of sight, his wife runs to a large window – identical to the windows through which Filipe has been looking – to try to see into the room in which the lovers are closeted. She struggles to open a window that, swinging back against her, knocks her backwards to her death. Her scream carries us to the outside of the house, as Filipe reaches the second window just in time to see her rolling at the bottom of the stairs. The camera cuts first to the top of the stairs, as Baines rushes back to see what has happened, and then to Filipe, still at the window, his eyes riveted on Mrs Baines, then glancing up

44

towards Baines as the butler reaches the top of the stairs. What Filipe does not see is that Baines is not there at the top of the stairs when his wife falls: ‘He pushed her’ is his immediate, and mistaken, conclusion. What does a child see and know? What of a child’s world can be represented to and for adults as well as other children? Central to the argument of this book, such questions bear not only on how children and childhoods are represented on screen – that is, on how cinema captures the ‘life’ of the child – but on the privileged role of looking in cinema as such: cinema, as Metz has put it, is grounded in a passion for perceiving.30 That such passion may be grounded, in turn, in childhood is a theme that runs through otherwise diverse approaches to film: the child’s enraptured gaze at the screen has become a recognizable motif in cinema – I will come back to this – as well as in the more or less anxious, more or less celebratory, writings that surround it. ‘Every single day’, wrote Hugo Münsterberg as early as 1917, ‘about two million American boys and girls sit for hours in a dark hall and gaze at the pictures on the screen.’ Published in Mother’s Magazine, Münsterberg’s ‘Peril to Childhood in the Movies’ was one of the first, and most cogent, statements on cinema – in particular, the rapid movements of its images – as a particular threat to the mind of the child (in fact, Münsterberg was anticipating an analysis of mass culture that would discover nothing less than a form of industrialization and, crucially, infantilization of human consciousness through the technologies of visual media as such). ‘[I]n the “movies”’, he continued,

45

we rush from one place to a dozen others; get only glimpses everywhere; never have time to think about a social problem or conflict which the scene suggests, and while the adult may enjoy the lightening-like rapidity of this change, the child acquires from it the habit of mental haste and carelessness.31 The speed and transience of the image would remain a central concern for early commentators on cinema. In London, also in 1917, the National Council for Public Morality took up the issue of eye strain in its investigation of the effects of watching film on child audiences (as if film could be a form of physical, as well as mental, assault). Reflecting, however, on the social and psychological effects of moving pictures in his initially influential, but now long-forgotten, book The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, published in 1916, Münsterberg derived the power of the moving image – its vivid impressions, its capacity to ‘force itself on the consciousness’, to solicit the members of its audiences to imitate what they are looking at – from a profound correspondence between cinema and mind, between cinema and what and how the mind thinks. ‘The associations’, Münsterberg insisted, ‘become as vivid as realities, because the mind is so completely given up to the moving pictures.’32 In other words, as a type of mime of both mind and world, the ‘from life’ for which cinema was so immediately acclaimed, depends on the life – the associations, the imagination, the capacity for thought – of the human mind. Indeed, following the movement of the mind, cinema can appear to offer

46

a certain relief from it: from the erratic ways of our imagination, say, or from the mental exhaustion that early commentators evoked in terms of the monotony of daily work, be it manual or intellectual (the idea of Hollywood as a dream factory, designed to revitalize its weary audiences, quickly took hold). ‘Only the technique of the film’, wrote the poet and novelist Lou AndreasSalomé in 1913, ‘permits the rapid sequence of pictures which approximates our own imaginative faculty; it might even be said to imitate its erratic ways.’ This was, it should be said, one of the first statements on cinema as a specific mode of representation (part of Andreas-Salomé’s fascinating account of her studies in psychoanalysis with Freud in Vienna between 1912 and 1913).33 Reflecting on the differences among cinema, theatre and photography, Andreas-Salomé gave voice to a series of questions that would gather pace during the twentieth century. What, if anything, is the connection between cinema and the processes of thought, dream and imagination? How do the special pleasures of cinema – movement, illusion, distraction – pleasure the mind? Where is the mind when it is captivated by the image on screen? ‘I can no longer think what I want to think’, complained Georges Duhamel in 1930. ‘My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.’34 Such complaints were by no means uncommon in the first two or three decades of commercial film: cinema, it seems, was quickly perceived as a threat to the very life supposed to sustain it. For many, cinema exemplified what has been described as a mode of reception in distraction – a mode that, while habituating its mass audiences to the charms of absorption in narrative

47

spectacle, also accustomed them to the demands of visual modernity: speed, shock, interruption, diversion (film-goers are, on one influential view, ‘addicted to distraction’). It was, as Walter Benjamin was among the first to point out, a change at the level of human sense perception – a change that, as the century wore on, was described more and more frequently in terms of an absorption of reality into the image, of a threat to the spectator’s capacity for thought, imagination and self-consciousness. ‘The sound film,’ wrote Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their now classic Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, ‘far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience . . . hence, the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality.’35 Given up to the dramas of the image – its rapidity and rhythm, as well as the stories told through film – it is as if the human mind can lose itself in a technology that comes too close to it, a technology that repeats the mind, as it were. Especially, perhaps, the mind of a child. Part of the interest of Münsterberg’s early commentaries is their attention to cinema as a mode of representation whose effects are by no means reducible to the stories told on screen – not what but how cinema tells is the key – and, too, the distinction that he takes so much for granted: namely, that between adults and children as spectators of film. Discussing the content of specific films or genres, for example, Münsterberg was quickly stymied by the variables involved: the age of the child, his or her temperament, the quality of the photoplay in question, and so on. But he moved nonetheless to the (still) moot point regarding the cumulative effects on the

48

mind of a life lived through the screen. ‘Each single photoplay may be decent and harmless’, he insisted, ‘and yet the mental development of the child may be seriously interfered with by the frequent attendance at those shows which are usually offered.’36 In the parlance of the 1920s and ’30s that saw the first attempts to study mass culture from a social scientific point of view, such conclusions might well be characterized as ‘literary’: that is, not proven. But then, how do you take the measure of a mind that, on one persistent view, is not only better represented by the technologies of the moving image but, in their speed, their verisimilitude, their processing of space and time, affected by them?37 It is a perplexing, and productive, question (and by no means a straightforward appeal for censorship of children’s viewing). ‘Yes,’ wrote Morin in a new Preface to Cinema, or, The Imaginary Man in 1978, ‘I am from one of the first generations whose formation is inseparable from the cinema.’38 Morin was born in 1921. In other words, by the second decade of the twentieth century the distinction between adult and child was one that needed to be thought in terms of cinema; quite simply, in the 1910s and ’20s the movies were a new phenomenon; the adult audience for film – anyone over the age of, say, 25 – had not grown up with the experience of going to the cinema. By contrast, addressing the (presumably worried) mothers of America’s children, in 1917 Münsterberg could already evoke that image of the ‘movie-made’ child, given over to the phenomenon of the moving pictures – and, in particular, the visual mayhem of early cinema (so often a cause for concern). ‘A census taken one day in Liverpool’, ran an editorial on the

49

‘Abuse of the Cinematograph’ in The Times on 4 April 1913, ‘showed that there were over 13,000 children between the ages of four and thirteen drinking in these horrors.’ The horrors – massacres, catastrophes, public hangings, lynchings – were those rehearsed by H. D. Rawnsley a few days later, as the debate on the ‘Child and the Cinematograph’ gained pace: ‘Those of us who know what a large proportion of the spectators are children between four and 14, and that before these children’s greedy eyes with heartless indiscrimination horrors unimaginable are in many of the halls presented night after night, are the reverse of happy.’39 The question of what children do with what they see, of what images do to children, persists – even as the idea of the child, formed with and through the new technologies of vision, makes such questions ever more difficult to pose. A prototype of the impressionable spectator, the child would remain a crucial figure through whom to announce the seductiveness of the moving image, its massive influence on the life of mind and culture. (Police and magistrates were well aware, Rawnsley insisted, that many children began their downward spiral into crime by imitating the scenes of burglary and violence they had seen on screen.) What strikes a reader now, perhaps, is the concern, at the very origins of cinema, with the sheer numbers of children, especially very young children, ranged before the screen. The movie-made child is also one who, in that telling indistinction between mouth and eyes, drinks the image, greedily consuming – taking inside, incorporating – whatever is taking place on screen (incorporation, then, as the psychical mechanism

50

underlying the tendency towards imitation identified as a major risk to the child audiences for cinema: you are what you eat). In other words, cinema can lay claim to the child – as the child lays claim to cinema. ‘The movie is coming! The movie is coming!’: at the beginning of Victor Erice’s award-winning The Spirit of the Beehive, released in 1973, the children’s excitement cues the film as the inhabitants of a small Castilian village gather in the local hall to watch a travelling cinema’s screening of James Whale’s now classic Frankenstein (1931). In its attention to the blank, and worn, screen hanging on the wall, to how the audience, carrying their chairs, and the showman, with his reels of film and his projector, transform the shabby hall into the space of cinema, the opening sequence of The Spirit of the Beehive offers a poignant reconstruction of the exhibition and reception of film in a rural community at the beginning of the 1940s. But, too, as Erice cuts repeatedly from one of the founding scenes of cinematic horror – the encounter between Frankenstein’s Monster and the little girl by the lake – to linger on the faces of its audience, the sequence yields some of cinema’s most compelling

A poignant look at the child’s look: Victor Erice, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).

51

images of children’s look at the screen, of the look of the child caught up in the wonders, and horrors, of the moving image. Part of the significance of The Spirit of the Beehive is its use of a child’s fascination with Frankenstein to explore both the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the powerful, but elusive, connection between cinema and a young girl’s experience of her own mind. As David Robinson put it in his review of the film on its first release, the two sisters whose story is at the narrative heart of the film – Ana, aged six, and Isabel, aged seven – are mesmerized by one of the cinema’s strangest moments of poetry: Frankenstein’s monster meets a little, unafraid girl by the river and undergoes his first experience of human tenderness when she gives him a flower. They play together. In the next scene the little girl’s corpse is carried back to town.40 There is, of course, a history of censorship – in particular, censorship of children’s viewing – embedded in this moment (and Robinson’s description). The scene from Whale’s film in which Frankenstein’s Monster throws the little girl into the lake has been routinely cut in public exhibition of the film. The possibility that the Monster believes that, like the flowers they have been throwing, the little girl will float in the water has been obscured in favour of an image of his unpredictable, and apparently unmotivated, murderousness, as the film cuts from the Monster and the girl by the lake to the shot of the father carrying his dead daughter through the streets of the village.

52

Strange moments of poetry? The Monster and the little girl in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).

‘Isabel, why did he kill her? Why did he kill her?’ Ana’s questions come in the wake of the death of a child on screen, the death she views through Whale’s (albeit suppressed) depiction of the Monster’s tragic attempt to play, to be like a child: a child, of course, is what the Monster has never been. Pursuing her questions through the film – ‘Why did he kill her?’ ‘Why did he kill the girl and why did they kill him later?’ – Ana is the very symbol of how a child’s passion for film is caught up into the

53

work of making sense of the world, its terrible violence. (That the child’s tormented question returns to the Monster’s murder of the child is, of course, the legacy of adult censorship.) When she comes across the Republican fugitive, hiding in the outbuilding where, according to Isabel, the spirit of Frankenstein’s Monster dwells, Ana befriends him, taking care of him in another complex mime of Whale’s imaging of a young girl’s fateful gestures of friendship towards the Monster. Following the slaughter of the soldier, Ana runs away across the empty fields, which, as her parents and sister begin to search for her, become the dread landscape of the missing child. Night falls, and the search continues through torch-lit woods. Cut to Ana, walking alone through another part of the forest. An image of vulnerable purposefulness – that Ana is looking for something, or someone, is strongly connoted by Erice’s cut to her mother, reading a letter from a lost lover – she crouches by the edge of a pond in which she sees, first, her own reflection, and then that of the face of Frankenstein’s Monster. That reflection, together with the sound of footsteps crunching on the leaves behind her, turns Ana around to encounter the Monster walking slowly towards her (let us note, he is too far away for his face to have been reflected in the water). It is a remarkable scene, recreating – even, perhaps, redoubling – the strange poetry that Robinson discovers in Whale’s film. The camera stays on the faces of the Monster and Ana as he kneels down beside her at the edge of the water. Speechless, lips quivering slightly (is it cold, or fear, or excitement?), Ana watches the Monster’s face intently as he raises his arms lightly,

54

putting out his hands towards her. Again, the young girl appears mesmerized as the Monster’s hands come down on her – and she closes her eyes, falling into sleep or, perhaps, unconsciousness. The screen fades, briefly, to black. As day dawns, Ana is found, apparently asleep, in the shelter of a ruined wall. What has happened? Has Ana dreamed her encounter with Frankenstein’s Monster – a dream that, if it follows the contours of Whale’s story, ends with her own death (that blank, black screen)? Or has she refashioned an actual encounter with a stranger in the woods to suit the story that so preoccupies her? Did she imagine, or hallucinate, the face in the pond? Back home, mute, sleepless, refusing to eat, Ana is examined by a doctor who attempts to reassure her mother with words that, while evoking the conventional dangers of the forest for a young girl – rape, sexual assault, murder – stall any certain knowledge of what, if anything, has occurred: ‘She’s under the effects of a powerful experience. She’ll get over it’; ‘Teresa, the important thing is that your daughter’s alive. She’s alive.’ Part of what The Spirit of the Beehive is struggling with at this point is how to represent to and for the adult spectator the young child’s experience of cinema. Cinema, it seems, has touched Ana’s mind; its preoccupation of her imaginary life has driven her towards hallucination – or, more precisely, towards refracting the traumas, the enigmas, of the world (the death of the soldier, the loss of her self in the woods) through a protective image borrowed from the screen. The image, in this instance, is of a Monster, brought to life by the child’s capacity to project that image into the world – be it the world of her village or her

55

Another form of enraptured looking? Victor Erice, The Spirit of the Beehive.

mind. That this projection is not without risk is part of the film’s probing of whatever it is that is taking place between Ana and the Monster: a taking place haunted, it seems, by sexuality and death, by the states of mesmerism and fugue into which Ana falls when revisiting her experience of Frankenstein, of film.

2

cinema, infans

Nuremberg, 26 May 1828. It’s a warm spring evening, between four and five o’clock. Suddenly, a young man is discovered standing, in a bizarre posture, on the Unschlitt Square of the city. He is dressed in coarse shirt and trousers, and the upper part of a frock coat from which the skirts have been cut away. On his head he wears a felt hat, lined with yellow silk; on his feet, a pair of high-heeled boots, ill-fitting and torn at the toes. In one hand, he is clutching a letter, which he holds out to a man – the shoemaker, Weikmann – who happens to pass by. The letter is addressed ‘To his honour the Captain of the 4th Esgataron of the Shwolishay regiment. Nuremberg.’ So begins the mystery of Kaspar Hauser, the name that this young man – perhaps 16 or 17 years old – writes, repeatedly, on a sheet of paper. Kaspar Hauser: ‘child of Europe’ as his friend and benefactor, Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, was to describe him in 1832. As the citizens of Nuremberg begin to piece together the events leading up to Hauser’s appearance in the city, a terrible history emerges. According to Mayor Binder’s first official proclamation, published in July 1828, the young man

57

‘neither knows who he is nor where his home is’: As long as he can recollect, he had always lived in a hole . . . where he had always sat upon the ground, with bare feet, and clothed only with a shirt and a pair of breeches. In his apartment he never heard a sound, whether produced by a man, by an animal, or by anything else. He never saw the heavens, nor did there ever appear a brightening [daylight] such as at Nuremberg . . . He never saw the face of the man who brought him his meat and drink. In his hole he had two wooden horses and several ribbons. With these horses he had always amused himself as long as he was awake; and his only occupation was, to make them run by his side, and to fix or tie the ribbons about them in different positions. Thus, one day had passed as the other . . . 1 Kaspar Hauser would learn to describe his arrival in Nuremberg – an arrival that falls somewhere between birth and exposure – as the moment that he ‘came into the world’, out of silence and darkness, into the sights and sounds of human life. The ‘man with whom he had always been’ – Hauser’s quiet description of the tie that binds him to an elusive, and singular, figure – neither speaks to his charge, nor allows him to look at his face.2 The face is missing from Hauser’s world, a being-missing that, essential to the loneliness that his life has come to represent, comes right to the fore in one of the most powerful, and unsettling, images from the beginning of Werner Herzog’s Jeder für

58

Sich und Gott gegen Alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) of 1974 – a film that, as I want to suggest in this chapter, is central to the topic of childhood and cinema. In the sequence concluded by this shot, we have seen the ‘man with whom he had always been’ struggle to lay Hauser on the ground, to mould his body in place: legs straightened, arms rigid by his sides, face turned down and away from both the man and the landscape, which is about to occupy the film’s field of vision. In other words, Herzog’s miseen-scène follows Feuerbach’s cue in its presentation of Hauser as one who ‘seemed to hear without understanding, to see without perceiving, and to move his feet without knowing how to use them for the purpose of walking’.3 A static camera dwells on – draws us into dwelling on, dwelling in – an image in which the ‘man with whom he had always been’ sits immobile with his back towards Hauser, who, with one side of his face pressed to the earth, lies prone in the foreground of the shot, eyes open but apparently unseeing. As one of the best-known examples of the phenomenon of the so-called wild child, the story of Kaspar Hauser is now canonical to the social and cultural history of childhood in Europe. Since the eighteenth century, as Adriana Benzaquén has pointed out, the wild child, as both fact and fiction, has been used to question not only the boundary between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ but the idea of the child as such: child as object of knowledge and medico-pedagogic intervention; child as origin, and truth, of selfhood; child as image, as spectacle, for the gaze.4 Displacing the image of the child from his screen, Herzog offers a striking, if paradoxical, opportunity to think otherwise

59

the ties between cinema and childhood. In particular, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser confronts us with the question of the child in cinema as a question of the film’s address to the spectator, its exposure of a potential convergence between the privileged role of looking in cinema and the place of the visual in the formation of mind and self as such. In this context, what remains most striking in this image, perhaps, is its staging of a double turning-away, an aversion of faces charged with both menace and pain. Hauser’s eyes have been turned away from the man, away from the panoramic landscape unfolding on screen. In this sense, the impoverishment of vision – or, more precisely, the sense of exclusion from the contemplative pleasures of the visual – that he embodies in this shot comes to symbolize the strange crime committed against Kaspar Hauser, the devastation of a life that comes in its wake. ‘He Caspar,’ Feuerbach reiterates, ‘never saw the face of the man either on this journey or ever before in prison. Whenever he led him he directed him to look down upon the ground and at his feet.’5 Shut out from the face – forbidden to look, not looked at – Hauser becomes a body to be shunned from sight. There are no eyes to return Hauser’s gaze, no face in which he can see and find – or, more precisely, form – himself as an animate, and continuous, being. ‘When a looking-glass was once held before him,’ Feuerbach recalls, ‘he caught at his own reflected image, and then looked behind it to find the person whom he supposed to be concealed there.’6 Banishment from the face, in other words, is a type of banishment from the self, and here we can begin to find the

60

measure of the crime with which both Herzog and Feuerbach, a distinguished jurist, are grappling – and to which The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser begins to give image. According to the judicial code of Bavaria, Hauser had been subject to illegal imprisonment and exposure. But, as the title of his study suggests, Feuerbach is convinced that what has happened to Hauser – a crime ‘in the history of human atrocities . . . still almost unheard of ’, he writes – brings that code up against its limits. Kaspar Hauser: An Instance of a Crime against the Life of the Soul of Man, the title of Feuerbach’s original study, tells of a crime that can be uncovered only through ‘inquiries purely psychological’, in Feuerbach’s view, into the state of the mind it has left in its wake.7 ‘Soul murder’ is the closest that Feuerbach can come to a description of that state, of an attack on the mind so fundamental that Hauser appears as a being on the borderline between life and death, human and inhuman. ‘His existence was, during all this time,’ Feuerbach comments on Hauser’s years of imprisonment, ‘similar to that of a person really dead; in having slept through his youthful years, they have passed by him, without his having had them in his possession; because he was rendered unable to become conscious of their existence.’8 An uncanny image, this, of a childhood lost, buried, spectral – but, it seems, still there and waiting to be lived through. Hauser is a being – a ‘monstrous being’, Feuerbach insists – who, never having been a child, is now fated to be pursued by the child he might have been. ‘That childhood could not be lived through by him at its proper time’, Feuerbach concludes his account, ‘ . . . and, it consequently follows him into his later years, not as a

61

smiling genius, but as the affrighting spectre, which is constantly intruding upon him at an unseasonable hour.’9 It is as if the time of childhood is imperative, demanding to be lived even as it becomes unlivable. It may be taken from you – childhood, like consciousness, is one of the possessions of which Hauser has been robbed – but you cannot evade its return, its invasion of a self who has arrived too late. That return is carried, too, by the equally uncanny back-to-back that both sustains and fractures Herzog’s emblematic shot of Hauser and the ‘man with whom he had always been’ (the image so often used, in fact, to promote this film). ‘Mutter, ich bin von allen abgetan’; ‘Mother, I am cut off from everything’: Hauser’s words, giving voice to the grief of a baby screaming for his mother, come later in the film, but they can begin to speak to what is unbearable in this image, its staging of the deprivation and abandonment of the ‘child of Europe’. ‘I have been done away from everything’ is how Herzog translated this phrase into English in an interview with Claire Clouzot in 1975.10 ‘Done away from’, ‘done away with’? Is this robbery or murder? Either way, bewildered, depressed – ‘he who put me there should have left me there’, Hauser confides to Feuerbach some months after his appearance in Nuremberg – the ‘child of Europe’ emerges as something like the outcast counterpart to William Wordsworth’s ‘blest Babe’, who ‘sinks to sleep /Rocked on his Mother’s breast; who with his soul/ Drinks in the feelings of his Mother’s eye!’ A remarkable passage, this, in which Romantic commitments to the gaze as a form of unmediated expression

62

runs into the image of mother and child, mother and baby, through that lyrical identification between breast and eye, looking and feeding, looking and loving (let us note the continuing purchase of that identification in the first attempts to explore the impact of cinema on the child, his or her ‘greedy vision’). As one of Wordsworth’s most recent editors has suggested, the depiction of the child – in particular, the attention to the mother–baby – in The Prelude ‘offers a new humanist myth with psychological implications a hundred years ahead of its time’.11 A world away from what Kaspar Hauser has come to represent, that myth is, nonetheless, a recurring theme in the long history of responses to his fate. In her interview with Herzog, for example, Clouzot attempts to explore the topic of the maternal in the film: notably, Hauser’s vital need for a mother that she, Clouzot, detects in his crying, silently, as Frau Hiltel hands him her baby: ‘Is that not because his need for a mother is vital?’ Acknowledging her interpretation, Herzog puts it, carefully, to one side: ‘Yes, but that’s not the major preoccupation of the film.’12 Perhaps not. But that Romantic vision of mother and child, sheltered in and by a reflective gaze, is crucial to the tantalizing sense of what might have been at the heart of our various interpretations of Hauser’s story – of what it is, precisely, that Kaspar Hauser has lost, of the form of the childhood that, abandoned to his cellar, he has been unable to live. In particular, in its imaging of a man who, absorbed by a painterly vision of the infinity of Nature, turns his back on Hauser’s back, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser tropes that vision of mother–baby to expose a gaze shadowed by the agony of non-reflection, non-recognition

63

(the baby, crying for his mother, can be said to be the ordinary moment of this). ‘Wouldn’t it be awful’, confides one of Donald Winnicott’s patients in the course of her psychoanalysis with him, ‘if the child looked into the mirror and saw nothing!’ Again, that question, its image, begins to give voice to the anxiety and loneliness carried by the story of Kaspar Hauser: the mirror that does not ‘look back’, the mirror from which one’s own image is missing. But, writing in 1967, Winnicott was also clear that the imaginary scene in which a child is unable to find her own reflection symbolized one way of losing, or not being able to experience, the mother’s face. ‘The precursor of the mirror’, he suggested, at the very beginning of ‘Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development’, ‘is the mother’s face . . . what the baby sees [in the mother’s face] is himself or herself.’13 This is a compelling statement, one that makes the visual exchange between mother and baby fundamental to the field of vision, as well as the condition of a selfhood forged through the work and pleasures of looking and being looked at. On this view, in his deeply lyrical presentation of Hauser’s empathy with a baby’s cries, as well as that depiction of a reflection lost between two, Herzog runs one of the most disturbing versions of childhood in European culture into our contemporary ‘Age of the Baby’ (to borrow Michael Eigen’s phrase), its grounding of human being and relation in the earliest ties between mother and child. In fact, Herzog began to elaborate the theme when, in discussion at Cannes, he derived his interest in Hauser’s story from its grappling with the fate of a being thrown into a world about which he has no idea, and that he will so often experience

64

as a form of torment (Herzog’s word). This may be a fate unique in the history of culture, Herzog explained, but it is a condition faced by us all: Hauser’s difficulties, the problems of solitude, language, expression, relation, belong to ‘you’, to everyone: I believe – it’s an intuitive, instinctive, knowing, and not a clearly defined knowledge – that this sort of image, this sort of solitude, this sort of difficulty with communication, of difficulty with forming oneself in society, all that is something that, you too, have truly felt, that it is in you, profoundly . . . 14 Struggling both to underline the exceptional situation at the heart of his film and to generalize its predicament, Herzog turns Kaspar Hauser into a symbol, or symptom, of what has been described as the basic anthropological situation: the human infant – helpless, dependent, speechless: infans – is born into the adult world of language, meaning and desire. ‘There is no such thing as a baby’: Winnicott’s well-known maxim summarizes a theme that, from the end of the eighteenth century, runs through the literatures of childcare and child psychology: ‘if you show me a baby’, Winnicott continued, ‘you certainly show me also someone caring for the baby’. Or, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, starkly, towards the beginning of Emile in 1762, one of the works that helped to found the modern idea of childhood: ‘No mother, no child.’15 ‘Mother, I am cut off from everything’: speaking for a baby, it is as if Kaspar Hauser gives momentary access to the

65

world of the infans embedded in us all: the eternal infans, to borrow Maurice Blanchot’s resonant phrase. ‘A child of whom we know nothing’, he continues, in the course of a discussion of the fascination of the infans in the modern period, ‘except this’: that the possibility of speech and life depend, through death and murder, on the relation of singularity established fictively with a mute past, on the hither side of history, thus outside any past, and for which the eternal infans becomes a figure, at the same time as it slips away there.16 This vivid passage begins to give expression, I think, to what can be carried by the image of the child – especially, perhaps, the very young child – on screen (I will come back to this). It is all the more striking, then, that Herzog should decide to embody Kaspar Hauser in a 40-year-old man, Bruno S., who, from the age of three, had spent much of his life in institutions. ‘For me, Bruno was Kaspar’, Herzog exclaimed, in response to criticism of his oft-disputed decision; in solitude since childhood, Bruno S., explained Jean Delmas, was ‘not an actor, but another character to identify with the character of Kaspar’; he was a man who conserved ‘a wild personality, incompressible and inassimilable by society’.17 Not an ‘actor’, Bruno S. is Hauser, living proof, as it were, of what the child is so often called upon to allegorize: the boundary between nature and culture, the anguish endured in crossing that boundary towards the human community. Not a ‘child’, Bruno S. runs the unbearable being of

66

Kaspar Hauser’s childhood (if that is what it was) into the postures, gestures and expressions of an adult man struggling to find a way into that community, into the selfhood that, for the historical Hauser, was cut short, once again, by death. Kaspar Hauser was murdered, by an unknown hand, in 1833. He was 21 years old. This is Kaspar Hauser, ‘child of Europe’, as symbol of the outcast, the outcast as a child who resists, who preserves something against, the demands of cultural life: demand that, in the story of Hauser, reveals itself in one of its most depressing and deadly forms – the abandonment of a child, the murder of a man-child struggling to live in the society to which he has come too late. But it may be, too, that what Bruno S. embodies through The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is the insight that childhood persists through the image – or, more precisely, that the forms of looking engaged by certain images, their arrangement of the look and its reflection, can thrust the spectator back towards the mute, but still agitating, states of being and mind in infancy and early childhood (let us recall, for example, Metz’s unelaborated comment on cinema as an institution marked by the ‘subterranean persistence of the exclusive relation to the mother’).18 In particular, the choreography of the look that takes place through the opening sequence of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser stages a vital, and vitally anxious, vision of childhood, of the infans, that, I want to suggest, begins to reflect on the role of the look, of reflection, in the institution of cinema as such. Cast out from sight, Hauser is cast up in the foreground of the image, towards the edge of the frame; that is, without looking into it, he has been

67

turned towards the imaginary space where the spectator is supposed to be, from where he or she is supposed to look at this scene, riven by the tension between visual pleasure and abandonment. On that cusp between cinema and world, the spectator is open to the call of the image, to the looks projected on, and in, to me – a projection I receive, that comes to rest in me. Breaching one of the fundamental codes of cinema – ‘characters look at one another’, as Metz puts it – that back-toback gives powerful visual form to the withdrawal of the face at the heart of Herzog’s vision of Hauser’s life.19 As Herzog reflects in discussion at Cannes, this is a cinema that ‘du public aussi exige quelque chose’, demands something of its public – a demand that begins to be made through the precise choreography of the look in this sequence, the peculiar force carried by its imaging of a look that does not happen.20 Failing in the image, as it were, the need for a look can be reflected back onto the spectator in so far as she is caught up into the pain, and perplexity, of this shot – its double obligation to a man’s withdrawal into private contemplation of the spectacle of nature and to the abandonment of a manchild on the very edge of the frame. Counterpoint to that spectacle, Kaspar Hauser’s characteristic gaze – myopic, frozen – is a gaze bequeathed by loss: loss of face, loss of image, loss of whatever it is that makes life ‘life’: ‘Mother, I have been done away from everything.’ In other words, it is part of the wager of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser to confront its audiences with the question of whatever it is that we long for, and fear to lose, in the domain of the visual (the realm of the face, the image, the cinema). ‘I live in

68

the facial expressions of the other’, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests, reflecting on the primal role of visual perception, the look of the other, in the young child’s discovery of world and consciousness.21 To push the point: drawing on that other fundamental code of cinema – the spectator looks at the screen – The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser begins to draw its audience towards what have been described as the ‘blank spaces of our beginnings’: the states of mind and feeling that, in that Romantic and continuing view of modern childhood, belong to the earliest ties between mother and baby, baby and world (a Romantic sensibility that, it should be said, informs our understanding of visuality and visual culture in ways that remain to be thought).22 Grounded in looking, cinema is an institution rooted in what Eric Santner has described as the ‘need for eyes that return a gaze’, the need, or ‘libidinal fuel’, that drives our relation to images projected on screen. Drawing on Winnicott, Santner, too, may make us wonder what Winnicott’s psychoanalysis would have to say about the convergence between psychic space and the development of new technologies of vision through the modern period. Certainly, in its commitment to the look as a privileged means to the creation and expression of the self, of the other, it is a psychoanalysis that tends to inflect cinema as a complex derivative of the face.23 That an image of the child on screen is unnecessary to engage the psychic space, the psychic states, of infancy and childhood in cinema is one of the rich insights generated by The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (part of its seminal importance for this book). Reducible neither to the theme of childhood nor to the

69

representation of the child, the infans is, I want to suggest, vital to the encounter between cinema and childhood – revealing the structural coincidence between the fascination, the charm, of the image and the emergence of human mind, human creativity, through the play, as well as the anxiety, of looking. To put the point another way: something in the image – or, more precisely, in the act of looking at the image – draws on the resources of the infans, whatever it is ‘I’ am before ‘I’ am there to experience it (‘before I was I’ in Enid Balint’s memorable phrase).24 Another space, another scene: above all, perhaps, the domain of the infans begins to account for the heterogeneity of the image, to whatever it is in the image that resists translation into words, narrative, interpretation. The unknown, or the known but not thought? Or what is, perhaps, not possible to think? No doubt what can be described as the idiom of the infans makes itself felt across a range of film genres and in a variety of different forms – not least, of course, through the figure of the wild child. In this context, it is worth noting that, in 1975, Herzog was at some pains to take his distance from what remains one of the best-known examples of the ‘wild child’ in cinema, François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage, released in 1969. To compare the two works, Herzog insisted, serves the interests of neither director, neither film: ‘Me, I would rather see my film as a “Passion”.’25 A passion as opposed to a child? It may be that Herzog was resisting, routinely, a comparison that came very easily to critics commenting on The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser on its first release. As Benzaquén has observed, ‘writings on wild children always tend to reinforce or fabricate links between the

70

various stories’ – so much so that the differences between, say, a ‘wild child’ and a ‘confined child’, the better description of Hauser, tend to be overlooked in the public and critical reception of these cases.26 Running counter to that trend, Herzog refuted association with L’Enfant sauvage, one of the best-known films of a director often celebrated as a man with the ‘soul of a child’ (Steven Spielberg’s description of Truffaut, whom he cast as the French scientist, specializing in ufos, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, released in 1976).27 Based on the life of the famous ‘wild boy of Aveyron’, or Victor as he would come to be known, L’Enfant sauvage brings the prototype of the modern wild child to the screen. Captured in the environs of the French town of Saint-Sernin on 9 January 1800, Victor had apparently lived in the forests since early childhood (he had been sighted in the region in the months – the years, according to some reports – before, having had some rudimentary contact with local villagers). Naked, speechless, often convulsive, this strange boy was the object of much political, scientific and popular curiosity, arriving in Paris, at the request of the minister of the interior, Lucien Bonaparte, in August 1800 (this was revolutionary Paris on the brink of international war). As Abbé Sicard, director of the Institute for Deaf-Mutes responsible for assessing Victor’s case, reported to the Gazette de France, the young boy would now be visited promptly by those who have long desired to raise a child cut off from all society and all intellectual communication, a child to whom no one had ever spoken and who would be scrutinized down to the

71

slightest movements he might make to express his first sensations, his first ideas, his first thoughts.28 Such was the climate of expectation surrounding the arrival of Victor in Paris, as well as the subsequent decline of media interest in his fate. Reports on the child’s condition were various and often contradictory, reflecting the different understandings of human nature and human potential embedded in the (sometimes tendentious) attempts to explain how this child had happened. Where Sicard encounters a young boy ‘who sometimes seems touched by the care he is tendered’, for example, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, whose extraordinary relationship with Victor is at the heart of Truffaut’s film, describes a ‘disgusting and slovenly boy . . . indifferent to every body, and paying no regard to any thing’.29 Apparently between 11 and 12 years old, the boy was described as a deaf-mute, an idiot, a savage – or an isolated child who, with proper care and education, could be brought (back) into the human community. Fascinated by Lucien Malson’s Les Enfants sauvages: Mythe et réalité, published in 1964, Truffaut began working with the screenwriter Jean Gruault to craft a script for a film based on Victor’s story. A professor of social psychology, Malson had studied the cases of 52 children who, for one reason or another, had been deprived of human contact and grown up in complete isolation – among them, the ‘wild boy of Aveyron’. Malson’s book includes the text of Itard’s two reports on Victor: ‘Of the First Developments of the Young Savage of Aveyron’, prepared in 1799, and ‘Report on the Progress of Victor of Aveyron’, printed

72

in 1807. Both are credited at the end of L’Enfant sauvage as Truffaut brings Enlightenment discussion of language, culture and childhood into contact with the medium of film, his own pedagogical vocation as filmmaker into contact with the career of one of the founding fathers of Enlightenment humanism. That Truffaut identified himself with Itard has become part of his public reflection on the film, especially his decision, after months of vacillation, to play the part of Itard himself: ‘Doctor Itard manipulated this child and I wanted to do it myself.’ It is a telling statement in which the child, the rights to access the child, emerges as the very object of Truffaut’s cinema, its significance: ‘From the day I decided to play Itard,’ Truffaut explained, ‘the film took on for me a complete and definitive meaning.’30 From the start, Truffaut had approached L’Enfant sauvage as a form of pedagogic and therapeutic intervention. ‘My films’, he explained in interview in March 1970, ‘are a critique of the French way of bringing up children.’ The plight of what he describes as ‘abused and merely unhappy children’ was a source of deep concern throughout Truffaut’s life, often driving his vision of childhood on film. ‘I knew from the beginning’, he insisted, commenting on his portrayal of the young boy, Julien, abused by mother and grandmother, in L’Argent de poche (1976), ‘that I wanted to speak of an abused child, since a few million exist in France; we hear about them in newspapers but never in films.’31 In its commitment to film as a form of public information – more strongly, public enlightenment – that comment begins to take the measure of Truffaut’s idea of cinema as a medium with a particular responsibility towards the child (not

73

least, perhaps, the child that Truffaut himself once was). To hear about (abused) children through the medium of the newspapers – the printed word, the still photograph – is, it seems, not enough; we need to hear, to see, to know, that child through cinema: nothing less than a way of life, of being alive, for Truffaut. ‘Life was the screen’ is his well-known description of his own childhood relation to film.32 Thus Antoine Doinel, the protagonist of Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), one of the founding films of the French New Wave, is the very type of the adolescent delinquent, Les Quatre Cents Coups the very type of a cinema poised to tell his story from the inside out. In its chronicle of the growth of a revolutionary and poetic mind – Doinel’s, Truffaut’s – the film has been described as the cinematic equivalent of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. On one pervasive critical view, in fact, Les Quatre Cents Coups is the definitive film about childhood. Such claims point not only to the importance of Truffaut’s contribution to a cinema of childhood, but also to that long, and complex, response to film as a new mode of access to the life and mind of the child. As a director deeply invested in the image of the child, Truffaut draws us towards the lure of that image in cinema. ‘I never tire of filming with children’, he has commented, reflecting on the production of L’Argent de poche. ‘All that a child does on screen, he seems to do for the first time.’ Put this way, part of the work of Truffaut’s vision of childhood on film – from Les Mistons (1957) to Les Quatre Cents Coups, from L’Enfant sauvage to L’Argent de poche – is to take us back towards what he has described as ‘our beginnings in life’, to the first times of both childhood and cinema.33 No surprise, then, that L’Argent

74

de poche should include a (possibly unwitting) tribute to the child pictures in one of two scenes reflecting on how children use the space of cinema – to hide, to play, to kiss, to spy on adults and each other – as well as to look at whatever is passing before their eyes on screen. In this instance, it is a newsreel of Oscar the Whistler, a mime who whistles instead of speaking. Scenes of Oscar as a baby – he is the child of an American soldier and a young French woman: the absence of a common language is compensated for by his whistling – recall the images of the child pictures: Oscar asleep in his cot; Oscar eating his dinner in his high chair; Oscar throwing away his too salty meal; Oscar quarrelling with a playmate about who ‘owns’ the toys. Above all, perhaps, Truffaut’s camera is on the side of the child, his face, his gestures, the tragi-comedy of his powerless, but still powerful, modes of being in an adult world. In L’Argent de poche, for example – one of the most poignant of Truffaut’s attempts to capture the world of childhood on screen – the remarkable Gregory, a two-year-old boy who has been left alone for a few moments, falls, giggling joyously, from the open window of a ninth-floor apartment. ‘Gregory go boom’ is his response as he picks himself up, still laughing, and runs off down the road. His mother faints. To what does Gregory owe his survival? To the magic of cinema? To the renowned resilience of the child? To the heady mix of the two so vital to Truffaut’s filming? On one level, Gregory is a hyperbolic example of what Truffaut describes as children’s great powers of resistance and survival – a power that makes itself felt through the closing shot of Les Quatre Cents

75

Truffaut’s tribute to the Child Pictures? ‘Oscar the Whistler’ in L’Argent de poche (1976).

Coups, for example, as Truffaut’s camera comes to rest, briefly, on the face of Antoine Doinel, the elusive expression of pain and defiance to which it begins to give image. That gesture is repeated at the end of L’Enfant sauvage, its compelling depiction of the relation between Itard and Victor, as Truffaut’s camera holds on the face of the young boy, climbing the stairs by the side of Madame Guérin (Itard’s housekeeper during the period that Victor was treated by him). Itard’s promise to Victor – ‘Later we’ll resume our lessons’ – is voiced over the image of the young boy; inscrutable, Victor’s face is turned towards the camera, his look framed through the closure of an iris. Once again, the child’s face is the last we see of Truffaut’s film. It may not be easy to forget that image. If so, however mute he may be, Victor has the last word in L’Enfant sauvage. But what word is it? How do you begin to look at this child’s face? Or, to borrow Richard Rushton’s terms, what mode of intuitive seeing does the child’s face demand?34 Nearly 2,500 children were interviewed and photographed during the pre-production

76

Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (1969).

of L’Enfant sauvage. Five were selected to visit Paris for screen tests. On 6 June 1969 Truffaut declared that he had ‘found the little boy’: ‘He’s a very handsome child, but I think he really looks like he came out of the woods.’35 The look of the child, in fact, is vital to the visual aesthetic of this film, an aesthetic as indebted to Jean-Pierre Cargol’s face and body as to the rhythm of the iris that is Truffaut’s homage to the silent fades and transitions of early cinema – as if he is writing the problem of beginnings, of the shock of the new, at the heart of Victor’s story, into the very look of the film.

77

What does that look do to the Enlightenment project? Itard’s as well as Truffaut’s? Preoccupied by the task of bringing Victor into language, into the domains of culture and community, that question is part of the legacy of Truffaut’s film, its exploration of the reach, as well as the limit, of the desire to know – to understand, to educate, to document, to film – the child. In one of the most painful sequences in the film, Itard, at the limits of his patience with Victor, berates him for his failure to give the correct signs for the vowels repeated to him – failure all the more acute because it follows Victor’s first successful use of his wooden letters to spell out the word ‘lait’ (milk), and so to use his signs as a way of asking for what he wants. This brief sequence ends with the use of an iris to bring into close focus the letters, ‘lait’, that Victor has laid on a table, before plunging the screen into darkness. The total darkness that brings the scene of Victor’s success to its conclusion transfers the audience to an unsettling image of a child, blindfolded, awaiting instructions. Victor can

Pedagogy or sadism?

78

see nothing: darkness, the image of the black screen, belongs both to the film’s tribute to the origins of cinema and to its evocation of a child’s experience of the adult’s demand that he learn to speak, to communicate, to use words not as an expression of pleasure but as a means to an end. The transition is at once from praise (‘Very good, Victor, very good’) to pain (‘No, Victor, no’), as Itard’s interested, but unsmiling, assessment of his pupil is suddenly transformed into a destructive, yet restrained, attack on Victor, using the very signs, words, that the young boy is struggling to grasp: ‘Go ahead. Cry. I give up. I’m wasting my time with you. Sometimes I’m sorry that I know you. I’m discouraged, Victor, and disappointed.’ The camera holds for a moment on Itard as he begins to address himself beyond the frame of the film, beyond the scene of pedagagy with Victor – that is, to extend both frame and scene to include us, the spectators, via the voice-over that performs this role throughout the film. As Itard describes his state of mind, and its apparent effects on Victor – ‘I had barely spoken when I saw his chest heaving noisily and a stream of tears falling from underneath the blindfold’ – so the camera pans left, looking for the child, looking for the distress that is being described. Such a quest is deeply implicated in the curious scrutiny of Victor that Itard is now about to condemn: ‘Now ready to renounce the task I had imposed upon myself, seeing the time I had wasted and how deeply I regretted having known him, I condemned the curiosity of the men who had wrenched him away from his innocent and happy life.’

79

This scene borrows, more or less verbatim, from Itard’s ‘Report on Progress’ of 1806 (‘Go back to your forests and the wild life of yore’ was Itard’s response to his disappointment in the historical Victor).36 Yet there is not much in L’Enfant sauvage to support this sudden recourse to the well-worn image of a pre-lapsarian child, ‘innocent’ and ‘happy’ because natural. ‘For me,’ Truffaut explained, ‘Victor’s life in the forest was wholly abject. And everything that happened to him in society constituted progress’ – a judgement that may begin to clarify the differences between L’Enfant sauvage and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, or, more precisely, between the two directors’ conceptions of the ties between culture and childhood.37 Certainly, what we see at the beginning of L’Enfant sauvage recalls Rousseau’s depiction of the life of ‘natural man’, uncorrupted by civilization, surely, but fundamentally restricted to what Nancy Yousef has described as ‘animal tranquillity, characterized by a profound inertia and emptiness of mind’.38 It is an emptiness, an inertia, carried by the very first sights and sounds of Victor on film: in the opening sequence of L’Enfant sauvage, we get our first glimpse of a small form, scampering through the undergrowth, coming more fully into view as he crams his mouth full of mushrooms, runs to lap from a stream, and then, finally, scrambles into the high branches of a tree, where, as the camera pans to capture the light of a setting sun, he sits, rocking rhythmically – a shot that brings the image of the natural child into contact with the iconography of autistic pain: as with Les Quatre Cents Coups, Truffaut had consulted Fernand Deligny, well known in France for his pioneering work with autistic children, during the production of

80

the film. Barely visible as the camera draws back – visible, in fact, only as movement, as rhythm – the first images of the wild child disappear into the darkness of a second closing iris. To put these points another way: Itard’s attack, his disappointment, brings L’Enfant sauvage and its audience up against the question of what it means to remove a child from the life that he, or she, knows – a life that, however unknown, however terrible, it may appear to the world, has become the world for that child. The question haunts Truffaut’s film – not least through the afterlife of L’Enfant sauvage as, precisely, a form of therapeutic intervention in the public and professional understanding of another ‘wild’ childhood. Two months after Truffaut’s film opened the New York Film Festival in September 1970, the American media began to report the discovery of a young girl in Temple City, California: ‘Girl, 13, Prisoner Since Infancy, Deputies Charge; Parents Jailed’ ran the headline in the Los Angeles Times on 17 November that year. Again, the story of a child’s devastated life emerges through the media; the girl – ‘a small withered girl’ on the description of one of the first social workers to see her (the worker assumed that the girl was about six years old) – was admitted to Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles. She was malnourished, barely able to speak, incontinent; for eleven years, from the age of two, she had been confined in a bare room, tied to a toddler’s chair. Social workers reported that the girl could not feed herself or chew. She had few objects with which to occupy herself: cottage cheese containers, two plastic raincoats, a couple of spools of thread and copies of TV Guide with the pictures cut out. She had no

81

radio, no television. The window of her room had been almost completely covered up (two inches of sky, the wall of a neighbour’s house, may have been visible). At the age of 13, she appeared to understand only a few words, the angry and negative words that had been spoken to her. The girl would soon become known as ‘Genie’, perhaps the most famous ‘wild child’ of the twentieth century (in 2001 her ‘life’ became the subject of Harry Bromley Davenport’s feature-length Mockingbird Don’t Sing).39 Descriptions of the conditions in which Genie lived recall nothing so much as Mayor Binder’s proclamation, in which he set out Kaspar Hauser’s history prior to his appearance in Nuremberg. But Genie appears not to have been compared with Hauser. L’Enfant sauvage opened in Los Angeles at the same time as Genie’s story was being reported. Immediately, Truffaut’s Victor, or Victor-Itard, became one of the privileged points of cultural reference for what had happened to Genie, as well as for the prospects for her rehabilitation. It is widely known that the team of professionals studying Genie – the question of how far she was studied, rather than cared for, burns through recent discussions of her case – arranged for a private screening of Truffaut’s film at conference in May 1971. ‘The film worked its magic’, Benzaquén notes, ‘and the scientists identified Genie with Victor’ (Benzaquén quotes Howard Hansen, head of psychiatry at Childrens Hospital, as follows: ‘It [Truffaut’s film] was awe-inspiring to us because here was the first case that had been documented in any scientific way’). Reinforced by Jay Shurley, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, who

82

recalled that ‘the impact on the whole group was stunning’, Hansen’s comment suggests that the professionals’ identification with Itard – as scientist, as humanist, as a therapist who documents a case – was decisive to the subsequent identification of Genie with Victor.40 In other words, identification was with the relation between Itard and Victor, at least in part because the ‘Genie team’ inherited the scientific and therapeutic paradigms that Itard had helped to establish. In her reflections on Victor, Itard and Genie, Benzaquén underlines the importance of such professional identification to the enduring appeal of Victor’s story for those working in the fields of child psychology and child education. ‘Ultimately,’ she concludes, ‘with few exceptions, the appropriations and rereadings of the story presuppose and reproduce the glorification of Itard, at the cost of devaluing, debasing, or simply forgetting the wild boy.’41 It is an intriguing insight, not least because it draws attention to what L’Enfant sauvage does to Victor’s story, to the difference of that story in cinema. At issue is not whether Truffaut ‘amputated’ Victor’s life, concluding his film to suggest that the relationship between Victor and Itard would continue until the child’s rehabilitation was complete. On one view, that conclusion had severe implications for Genie. As Russ Rymer put it: ‘How much different would Genie’s story have been if the movie that, in Jean Butler’s [one of the Genie team] words “followed Itard’s case study to the letter”, had followed it to the end?’42 The ‘end’ of Victor’s story, on this telling, was not Itard’s commitment to continue his work with Victor – the final words of Truffaut’s film – but, more painfully, Itard’s withdrawal from

83

both pedagogic and personal involvement with Victor, who spent his more mundane adulthood in an annexe at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes, cared for by Madame Guérin. Victor died, aged 40, in 1828, twenty years after Itard’s final report. But that sense of an ending does not begin to address what happens when, adapting one of the founding texts of Enlightenment pedagogy to cinema, Truffaut invests and confronts the image of the child on screen. If, on one level, the question that is Victor’s face appears to have been screened out by what can be described as a knowing – or, at least, professionalized – look at L’Enfant sauvage, that face remains to be seen, and questioned, by Truffaut’s other audiences. Not, or not only, the object of a humanist knowledge, the image of Victor in L’Enfant sauvage turns his muteness, his face, into the image of an other scene – a beyond of language, of speech, if not of the call. Withdrawing from the remainder of Victor’s story, Truffaut opens cinema onto that scene, drawing his audience towards the limit of what can be known and shown of the child – more precisely, towards the child, the child’s face, as the very image of that limit. How different might Genie’s story have been if those charged with her rehabilitation had been more attentive to the silence of that final image on screen, to its resistance to interpretation, to our own investments in that resistance? It’s a rhetorical question – as well as a call for visual literacy – but one that can serve to draw attention to the stakes of Truffaut’s cinema at this point, its challenge, as well as its commitment, to the ongoing project of seeing and knowing the child. Nowhere, perhaps, is the conflict between the two – the

84

Enlightenment project, the experience of the (mute) child – more apparent than in the very final moments of Truffaut’s film. At once a moment in the emergence of psychic life and a state of mind and being that never goes away, it may be that the infans has a special, and probably finally elusive, tie to the various technologies of vision that have come to pervade the experience of everyday life throughout the twentieth century, and beyond. First times, first things: the idiom of the infans, its fascination, can be found at work across the field of vision: in the very structure of looking in cinema, in the image of the child, as each comes to carry the delights, as well as the terrors, of an elsewhere, of a way of being otherwise. Bordering on an otherness within, a space and time that we have all known without knowing it, this is a child that must be left behind – or, more dramatically, put to death, to murder – if we are to find our way into the worlds of language, culture and community, but that we must, too, continually renegotiate. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the spectacle of the child on screen has been one site of such negotiation, integral to the modern investigation of children and childhoods, its attempts to capture – to tell, to give image to – the child. No surprise, then, that infancy and death have been described as the two limits of an aesthetic grounded in knowing and showing the mind of another, or that the child should so often bring us up against the limits of language, of knowledge, of sexuality, of death. Such limits are inseparable from the concept of the infans, from modern constructions of the difference of the child, as at once known and not known, domestic and uncanny, lyrical and

85

Another blest babe? In L’Argent de poche, Lydie Richet’s pregnancy helps to frame the episodic narrative of the film.

atrocious. Something in the image – something in the image of the child – slips towards us, and away: the idiom of the infans, bound and, perhaps, unbound through the image. And, in particular, its spectacles of sexuality and death.

3

child, sexuality, image

‘You have the radiance and innocence of reinstated infant divinity showered again among the flowers of English meadows’: in a public lecture in Oxford in 1883, John Ruskin praised the work of the innovative and highly successful children’s illustrator Kate Greenaway (the first printing of 20,000 copies of her Under the Window in 1879 had sold out immediately). In private, Ruskin was pestering Greenaway to draw her little girls for him: ‘Will you – (it’s all for your own good!) – make her stand up and then draw her for me without a cap’, he wrote to Greenaway on 5 July 1883, ‘ – and, without her shoes, – (because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her – frock and frills? And let me see exactly how tall she is – and – how – round. It will be so good of you and for you – And to and for me.’1 It was a provocative request. One of the first illustrators to produce images of children for the new commercial markets – in children’s books, greetings cards, stationery, advertising pages – Greenaway was a major contributor to what has been described as the ‘Golden Age of the Illustrated Child’.2 ‘No one has given us such clear-eyed, soft-faced happy-hearted childhood’, wrote the

87

poet Austin Dobson, viewing the exhibition of Greenaway’s drawings for Under the Window at the Fine Arts Society in London in 1880, ‘or so poetically “apprehended” the coy reticences, the simplicities, and the small solemnities of little people’.3 A characteristic response to Greenaway’s images of childhood, Dobson’s comment also draws attention to the ambivalent quality displayed by the characters in Greenaway’s books: her children are ‘coy’, ‘arch’ (Dobson’s word), caught up in a contrast between the ‘naturalness’ of their childhood and the fact of being offered as a spectacle to the gaze. That this gaze was as likely to belong to an adult as a child – the ostensible reader of Greenaway’s books – was important to her success. According to her first biographers, what distinguished Greenaway from her peers – Randolph Caldecott and Walter Crane, for example – was that while they aimed to interest and amuse children, Greenaway ‘interested us in the children themselves’.4 Or, to put the point another way, Greenaway, one of the most famous illustrators of and for children, represents the child for the adult: capturing the childishness of children – ‘Greenaway’s images looked childlike’, as Anne Higgonet put it – her pictures solicit adult interest in looking at the child and her world.5 These ‘seductively pretty pictures’, as one critic has very recently described them, captivate their adult audience with a spectacle of childhood, childhood as spectacle, that can be difficult to distinguish from a scene of seduction: of the adult by the image of a child.6 In admiration of her drawings of children, Ruskin wrote to Greenaway in January 1880, initiating a correspondence

88

that would run for some twenty years. Not infrequently, his letters to Greenaway contain advice on how to improve her drawing skills and, in particular, her child figures. ‘But especially I do want more children as they are’, he wrote on 15 June 1883, ‘and that you should be able to show a pretty one without mittens and that you should be more interested in phases of character.’7 The natural form of the child’s body – arms, hands, faces, feet – was essential to Ruskin’s critical response to Greenaway’s drawings, and his irritation at her ability, or lack of it, to make an accurate copy of what she saw. ‘You should go to some watering place in August with fine sands, and draw no end of bare feet’, he instructed her, a few days after the thinly veiled request for a picture of a more naked Greenaway girl. What Greenaway should be drawing was ‘any actual piece of nature (however little) as it really is’ (an instruction to be found in one of Ruskin’s first letters to her in January 1880).8 To read Ruskin’s letters to Greenaway is to become aware of the convergence, as well as the tension, between his complex commitments to naturalism and his pleasures in Greenaway’s highly stylized drawings of children, especially female children. Sometimes wounded by Ruskin’s comments, unable to meet his demands for drawings of and from nature, from life, Greenaway continued to send him the pictures of little girls that so pleased him – a strategy to deflect his criticism (and, at times, his depression), of which Ruskin appears to have been very well aware. ‘But how you do work me with them’, he wrote on 11 January 1884, ‘ – never to see real ones! All the same, they do delight me – and are a new life to me – ’. ‘You really must draw her again

89

for me without any clothes,’ he responded to one such consoling picture a few days later, ‘because you’ve suggested a perfect coalheaver’s leg which I can’t think you meant! And you must draw your figures now undraped for a while.’9 This is a telling remark, in which the demands for naturalistic depiction devolve on the excited, and eroticized, longing to discover the dimensions of a fictional little girl, a picture, which breaks through in Ruskin’s prose: ‘And let me see exactly how tall she is – and – how – round. It will be so good of you and for you – And to and for me.’ What did Ruskin want to see? What was he looking for in Greenaway’s drawings of little girls? In what he might have described as the ‘mind’s eye’, a child is made to stand up so that Greenaway can draw her again – without her hat, without her shoes, without her clothes – and he, Ruskin, can see how round she is; or, perhaps, all around her. Peering beyond the frame of the picture, Ruskin was in the unusual position of being able to ask for it to be drawn again and again, so that the image of the child could be made to reflect more accurately the body of the actual child that was his implicit, but constant, reference. In other words, what he was shown prompted Ruskin to wonder about what he could not see, what was being concealed, or distorted, within the field of the visual itself (whether by Greenaway’s clumsiness or by Victorian conventions on dress and nudity). The dialectic between the two is complicated as Ruskin struggles to see what is there but, somehow, concealed ‘in’ the image – as if what lay beneath the lines and colours from which Greenaway’s sketches were formed was not a piece of

90

paper but the body of a child, waiting to be uncovered (‘let me see’ was his constant refrain). Above all, what his letters to Greenaway expose is the importance of the image – the sketch, the drawing – as well as the process of its production to Ruskin’s well-known fascination with little girls.10 Itemizing what Greenaway need not draw, Ruskin keeps the artist’s pencil, her aesthetic manipulation of the child, in view, while he plays with the vision of a little girl who has undressed, or been undressed, before him. Crucially, as his instructions to Greenaway accumulate, so Ruskin introduces an impression of sequence, of movement, into his letter that becomes part of its erotic impulse: making Greenaway’s hand – and, perhaps, Greenaway’s drawing – move, Ruskin could see more of the child as she was. Idiosyncratic in giving voice to his wish that Greenaway should draw her little girls unclothed – the wish that, despite the alibi of a naturalistic aesthetic, may announce the sexual theme – Ruskin was very much of his time in his desire to see more and more of the little girl, as well as in his commitments to a more ‘lifelike’ mode of representation. While Ruskin was poring over Greenaway’s sketches, for example, Muybridge was using his multiple cameras to produce pictures of children, unclothed and all round – ‘Child running’; ‘Child running after a man’; ‘Child crawling on hands and knees’ – although it is in his photographs of women that a sexualization belonging, it seems, to the very act of looking becomes most apparent. ‘Walking with high-heeled boots on’; ‘Two women walking arm in arm and turning around, one flirting a fan’; ‘Kneeling on right knee and scrubbing the floor’; ‘Getting out of bed and preparing to kneel’ give the

91

flavour of the narratives embedded in Female Nudes (it is worth noting that, in Muybridge’s photographs, it is women and children, not men, who crawl on hands and knees).11 From its inception, cinema was poised to respond to the elusive longing, at once gnostic and erotic, for the child that comes through in Ruskin’s letters (a few years later, he might have been describing a sketch for a slightly salacious animated film). Catching the child up into its claims to naturalism, early cinema delivered that child as object of the gaze: by the end of the 1890s, as we have seen, the child pictures would feature the bodies of babies and young children, sometimes, as in the following description of one early Biograph feature, in states of oddly suggestive undress. ‘Two babies in a nursery, in very abbreviated garments, playing with toys’ is how American Mutoscope and Biograph promoted Babies Playing on a Hot Day in 1899. Almost nothing, a tiny detail, embedded in an already brief advertisement, but the babies’ clothing, or lack of it, is singled out as part of the attraction offered by this film. (It appears to be part of a series of views exhibiting ‘hot babies’ produced by American Mutoscope and Biograph: Three Hot Babies and A Warm Baby with a Cold Deck were also released in 1899.) What is the significance, the ‘pull’, of a small child’s nudity for the public spectacle of cinema? What, if anything, are its audiences invited to see in the image of two almost naked infants? Little seems to be known about this particular film but, like Ruskin’s response to Greenaway’s drawings, the terms of its promotion draw attention to a form of investment by adults in the child’s nakedness as source of pleasure, interest and desire

92

that is not now easily separable from the issue of sexuality. That the image of the nude, or semi-clothed, child was ubiquitous in late Victorian and fin-de-siècle iconographies of childhood – iconographies with which cinema was immediately embroiled – has been central to recent (more or less polemical) constructions of the period as one in which, as Bram Dijkstra puts it, a genre of ‘crass child pornography disguised itself as a tribute to the ideal of innocence’.12 Matthew Maris’s L’Enfant couchée (1873), Bruno Piglhein’s Christmas Morning (c. 1890), Carl Larsson’s The Little Girls’ Room (c. 1895) and Susanne Daynes-Grassot’s Child Before the Mirror (1912) are amongst Dijkstra’s very striking examples of paintings and drawings in which the child appears to be sensualized, eroticized, often by analogy with the sexuality of the woman – herself often represented as a child. And not least, of course, in cinema, which was almost immediately caught up in the ambivalent erotics of a woman impersonating the child, the child impersonating the woman. ‘Mary Pickford, doll divine!’ exclaims Vachel Lindsay at the beginning of ‘To Mary Pickford, Moving Picture Actress’: Mary Pickford, doll divine, Year by year, and every day At the moving-picture play, You have been my valentine.13 Lindsay’s infatuation with Pickford, who, 17 years old when she made her first film in 1909, specialized in playing children, underlines the continuity between fin-de-siècle repre-

93

How old is she? ‘Little Mary’ plays another 12-year-old girl in William Beaudine’s Little Annie Rooney (1925)

sentations of childhood and the eroticization of the child on screen. In 1917, for example, Pickford, or ‘Little Mary’, played the role of a young girl in no less than three successful films: The Poor Little Rich Girl, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and A Little Princess. ‘The little girl made me’, as she comments, reflecting on her decision to leave the screen at the beginning of the 1930s. ‘I wasn’t waiting for the little girl to kill me.’14 Even Pickford, then – ‘Dimpled as no grown-folk are’, as Lindsay continues – cannot be a child forever. And the woman who has based her career, her unprecedented celebrity as America’s screen sweetheart, on her talent for impersonating little girls, must know when the game is up: the little girl can, as Pickford suggests, turn murderous. But who, or what, is desired in the image of Mary Pickford? On one view, Pickford’s career bears witness to a deeprooted nostalgia for a Victorian ideal of femininity: cast as child, the woman’s sexuality is contained, safe, made innocent. By the

94

same token, the popularity of ‘Little Mary’ has been said to expose the prevalence of a form of cultural paedophilia inhabiting the look at the child on screen. The fact that Mary Pickford is ‘really’ a woman, so the argument runs, can also be used to reassure a looking that might otherwise be forced to encounter its erotic interest in images of young girls and boys: in 1921 Pickford played the roles of both boy and mother in Little Lord Fauntleroy, a mix that underlines the mutability, or liminality, carried by Pickford’s sexuality on film. Is she a woman or a child? A girlish woman, or a womanly girl – or, a child-woman (to borrow Gaylyn Studlar’s recent characterization of Pickford’s appeal)?15 The questions continue to insist. Holding out the pleasures and possibilities of a body without sex, of a sex that does not yet know itself as such, cinema has a long history of investing the child – as image, as idea – as a figure for the instability, and indeterminacy, of sexuality and sexual identity. If, for example, it was Shirley Temple who inherited the legacy of Mary Pickford – Temple remade a number of Pickford’s films, including Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938), The Little Princess (1939) and Miss Annie Rooney (1942) – then part of what she took on was the work of embodying the woman in the child. Among Temple’s first roles was that of Charmaine in Charles Lamont’s War Babies (1932), the first in the series of onereel Baby Burlesks in which very young children, apparently aged between three and five, were cast in the roles of adults. In War Babies, Charmaine is a dancer, entertaining a group of soldiers, vying for her attention (with milk and oversize lollipops). In the

95

same year, Temple played La Belle Diaperina, modelled on Mae West’s Diamond Lil, in Glad Rags to Riches and, in 1933, Morelegs Sweettrick in Kid in Hollywood (both films belong to Lamont’s Burlesks series). It is evidence of our changing sensibilities towards children and sexuality that such images are now less likely to provoke laughter than a sense of unease. As Temple masquerades as prostitute, as exotic dancer, as sweetheart, it is difficult not to wonder about what the adult audience wants from this child – a question that, in fact, was raised by both Gilbert Seldes and Graham Greene in the 1930s. Greene’s career as a film reviewer was effectively brought to an end by his suggestion that, in Captain January, released in 1936, Temple, then nine years old, ‘wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich’.16 That Marlene Dietrich had been one of the models for Temple in the Baby Burlesks – by the mid-1930s, with the increasing influence of the industry Production Code, this series may well have seemed less respectable – was not enough to save Greene from the libel suit that forced his magazine, Night and Day, to close in 1937. He had, perhaps, come too close to exposing the simultaneous pleasure in, and denial of, the sexuality at work through Temple’s screen image. ‘Infancy’, Greene insisted, ‘is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult.’17 Greene’s suspicions about the motives of the middleaged men and clergymen (his categories) who pursued Temple on screen were met with some outrage. But Seldes, too, insisted on the similarity between Shirley Temple and Mae West, asking his readers to reflect on the power of Temple’s persona to

96

provoke what he described as the ‘growl of satisfaction [that] arises from the men in the audience’.18 It is a stark claim, juxtaposing Temple’s ‘celebrated dimpling and cuteness’ with a (collective) male sexuality that, groaning in response to her image, evokes the scene of a predatory, if inhibited, lust for the child – or, more precisely perhaps, for that woman in the child, the child in the woman. In 1956 Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll could be said to bring that mix of infancy and femininity to its limit – in particular, the advertising posters that cue the spectator into the film. Loosely covered, curled up on a child’s crib, a young blonde woman gazes towards the camera. Sucking her thumb, she is framed by the bold pink letters that proclaim both her name and

Film poster for Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956).

97

Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll. Baby Doll’s husband peeps at his wife through a hole in the wall: she is the very image of a sexuality at once feminine and infantile.

the title of the film: Baby Doll. Below that, we can read the premise of the story: ‘She’s nineteen. She makes her husband keep away – she won’t let the stranger go’.19 ‘Is it innocent? Is it sexual?’ Catherine Robson’s summary of the interpretative dilemma generated by Lewis Carroll’s numerous photographs of little girls – notably, his wish to photograph his child friends in their ‘favourite state of

98

nothing-on’ – identifies the terms through which discussion of representations of the child continue to take place.20 If such discussion appears often to be at an impasse, it may be because these terms – innocence, sexuality – are themselves so deeply implicated in the work of sustaining the ideal of childhood as symbol of the good, the natural, the pure: the Victorian ‘cult of the child’ that, more than a hundred years later, continues to help to shape our sensibilities towards children. In particular, the compulsion to render the child sexless, to present her nudity as symbol of her primordial innocence – the Edenic ignorance of procreation, of sexual desire – tends to have the effect of sexualizing the child through the look that comes at her or him. Repudiated in the object of vision, sexuality, that constant reference in notions of childhood innocence, can only rebound on the one who wants to look: to paint pictures, to make drawings, to take photographs and, now, to make films. Part of the significance of such constructions of the ties between sexuality and the child during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is that they bring into focus a number of questions for contemporary studies in visual culture. What does sexuality have to do with the image of a child? What does the idea of the child have to do with the sexuality of the image? Central to what has been described as the visual turn in contemporary cultural life, such questions sustain speculation about the charm, the fascination, exerted by the image in cinema (‘This quality’, as Morin has put it, ‘that is not in life but in the image of life’).21 As we have seen, the idea of cinema as a technology for the illusory reproduction of life may be one source of that fascination; an

99

intuition of the profound correspondence between cinema and mind, cinema and infancy, is another. But the topic of sexuality has also been vital to exploration of how the image works on film: the forms of looking it provokes, or with which it connives; the pleasures and anxieties it solicits. As such, critical discussion of cinema behaves like any other modern discourse. ‘In the space of a few centuries,’ as Michel Foucault suggests in The History of Sexuality in 1976, ‘a certain inclination has led us to direct the question of what we are, to sex.’22 Sex, sexuality: the ‘truths’ that emerge from discovery and discussion of the two have become ever more central to modern efforts to think about what it means to be human. Looking, its sources and significance, does not escape the trend: scopophilia – love of looking, pleasure in looking – has been drawn into the excitements of the sexual libido and tracked back into the earliest experiences of infancy and childhood. In particular, it was Sigmund Freud who changed the way we think about sexuality and childhood, sexuality and vision, when he made the connections among a child’s curiosity about the origins of life, the differences between bodies and the erotics of looking. ‘A thorough study of the sexual manifestations of childhood’, he urged in Three Essays on Sexuality in 1905 – a book that remains one of the most influential, and sometimes unmanageable, discussions of sexuality of the twentieth century – ‘would probably reveal the essential characters of the sexual instinct and would show us the course of its development and the way in which it is put together from various sources.’23 The implications of this statement continue to unsettle

100

Freud’s readers (or, more accurately, perhaps, those who inhabit the culture evoked by W. H. Auden’s ‘In Memoriam Sigmund Freud’: ‘To us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives’).24 To read Three Essays on Sexuality, edited and amended for more than twenty years, is to encounter Freud’s insistence on the child, and the infant, as a sexual, libidinal being; put differently, it is to encounter an approach to sexual life in which the concept of sexuality has been massively enlarged. No longer the preserve of adult men and women, driven by a natural attraction to one another – heterosexuality, Freud claims, is a problem that needs to be explained – sexuality is a diverse and wayward business. Men desire men, women long for other women; some people want both; others, only themselves. Objects of desire can be obscure. Even if men and women do desire one another, what they want to do is not necessarily subject to the familiar heterosexual imperatives of copulation and procreation. Voyeurism, fetishism, scopophilia, kissing, sadomasochism, masturbation (the list could go on): Freud gives each some due in his discussion of a heterosexual and homosexual erotics in which the human body is envisioned as a collection of erogenous zones, parts of the body – mouth, skin, penis, anus, clitoris, eyes – subject to particular forms of pleasure from the very beginnings of life. The wager of the concept of infantile sexuality is that it is the prototype, or paradigm, of an adult sexuality ‘put together’ from its diverse sources and pleasures. The sexual pleasures are, precisely, pluralized, sensual, but particular. Children’s interest

101

in reproductive sex – the question of their own origins, the differences between the sexes, their ‘sexual researches’ – may be there, but it is not the only, certainly not the privileged, idea of a young child’s libidinal pleasure. The eroticism of infantile life, in other words, is not reducible to what Freud would describe as the ‘popular sense’ of sex – heterosexual coitus – there, and waiting, to come into force (an incomplete precursor to adult sexuality, as it were).25 In this sense, you cannot read Freud simply for an account of the precociously sexual child, seducing the adult into what he, or she, wants. Nor, given his emphasis on the trauma of sexuality for the child, is he easy to read on the side of a normative account of sexual liberation.26 But, in breaking the connection between sexuality and reproduction, Freud underlines the various – or, more strongly, the perverse – quality of the sexual as such. Divorced from biological function, sexuality has no one object, no one aim, no one place. Freud can find it everywhere, in every human activity, every human pleasure, every human distress (which is not to say, as some of its opponents have claimed, that psychoanalysis explains everything by sex). In fact, discovering sexuality in everything – his examples range from the rhythmic rocking of the body to verbal disputes, from romping to intellectual effort – Freud puts considerable strain on the very concept he is attempting to elucidate. What sexuality means for psychoanalysis can become as obscure as the many pleasures it claims to track. Clearly, Freud was conforming to that profoundly modern impulse to cast the search for the self, for the other, in the form of a quest for the child – a quest that psychoanalysis

102

runs into the equally modern compulsion to discover the truth of the self in sex. In other words, at the same time as he expanded the concept of sexuality, Freud devolved the question of sex onto the child, onto the origins of selfhood in infantile life. It may be that the erogenous zones are the privileged sites of such sexuality: the image of a baby, falling into blissful sleep at the breast from which he has been sucking, is the prototype of sexual satisfaction in Three Essays. But it is clear, too, that any part, any process, of the body can release the disturbance that Freud called sexual. Whether pleasurable or distressing, that disturbance becomes the very definition of sexuality, and its arousing, sometimes shattering, effects on the self.27 In its very strangeness, it is this account of the sexual that begins to clarify Freud’s uses of the child as a means to explore the vicissitudes of eroticism in adult life – and, in particular, his turn to the infant as the very image of susceptibility to that shattering. Preoccupied by the idea of the baby throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, Freud, like cinema, was in keeping with a broad range of social, cultural and political practices deeply engaged by ideas and images of childhood. ‘We find the child’, he wrote in his ground-breaking The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1900, ‘and the child’s impulses, still living on in the dream.’28 This is a crucial claim in a book that can be read as one of the founding statements on childhood and visuality in the twentieth century: documenting Freud’s discovery of the unconscious mind, The Interpretation of Dreams discloses the figure of the baby, in the throes of wishful hallucination, at the very origins of the human mind. The dream, Freud maintains,

103

has a pronounced preference for ideas and feelings that can be represented in visual form, a preference that he tracks back to the very earliest experiences of infantile life: hallucination, the mind’s first attempt at wishing. At the heart of Freud’s thinking on dreams, on wishing, is the idea of a baby, hungry, helpless, screaming: defenceless in the face of her every need, the baby depends on someone (or something) to help her to suck, to feed, to sleep, to play.29 It is a more or less familiar story (the infant, in the words of the eighteenth-century French naturalist, GeorgesLouis Leclerc, is ‘an image of misery and pain’).30 But Freud adds another dimension to this by suggesting that what the baby wants is not, or not only, relief from painful sensations of need but the memory of a previous experience of satisfaction. Or, to put the point another way: agitated, but powerless, Freud’s baby turns in on herself, opens up the possibility of a space for the mind, in her attempts to assuage her distress by conjuring up the mental image of former pleasures. ‘An impulse of this kind,’ Freud clarifies, ‘is what we call a wish.’31 An imaginary scene of satisfaction – to use the more familiar word, a fantasy – comes to displace the unbearable pressure of need; the very model of the fantasizing – dreaming, daydreaming – subject for Freud, the hallucinatory wishing of infancy is the product of the baby’s first attempts to help herself. The hallucinating baby can be said to put Freud on the track of an unconscious bound to pleasure and to image. Again, as one of the first resources of the human mind, the image retains a privileged point of contact with the worlds of infancy

104

and childhood (the illusory and animated world of the dream – the normal mode of hallucination, you might say – is Freud’s initial evidence for that claim). Certainly, Freud’s claims for the connection between the helplessness of the human infant and the predominance of the image in the formation of her mind resonate with the idea of the child’s relation to the visual discussed in the previous chapters. Important, too, is that idea of the baby as especially susceptible to agitation, to shock, to stimulus – the terms, as we have seen, of visual modernity – both from without and within. The infant is in a state of being overwhelmed, a state to which the image, the formation of images, is a protective, as well as a potentially pleasurable, response. At this point, Freud prepares the ground for his extension of the concept of sexuality – sexuality as stimulation, as shattering – as well as the sexualization of the visual: through Freud’s work, the act of perception is inseparable from the domains of wishing, of fantasy, as modes of pleasure and protection (the binding of stimulation, its distresses as well as its delights). As an institution devoted to stimulating, to pleasuring, the eye, cinema is deeply embroiled in Freud’s rethinking of the concepts of sexuality and childhood. The pleasures of an explicitly sexual form of looking, voyeurism, were among the first themes of Victorian cinema: in 1896 Le Coucher de la mariée drew on the archetypal scene of voyeurism in which a woman undresses under the (unseen by her) gaze of a man. It was probably the first of many so-called through-the-keyhole films, diversified to include features such as George Albert Smith’s As Seen Through

105

The pleasures of voyeurism. George Albert Smith, As Seen through a Telescope (1900).

a Telescope (also known as The Professor and his Field Glass) of 1900, which yields, for both the professor and the film’s spectators, a ‘very pretty ankle shot at short range’ (this was part of Edison’s promotion of the film). Cinema, in other words, is very conscious of the forms of sexual looking it invites, and which play across different genres and ‘moods’. In the first decade or so of film production, optical devices – telescopes, spyglasses, cameras – played a strategic part in the presentation of looking on screen, while the image of peeping through a keyhole to spy on and so to expose what lay behind closed doors became ubiquitous. In 1903, for example, Biograph’s A Search for Evidence, described as the very acme of the genre, is a sequence of seven scenes in which a deceived wife and her private detective peer through the

106

keyholes of several doors in an attempt to discover the husband in flagrante delicto (he and his lover are revealed, of course, behind the very last door). It is in this general, frequently comic, context of sexual peeping that one image from Edwin Porter’s popular The ‘Teddy’ Bears, released in 1907, stands out. Advertised as a ‘laughable satire on the popular craze’ – that is, the ‘teddy bear’ craze, provoked by President Theodore Roosevelt’s refusal to shoot a bear cub while on a hunting expedition – The ‘Teddy’ Bears is an odd film, adapting the well-known children’s story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ to include a contemporary political reference. It was, at times, reviewed as a children’s film gone slightly awry: the confusion of tongues between adult and child genres may well be symptomatic.32 About thirteen minutes long, the film offers a remarkable shot of Goldilocks in profile towards the left of the frame, looking avidly through a peephole. It is the classic position of the male voyeur, displaced onto the young girl, captivated, as is quickly revealed, by the sight of six animated teddy bears standing in a row (the shot through the keyhole). It is the scene of a child’s play. But part of the satire, its ‘laugh’, perhaps, is that Porter is able to exploit the established association between the peephole and sexual looking to present an image of the child as voyeur, and then to retract it as the camera reveals the object of the girl’s look: the animated, and much-acclaimed, teddy bears (not, in any straightforward way at least, an image of sexuality). Child as object of the gaze; child as voyeur – with that picture of Goldilocks, Porter gives momentary image to a charac-

107

teristic preoccupation with sexuality and childhood in modern cultural life. Because she is a child, Goldilocks does not see a woman, undressing for her gaze. Rather, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, she discovers a type of Wonderland, suddenly become murderous when she is pursued by the family of bears. In his slightly earlier film, The Seven Ages (1905), Porter explored the popular topic of the ‘seven ages of man’ through scenes of a couple kissing, beginning with the couple as two toddlers, one of whom (a boy?) leans towards the little girl, curled up on a chair, as the camera moves towards a medium close-up view of the kiss. Explicitly troping the very popular Edison short The May Irwin Kiss (1896), the film also draws on an established iconography of the child as one who likes to mime the worlds of adults, playing at being ‘grown-up’ by, in this instance, playing with their future as a couple. But whatever its comedy, the image of a peeping child, like the shots of two children kissing, has the potential both to secure and to disturb that cherished notion of childhood as a time and space apart. Evoking as they do not only the children’s libidinal pleasure in one another (if that is what it is) but also the child’s sexual interest in the adult world, such images bring into focus the difficult relation between adult and child on the issue of sexuality. Such miming and playing depend, of course, on the possibility of making a distinction between those two worlds: the idea of a difference between majority and minority for persons, between adult and child, makes the acts that children do look the same but mean something different.33 Like The ‘Teddy’ Bears, The Seven Ages makes its play with that difference, the ideas of innocence and experience on which it draws. If the idea

108

that children are different from adults is fundamental to the modern period, then the regulation of sexuality and sexual knowledge has become increasingly important to the work of making that distinction – so much so, in fact, that the child who ‘knows’ sex can become the very symbol of a childhood lost. In 1998 Adrian Lyne concluded his screen adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita with a scene in which Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons), pursued for the murder of Quilty, gazes out across a valley, listening to the sound of children’s voices, faint at first, but growing louder, competing with Humbert’s voice-over as the camera holds on his bloodied face: ‘What I heard then was the melody of children at play, nothing but that. And I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that chorus.’ Lolita, or childhood destroyed (the acknowledgement is there, too, in Nabokov’s prose, condensed through this scene). ‘Remember she is only a child’, Humbert Humbert reminds himself as his 11-year-old stepdaughter, Lolita, passing the time on a tedious car journey, taunts him with the fact that, not having kissed her, he has ceased to care for her.34 First published in Paris in 1955, Nabokov’s Lolita, written out of the borderline between literature and pornography, remains one of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century for its depiction of a man’s sexual desire for, and designs on, a young girl who, the narrator insists, seduces him: ‘I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.’35 But even Humbert Humbert, like the novel in which he appears, knows that for a child, when it comes to the question of sex, getting what she asks

109

‘The filthiest book I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography’: John Gordon, denouncing Nabokov’s Lolita in the Sunday Express, 29 January 1956.

110

for is not the same as getting what she wants. ‘While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids’, Humbert muses, as Lolita tells him where they must start, ‘she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid’s life and mine.’36 Discrepancy – a code, perhaps, for passion, or rape? Certainly for a difference that cannot be reconciled. The theme recurs through contemporary depictions of the ties between childhood and sexuality, often running into the conviction that the child – the idea of the child, but also actual children – is at risk, sexual risk, from the eroticized commodification of the image through the visual media: photography, cinema and, now, virtual technologies of the image. In this context, the advertisement for Stanley Kubrick’s film Lolita, released to considerable controversy in 1962, remains one of the most scandalous images in the history of cinema. ‘How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?’ runs the caption, printed to one side of the image of a young girl, looking out from over the top of a pair of red, heartshaped sunglasses, her red lipsticked lips sucking a lollipop (warnings, ‘The Book is Banned’ and ‘Not Suitable for Children’, appear on some versions of this poster). Appearing in various forms – the poster has been cropped, re-framed and retouched for the various distribution of Kubrick’s film since its first release – it is an image now synonymous with the commodification of adolescent sensuousness for the (older) male viewer. Whatever the sophistication of Nabokov’s prose, or, indeed, of the scenarios screened by Kubrick and Lyne, it is this image that has come to stand for the phenomenon of the ‘Lolita’ in the public domain – and so to reach an

111

audience, including children, far wider than either the novel or both films. Printed with the caption, which is also part of the original trailer for the film, it is an advertisement that draws attention to the wager of cinema as such. Can cinema do it? Has cinema done it? ‘How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?’ To make, however, is not to screen. Before the film was passed by the British Board of Film Censors in 1961, Christian Action had petitioned against its classification on the grounds that any filmed version of Nabokov’s novel ‘must be a provocation of the kind that might lead to rape and even murder’.37 This is a strong statement that, once again, gives voice to the ongoing belief that, in its unique verisimilitude, the filmed image can be uniquely provocative (a provocation aimed, in this instance, at the relation between male spectators and the adolescent girl). More than thirty years later, considering the legality of Lyne’s film, the (renamed) British Board of Film Classification (bbfc) issued a lengthy statement in support of its decision to classify the film, referring both to the fact that Lyne had used a body double for the actress, Dominique Swain, who played Lolita – I will come back to this – and to the Board’s own considerations of the film’s potential effects beyond the issue of its technical legality. ‘The Board also consulted two distinguished child psychiatrists,’ runs this carefully worded statement, ‘one a specialist in child sexual abuse, who both agreed with the Board’s legal advisers that the film was unlikely to encourage paedophile behaviour or put children at risk’ (my italics).38 Lolita, a risk to the child both on and off screen? Appealing to the rights of adult cinema-goers to judge this film

112

for themselves (‘the new Lolita is a challenging and compassionate treatment of an established literary classic’), the Board was nonetheless concerned to emphasize that it had taken into account what it described as the ‘public’s revulsion at the widespread incidence of paedophile behaviour’ (an accounting that, perhaps oddly, was then said to be demonstrated by the decision to restrict viewing to adults over the age of 18). But, crucially, the idea that the photograph or film can provide an overwhelming form of incitement to sexuality continues to hold here. In other words, shades of Münsterberg persist. And Lolita – as book, on film – continues to act as the paradigm through which to refer to the difficulty of childhood, sexuality and the visual. ‘I had had some experience in my life of pederosis,’ muses Humbert Humbert, reflecting on the passion he has conceived for ‘Lo’; ‘had visually possessed dappled nymphets in parks.’39 This is one of several moments in which Nabokov’s prose gives expression to the desire that so troubles current discussion of what it means to look sexually, almost demonically, at a child. What is ‘visual possession’? What form of sexual possession of the young girl can take place through the act of looking? Notably, Lyne’s Lolita locates erotic obscenity not, or not only, in a middle-aged man’s love for young girls – opening with the scene of Humbert’s doomed first love, the film casts his passion for Lolita as an expression of his permanent adolescence – but also in the act of filming them, of turning the young girl into a pornographic object on screen. This is an obscenity reserved for Quilty against whom Humbert’s passion for Lolita can then be redefined. ‘Well, everybody knew he liked young girls’, Lolita tells Humbert in the

113

The pornography of the filmmaker. Adrian Lyne, Lolita (1998).

course of their final meeting. ‘He used to film ’em, over in his mansion . . . film the whole thing.’ That Lyne makes so much more of this than Kubrick – in the final scenes, Quilty is revealed as the very type of the child pornographer – reflects on how, in the mid-1990s, Lolita was caught up in the formulation and application of the new laws on child pornography on both sides of the Atlantic. But if what distinguishes the pornographic form of paedophilia (Quilty) from its more loving variant (Humbert) is the act of filming young girls, then how do you tell the difference between Lyne and Quilty? Between Lolita and the genre of child pornography? Between the spectator (of Lolita) and the paedophile? In the first, and material, instance, by using a body double to represent the adolescent girl in her overtly sexual encounters with Humbert. 15 years old when she was first cast in the role of Lolita, Swain was legally under-age in terms of the Protection of Children Act

114

1978 – first introduced in the United Kingdom in 1978, and variously amended since, the Act made it an offence to show a sexual image of anyone under the age of 16 – and, in the United States, the Child Pornography Prevention Act (cppa), passed in 1996. In the United States, the body double was not enough to defend Lyne’s filmmaking against the charge of pornography (no major Hollywood studio would release the film). Although subsequently challenged as unconstitutional under the First Amendment, at the time of filming Lolita two provisions of the cppa restricting the production of images that appear to depict children but do not were in force (that is, restrictions on virtual child pornography, or images in which youthful-looking adults take on the role of children or teenagers). If what is happening on screen looks like a sexual encounter between a teenage girl and a middleaged man, then, in the initial terms of the cppa, it is a sexual encounter between a teenage girl and a middle-aged man. That the young girl, or her body double, might be acting appears to be of no relevance here; as represented by a child, defined in legal terms, a sexual act is, precisely, not that; it cannot be performed, enacted, or played with: the very presence of the body double, to be singled out by the bbfc as a sign of Lyne’s carefulness, is evidence of that. At the level of production, then, Lyne conformed to the requirements of the law. But, in their thoroughgoing consistency, both the Protection of Children Act and the Child Pornography Prevention Act tangle with the question of reception, of what is seen, or thought to be seen, in the image rather than what has actually been filmed. As recently as 2000, in an

115

otherwise carefully researched article on the application of child pornography law in England and Wales, for example, Lolita was used as evidence of a supposedly widespread sexual abuse of children through cinema. ‘The term “child pornography” is an oxymoron’, wrote Susan S. M. Edwards, introducing the question of what it means to prosecute child pornography as itself a form of sexual abuse. ‘“Child pornography” is a record of the systematic rape, abuse and torture of children on film and photograph, and other electronic means.’40 Whatever the notorious difficulty of defining pornography, this use of the idea of the photograph – whether still or moving – as a form of visual witnessing has been decisive to discussions of sexuality and representation (to push the point, to the crisis in the representation of childhood and sexuality). That Edwards, like the Child Protection Act, aims beyond the scenario in which a child is abused in the process of producing a film, is clear from her immediate recourse to Lolita as the privileged example – in this article, the only example – of the pornographic abuses of children on film (as if the naturalism of cinema makes it difficult to make the distinction between the picture of a child and what has happened to an actual child). ‘The sexual abuse of children’, she concluded, ‘is extensive and widely disseminated in film (Lolita), in photographs accessed by computer . . . and disseminated on the internet.’41 It is not unusual to find Lolita cited as evidence of a sexual fantasy in which a child is cast as seducer. But to include Lolita as evidence of the sexual abuse of children is to run its fictionalization of a man’s desire for an adolescent girl into, say,

116

the ‘homemade’ videos and photographs of children for the production or possession of which the defendants discussed by Edwards are frequently on trial. At issue is not, or not only, the intention of the director (or photographer) or what has, or has not, happened to the child in the process of producing the image. What matters, rather, is the image itself: the ‘indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph’ – to which film is, in law, assimilated – described by amendments to the Protection of Children Act in 1988 and 1994.42 In both the United Kingdom and the United States, the general direction of this legislation is to turn the problem of sexuality and image in relation to the child over to the judgement of ‘right-thinking people’: ‘If the photograph is one which right-thinking people would regard as indecent,’ according to one influential recent decision, ‘the motivation of the original taker, in our view, cannot be a relevant matter.’43 At stake is what this ruling describes as the permanence of the photograph, its reproducible life beyond the immediate context of its production (that is, the desire, sexual or otherwise, that may have prompted the photographer; the consent, or lack of it, of the children involved; the purposes for which the image is intended). Able to be passed from one person to another, from one social and cultural context to another, the photograph can be dispersed across moments in time to gather its sometimes wayward, always unpredictable, audiences. Who knows who might be looking? Or what they might think they are looking at? Thus that recourse to the indecency of the photograph as such, the appeal to ‘right-thinking people’ – that is, to notions of sexual propriety and public reason – to think right about the

117

image of the child. To bring sexuality and the image back to reason, as it were, in the name of the child. Such an appeal brings right to the fore the sheer complexity of the image of the child’s body in the public domain – especially the difficulty of knowing how to make the distinctions between an immediate visual intimacy with the bodies and faces of children and a pornographic picture. The question burns through critical discussion of Sally Mann’s profoundly unsentimental photographs of her own children – images suffused not only with a form of maternal desire for the body of the child but also an equally maternal anxiety for its vulnerability.44 Let us note, too, that Dobson’s enthusiastic response to the ‘coyness’ exhibited by Greenaway’s drawings might now be enough to criminalize a photographic image of a child. If, as various critics have pointed out, there is a widespread tendency to find sexuality – more specifically, paedophilic sexuality – across the visual field, then the problem may be not, or not only, how to judge the indecency of a particular photograph but the possibility of producing a decent image of a child at all. Put the emphasis on the dissemination of the photograph – its autonomy vis-à-vis its producers, its permanence, its reproducibility – and what image could not, in principle, become subject to the adult sexual imagination (however ‘innocent’, in this rhetoric, the intentions of its makers)? The question is anticipated by the scene in Kubrick’s Lolita when Humbert, making (more or less) unwilling love to his wife, gazes at the photograph of Lolita placed on the table by Charlotte’s side of the bed: in effect, an unloving mother’s photograph of her daughter – close-up, on her face – has

118

Family photograph or pornographic picture? Stanley Kubrick, Lolita (1962).

become a prop to the sexual fantasy that sustains the reality of this marital bed. Family photograph or pornographic picture? Or, what do you do with the (adult) sexual imagination when it comes to the image of a child? In Kubrick’s Lolita – to broaden the point, the phenomenon of Lolita – the question is still bound by the figure of the seductive young girl. ‘Perhaps, in all innocence, she is the temptress and not the man’, as the author of The Facts of Sex, a sex education text of 1970, put it, speculating on the active sexuality of young girls. That the writer depended on the fiction put forward by Nabokov is apparent: ‘The novel Lolita . . . describes what may well happen’.45 In other words, the limit to the adult sexual imagination is the child who tempts; this is, perhaps, one of the primary cultural functions of the Lolita, her image as sexual being (‘I’m not a baby’ the declaration of David Slade’s unsettling Hard Candy, released in 2005, can be described as a forceful intervention against that function – as well as a renewed expression of the fantasia of the womanly child.)

119

But that limitation depends on the notion of the child as sexual agent in relation to an adult, an agency that, since the 1970s, has become increasingly difficult to credit, or even to think. Again, it is not that sexuality is simply denied in children – although it may be – but that adult sexuality has become ever more difficult to separate from the issues of power and violence (the feminist critique of rape and, by extension, the sexual abuse of children has been important to this intellectual, social and political shift). It is a theme that sustains, for example, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence, released in 2004: drawing on both the legacy of cinema’s fetishization of the young girl and a contemporary pressure towards ever more vigilant, ever more sexually self-conscious, looking at children, Innocence creates a remarkably suspenseful depiction of a boarding school for girls (though the idea of the boarding school does not quite capture the strangeness of the world invested by the film: aged between six and eleven,

The death of childhood? Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (2004).

120

the new girls arrive in coffins, and leave, it seems, with the onset of puberty). ‘Great claims have been made for this movie’, wrote Philip French, striking a note that ran through initial reception of the film. ‘I found it distinctly creepy and wonder about the kind of audiences it might attract.’46 Such suspense, such wondering, owes much to the (frustrated, in this instance) expectation that a desiring, but illicit, look at the young girl frames what is passing across the screen of Innocence. As if reading from the script of the bbfc’s statement on Lyne’s Lolita, French looks for the paedophilic gaze as cause and, presumably, as construct of Hadzihalilovic’s film. In other words, the spectacle of the sexual child is one of the effects of the expansion of the surveillance of images of children; children are sexualized through the discourses of child protection, their proliferation of anxiety not, or not only, about what adults do to children but how they look at them – as if the sexuality of looking becomes unbearable when it satisfies itself in the image of the child.47 This sexual imagination has become one of the primary dreads of contemporary cultural life as, since the 1970s, the sexual abuse of children has come to the forefront of public concern. Often adapting novels and memoirs to the screen, both independent and mainstream cinemas have grappled with that concern, sometimes embedding themselves in broader discussion of sexuality and the visual commodification of the child. Towards the beginning of Todd Solondz’s Happiness, released in 2000, for example, one of the protagonists, Bill Maplewood, buys a copy of Kool magazine – or, more accurately, the promise

121

of its lurid green-purple cover: ‘more gorgeous creatures!!!’ inside. Together with the capitalized self-advertising – ‘prizes, posters, pin-ups & more!!!’; ‘win a date’ – the colour photographs of three adolescent boys announce the more licit sexual markets for Kool: the adolescent girl, possibly the queer teenage boy. Leaving the shop to masturbate urgently, compulsively, in the back of his car, Bill embodies its less public, but perhaps no less commercial, audience of adult men in search of images of beautiful boys. No clandestine publication, Kool participates in an ongoing sexualization of the adolescent and, increasingly, the preteenage child across a range of commercial forms and markets. In Happiness, the magazine cues the sexuality of a man who listens professionally, if distractedly, to the violence of his patient’s

The commodification of the child? Todd Solondz, Happiness (2000).

122

heterosexual fantasy before screening his own dream of apparently random mass murder. Bill, a therapist, is seen talking to his own therapist about the dream that, in fact, occupies the diegetic reality of the film. His attention caught by the sight of two young men, walking hand in hand through the idyllic greenery of a public park, Bill begins to gun down the men and women around him until he is left standing alone among the dead and wounded. The camera hovering above the scene shows one of the two men at the beginning of the sequence crying over the body of his (presumably) dead lover; he is dressed identically to Bill. On one level, Bill’s masturbation, our first encounter with the paedophilic desire so important to the controversy of this film, is one consequence of the almost indescribable mix of sentimentality and aggression that characterizes the opening sequences of Happiness – as if Bill is exploding in response to what he, like the audience, is asked to absorb by the film. Random, mutable, absent – there is ‘no sex’ between Bill and his wife; his patient fantasizes about ramming his penis into a woman; Billy, his adolescent son, is riven by anxiety about ejaculation (‘I’m not normal’) – the idea of the sexual as a problem is part of the opening wager of Happiness, its contribution to the representation of sexuality in contemporary and independent cinema. In this context, the father who wants to have sex with pre-teen boys – though not, it should be said, with his son – takes up his place in a culture marked by the waywardness of the sexual. That there is no ‘normal’ sexual relation against which Bill can fail is part of the challenge of Happiness, its capacity, against the cultural odds, to humanize the paedophilic imagination.

123

Striking a rather different note, Nicole Kassell’s The Woodsman, also released in 2004, puts the question of looking at the very heart of its exploration of the rehabilitation of a convicted sex offender, Walter (played by Kevin Bacon). Punctuating the film is Walter’s look through the window of his small apartment, a window that overlooks a grade school, its playground alternately noisy with the sound of children playing, or empty, gated and locked against the outside world. ‘I watch the kids arrive at school’, is the first sentence that Walter pens in the journal that his therapist has asked him to write as a means to reflect on his sexuality, as well as a defence against the threat of his reoffending. Though the details of Walter’s crimes are never revealed – ‘I molested little girls’, he tells his girlfriend, Vicki. ‘It’s not what you think. I never hurt them. Never’ – that possibility of a sexual encounter between the older man and a young girl is vital to the drama of the film, a drama that Kassell runs in (at least) two directions. On the one hand, Walter notices someone else watching the children in the playground, a man – ‘I call him Candy’ – who comes to symbolize a predatory, and homosexual, form of paedophilia. At the climax of the film, as Walter attacks Candy, his – Candy’s – face is replaced, momentarily, with Walter’s own. Attacking the paedophile, in other words, he can be attacking only himself, or, that part of himself that cannot be distinguished from this man who, as the police will later reveal, is wanted in Virginia for the rape of a boy. On the other hand, deploying the visual conventions of the horror genre – at one point, a camera tracks at speed through the forest (shades of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead of 1981) –

124

Kassell screens a version of Little Red Riding Hood, with a young girl, Robin, as lure to Walter’s woodsman. After his first sight of Robin on a bus, whether or not Walter will follow this girl, dressed in a red coat, becomes the overwhelming question of the film. When, finally, the bus moves off to reveal Walter standing motionless, but purposeful, on the edge of the sidewalk, The Woodsman confronts its audience with the bleak presumption that men like Walter end up ‘back there’, in prison, beyond redemption. But, too, part of the challenge of the scenes between Walter and Robin belongs to the fact that it is here, in the woods, with a young girl, that he smiles (‘One of the saddest things,’ as Kassell puts it in her commentary on the film, ‘is that he is more comfortable with children’). That challenge belongs, too, to the understanding that begins to emerge between them when, accepting that Robin does not want to sit on his lap, Walter discovers in conversation that she is being sexually abused by her father. Walter, of course, knows what to ask: ‘Does he move his legs in funny ways?’ (a reference back to Lolita?). But the scene is also part of the pervasive sense of sexual threat to the child in which The Woodsman is embroiled, in common with Happiness and, amongst others, John N. Smith’s The Boys of St Vincent (1992), Anjelica Huston’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1996), Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2003) and Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004). If not home, where is it safe for the child? In the course of the film, Walter’s lover reveals that she, too, was molested by her three brothers. But, she insists, she loves her brothers: ‘They’re strong gentle men, with families of their own’ – another moment in

125

which contemporary depictions of paedophilia place that desire, firmly, within the home. ‘Go home, Robin.’ In this context, releasing her from the immediate threat of his own desire, Walter’s advice to the young girl can only strike the note of desolation carried, too, by the visual surface of this film. Largely bleached of colours, The Woodsman is characterized by tones of blue, grey and green. The most notable exceptions to this are the red ball that appears to haunt Walter – rolling towards him through a closed school gate, for example, it comes to stand for his memory of the girl he has molested – and Robin’s red coat. But these are signs – the ball, the red coat, the colour red – that bring with them the burden of cinematic history as well as cultural associations with a transgressive female sexuality. It was, of course, Fritz Lang’s M, first released in 1931, that introduced the rolling ball as the classic signifier of the death of a child, of a paedophilic desire for a child that can only be transformed into murder (I will come back to this film in the next chapter). But, too, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) forges the connections between the sexualization of a young girl’s death – the film is renowned for its realistic depiction of the lovemaking that takes place between the bereaved couple after the mother has been assured that her dead daughter is with them, can see them – and the scene of grotesque murder: the dead child who, dressed in her red coat, drowns at the beginning of the film is uncannily doubled by the dwarfish old woman – dressed in a red cloak and mistaken for a child – who leads the girl’s father to his own death. His wife’s cry, ‘Darlings!’, as she stands at the gate of the Venetian building in which he meets his

126

fate only underlines the identification between child and murder, child and death, to which the film stakes its memorable claims. This identification tends to re-inflect the death of the daughter at the beginning of the film from loss to threat, from death to warning, or, perhaps, recasts the child as both victim and vehicle of death. Either way, both M and Don’t Look Now help to over-determine the significance of the red ball as it rolls towards Walter and, in one especially fraught sequence, rests motionless on the floor of his apartment as a young girl walks away from it, apparently into Walter’s bedroom. It is as if the threat of death suffuses the adult’s sexual desire for a child – the death of the child, certainly, but even more, perhaps, the death of childhood. Can a child survive the sexual? The question haunts the visual depiction of the ties between sexuality and childhood, driving sexuality away from the child. ‘Precocious’ is the only word used by the British Board of Film Classification to describe Lolita, to name her sexuality as premature, too knowing for her age (it may be worth noting that the girl’s sexual agency can emerge, still, under the cover of the Lolita phenomenon). In other words, she is supposed to be not like other girls, the girls prohibited from seeing her on screen, whose innocence is secured again by comparison with Lolita. In its brief advice to consumers, the Board notes that Lyne’s Lolita was certificated ‘18’ on the basis of its destructive sexual relationship, sexual situations and one scene of violence (presumably, the grotesque depiction of Quilty’s murder; by contrast, Kubrick’s Lolita is currently classified as ‘15’ for the home video market). Film classification is, of course, about regulating what children can,

127

and cannot, look at on screen, as well as reinforcing the distinctions between adults and children as spectators of cinema. In this instance, what adults can see, and know, about sex is not for children; in particular, the destructiveness that ensures the moral probity of Lyne’s Lolita – the relationship between Humbert and Lolita, on the Board’s view, is shown to be both disastrous and wrong – helps to ensure that the film is deemed unsuitable for children, or adolescents. In other words, what defines an adult in this context – the context of child, sex, cinema – is not only the freedom to decide whether or not to view Lyne’s film, but also the capacity to know what to do with that connivance between sexuality and destruction – a sexuality beyond reason, beyond the self-interested attachment to life – that is seen to be at the heart of its properly moral and careful response to paedophilic desire. But what sense might a spectator who is not an adult discover in this exploration of sexuality and sexual desire? Is it that the child or adolescent cannot be trusted to feel the moral revulsion required to assure the probity of Lyne’s Lolita: what if a child or adolescent were to laugh rather than shudder, to experience desire rather than disgust, on watching this film? What if the child is excluded from its audience not because she does not know, or does not want to know, about sexuality but because someone else prefers that she shouldn’t? What if she is presumed innocent because innocence, its unknowing forms of sexuality, is what someone else desires? (Desire rebounds, once again, on the who looks, or, in this instance, legislates the visual field on behalf of the child.)

128

It has been central to the argument of this chapter that adults want something from the image of the child, something that can break through in their acts of watching – filming, photographing – children. But to understand that wanting in terms of a resolutely adult sexuality that can only be denied in the child is, I think, one of the effects, and limitations, of the discourses of childhood innocence and, in that other modern legal and social rhetoric, child protection. What, after all, is sex for a child? If the question can be difficult to pose at present, it is a mark of the achievement of contemporary cinema that it continues to engage the sexuality and sexual dissidence of children and adolescents: from, say, the gentle, almost incidental, insight into the psychosocial dynamics of a boy’s transvestism in Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliott (2000) to Alain Berliner’s more sustained exploration of a young boy’s desire to grow up to be a woman in Ma vie en rose (1997); from Hettie MacDonald’s depiction, in Beautiful Thing (1996), of the romance between two adolescent boys on a south London housing estate to the muted exploration of the love between Eban, nearly 30 years old, and the teenage Charley in James Bolton’s Eban and Charley (2000) (that Eban looks much the same age as his younger lover is one way for this film to broach its potentially controversial subject). In Araki’s Mysterious Skin, for example, Coach – in many ways the prototype of the paedophile who befriends, and sexualizes, the young boys in his care – both photographs the eight-year-old Neil McCormick and records his voice on tape (the photograph of the Little League team will play an important role in the recovery of the facts of sexual abuse through the film and its ideal of

129

restoring narrative coherence to its subjects). If the film opens with the lyrical image, and sound, of a young, dark-haired boy (Neil) enraptured by the multi-coloured sweet cereal raining down on him, it quickly changes gear: a black screen, a moment’s silence, a boy’s voice beginning to speak just before the title that announces his name and the time of which he is speaking: Brian Lackey, Summer 1981: ‘The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life. Five hours. Lost, gone without a trace.’ As the camera pans down from the darkness of the black screen to the dim greyness of what appears to be a wall against which a young blonde boy, wearing glasses and a baseball cap, is crouching, Lackey’s voice-over continues: ‘I remember I was sitting on the bench at my Little League game. It started to rain. And after that remains a pitch black void.’ Black screen. The black void of memory, the black screen of cinema: the association is there throughout Mysterious Skin, with its use of the blank spots of cinema to represent the blank spots in the mind – as well as the child’s response to his first experiences of an adult’s sexual desire. As the camera focuses close, and then closer still, on Coach’s face, looming over Neil’s, his features darken and blur into the darkness of the fading screen; when Brian encounters Coach for the second time, he emerges out of the darkness of a Hallowe’en night, the black outline of his approaching body filling the space of the screen until the boy, once again, loses consciousness. The challenge of Mysterious Skin is its refusal to tell a single story about the relation between childhood and sexuality,

130

the ties between adult sexuality and the sexual traumas of childhood. Brian, driven to solve the mystery of his lost hours by recourse to stories of alien abduction, can be seen as the very image of the abused child, his face erased by the experience of sexual abuse at the hands of Coach and, indeed, his prop, Neil. But Neil’s sexuality does not fit the more or less conventionalized narratives of child sexual abuse. On first seeing Coach, for example, he is – at least, as the 18-year-old Neil recalls his eight-yearold self – overwhelmed by desire: ‘Desire sledgehammered me. He looked like the lifeguards, cowboys and the firemen I’d seen in the Playgirls that my mum kept stashed under her bed. And back then, I didn’t know what to do with my feelings.’ It is a complex scene, in which, as the film slows down – falters, perhaps, on its own insights – to dwell on the image of Coach, on Neil’s desiring but intensely awkward looking, Araki films the still photographs, magazine pictures, of adult men, clearly framed and commodified for the sexual looking of women and homosexual men. Caught up in that looking, Neil is caught up in the economic and symbolic exchange of the sexual that, in this scene, will find its purchase in his first sight of Coach: ‘And back then, I didn’t know what to do with my feelings.’ And it is that notknowing, the prematurity of the sexual – not absent in the child but not formed – to which the reality of adult desire does violence. In this instance, giving sexuality a shape – kissing, penetrating, fellatio, fisting – Coach breaches the boundary of the child’s less delimited pleasures, at the same time as he imposes a narrative on what has happened to Neil on the floor of his kitchen. Leaning into the young boy, it is his voice, as well as his body, that closes

131

down the space for a child’s feelings, for liking and not liking, for not knowing what to do with his feelings: ‘You like it. It’s okay that you liked it. Everything’s going to be okay.’ ‘But that was a lie’: in the closing scene of Mysterious Skin, as Brian and Neil hold each other on a couch with Neil, finally, revealing to Brian what had happened to him during his hours at Coach’s house, the erasure of the child, the death of the child, in the realization of adult desire, comes right to the fore of the film. Giving voice to a wish to go back and undo the past – Neil’s role in Brian’s traumatic entry into the sexual and also his own experience of abuse at the hands of Coach – Mysterious Skin runs through that past at the same time as it works towards an identification between the wish of the abused child to disappear, to leave the world behind, and the closing down of the film, of the apparatus of cinema, itself. With Neil still cradling Brian in his lap, the camera draws up above them, further and further away until the figures lit up on the couch are barely visible, and Neil’s voice-over comes to its conclusion: I thought of all the grief and sadness and fucked up suffering in the world and it made me wanna escape. I wish with all my heart that we could just leave this world behind, rise like two angels in the night and magically . . . Disappear. Blank, black screen. No wonder one might wish to protect a child. But what is, or can be, at work in such wishes? How might cinema begin to

132

give image to such wishes? A remarkable shot towards the beginning of Danis Tanovic’s L’Enfer, released in 2005, suggests one way into such questions: a young girl, running into a room in which an adolescent boy stands, apparently nude, before an older man (her father); a woman, her mother, clamps her hand across the girl’s eyes. A far-reaching meditation on sexuality and sexual desire, L’Enfer is forged through its play with this scene, its significance as trauma, as secret, in the life of a family of three sisters – Céline, Sophie and Anne – their invalid mother and their father, imprisoned as a result of his wife’s denunciation of his relationship with the young boy discovered in his office. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that, on his return to the family home, presumably after some years of imprisonment, his wife had refused to allow her husband back into their lives – a refusal that sparks a confrontation during which, with their three daughters listening in their bedroom, he violently attacks her. Battering her head against a mirror, which shatters against her fall, it is, again presumably, this incident that confines the mother, speechless, to her wheelchair. In despair, her husband leaps to his death from the apartment window. Two scenes, then: a sexual encounter between the father and a young boy; the father’s violent attack on the mother and his subsequent suicide. At the beginning of the film only the oldest sister, Céline, continues to visit her mother. The bonds between the sisters also appear to be shattered, until a young man, Sébastien, draws them together in his quest to find Céline. That Céline mistakes Sébastien’s need to tell her something for

133

his erotic pursuit of her indicates how far this film binds sexuality to misrecognition, to secrecy. In fact, what he wants to confess engages L’Enfer in a reinterpretation of the opening sequence of the film: Sébastien, desperately in love with Céline’s father, had waited a long time to be alone with him. On the day that Céline had come into the office, he, Sébastien, had finally plucked up the courage to tell his tutor about his feelings for him: ‘I got undressed. I was crazed. I didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t want me. He comforted me, said he understood, but that it wasn’t possible . . . ’ An adolescent’s desire for an older man? His pursuit of the father? It is a desire that, as Sébastien now recalls, he was too frightened – of police, of parents, of teachers – to tear away from the narrative of the teacher’s predatory desire towards him that, it seems, was immediately invoked – and invoked by the wife, by the mother. The accusation is there in the look that she turns on her husband at the very end of the film’s return to the scene with which it opens, and to which, now, we can supply a story: again, we see Céline, running into the room, to discover Sébastien standing, naked, in front of her father; again, the mother clamps her hand across her daughter’s eyes – and, this time, casts the look at her husband that provokes what can be described as the fundamental enigma of the film: ‘Why did she do it? Why did she denounce him?’48 What does the mother conceal from Céline? The sight of sexuality? The knowledge of her father’s desire, or of his innocence? Refusing to compromise on the mother’s desire – ‘I regret nothing’ is her response to her daughters’ question – what remains

134

What does the adult want of the child? Of her innocence? Danis Tanovic, L’Enfer (2005).

most striking in L’Enfer is not, or not only, its engagement with the waywardness of adolescent sexuality, but its reflection on the ambivalence of that gesture of protection. What does, or can, it mean to protect a child from the sight of sex? To shield the child from what she sees (in this instance, too, from the truth of the mother’s desire)? Re-inflecting that protection, L’Enfer renders its consequences at the level of the family – its romance, its drama, its drive to repeat the patterns of love and hate across the difference of generations. But, too, it brings its audiences up against an insight that should begin to agitate through current thinking on sexuality, childhood and the visual: namely, that protection is never without its own devices and desires.

4

the child, from death

‘The most beautiful book in the world’, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in 1948, ‘will not save a child from pain.’1 Coming in response to his own reflections on the meaning of literature for a Europe devastated by World War Two, it is a comment that draws attention to one of the fundamental tenets of post-war international society: the rights of the child to protection against violence, exploitation and abuse, the rights of the child to life as expressed, for example, in Article 6 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: ‘1. States Parties recognize that every child has the inherent right to life. 2. States Parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child.’ Unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 November 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child became international law less than one year later, making history as the most widely, and quickly, ratified treaty on human rights in the world. To date it has been signed by 192 nations (at the time of writing, in April 2006, only Somalia and the United States have yet to ratify the Convention). Formally, at least, the rights of the child appear to be uncontentious. But, as

136

Karin Landgren, Chief of Child Protection for unicef, has observed, many states that ratified the Convention entered reservations, either to particular articles or to the Convention as a whole, that were incompatible with its overall aims and objectives. In fact, on Landgren’s estimate, more than 300 million children are currently suffering from the very abuses – among them, sex trafficking, child soldiering, bonded labour, forced marriage, genital mutilation – that international commitment to the treaty was supposed to eliminate, or at least reduce.2 What does it mean to measure the value of literature against the life and death of a child? Part of the significance of Sartre’s intervention is that, while it casts the child’s body – in pain, in death – as a type of limit to an aesthetic committed to acts of social transformation, it is also speaking out of a long tradition in thinking about the power of representation as, precisely, transformative of pain (a tradition usually derived from Aristotle’s well-known commentary on our delight in the realistic depiction of objects that it would be painful to see).3 In fact, the worry is that the power of representation to turn pain into pleasure, evil into beauty, may well undermine any contribution that literature – or, to broaden the point, cinema, painting, sculpture, music – can make to the work of recreating the world, recreating human consciousness, by aesthetic means (a pervasive idea of the aesthetic in the modern period). By enabling the delights of contemplation (in the Aristotelian formulation), the scandal of representation is that it can help us to bear – even, at times, to enjoy – what has been, for someone else, the unbearable (this may belong to the paradox of what John Hutnyk has

137

described as ‘photogenic poverty’, a visual form to which unicef is, perhaps not coincidently, deeply indebted).4 ‘A child’s death’, wrote the psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire, ‘is unbearable: it fulfils our most secret and profound wishes.’5 It is a stark, and complex, claim (the necessary death of the infans, the wonderful mute child agitating through us all, is at the core of Leclaire’s thinking). No doubt, as Leclaire insists, in the death of a child it is possible to rediscover a version of sacred horror. ‘It just can’t be’, is how he ventriloquizes our response. ‘God himself stops the hand of Abraham’.6 ‘A child is being killed’: the phrase, also the title of Leclaire’s book, is used to name a scene, an imaginary situation, a fiction, that, on this reading, remains deeply hidden in modern cultural life – more hidden, perhaps, as a fantasy than as a fact. ‘You don’t bomb babies. You don’t shoot children. You don’t single them out for hatred’: writing in response to the photograph of a young girl pipe-bombed as she walked to school along the Ardoyne Avenue in Belfast in early September 2001, the journalist Christopher Hope immediately corrected himself. ‘A moment’s thought’, he continued, ‘will show that this is a sentimental delusion. Babies are bombed. Children are shot. . . . Children are waged war upon and wage war themselves.’7 It is as if the fact of (often fatal) violence against children is both known, and not known; we have to think to recall what we know to be the case because that knowing is so easily displaced by the ideal that children are not killed, not hurt, not hated. Who, after all, would want to kill a child? The naïveté of the question is part of its force, its simultaneous acknowledgement that

138

children die at the hands of adults (and, sometimes, other children) and its commitment to the idea that no one could wish it to be so – as if a mind hostile towards the life of a child is more difficult to comprehend than the reality of her death. It is, often enough, the photographic image of a child – whether still or moving – that comes both to render our hostility and to rend the visual field: the small boy, wearing a cap and a yellow star, raising his hands at gunpoint, during the Nazis’ destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 (the photograph appeared in Alain Resnais’ documentary Night and Fog of 1956, as well as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona of 1966); a young black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by a white mob, as she walks to school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957; a naked young girl, nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, fleeing her village in South Vietnam after being doused with napalm (when published in the United States, Judith Butler has argued, such images ‘disrupted the visual field and the entire sense of public identity that was built upon that field’); most recently, the photograph of a newborn baby, buried in the rubble of a Beirut suburb, apparently cuddling in the arms of her dead mother (the image was published around the world towards the beginning of August 2006).8 What is the force, the life and death, of such images? If, as various critics have suggested, the photograph reproduces the faculty of human memory – like the photograph, wrote Susan Sontag, memory is a ‘freeze frame’ – then such images may well have a unique capacity to haunt us.9 No doubt, they haunt the visual iconography of childhood, transferred across national

139

borders, between moments in history, through different forms of media culture, as evidence of the destruction of children and childhoods, cultures and communities. But Sontag’s claim echoes, too, our various constructions of cinema, its moving images, as a form of mime of both mind and world. Sometimes, of course, cinema behaves like a photograph, appearing to halt the flow of images to diverse, but often staggering, effect. Take, for example, the sequence in Persona – one of the most powerful representations of the tie between cinema and child – when, following Elisabet’s gaze, the camera moves in on that photograph from the Warsaw ghetto (Elisabet appears to have discovered it between the pages of her book). Holding on this image, the camera holds us in the details of its scene via a series of shots that, cutting into the photograph, bring the viewer ever closer to its stillness: the frozen horror of faces, hands, guns and, especially, the stillness of the children – the young boy in the cap, the face of the boy behind the woman who has turned her head (to look at him? to look at the soldiers?), the little girl who stands at the very edge of the frame, looking out towards us. Captured again by Persona, the photograph becomes a means to represent the precedence, or imposition, of memory over lived time: the (still) life that rushes back in to interrupt our moments of being, registering the irruption of personal as well as historical memory. In response to that irruption, Persona offers a black screen. The sequence ends not with the reverse shot back to Elisabet that would anchor the look at the photograph in her subjective vision, but with a return to the close-up on the young boy and then that blank, black screen that begins to

140

A photograph that rends the visual field? The Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. In Persona (1966), Bergman cuts into this iconic image of Nazi destruction of Jewish men, women and children.

141

connote not only the (threat of) death that suffuses this image but also the difficulty of knowing how to respond to it. What image can follow the document of a child’s fear, of a child, driven by gunpoint, to the edge of the frame? The question can be said to drive the turn to the child as a figure through which to explore the legacy of war and genocide during the twentieth century. In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, Roberto Rossellini’s trilogy of Italian Neorealism, Rome, Open City (1945), Paisà (1946) and Germany, Year Zero (1948), helped to found a canon that includes Fred Zinneman’s The Search (1948), René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952), George Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), André Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and The Mirror (1975), Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Elim Klimov’s Come and See (1985), Louis Malle’s Au Revoir, les enfants (1987), Bahram Beizai’s Bashu (1989), Agnieszka Holland’s Europa, Europa (1990), Guillermo del Torro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Bahman Ghobadi’s A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) and Turtles Can Fly (2004), Denijal Hasanovic’s List (2001), Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s documentary The Afghan Alphabet (2002) and Marzieh Meshkini’s Stray Dogs (2004). The list could go on. It does not include, of course, the numerous films that make striking, but less sustained, use of the child – as point of view, as image – to drive home the destruction of war: Steven Spielberg’s investment in the little girl in Schindler’s List (1993) is perhaps only the most obvious example (dressed in a red coat, she is the only point of colour in the film). Deeply engaged by the capacity of the moving image to deliver the child, cinema has forged a diverse, sometimes deeply

142

painful, iconography of the child as victim of war, certainly, but also as active, if radically traumatized, participant in adult hostilities. In one of the most striking scenes from Rome, Open City, for example, the sound of an explosion rips across a conversation in which Pina warns that her son, Marcello, is missing, out after curfew. As the adults gather to look at the flames through the darkened window, the children emerge from the darkness, their fragile bodies framed against the smoke, the soundtrack soaring. The boys are ‘resistance fighters’, comrades-in-arms, but still subject, comically, to the fury of their worried parents on their return home. Maintaining that distinction between adult and child, Rossellini underlines the role of the children as increasingly privileged witnesses of war and murder: Pina is gunned down before Marcello’s eyes while, in the closing scenes of the film, the boys gather to watch the execution of Don Pietro Pellegrini, the Catholic priest who has helped to foster local resistance to the Gestapo. As the camera cuts between the boys, whistling behind the wire fence, and the face of Don Pellegrini, the children take up the burden of providing significance for his death, the possibility of a future in which his sacrifice – by extension, the sacrifices made by the resistance – can find their purpose. It is, perhaps, because he sets the film in the winter of 1943–4 that Rossellini is able to maintain that image of the (Catholic) child witness over and against that of the child as object of Fascist violence (more than a thousand Jewish men, women and children were rounded up in Rome between 16 and 18 October 1943, before being deported to Auschwitz). By

143

In Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), children bear witness to the devastation of the Nazi Occupation of Rome.

contrast, that theme comes right to the fore in a number of films from the 1980s and ’90s: Malle’s Au revoir, les enfants, Holland’s Europa, Europa, Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Klimov’s acclaimed Come and See, awarded first prize at the Moscow Film Festival in 1985. ‘Leave the children’: in Come and See, that atrocious command is used to epitomize the genocidal brutality of the German invasion in 1943 of what is now Belarus; in its final

144

title, Come and See informs its audience that 628 Belarussian villages were burned, and their inhabitants massacred, during the German onslaught. Told largely from the perspective of the adolescent boy, Florya, who enlists as a partisan, Come and See has been described as a rite of passage that, while allowing the carnage of war to be seen through the eyes of a quickly ageing child, devastates its audiences with the unflinching realism for which it has become renowned. In one of the concluding scenes of the film, a punitive detachment of the Waffen-ss arrives in the village of Perekhody, where Florya, separated from the partisans, has taken brief refuge. The chaos of the German arrival – guns, dogs, loudspeakers, queues, humiliation, shooting, torture – is a prelude to the task of herding the men, women and children of the village into a wooden barn; peering through a narrow window, an impassive ss officer delivers the impossible choice: ‘Get out now. Leave the children.’ Silence falls. Outside the barn, the noise and chaos continue. Only Florya makes his way to the window. Only a child, perhaps, can abandon the children? The child as witness to the future? As the ss drag him away, his face appears to be visibly ageing, even petrifying; coming ever closer to the camera, it is a face that almost fills the screen. At this point, Klimov cuts back to a German officer, petting his tamed rodent, and then to the barn where, it seems, a woman and her young son have struggled through the window; the boy is thrown back into the building as his mother is dragged away by her hair. Like Florya, she is forced to watch their grotesque pleasure as the soldiers set fire to the

145

The petrification of the child’s face. Elim Klimov’s Come and See (1985).

barn, taking their fill of the mayhem that ensues before, finally, opening fire. ‘With the children, it would start all over again’: ambushed by the partisans, the young ss officer, identified as having ordered the villagers to save themselves by leaving their children to die, gives voice to the genocidal ideology that helps to sustain Nazi atrocity. ‘You have no right to be’, he insists, maniacally, to the small crowd of partisans – Florya, the witness, among them – about to open fire on the surviving remnant of the Waffen-ss and their collaborators.

146

The logic is stark. The murder of the children, the racist refusal of their right to be, casts the child as the very symbol of the human right, at once individual and collective, to exist, to be. To kill the child is to murder that right, a symbolic equation that, crucially, begins to shed light on the extraordinary scene that brings Come and See to a close. As the partisans are preparing to move off, the film suddenly shifts gear, departing from the diegetic reality of the film to run through documentary footage and photographs of what appear to be the victims of the death camps. Cut to Florya, and a new recruit to the partisans, staring down at a puddle in the mud. The camera draws in to reveal that what Florya is looking at – is almost hypnotized by – is a portrait of Adolf Hitler. Raising his rifle, he shoots into the glass, shattering it. Ignoring the call from his comrades to move on, Florya remains staring at the picture, which has now begun to screen documentary footage of Hitler, of Nazi rallies, of the death camps, of bombed cities – images canonic to the visual history of World War Two. As Florya shoots, the footage rewinds: ruined buildings are rebuilt; Nazi processions move swiftly backwards; Hitler, his gestures and salutes, are staggered, and returned. But it does not stop there. The film begins to reach further back in time, towards Hitler’s childhood: there is a photograph of the Führer as a young child, ranked with a larger group of children; then, further back still, an image of Hitler as an infant, sitting on his mother’s lap, staring wide-eyed into the camera. Cut to Florya, who is not shooting now; cut back to the photograph, as the camera pans slowly down from the mother’s face, moving in towards the face of the baby, still staring out into the world that he will do so much to destroy.

147

The child Hitler, or Where does that evil come from? Klimov’s Come and See.

Child Hitler? It is as if, at this point, the film invests that ‘life’ in the photographic image explored in the first chapter of this book: to shoot and shatter the portrait of the adult Hitler is, it seems, to do a quasi-magical violence to the man. ‘Even an adult’, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has put it, ‘will hesitate to step on an image or photograph; if he does so, it will be with aggressive intent’ (hence the shock of that moment in Persona when Elisabet tears up the photograph of her son: it is an attack on the image-life of her child).10 Unleashing aggression against the man – Kill Hitler, let’s note, was the first proposed title for Klimov’s film – Florya, like the film, is brought up short by the image of the child, the infant, the sacred origin of the self (to recall Leclaire’s terms). As if discovering the limit of killing in that image of a child, Florya stops – like the documentary footage that, playing in reverse, comes to rest, too, in the fatality of this image.

148

Working at the limits of what it is bearable to watch, it may be that Come and See has to discover its limit in the material reality of cinema, its ‘reel’ time as well as its capacity to capture the real (this is a film propped on the power of the documentary form). If that reel time is there to support, albeit momentarily, the fantasy that the act of a child’s shooting into a portrait can reverse historical time, then it takes the image of the child Hitler, embedded in that other scene of the documentary film, to expose that fantasy to the question: Where does that evil come from? Or, more radically, what is evil? Can it appear in the face of an infant? Transcending the time and space of Florya’s consciousness – these images cannot ‘belong’ to him – such questions come to the audience via the hallucinating child: the child, witness to genocidal murder, overwhelmed by the visual documents of a Holocaust that, in terms of the diegetic unfolding of the film, had yet to be exposed to public view. The child confronted, too, with the image of a child made uncanny by its identification with murder – an identification made, of course, by the audience for the film seeing through, but not with, Florya’s eyes. Juxtaposing the documentary footage of the Holocaust with the photograph of Hitler as a baby, Come and See offers this child as a type of origin, or cause, of the genocide that has taken place on its screen (the film’s reversal of historical time stops at this point). It is an origin, however, that cannot be faulted. It is not only that, however real, however true the photograph, it fails as an index of evil – evil is not what is given to be seen here – but that Come and See has already marked the killing of a child as an act that defines the realm of the inhuman. If the human is to be,

149

if there is to be a future, Florya can only lower his gun. Kill the child and you kill the future; in this sense, even as it forces its audiences up against the radical destruction of children, of childhood, in war, Come and See preserves the domain of the child, its image, as sign of the unforeseeable, the arrival of a new world in the existing one. Kill the child? No, in Come and See, finally, the act remains unbearable. But as it converges on what appears to be a human drive towards destruction, as well as a massive appetite for spectacles of pain and suffering, cinema may well make us wonder about the wishes at work in the visual archive of the child in pain, in death. Wishes that are not bound to a straightforward idea of pleasure, but that are caught up in the deep ambivalence of a mind divided against itself: the idea that we hate where we love, desire where we are disgusted, rejoice where we express sorrow, is one of the primary suspicions of modernity. Nowhere, perhaps, is that division more apparent than in attempts to understand the appalled fascination with sights of suffering and death that haunts contemporary discussion of vision and visual culture. Regarding the pain of others (to borrow the title of Sontag’s most recent book on the subject) has become an urgent, and controversial, topic in the context of the mass reproduction of images that refract established discourses on the ties between spectacle and sympathy through the phenomena of the new technologies of vision. If, on one model of the enlightened public self, the sight of suffering is supposed to solicit our compassion and, hopefully, our aid, that model falters when confronted by the wayward, sometimes ruthless, world of mediatized wishes – a world in which the

150

scene of human suffering may appeal not, or not only, to our feelings of compassion, but to a less speakable, more unmanageable, pleasure in the degradation, even the death, of others. It can be difficult to name that pleasure (Geoffrey Gorer’s concept of the ‘pornography of death’ is one attempt to phrase the connivance between aggression and eroticism so often felt to be peculiar to it).11 On one strong critical consensus, with the advent of new forms of visual media, there has been an intensification of the field of the visible in public life, a ‘frenzy of the visible’ as Comolli has put it, that normalizes a voyeuristic – that is, libidinized but distanced – mode of looking at and being in the world (that looking in distraction, absorption in the spectacle of narrative, that was at issue in the first chapter of this book).12 As the twentieth century wore on, it is a form of looking, and distraction, described more and more frequently in terms of a fundamental loss of the spectator’s capacity to tell the difference between image and reality, of the absorption of reality into the image. Again, on this view, with that absorption – of the spectator in the spectacle, of reality in the image – comes a catastrophic loss of feeling: the more we look, so the argument goes, the less we feel, a presumption that has come to define an idea of looking as simultaneously impulsive – aggressive, prurient, vulgar – and exhausted: a looking at the (more or less corrupted) heart of a culture driven to distraction by images, by information, by the overwhelming ‘noise’ created between the two. From its origins, cinema has exposed the connivance between pleasure and pain, pleasure and terror, in the spectacles and stories it presents to its audiences. Directed by Alfred Clark

151

in 1895, for example, The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots was one of the earliest films on the popular theme of executions. Most such scenes were reconstructed. In Clark’s film, stopaction substitution was used to bring the executioner’s axe down on the head of a dummy rather than the actor (Robert Thomae). But, too, documentary footage of killing – or, what appears to be documentary footage of killing – was a popular draw: Execution of ‘Li-Tang’, the Chunchus Chief of Manchurian Bandits was advertised by the Charles Urban Catalogue for 1904 as the ‘only animated picture of a Chinese execution ever taken. Gruesome, but faithfully depicting the actual scene’ (in 1903 Selig’s Beheading Chinese also claimed to show the horrible truth of this method of execution). It may be that in reconstructing historical scenes of violence early cinema was providing a type of alibi for the spectators who flocked to view the atrocities on display – an alibi that would cover the viewing of documentary footage as a means to knowing the truth of ‘what happens’, however disturbing. On the other hand, fin-de-siècle cinema inherited the traditions of nineteenth-century sentimentalism in which the drama of the death of a child, the pathos of a child’s pain, played a defining role. That at least eight versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published in 1852, were made before Harry Pollard’s production for Universal in 1927 underlines the assumption of that tradition – literary, painterly, theatrical – by cinema. In 1903, for instance, Edwin Porter’s ground-breaking adaptation of Stowe’s book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Slavery Days, produced by Edison, was one of the first examples of how

152

cinema invests the spectacle of a dying child: with his use of multiple exposures to produce the image of an angel carrying Eva’s spirit to heaven, Porter made his own contribution to the already elaborate conventions for depicting the death of Little Eva, her pleas for human love and tolerance (as Linda Williams has pointed out, this was the one scene essential to the many, and various, theatrical versions of Stowe’s book).13 The close association between nineteenth-century literature and film draws attention to the importance of this tradition. But the spectacles of a child’s suffering on screen did not – and

Edwin S. Porter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Slavery Days (1903). Through the use of multiple exposures, an angel appears to carry Eva’s spirit to Heaven. A few weeks later, Lubin would release his (cheaper but almost identical) version.

153

do not – always conform to the demands of the sentimental, with its unstable mix of pathos and aggression. Consider the following letter, published in the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly in 1907, apparently in response to The Black Hand (1906), an early example of the crime thriller directed by Wallace McCutcheon (McCutcheon, let us note, had also participated in the more sedate genre of the child pictures): a most disgusting scene in its performance is where two ruffians enter a bedroom where a little child is sleeping in its cot while its mother is doing some sewing. These two men are seen to take this young child out of its bed, tie a rope around its neck, pass the rope over a peg behind a door, and actually pull the young innocent up by its neck until its feet are two or three feet from the floor whilst the mother is kept at bay.14 This is a memorable description of what film-goers, including children, might encounter on the screens of cinema in its first decade, its ‘copious supply of mere horrors’, to borrow the rhetoric of an editorial that, promoting the campaign for better regulation of the cinematograph and the ‘picturedromes’, ran in The Times in 1913.15 In the absence of recognized conventions for publicizing consumer advice on the content of particular films – the British Board of Film Censors was not established until 1913 – it may well be that early film-goers could be taken by surprise by what they saw on screen. Amidst the horrors with which spectators might become familiar – burglaries, suicides,

154

massacres, railway accidents, filmed funerals – there is an attack on the child that, for the author of this letter, stayed in the mind, provoking the disgust that, it would seem, helped to secure the proper distance between what the viewer saw and what he or she wanted to see (or, indeed, wanted others to see). In particular, outside the containing – more strongly, restraining – conventions of the established literary and dramatic genres, the visuality of cinema, its unsurpassed sense of lifelikeness, makes the scene too real, too seen, too much: ‘These two men are seen to take this young child . . . and actually pull the young innocent up by its neck until its feet are two or three feet from the floor’ (my italics). Breaching the sentimental tradition, it is as if the new sensationalism of cinema exposed to view its sadistic underpinnings: the delight of the camera and, by extension, the audience in the scene of a child’s suffering. At issue is not, or not only, the question of the child’s pain as such but how that pain is handled, how it arrives at – addresses itself to – its audience via the always potentially coercive ‘look’ of the camera. With this new technology of vision and, later, sound, it was easy to get the death of a child wrong. Even, it seems, for a master. ‘I made a serious mistake in having the little boy carry the bomb’, Alfred Hitchcock recalled, reflecting on the public response to Sabotage, released in 1936. ‘The boy was involved in a situation that got him too much sympathy from the audience, so that when the bomb exploded and he was killed, the public was resentful.’16 Renowned, of course, for his manipulation of the film audience, Hitchcock admitted to a grave error in depicting the death of a child in this film. ‘Making a child die in a picture’, as

155

Truffaut put it in his conversations with Hitchcock on the topic, ‘is a rather ticklish matter; it comes close to an abuse of cinematic power.’ Based on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), Sabotage substitutes Stevie – an adolescent boy, the younger brother of Verloc’s wife – for the older, if afflicted, brother-in-law of Conrad’s novel. In other words, Hitchcock was only too prepared to risk that abuse of power in cinema, one that appears to derive from what he describes as the capacity of the camera to force the audience to live in the spectacle given to view – to live, in this instance, the death of a child blown to bits. ‘Thanks to the camera’, as he commented, ‘the public is now living the scene’, in which Stevie is, unknowingly, carrying the package in which Verloc has concealed a bomb. The audience knows that the bomb is going to explode, that, dawdling and delayed, Stevie does not have time to leave his fatal package at the place assigned, Piccadilly Circus. But, placing the boy amidst the crowds of London – a travelling salesman, the huge throng gathered for the Lord Mayor’s Show and, finally, the London bus, hemmed in by traffic – Hitchcock disperses the danger to Stevie to include all those with whom he is coming into contact. (The crowd, it should be said, is also representative of the cinema audience: Verloc, who in Conrad’s novel runs a discreet trade in pornography, is, in Hitchcock’s film, the proprietor of a marginally profitable cinema.) In this sustained sequence, the camera returns repeatedly to shots of Stevie as he makes his way through the crowds, an unwitting but nonetheless deadly threat. Playing with that threat, Hitchcock reinforces the passage of time, superimposing the coded message of warning passed to Verloc – ‘don’t forget the

156

birds will sing at 1.45’ – over the image of the boy walking the London streets; returning to the faces of the clocks that register the relentless passing of the hour; cutting to the close-ups of Stevie’s increasingly unbearable proximity to his package (it is held closely, almost caressingly, against his body); dwelling, notably, on the image of another child, standing too close to Stevie while they watch the Lord Mayor’s parade; cutting, finally, between the close-up shots of the package, placed beside Stevie on the bus, of his hands – alternately touching the package, tickling a puppy’s face – and of his brief encounter with his luckless fellow passengers. External views place the bus mired in traffic. Three rapid frames, like freeze frames, of the bomb, shot from different angles – ‘to give the bomb a vitality of its own, to animate it’, Hitchcock told Truffaut – and then the explosion. Annihilation. Nothing left to be seen of this child except the ghostly image of his face as it appears to his sister, who, fainting on hearing the news of his death, comes round to the sight of a group of children, their faces suspended, oddly, above her. Curious, they seem, rather than compassionate. As she looks again, she sees the face of Stevie, suspended in the middle of the frame, his expression inscrutable. Writing in 1938, B. R. Crisler described this sequence as merciless, sadistic (but, still, evidence of Hitchcock’s mastery of cinematic suspense). By contrast: ‘How could you do it, Hitch?’ asked the film critic C. J. Lejeune (also a good friend of Hitchcock’s). ‘It made me want to run home and see if my boy was all right.’ Reporting this conversation, Crisler noted that, as a mother, Lejeune was outraged by the violence of Sabotage,

157

condemning the film in the columns of the Observer. (Sabotage fared poorly at the box office).17 No surprise, perhaps, but Lejeune’s comment draws attention to how the death of a child, the threat to a child, can breach the fictional frame of the image, reaching out towards the spectator who, on this occasion, fears for the life of her own son. In other words, if it is often said that Hitchcock was committed to making his audiences suffer, it is also clear that he was ready to inflict that suffering via the image of the child. In fact, there is a pervasive, if incidental, aggression towards children running throughout Sabotage: in addition to the death of Stevie, and the camera’s lingering look at the little girl who leans so close to him amidst the crowd at the Lord Mayor’s parade, there is the young girl, the illegitimate granddaughter of the bomb-maker who provides Verloc with explosives. Verloc, who has made no secret of his distaste for an act of sabotage aimed at the destruction of human life, is a reluctant visitor to the lodgings of the bombmaker who, operating under cover of a pet shop, conceals the bomb in the bottom of a birdcage, an ostensible gift for Stevie. Shot repeatedly from almost identical views, the silence of the daughter and granddaughter underlines the uncanny chaos of this domestic scene. If now in a state of watchful suspense, the child has been playing amongst the explosives, disguised by her grandfather as everyday objects: a bottle of tomato sauce, a packet of sugar. Holding up a metal toy car, he acknowledges the danger, implying that it is his daughter who, in the absence of a husband, has become careless, undisciplined, putting her child at risk. That child, he tells Verloc, is her ‘cross to bear’, her burden.

158

The little girl continues to look on. Her doll is discovered, wedged into a cupboard alongside the material for bomb-making. Her grandfather hands it back to her. A gift or a death threat? In its treatment of the child, Sabotage can make it difficult to tell the difference between the two – an ambivalence transferred to the figure of the child herself. Stolid, expressionless, the young girl is an unsettling presence, coming to life only when her grandfather encourages her to slap him for having lost her doll. And Stevie, too, is both innocent victim and fatal threat, our final image of him the spectral, and so haunting, presence of his face. What remains striking in Sabotage – more generally, in Hitchcock’s cinema – is its exposure of sadism against the child as a privileged means to sadism against the audience (Sabotage presages Hitchcock’s The Birds, with its more sustained, if enigmatic, attack on the child as one of the primary objects of the birds’ aggression).18 Certainly, the death of Stevie belongs to an ongoing convention, at once narrative and visual, in which the threat to a child, that privileged object of fellow-feeling, is used to promote the experiences of terror, suspense, pity, pain – as well as those less speakable pleasures in regarding the pain of others. In 1931 Gabriele Tergit’s response to the premiere of Fritz Lang’s now classic thriller M gave voice to a pervasive sense that, in depicting the murder of a child, cinema was not only mounting a sadistic attack on the audience but was also working to stimulate, dangerously, what she described as the ‘rawest instincts’, the ‘cruelty slumbering everywhere’.19 Murder, in other words, is part of what we want – especially, it seems, on

159

film. (Sabotage expresses a similar theme: the film that Stevie is carrying on his fateful errand is Bartholomew the Strangler, evidence of the fact that the public wants ‘plenty of murders’.) On this view, embroiled in the pursuit of a serial killer who preys on children, M, Lang’s first sound film, becomes evidence of its audiences’ appetite for spectacles of pain and suffering – or, more precisely, for spectacles that engage the lust for cruelty, for murder, in themselves. We want that sadistic attack – on the child, on ourselves. ‘At the premiere’, Tergit recalled, ‘a lady in the back screamed: “The guy ought to be quartered!”’ This may not be quite the response envisaged by Lang when he cast M as a film that brings us up against the limits of the social self, the waywardness of the human desire for cruelty, for destruction, that civilization can only fail to curb. ‘There is enough in most of us of the wild, uninhibited creature’, he mused, ‘to identify ourselves momentarily with the outlaw who defies society and exults in cruelty.’20 In this context, it is worth noting that there is a missing scene from the current (restored) text of Lang’s M, a scene that may well have been in the film for the premiere on 11 May 1931. The scene follows the sequence in which the mob attacks an elderly man in the mistaken belief that he is the child murderer whom the city of Berlin is seeking. It begins with a police poster, publicizing details of the murder of Elsie Beckmann: 15,000 Mark Reward! Another Child Murder. Elsie Beckmann, eight years old, having resided with her mother at Marienstraße 519/iv, was found dead with

160

heavy wounds today around 2 p.m. in a bush at the Wohlitzer Chaussee, close to Kilometre Mark 7,3. Lang then cuts to a group of citizens all claiming to be the murderer – ‘I am the murderer! It was me! I did it! I am the murderer! I did it! I am the murderer! I did it!’ – and, on the evidence of the production stills, writing letters to the police, in type cut out from newspapers to conceal their identities.21 That identification with the child murderer is one of the most unsettling aspects of M; in particular, its celebrated, and much cited, final scene in which the outlaws of Berlin’s criminal underworld put Hans Beckert on trial for murder. Confronted with a balloon like the one he bought for Elsie Beckmann, and with newspaper photographs of another three little girls, Peter Lorre’s performance of the torment suffered by a man pursued by himself, as well as by the ghosts of the children he has murdered, has come to symbolize what, in 1926, Lang described as cinema’s great gift to modern cultural life: visual empathy, the experience, via the film image, of the working of another’s soul through the self.22 ‘His [Beckert’s] impassioned description cannot help but arouse sympathy’, Tom Gunning concluded in his recent reassessment of the pain of Lang’s film, ‘and Lang shows several of the audience nodding in understanding or empathy.’23 A visual cue to the audience in front of the screen, perhaps: in Lang’s terms, Lorre is a carrier, his performance designed to touch the soul and, in so doing, to compel his audience towards sympathy, towards identification. On this reading, part of the wager of M is to put that visual empathy to the test by depicting one of the most loathsome

161

‘I cannot help what I do.’ Beckert, in Fritz Lang’s M (1931).

of crimes (Lang’s words). Like Hitchcock, like Truffaut, Lang is aware that representations of the death of a child present a particular challenge to cinema, its special ties to illusion, to daydream, as well as to empathy. ‘How to present such a crime so that it would not sicken the audience’, he wondered in ‘Some Random Notes about M’, reflecting on his decision to evoke, rather than to show, the murder of Elsie Beckmann.24 Not, in other words, to make Hitchcock’s mistake. The scenes are now canonic: the rolling ball, the balloon caught in the wires, the image, in the mind’s eye, of a child’s hand letting go. Once again, though, this is evocation in the name of implication. By hinting, rather than showing, Lang insists, the

162

film can force its spectators to participate in the creation of this ‘special scene’, to provide its gruesome details according to his or her personal imagination. Faulting the audience, in other words, catching them out in how, and what, they imagine is one of the principles of Lang’s filming. There is no possibility of an innocent look at M, a look not caught up in, or caught between, its dramatizing of a compulsion to murder and its commitment to

A special scene: Elsie’s ball; Elsie’s balloon. Images of death, and provocations to an atrocious imaginary.

163

the representation of loss, of grief. In the opening sequence of the film, the credits unroll in silence before plunging into the black screen from which, after the startling sound of a gong, the film will start to emerge: before the image, the sound of a child’s voice, singing, cues the film from a space off-screen, elsewhere. It is an address, first, to the spectator – ‘Wait, wait just a little while’ – through the words of a well-known nursery rhyme of the time about the serial killer, Fritz Haarmann, executed in 1924 (there was, apparently, a spate of serial killing in Weimar Germany). As Anton Kaes has pointed out, Lang substitutes the killer’s name with ‘The Man in Black’, but the song, a counting rhyme for children, was popularly known as the ‘Haarmann song’: Wait, wait just a little while Haarman will soon also come to you And with his little chopping knife He will make liverwurst of you.25 As the image opens onto the screen, a group of children are singing a version of this song to a game of ‘You’re Out’. The children, it seems, know how to play with the murderer, his game of serial, but random, elimination. The game is the first indication of their special bond with him, a bond carried, too, through Lang’s casting of Peter Lorre as Beckert – so often described as childlike in his features, in his affinity with the world of children – and in his use of sound to create and use off-screen space in M: like the children, Beckert is heard before he is seen: ‘What a pretty ball. What is your name?’ (The comment and the question,

164

to Elsie Beckmann, are voiced over Beckert’s shadow, falling across the poster that announces his crimes). The children’s game takes us into the physical space of the city tenement, and then into the world of a mother, Frau Beckmann, preparing for her child’s return from school. ‘As long as they’re singing at least we know they’re okay’, Frau Beckmann says to a woman who has been shouting at the children to stop singing that dreadful song. That equation between sound and life, silence and death, will take on its full impact through this sequence as Elsie’s absence is carried through the silence that greets her mother’s increasingly anguished calls, pervading the unbearably empty, unbearably still, spaces on which the camera dwells: the stairwell, the cavernous attic in which laundry is drying, the place laid for Elsie at the table. This is, as Thierry Kuntzel has suggested, ‘the despair of the void’, a despair that motivates the call to the mothers that helps to bring M to its uncertain conclusion.26 ‘Ask the mothers!’ is the cry that goes up from the Underworld Court in response to the nods of sympathy and understanding that follow Beckert’s description of his own sufferings. ‘And I am pursued by ghosts’, Beckert has insisted. ‘Ghosts of mothers. And of those children . . . They never leave me.’ The ghosts, or spirits, of mothers? Not the direct victims of Beckert’s murderousness, nonetheless mothers appear among the dead that pursue him – as if the loss of a child is a type of attack on the life of a mother, an attack on her wish to be alive, to have a future in the world of the living. ‘Ask the mothers!’ The assumption is that the mother of a dead child is a force for

165

This shot of Elsie’s empty place at table is, as Gunning points out, a perfect still-life. Or, to put the point another way, an image of life stilled.

vengeance, for destruction: ‘Do you think they will have mercy on him?’ That imperative, its question, runs us back towards the beginning of the film, as, in a series of remarkably elliptical scenes, Lang cuts from the noise and chaos of the Underworld Court to the serenity of public law: an empty court bench, as the judges file in to deliver their verdict ‘in the name of the people’. Instead of giving that verdict to be heard, M cuts to a shot of three women, dressed in mourning black. Deeply grieving, two of the women bow their heads down from the camera; in the centre of the frame sits Frau Beckmann, her stricken face looking out towards us, her voice, broken in its grief, carrying over that of the judges: ‘This won’t bring back our children.’ As the

166

screen cuts to black, her voice continues into the off-screen space that marks the end, as well as the beginning, of the film: ‘We, too, should keep a closer watch on our children.’27 ‘The film’s message’, Lang recalled in an interview, ‘is not the conviction of the murderer but the warning to all mothers, “You should keep better watch over your children.”’28 Putting that warning into the mouth of a grieving mother, M tends to displace the guilt of male sexual violence against children onto the failures of maternal protection. In 1931 Thea von Harbou, co-author of M and Lang’s then wife – he would, of course, take his distance from her increasing

The warning to mothers is vital to the sadism of M.

167

identification with Nazism – put the materialist perspective on that displacement. ‘How is a woman’, she asked in an article responding to ‘Why exactly “such” a film?’ – the question that greeted M on its first release – ‘who has to go to work in the factories and offices supposed to ensure a safe life for her children?’29 But what also comes into view, I think, through Lang’s comment is the matricidal force carried by the death of the child in and through M: that is, if an attack on the child is, in the film’s own terms, an attack on the life of the mother, then what does it mean to screen that death as a warning to her? What kind of sadism against the mother, against the ‘need of mothers robbed of their children’, as Tergit put it, is driving through Lang’s film, its appeal to its audience to live through one of the most powerful imaginaries of the death of a child in cinema? Once again, in M sadism against the child at the level of the film’s plot becomes a means to sadism against the audience at the level of the film’s address: the mother, in this instance, as giver and (failed) protector of life. Like The Black Hand, like Sabotage, M draws attention to a uniquely privileged mode of ‘filmed sadism’, in which the imaginary pain, the imaginary death, of a child becomes a form of attack on the audience and its pleasures in the spectacle of aggression, be it implied or screened. In particular, it is part of the significance of M, its cultural history as well as its textual unfolding, to situate the murder of a child as a form of provocation: to pity, to violence, both on and off screen. On the one hand, the film’s sadism towards the child, towards the spectator, is vital to the development of the horror genre in cinema, its generative dialogue with the idea of the

168

uncanny child as both subject and object of terror (again, that Beckert is like a child, that children are like Beckert, is inseparable from the horror of M). From the death of the little girl in Whale’s Frankenstein – the sight of the child being thrown into the water was, as we have seen, censored for decades – it is a rich, and various, genre. Notable examples include Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960), Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), Roman Polanksi’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976), Robert Wise’s Audrey Rose (1977), David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot (1979) and Poltergeist (1982), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), Fritz Kiersch’s Children of the Corn (1984), Mark L. Lester’s Firestarter (1984), del Torro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water (2002), Takashi Shimizu, Ju-On: The Grudge (2003) and, of course, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. The mix of anticipation and anxiety that surrounded the first cinema release of this film in 1973 is, I think, unimaginable without the child, the images of a tortured little girl, Regan, that, as both Friedkin and William Blatty – the screenwriter and author of the bestselling book on which the film was based – were all too aware courted the pleasures of obscenity. ‘Bill Friedkin always said that would be the case’, Blatty commented in an interview; ‘that they would come to see the little girl masturbate with the crucifix’ – a supposition with which Blatty appears to have been much less comfortable than Friedkin.30 Disputes between Blatty and Friedkin concerning footage cut from the film in 1973 but restored on its release on dvd in 2000

169

– the film can still be marketed as the ‘scariest movie of all time’ – cast some light on the uses of the child in both novel and film. For example, the reinstated film footage includes an expository sequence: a brief conversation, a lull during the final exorcism that will see the death of both priests, Fathers Karras and Merrin. With the two priests, their faces turned away from one another, sitting at the top of the stairs in the hallway outside Regan’s bedroom, the scene is one of exhausted despair, a moment of quiet wrested from the noise that helps to generate the spectacle of this film. That quiet is broken by the question that Karras puts to the older priest: ‘Why this girl? It doesn’t make sense.’ Merrin’s response – ‘I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly, to reject the possibility that God could love us’ – refocuses, albeit momentarily, the target of the evil that has been such a palpable presence through the film. Not Regan, not ‘this poor child’, whose suffering has forged the visual aesthetic of the film, but ‘us’, all of us, whatever it is in us that makes us human. Possession of the child, in other words, is (potential) possession of the world, her corruption the very sign of the potency of the threat. The logic, as conventional as it is dismal, is one that, as Blatty recalled, he wanted to make as explicit in the film as it is in his novel. Commenting on his differences with Friedkin on this point, Blatty spelt out the importance of the restoration of this scene for The Exorcist as film: But I wanted that explanation from Merrin because I thought it would be good to hear him tell Karras that this

170

whole story is not about a little girl. He tells Karras that everyone else is the target . . . it gives the audience a reason. It allows the audience not to despise themselves for loving all that obscenity, the torture of the little girl, the crucifix masturbation. It allows them to enjoy the film for what it is, and not revile themselves for enjoying it.31 Why does The Exorcist need a reason? Or, put differently, what does reason do to the experience of watching The Exorcist? As a film that attacks both child and audience, that uses its aggression against the child to drive its audience towards a love of obscenity that then revolts against itself, The Exorcist courts the appalled fascination that, on one view, is inseparable from the spectacle of suffering. Certainly, the film might well be described, in Friedkin’s phrase, as a ‘torture chamber for a child’ (the photographic realism of the scene in which Regan endures an arteriogram is only one case in point: Friedkin clearly relishes the fact that this sequence was used as a training film for radiologists throughout the 1980s). But that torture is directed, too, at the audience: on Blatty’s telling, the work of this restored scene is not only to vindicate the vicarious, and eroticized, sadism towards the child that the film has tried to provoke, but also to disseminate its aggression: not, or not only, the child but everyone is under attack – an attack that, on this argument, can restore the self-love that the audience has sacrificed in the name of its visual, and sadistic, pleasures. Sadism against the child as a means to sadism against the self? Sadism against the child as a means to the masochistic

171

experience of cinema? Such questions depend on the perceptual resources of cinema, certainly – its passion for visual and aural coercion, as it were – but, too, on the genre of the child on film. Regan, for example, has become one of the most spectacular, and productive, examples of child possession on screen. In the wake of The Exorcist, is it possible to watch the opening sequences of The Shining without being on the alert for the horror of Danny Torrance, who, in conversation with his mother, begins to speak through the identity of ‘Tony’ – shades of Captain Howdy – a voice, an identity, that inhabits the child even before the family’s catastrophic move to The Overlook Hotel? In fact, the uncanny child, in various guises, is central to the anxiety generated by The Shining: notably, the camera’s (often claustrophobic) identification with Danny’s point of view as he cycles around the empty corridors is vital to the anxiety of these now iconic sequences. If what Danny sees, and knows, is once again a driving question for this film – the telepathic child, the child who knows the ‘shining’, is part of Kubrick’s play with horror – its answer rushes the audience towards some of the most disturbing images of the child on film: the images of the (murdered) sisters, who, in their frontality and stillness conjure the domain of the still photograph within the scene of the moving image (as Brigitte Peucker has noted, the sisters are ‘silent images only partially released from a photograph’).32 Standing hand-inhand, the sisters appear forever locked together in death, in the moment of capture by the camera: one of the uncanny effects of this sequence of The Shining is that it is as if the image of the sisters, cropped from a photograph, is moved towards Danny as

172

In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), the sisters invite Danny to play in death.

they invite him to play, to join them in death – the death of their mangled bodies, certainly, but also the confines of the ‘still life’, the uncanny domain of the photograph that threatens to bring the illusion of the moving image to a halt. On the other hand: the time and place of M in pre-Nazi Germany also draws the horror of child murder towards the genocidal history of that sadism, its potential for a massive attack on a life in common, a common being in the world. ‘This won’t bring back our children’: Frau Beckmann’s judgement is, implicitly, a criticism of the law of talion, caught between a lust for

173

vengeance and a vindication of justice, that breaks out in both the Underworld Court and the professional court of law – as well, of course, as in the initial public reception of the film. The dangers against which Tergit warned in her review of the premiere of M come right to the fore when confronted with the woman in the audience, crying out for Beckert not to be imprisoned, not even put to death, but quartered – cut up, tortured, destroyed. That cry, its wish, finds its political expression, perhaps, through the voice of Joseph Goebbels, who, on viewing M, confided his enthusiasm for the film to his diary: ‘Fantastic! Against humanitarian soppiness. For the death penalty. Well made. Lang will be our director one day.’33 To hear cries for the destruction of Beckert, of Lorre, a Jewish actor, must have struck hard in the context of the rise of National Socialism (it has often been noted that the selfappointed leader of the Underworld Court, Schränker, himself accused of three murders, is a symbol of Nazism). It is well known that the Nazification of cinema was fundamental to Goebbels’ plans for a renewal of a popular, national culture for the masses. In 1931 M, with its depiction of a child murderer, could be claimed as one such film; by 1933 the Nazis had banned it; in 1940, in the propaganda film The Eternal Jew, Fritz Hippler would appropriate Lorre’s performance before the Underworld Court as evidence of the mad degeneration of the Jews. M, to put it mildly then, has an unstable history in relation to the hesitation between murder and justice, empathy and violence, in which it traffics. As vindication of state murder, for example, the death of a child appears to have been central to Goebbels’ response to

174

Lang’s film – a death, a child, coming to Nazism through complex Christian and German Romantic traditions.34 Six months after the first release of M, his reaction to the murder of 16-year-old Herbert Norkus, a member of the Hitler Youth, indicates what Goebbels expected not only from cinema – ‘one of the most modern and far-reaching means of influencing the masses’, as he put it – but from the death of a German youth.35 The son of a Berlin factory worker, Norkus had joined the Hitler Youth in 1931 (unlike the majority of boys and young men from his workingclass district, who supported the communists). On the morning of Sunday, 24 January 1932, leafleting for Goebbels’ Sports Palace rally to be held later that day, Norkus was attacked by a group of thirty or forty communists, acting on information from a rival faction of Berlin Nazis. Stabbed and trampled, Norkus died in the emergency room of Moabit Municipal Hospital. Two days later, Der Angriff, the newspaper founded by Goebbels in 1927, published his tribute to the young boy about to enter the martyrology of Hitler Youth: There in the bleak, gray twilight, yellow, tortured eyes stare into the emptiness. His tender head has been trampled into a bloody pulp. Long, deep wounds extend down the slender body and a deadly laceration tears through his lungs and heart. . . . Yet it is as if life stirs anew out of pale death. And look: the slender, elegant body begins to move. Slowly, slowly he rises as if conjured up by magic, until he stands tall in all his youthful glory right before my trembling eyes. And

175

without moving his lips, a frail child’s voice is heard as if speaking from all eternity: ‘They killed me. They plunged the murderer’s dagger into my breast and mangled my head . . . Warm blood poured out of me and I lost my breath. . . . Horrified, I ran for my life . . . I fell one last time and knew that it was all over. Again and again, they cruelly trampled my face, streaming in blood. I lost consciousness and then sank into a merciful death. This happened in Germany. In a nation that claims to belong to Western civilization. And only because I – still a child – wanted to serve my country. . . . I am Germany.’36 It is a chilling passage, uninhibited in its lingering over a dead child’s body. Up close, and looking, Goebbels works over the wounds sustained by Norkus – who, it should be said, was laid out in an open casket for 24 hours – as a prelude to that ventriloquized address to Germany in the frail, and impossible, voice of a murdered child: ‘They killed me. . . . And only because I – still a child – wanted to serve my country. . . . I am Germany.’ This is, on Goebbels’ telling, the voice of the future. ‘And look’, he continued to exhort his audience. On 11 September 1933 Hans Steinhoff ’s Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex) premiered at the Ufa Phoebus Palace in Munich (a showing elaborately staged and attended by the elite of the Third Reich, including Adolf Hitler). Based on the life and death of Norkus,

176

it was the first feature film sponsored by the Youth Leader of the Reich, Baldur von Schirach; its subtitle, ‘A Film on the Sacrificial Spirit of German Youth’, announced the theme that would contribute to the reputation of Hitlerjunge Quex as the prototypical film of National Socialist youth. Strenuously promoted by the Nazi Party, including classroom outings to see the film, it achieved an audience of somewhere between 10 and 20 million viewers.37 Produced by Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, which, as the largest film company in Germany, had fired all its Jewish employees in March that year, Hitlerjunge Quex was rated as ‘artistically especially worthwhile’ by the Ministry of Propaganda, and praised by Goebbels as the ‘first large-scale attempt to depict the ideas and world of National Socialism with the art of cinema’.38 What price the image of the child? in pain, in death? At the limits of language, of culture, of knowledge, the child can always be used to make the familiar strange, the domestic uncanny, in a way that also draws on that attachment to the image of the child as an incitement to compassion, pity, feeling – above all to the future. But what happens if that image fails? ‘I . . . don’t think that these children acting in the movie’, Bahman Ghobadi has reflected on the filming of Turtles Can Fly, ‘could be called real children. They never had a childhood.’39 Set in a small village in Kurdistan, on the Iraqi–Turkish border, Turtles Can Fly chronicles the lives of Kurdish refugee children in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003. The children, many of them maimed, survive by collecting landmines to sell on to a local buyer;

177

in one of the most startling scenes in contemporary cinema, Henkov – a boy, gifted with prophecy, who has lost both arms in an Iraqi attack on his village – demonstrates his skill in defusing mines with his teeth. Beyond what may be described as the brute fact that we have all been children, is Henkov a child?40 Not in Ghobadi’s view, clearly; nor, in fact, is Hassel an actor in the conventional sense of the term. There are, as Ghobadi has explained, no professional actors in the region, no film industry, no concept of acting. The children in the film, in other words, play themselves or, as Ghobadi puts it: ‘They replay their real role in life.’41 Part of the economic and cultural reality of contemporary Kurdish cinema, then, the children are recruits from the region, ‘playing’ themselves – a reduction of the work of fictionalization that underlines the documentary status of the moving image. But, of course, the children, the image of the child, are also doing more than playing themselves; in particular, through the deaths of Agrin and Ragi, Turtles Can Fly begins to symbolize the death of the future that may be driving this cinema to its documentary limits. Raped by the Iraqi soldiers who destroyed her village, Agrin, Henkov’s sister, is now mother to the blind toddler, Ragi. The film opens in a close-up on Agrin’s face – is she a girl or a woman? – as she walks towards the edge of an exposed cliff top. As she looks back, the screen is filled with the image of blue water; a figure, blurred, but, in its outline and colour, possibly recognizable as the girl on the cliff, appears to the right of the frame, walks along the edge of the water, stops, stands, throws something in. Cut back to Agrin, still looking back, then to a long shot that shows her exposed, a tiny figure, to the left of the frame dominated by

178

Children of war in Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly (2005). Henkov defuses mines with his teeth; Ragi, child of a rape; Satellite, the boy who knows technology.

179

Agrin on the edge of the clifftop, in Turtles Can Fly.

rocks and sky. Cut back to a close-up on her bare feet, on the very edge of the cliff; as the film slows, slightly, she jumps. Is it that, beyond a certain level of violence, the child is no longer a child; the future is no longer the future? At least, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a future. It may be that this is the structure of feeling that, haunting the death of a child in his or her irreducible singularity, underlies the investment in the image of the child as a sign of the future, as defence against loss of significance in the world. ‘Anyone who comes to Iraq’, Ghobadi has said in an interview, ‘and sees it for himself could never think of any other solution than death. I myself have thought of committing suicide two or three times in my life. I didn’t want this life, this plight and this suffering.’42 Prepared for throughout the film, that failure of imagination, lived out as a profound attack on the wish to be alive, is staged in Agrin’s murder of Ragi and her subsequent suicide. Against the noise of the us invasion, Turtles Can Fly loops back to the beginning of the film, the enigma of those opening shots, as, in a sequence on the cusp between Henkov’s prophetic dreaming and his waking realization

180

A child on the end of a rope. ‘I wish to dedicate my film to all the innocent children in the world,’ Ghobadi has said – ‘the casualties of the policies of dictators and fascists.’

of the meaning of what he has seen, Ragi is revealed, sitting on the very edge of the spring. Drenched by rain, he is tethered to a rope that Agrin, in the next shot, is seen tying to a heavy rock. As the camera draws back, Ragi is jerked, suddenly, into the water. It is the shot that completes that opening sequence in which a figure throws something – the end of a rope – into the lake.

conclusion

‘Who is that boy?’ Writing in 1969, Susan Sontag gives voice to a question that runs through critical responses to a film renowned for its modernist challenge to the conventions of narrative and visual interpretation.1 Not immediately a film ‘about’ childhood, the Prologue to Bergman’s Persona introduces one of the most enigmatic representations of the child in twentieth-century film. Beginning in darkness, the first image of the film returns its audience to the origins of cinema: two points of light, the carbons of a projector lamp; a flash of light; a fragment of film leader, flashing by; a blank white screen; a primitive animated cartoon, projected sideways, its movement uneven, flickering (a chubby woman, bathing her face and breasts, provides a brief moment of narrative relief). The film moves very rapidly, too rapidly to be seen at times, as if these often brutal images are at once given to be seen and withheld. But as the film begins to slow down, its images become like ‘stills’ in time – as if, at this point, Persona cannot find its ‘normal’ speed, the speed that would give that impression of movement from one still to the next. At the level of the image,

182

the film cuts rather than flows: a deserted forest, iron railings, snow heaped outside a brick building (a church, perhaps, or a hospital). Then the first shot of the lower half of an aged face, motionless, prone, filmed very close up (as if the camera is shutting out what may, or may not, be there in the surrounding space). A faint tolling of bells, the noise of a dripping tap, come to reinforce the sense that what we are looking at is a dead body. Next, shot from below, again in close-up, the head and hair of an elderly woman (perhaps another view of the first face, but it is impossible to determine by looking). Then the first shot of a young boy, lying beneath a white sheet, his upper chest and head exposed. This time, the camera is further back, and the boy is lying in the lower portion of the frame. The tap continues to drip, but the camera holds on stillness. Cut to the close-up, shot from below, of a hand and lower arm, hanging over the edge of a trolley; cut back to the elderly woman seen in the previous shot, the camera now positioned so that we can see her hands folded across her chest. Again, this is an image suffused with death. As the shots accumulate, the noises off-screen appear to penetrate the images, carrying the impression of movement, of life, happening elsewhere, in the invisible, but imaginable, space off-screen. The tap continues to drip, rhythmically; there is the sound of doors, perhaps, opening and shutting, of footsteps, of a bucket crashing over. The ringing of a telephone becomes increasingly insistent. Two images, in rapid succession, are especially significant. The first is another shot of that elderly woman, lying with eyes closed, telephone ringing shrilly in the background.

183

Ingmar Bergman, Persona (1966).

184

Then, a second shot, of the same woman, her eyes open wide now, her face tilted up slightly. But we don’t see her move. The shock of the impression of movement at this point belongs to the rapid juxtaposition of two apparently static images. Now Bergman cuts back to the boy on the trolley, and, for the first time, the telephone still ringing, he turns his face towards us, then curls away from us, covering himself up as if to sleep, before raising himself up on his arms to read a book. What Bergman exploits towards the end of this sequence is one of the basic, but hidden, components of cinema: the photograph, the frame, the timed stops of the separate frames, from which the moving reality of film is formed. As if stopping and starting the flow of images across the screen of Persona, Bergman begins to restage the conditions of early cinema, restoring the illusion of movement to an old woman’s face, and then, as the (apparently) dead child turns his face towards the camera, bringing the still image to life, reconstituting the impression of movement within the frame. Movement, animation, ‘life’: in Persona, the terms of the critical and public reception of early cinema are devolved onto the image of a child, surrounded by the dead (at the level of theme) and by the ‘still’ frames that render the threat of immobility, stillness, death to the child’s body on screen. The camera, from this point, cannot let him alone, moving closer as the boy sits up, puts on a pair of glasses and props himself on his elbows to read a book. To the strains of music, he turns, again, to look out towards us with a look of quite inscrutable perplexity. Reaching out to touch the space beyond the edge of the frame – towards the camera, towards the film’s

185

In one of the most poignant encounters between child and cinema, Bergman puts the child on the side of movement, of the illusion of life amidst the death of the mortuary and the still image.

spectators – the boy is shown, in a reverse shot, to be touching a massive cinema screen, his hands roving over an image that, as it appears to move in and out of focus, dissolves between the faces

186

of the two women, Elisabet and Alma, whose strange encounter is at the narrative heart of Bergman’s film. If there is one image that can be said to stand for the impact, at once visual and conceptual, of Bergman’s film, then it is that composite image of the faces of the two women – Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, ‘devilishly alike’, as Bergman described them – that appears towards the end of the monologue in which Alma (played by Andersson) ventriloquizes Elisabet’s wish for a dead baby (or, less ambiguously, though perhaps less precisely her wish for the death of her unborn child).2 The monologue is run through twice: first, with the camera on Elisabet’s face as she listens to Alma’s words; the second time, with the camera fixed on Alma as, once again, she speaks for Elisabet. As she reaches the end of that repeated speech, the double, or composite, image formed between the faces of the two women brings the sequence to its conclusion in Alma’s forceful protest: ‘I’m not like you. I don’t feel like you.’ It is an image, the very crisis of the film for many critics, anticipated in the Prologue by a young boy’s looking at, his feeling of and for, the screen of cinema, the illusory presence of a woman’s face that it supports. As the object of the camera’s prolonged attention, the child returns that absorption in the form of a wondering look, a touch, that breaches the conventional bounds between viewer and screen (perhaps only a child can afford to ignore that familiar, if frustrating, imperative, ‘Look, don’t touch!’). Quite a wager, this, to put the encounter between child and cinema on the side of the illusion of life, of movement – a counter to death, to the threat of lifelessness, that might otherwise

187

‘I’m not like you. I don’t feel like you.’ Bergman’s Persona.

engulf them both (the elderly dead, the unmoving photograph). Such a wager is often central to Bergman’s telling of his own discovery of cinema, as both spectator and filmmaker. Recollecting his first experiments with the cinematograph (a Christmas present given to his brother, but exchanged with Bergman for 100 tin soldiers), Bergman put the action of turning the handle of the projector, over and over again, at the heart of his fascination with film. Retreating into a wardrobe with his new device, Bergman projected his first images onto a whitewashed nursery wall:

188

A picture of a meadow appeared on the wall. Asleep in the meadow was a young woman apparently wearing national costume. Then I turned the handle! It is impossible to describe this. I can’t find words to express my excitement. But at any time I can recall the smell of the hot metal, the scent of mothballs and dust in the wardrobe, the feel of the crank against my hand. I can see the trembling rectangle on the wall. I turned the handle and the girl woke up, sat up, slowly got up, stretched her arms out, swung round and disappeared to the right. If I went on turning, she would again lie there, then make exactly the same movements all over again. She was moving.3 And, of course, he, Bergman, was making her do it. In setting up the child as spectacle for our gaze, Bergman pictures, too, the marvels of cinema: camera, screen, projector, lights, movement. In a brief Epilogue, the boy’s hand, wandering across the giant screen, also moves the film to its conclusion: the extinction of the light from the projector arc. In other words, as one of the primary examples of modernist cinema, what Persona gives us to see is how the image of the child can be used to embody, as well as to embrace, the distinctive experience of the moving image on film (the original title of the film, it should be said, was Cinematographet). More strongly, as a film that runs the image of the child on screen into its discovery of the dialectic between life and death, between stillness

189

and movement, at the very origins of cinema, Persona offers a unique perspective on the mutual implication of cinema in childhood, childhood in cinema, that has been the guiding thought of this book. What does cinema do to our myth, or myths, of childhood? ‘I sort of wanted to set a palette for seeing things from a child’s point of view’, recalled Jonathan Caouette, reflecting on the production of his début film, Tarnation, released in 2003.4 Edited with Apple Computer’s iMovie software (apparently for the oft-cited sum of $218), Tarnation was widely acclaimed as a film that, in its restaging of Caouette’s childhood – and, in particular, his relationship to his mother’s mental illness – re-imagined the very form of documentary cinema. Using a Sony Handycam as well as Super 8 film, Caouette had been recording his life since the age of 11; re-compiling that record, narrating and imaging it through the visual and aural landscape of popular film and music, Tarnation has been said to deliver Caouette’s ‘life’ to his audiences – most notably, perhaps, in the sequence in which, as an 11-yearold boy, dressed in his grandmother’s housecoat and his mother’s bandanna, he performs the role of the abused housewife, Hilary. This is, in Caouette’s words, the ‘filming in reality’ for which Tarnation has become renowned. ‘The camera was set on a tripod in our hallway,’ Caouette explains, ‘and I would do these impromptu monologues as whatever characters I’d been inspired to portray things around me. Hilary is supposed to be giving her testimony in court to justify the murder of her abusive husband.’ A child turns a camera on himself? More precisely, a child turns a camera on the scene in which he takes on the

190

Is there a child in this picture? Jonathan Caouette, Tarnation (2003).

imaginary identity, at once narrative and visual, of a woman who responds to the trauma of physical and psychological abuse with murder. And tears. Who can say whom, or where, the child is in this scene? Part of the significance of Tarnation is that, like Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans, also released in 2003, it suggests how a child might begin not only to create a visual document of his life but also to use the camera to survive that life (in the field of still photography, we might compare Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh, 1996). It is a form of survival for which both child and adult may well pay a price. Critics have speculated, for example, on the connection between Caouette’s experiences of radical depersonalization and his objectification of himself on film. Jarecki’s extensive use of the Friedmans’ visual archive of their life as a family, as well as the disintegration of that life following the charges of sexual assault levelled against Arnold and Jesse Friedman (father and son, respectively) in 1987, embroils both family and audience in the dramas of exhibitionism and voyeurism so often felt to be coextensive with the very mode of docu-

191

mentary. ‘If you’re not me, you shouldn’t be watching this’, is David Friedman’s challenge to the viewer, towards the beginning of Jarecki’s film, when we are first presented with footage from the video diary he had begun when his father was arrested on charges of trafficking in child pornography. No doubt developments in visual technologies and their increasing availability to both children and adults – iMovie, for example, is a free software package for Apple users – have the capacity to unsettle the classical choreography of the look at the child that helps to forge, and continues to dominate, the encounter between cinema and childhood. In fact, the idea of the child performing before his or her own camera can now serve to draw attention to the (adult) demands made on the image of the child through the century of cinema. Part of the work of this book has been to trace the shape of those demands through the themes of language, sexuality and death with which the figure of the child on screen is so deeply embroiled. It has been, too, to discover the figure of the child as a means to reflect on the form, and significance, of cinema itself. That what Guy Debord was the first to call the ‘society of the spectacle’ is difficult to think outwith the institution of cinema was one of my starting points for this exploration.5 What, if anything, cinema might do – what it might do with the image of the child – to retort to that spectacle remains very much its question.

references

introduction

1 Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the

2

3 4 5

Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (London and Cambridge, ma, 1995), p. 9. For further discussion, see Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth-Century Photography (Manchester and New York, 1998). Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals [1872] (London, 1998), p. 147; Michelle Shawn Smith, ‘“Baby’s Picture is Always Treasured”: Eugenics and the Reproduction of Whiteness in the Family Photograph Album’, Yale Journal of Criticism, xi/1 (1998), p. 196. Lesley Caldwell, The Elusive Child (London and New York, 2002), p. 4. Anne Higgonet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London, 1998), p. 87. See, for example, Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (New York, 1982). For Postman, there is a necessary cognitive regression at work in the consumption of images – regression with consequences for the very possibility of a distinction between adult and child at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

193

6 Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, in The Cine7 8 9 10 11 12

matic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York, 1980). Edgar Morin, The Cinema; or, The Imaginary Man (Minneapolis, in, and London, 2005), p. 199. Elkan Allan, Guardian (12 October 2002), p. 24. For further discussion of Bad Education, see Garrett Stewart, ‘Vitagraphic Time’, Biography, xxix/1 (2006), pp. 159‒92. Henry James, ‘Preface’, What Maisie Knew [1897] (Oxford, 1980), p. 6. Reinhard Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature (Hanover, nh, and London, 1982), p. 61. ‘Looking and touching’, wrote Kenneth Wright, for example, in Vision and Separation in 1991, ‘are direct and unmediated and are the primary stuff of our first relationship with the world’ (Kenneth Wright, Vision and Separation: Between Mother and Baby, London, 1991, p. 56); ‘Young infants’, as Lorraine E. Bahrick, Maria HernandezReif and Ross Flom explain in their study of perceptual development in babies, ‘are excellent perceivers of faces’ (‘The Development of Infant Learning about Specific Face–Voice Relations’, Developmental Psychology, xxxxi/3, 2005, p. 542). As the authors go on to point out, infants are also excellent perceivers of the human voice, a theme taken up at the beginning of Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York, 1990). Martin Jay’s ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ is included in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Washington, dc, 1988).

194

1

the child, from life

1 T. S. Eliot, ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, in Complete

Poems and Plays (London, 1969), p. 25.

2 André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ 3 4

5 6

[1945], in What is Cinema?, vol. i (Los Angeles, ca, and London, 1967), p. 14. Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows (London, 1990), p. 24. Maxim Gorky, newspaper review of the Lumière programme, in In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. Colin Harding and Simon Popple (London, 1996), p. 6. Ibid. An on-going project that contains filmographic information for all American feature films produced from 1893 to 1971, the American Film Institute Catalogue of Silent Films is a crucial resource in the study of early film. Unless otherwise noted, the afi database, together with the Internet Movie Database, have been consulted for the catalogue and production information discussed in this and the following chapters (the databases can be consulted online at www.afi.com and www.imdb.com). Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York, 1990), and Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, ca, 1991); Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana, il, 1991); and Christopher Williams ed., Cinema: The Beginnings and the Future (London, 1996), are also important sources of information on the origins of film in the United States and Europe. Additional web resources include the

195

7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

British Film Institute Film and tv database (available to consult at www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/ftvdb) and Silent Era (available to consult at www.silentera.com/index.html). Gorky, review of the Lumière programme, p. 7. Marie Corelli, ‘To John Millais’ [24 December 1895], cited by Julia Kuehn in ‘John Everett Millais’s Bubbles and the Commercialization of Art’, in The Victorian Web: Literature, History and Culture in the Age of Victoria, (www.victorianweb.org/authors/corelli/kuehn6.html, accessed 10 March 2007). Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, p. 125. Edweard Muybridge, Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion, 3 vols (New York, 1979). Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (London, 1990), p. 35. Georges Méliès, cited in Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, nj, 1995), p. 119. George Pearson, Flashback: Autobiography of a British Filmmaker [1957], cited in In the Kingdom of the Shadows, ed. Harding and Popple, p. 9. Burch, Life to those Shadows, p. 21. Ibid. Robert Herring, Films of the Year, 1927‒1928 (London, 1928), p. 1. ‘In a singular way’, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘the image incarnates and makes appear the person represented in it, as spirits are made to appear at a séance.’ See ‘The Child’s Relations with Others’, in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, il, 1964), p. 132. In The Cinema; or,

196

18 19

20

21 22 23 24

The Imaginary Man, Edgar Morin also refers to this ‘quality that is not in life but in the image of life’ (Minneapolis, in, and London, 2005, p. 15) – themes that I will return to in chapters Two and Four of this book. Advertisement cited in In the Kingdom of the Shadows, ed. Harding and Popple, p. 36. C. Francis Jenkins, Animated Pictures: An Exposition of the Historical Development of Chronophotography, its Present Scientific Applications and Future Possibilities, and of the Methods and Apparatus Employed in Entertainment of Large Audiences by Means of Projecting Lanterns to Give the Appearance of Objects in Motion (New York, 1970), pp. 104–5. The commentary from The Era and the Edison Catalogue is available to view via Screenonline / British Film Institute (www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/727557/index.html). Clips from the film are also available view at this site, but only via registered uk educational institutions. Béla Balázs, Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (New York, 1970), p. 40. Hepworth, cited by Tom Gunning, ‘In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film’, Modernism / Modernity, iv/1 (1997), p. 23. Michael Brooke’s commentary is available via the British Film Institute / Screenonline (www.screenonline.org.uk/ film/id/727557/index.html). Vanessa Toulmin and Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Is It You?: Recognition, Representation and Response in Relation to the Local Film’, Film History: An International Journal, xvii/1 (2005), p. 7. For further discussion of the history and exhibition of early film, see Celebrating 1895: The Cente-

197

nary of Cinema, ed. John Fullerton (London, 1998). In particular, Nicholas Hiley’s ‘“At the Picture Palace”: the British Cinema Audience, 1895–1920’ includes a commentary on the speed of projection in early cinema. 25 Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, p. 15. 26 See, for example, Dimitris Eleftheriotis, ‘Early Cinema as Child: Historical Metaphor and European Cinephilia in Lumière & Company’, Screen, xlvi/3 (2005), pp. 315–40. My thanks to Dan North for bringing this article to my attention, as well as his comments on Premiers pas de bébé. In this context, it is also worth noting the number of early films that feature the bathing of black babies. ‘The real hit with the children’, wrote an anonymous reviewer in the Kansas City Star on 2 December 1896, ‘was the Biograph pictures . . . [T]he bathing of the black baby who kicked and struggled brought the house to a fever pitch’ (cited in Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, Berkeley, ca, 2005, p. 129). The picture in question is probably William K. L. Dickson’s A Hard Wash (also known as The Pickaninny’s Bath): ‘A colored woman washing a little pickaninny’, ran the entry in the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Catalogue, ‘Very funny, and especially pleasing to children’. It is a bald description of what appears to have been a popular theme. Biograph’s rival, Edison Company, also released A Morning Bath towards the end of 1896: ‘Mammy is washing her little pickaninny. She thrusts him, kicking and struggling, into a tub full of foaming suds.’ In January 1903 Lubin released Colored Baby’s Morning Bath – ‘In which a darkey is seen washing her pickaninny in a large tub’ – and Whitewashing a Colored Baby – ‘Showing a woman trying to wash a

198

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

colored baby white. An excellent film.’ In this instance, Lubin makes explicit the racist humour on which all four films depend: no matter how ‘hard’ she scrubs, the black mother cannot wash her baby clean (i.e., white). In other words, the black baby does not function primarily, iconically, as a child in these features; if he or she draws the gaze, it is as racist stereotype – the phobic idea of blackness as dirt – rather than as guarantor of the novelty of cinematic technology. Gunning, ‘In Your Face’, p. 22. Sadakichi Hartmann, cited in Anne Higgonet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London, 1998), p. 69. Fritz Lang, ‘The Future of the Feature Film in Germany’ [1926], reprinted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley, ca, and London, 1994), pp. 622–3. I will come back to this topic in chapter Four. Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (London, 1982), p. 58. Hugo Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York and London, 2002), pp. 191–4. Ibid., p. 154. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Freud Journal (New York, 1964), p. 101. Georges Duhamel, cited in Howard Eiland, ‘Reception in Distraction’, Boundary 2, xxx/1 (2003), p. 56. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944] (London, 1991), p. 126; for two influential inflections of this theme in contemporary critical

199

theory, see Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism v (London and New York, 2002), and Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York, 2002). Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg on Film, p. 193. See Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarrie and Kathryn H. Fuller, Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (Cambridge, 1996), for a crucial discussion of the Payne Fund Studies, one of the first attempts to undertake sociological analysis of the effects of media on children (the ‘moviemade child’). For another perspective on the relations among mind, technology and ‘effect’, see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (Chicago and London, 1995). Morin, The Cinema; or, The Imaginary Man, p. 220. ‘The Abuse of the Cinematograph’, The Times (4 April 1913), p. 7; Rawnsley’s letter, published a few days later, has also been reprinted in Harding and Popple, eds, In the Kingdom of the Shadows, pp. 71–2. David Robinson, ‘The Haunted Worlds of Childhood’, The Times (11 October 1974), p. 17. v

36 37

38 39

40

2

cinema, infans

1 Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, Kaspar Hauser: An Instance

of a Crime against the Life of the Soul of Man (Boston, ma, 1832), pp. 344, 304–5. 2 Ibid., p. 304. 3 Ibid., p. 284. For copyright reasons, the image in question cannot be reproduced here. However, it can be viewed, freely, as the image frequently used to market the film, at www.imdb.com/title/tt0071691/ and www.activitaly.it/ immaginicinema/herzog/kaspar_hauser.htm.

200

4 Adriana Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children: Temp5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16

17

tation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (Montreal, 2006). Feuerbach, Kaspar Hauser, p. 306. Ibid., p. 229. Ibid., p. 313. Ibid., p. 312. Ibid., p. 313. Clare Clouzot, ‘Entretien avec Werner Herzog’, Positif, 169 (May 1975), p. 66 (my translation). William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (London, 1995), p. xxix [book ii, lines 234–6 (1850), p. 87]. Clouzot, ‘Entretien avec Werner Herzog’, p. 67 (my translation). D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality [1967] (London, 1999), pp. 116, 111–12. Jean Delmas, ‘Entretien avec Werner Herzog’, Jeune Cinema, 88 (July–August 1975), p. 17 (my translation). Michael Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope (New Jersey and London, 1993), p. 200. D. W. Winnicott, ‘Anxiety Associated with Insecurity’ [1952], in Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers (London, 1987), p. 99; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education [1762] (London, 1991), p. 46. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln, ne, 1995), p. 71. I am indebted here to Christopher Fynsk’s Infant Figures (Stanford, ca, 2000), which first drew my attention to this text by Blanchot. Delmas, ‘Entretien avec Werner Herzog’, p. 15, my translation.

201

18 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary

Signifier (London, 1982), p. 4.

19 Ibid., p. 55. 20 Delmas, ‘Entretien avec Werner Herzog’, p. 17. 21 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception

(Evanston, il, 1964), p. 146.

22 Bryher, The Days of Mars: A Memoir, 1940‒1946 (London,

1972), p. 150.

23 Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film

in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, ny, and London, 1990), p. 125. In 1967 Winnicott described the work of psychoanalytic interpretation as a ‘complex derivative of the face that reflects what is there to be seen’; see ‘Mirror Role of Mother and Family in Child Development’, in Playing and Reality, p. 117. With the launch in the United States on 25 October 2006 of BabyFirsttv – the first 24-hour television channel devoted to programming designed for babies and toddlers from six months to three years of age – it may well be that we need to ask the questions posed in this chapter urgently. The American Academy of Pediatrics has described the use of video and television in this age range as ‘an uncontrolled experiment on youngsters’, while supporters of the channel stress that its programmes encourage interaction between parent and child in the very act of watching the television. 24 Enid Balint, Before I Was I: Psychoanalysis and the Imagination (London, 1993). 25 Delmas, ‘Entretien avec Werner Herzog’, p. 17, my translation. 26 For invaluable information on Victor and Hauser, see Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children, p. 252 and passim.

202

27 Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biog-

raphy (Berkeley, ca, 2000), p. 325.

28 Nancy Yousef, ‘Savage or Solitary?: The Wild Child and

40 41 42

Rousseau’s Man of Nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas, lxii (2001), p. 247. Ibid., pp. 247–8. Truffaut, cited in Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children, p. 203. Truffaut, cited in Annette Insdorf, François Truffaut (London and Basingstoke, 1981), p. 148. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, p. 21. Insdorf, François Truffaut, p. 145. Richard Rushton, ‘What Can a Face Do?: On Deleuze and Faces’, Cultural Critique, li (2002), p. 220. De Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, p. 264. Lucien Malson, Wolf Children (London, 1972), p. 157. Truffaut, cited in Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children, p. 181. Yousef, ‘Savage or Solitary?’, p. 150. I am indebted to Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children, and Russ Rymer, Genie: A Scientific Tragedy (New York, 1993), for details of Genie’s history. Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children, p. 245. Ibid., p. 202. Rymer, Genie, p. 74.

3

child, sexuality, image

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

1 Rodney Engen, Kate Greenaway: A Biography (London,

1981), pp. 90, 93–4.

2 Anne Higgonet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis

203

of Ideal Childhood (London, 1998), p. 60.

3 Austin Dobson cited in Bryan Holme, The Kate Greenaway 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Book: A Collection of Illustration, Verse and Text (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 7. Higgonet, Pictures of Innocence, p. 54. Ibid., p. 53. Susan R. Gannon, ‘Review of Anne Lundlin, Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 28 (2004), p. 316. Engen, Kate Greenaway, p. 92. Ibid., pp. 94, 67. Ibid., p. 106. For further discussion of Ruskin’s relation to the little girl, see Lindsay Smith, ‘Infantia’, New Formations: The Ruins of Childhood, 42 (2001) pp. 85‒98. Edweard Muybridge, Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion, 3 vols (New York, 1979). Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford, 1988), p. 195. Vachel Lindsay, ‘To Mary Pickford, Moving Picture Actress’, in The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay, Complete and with Lindsay’s Drawings, ed. Dennis Camp (Peoria, il, 1984). See Mary Pickford biography on The Internet Movie Database at www.imdb.com/name/nm0681933/bio (accessed 10 March 2006). Gaylyn Studlar, ‘Oh, “Doll Divine”: Mary Pickford, Masquerade and the Pedophilic Gaze’, Camera Obscura, 48 (2001), p. 209. Graham Greene, review in Night and Day (28 October 1937), pp. 184–5.

204

17 Graham Greene, cited in Blake Stimson, ‘Andy Warhol’s

Red Beard’, Art Bulletin, lxxxiii/5 (2001), p. 537.

18 Gilbert Seldes, cited in ibid., p. 537. 19 dvd sources for Baby Doll (2006). Warner Bros. Entertain-

ment Inc. 20 Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of 21 22 23

24

25 26

27

the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton, nj, and Oxford, 2001), pp. 137, 141. Edgar Morin, The Cinema; or, The Imaginary Man (Minneapolis, in, and London, 2005), p. 15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. i (New York, 1980), p. 78. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality [1905], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. vii (London, 1995), p. 173. W. H. Auden, ‘In Memoriam Sigmund Freud’, cited in John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and its Passions (Cambridge, ma, and London, 1997), p. 184. Sigmund Freud, ‘Wild Psychoanalysis’ [1910], in Standard Edition, vol. xi (London, 1995), p. 222. See, for example, Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York, 1986), and Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore, md, and London, 1976). ‘It may well be’, Freud wrote towards the end of ‘Infantile Sexuality’, ‘that nothing of considerable importance can occur in the organism without contributing some component to the excitation of the sexual instinct’ (Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, p. 205).

205

28 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900], in

Standard Edition, vol. iv (London, 1995), p. 191.

29 Ibid., pp. 565–6. 30 Georges-Louis Leclerc, cited in Adriana Benzaquén,

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (Montreal, 2006), p. 37. For further discussion of the helplessness of the infant in Freud’s writings, see Vicky Lebeau, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows (London and New York, 2001). Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900], in Standard Edition, vol. v (London, 1995), pp. 565–6. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York, 1990), p. 349. Frances Ferguson, ‘The Afterlife of the Romantic Child: Rousseau and Kant Meet Deleuze and Guattari’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 102.1 (2003), pp. 215‒34. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita [1955], vols i and ii (Paris, 1958), p. 152). Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 179. The Times (13 May 1961), p. 5. The British Board of Film Classification statement can be found at www.bbfc.co.uk/news/press/19980320.html (accessed 12 March 2007). Nabokov, Lolita, p. 77. Susan S. M. Edwards, ‘Prosecuting “Child Pornography”: Possession and Taking of Indecent Photographs of Children’, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, xxii/1 (2000), p. 1. Ibid., p. 2.

206

42 Relevant amendments to the Protection of Children Act

43 44 45 46 47

48

4

can be accessed online at www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1994/ Ukpga_19940033_en_8.htm; see Edwards, ‘Prosecuting “Child Pornography”’, passim; there is also a useful discussion of the implications of this legislation for cinema on the website of the British Board of Film Classification (www.sbbfc.co.uk/student_guide_legislation2.asp). The Court of Appeal ruling in Regina v. Graham-Kerr can be read in full at www.geocities.com/pca_1978/reference/ grahamKerr.html (accessed 14 March 2007). For a discussion of the work of Sally Mann, see Higgonet, Pictures of Innocence. The Facts of Sex, cited in Steven Angelides, ‘Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse and the Erasure of Child Sexuality’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, x/2 (2004), p. 144. Philip French, review of Innocence, in the Observer (2 October 2005). For further discussion, see Higgonet, Pictures of Innocence, passim, and Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Virtual Child Porn: The Law and the Semiotics of the Image’, Journal of Visual Culture, iii/1 (2004), pp. 17‒34. My thanks to Tim Huntley for the suggestion of, and his insights into, this film. the child, from death

1 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? [1948] (London,

1970), p. 233.

2 Karin Landgren, ‘The Protective Environment: Develop-

ment Support for Child Protection’, Human Rights Quarterly, xxvii (2005), p. 216. The text of the United Nations

207

3

4

5 6 7 8

Convention on the Rights of the Child is reproduced in Children and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (Princeton, nj, 1995). In The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau and Mary Shelley (Chicago and London, 1988), David Marshall offers an important reading of eighteenthcentury responses to Aristotle’s Poetics; see, too, Carolyn J. Dean’s crucial essay, ‘Empathy, Pornography and Suffering’, differences:A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, xiv/1 (2003), pp. 88‒124. John Hutnyk, ‘Photogenic Poverty: Souvenirs and Infantilism’, Journal of Visual Culture, iii/1 (2004), p. 81. Hutnyk describes the archive of photogenic poverty – and, in particular, a Unicef fund-raising advertisement – as a ‘vast representational compendium of children in need [that] supports a mode of charity clearly insufficient and inadequate in its effects’. On this view, the image of the child plays a vital role as ‘alibi for avoiding the structural redistribution that would not only alleviate but eradicate the poverty of children, also of adults, families, people’. Serge Leclaire, A Child is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive (Stanford, ca, 1998), p. 2. Ibid., p. 2. Christopher Hope, ‘A Child in Time’, Guardian (7 September 2001), g2, p. 2. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York, 2004), p. 150; for further discussion of Elizabeth Eckford, see Vicky Lebeau, ‘The Unwelcome Child: Elizabeth Eckford and Hannah Arendt’, in Race, Identity and Representation in Education, ed. Cameron McCarthy et al., 2nd edn (New York and London, 2005).

208

9 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London, 2003),

p. 1.

10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Child’s Relations with 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Others’, in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, il, 1964), p. 132. Geoffrey Gorer, ‘The Pornography of Death’, Encounter, v/4 (1955). Gorer is discussed further in Dean, ‘Empathy, Pornography and Suffering’. See also Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others. Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York, 1980). Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, nj, and Oxford, 2001). The letter is reproduced in In the Kingdom of the Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. Colin Harding and Simon Popple (London, 1996), p. 63. ‘The Abuse of the Cinematograph’, The Times (4 April 1913), p. 7. Alfred Hitchcock in conversation with François Truffaut, in Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York and London, 1983), p. 109. Subsequent citations are from ibid., pp. 109, 111, 265. B. R. Crisler, New York Times (12 June 1938). See Lee Edelman’s recent discussion of Hitchcock in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, nc, and London, 2004). Gabriele Tergit, ‘Fritz Lang’s M: Filmed Sadism’ [1931], reprinted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley, ca, and London, 1994), pp. 632–3.

209

20 Fritz Lang, cited in Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Lang (London,

1976), p. 112.

21 For details of this scene, see Anton Kaes, M (London,

2001), pp. 81–2.

22 ‘We will not longer limit ourselves to seeing the effects of

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

feelings’, Lang wrote in ‘The Future of the Feature Film in Germany’ in 1926, ‘but will experience them in our own souls.’ The article is reprinted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Kaes, Jay and Dimendberg, pp. 622–3. Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London, 2000), p. 195. Lang, ‘Some Random Notes about M’, cited in Eisner, Fritz Lang, p. 123. Kaes, M, p. 10. Thierry Kuntzel, ‘The Film-Work’, Enclitic, ii/1 (1978), p. 59. In this context, it is worth noting that M has been an unstable text. Kaes points to a French version of 1932, M le Maudit, which ends with children dancing in a circle; writing in 1976, Eisner pointed out that the final shot of the mothers dressed in mourning did not appear in versions of the film then available; Frau Beckmann’s intervention is heard only as a voice-over to the fade-out: ‘This won’t bring back our children. We, too, should keep a closer watch on our children.’ Restored by the Munich Film Museum, that scene is now, of course, available to view, and it underscores Lang’s own commentary on M as a warning to mothers. Lang, cited in Eisner, Fritz Lang, pp. 127–8. Thea von Harbou, cited in Kaes, M, pp. 75–6. William Blatty, cited in Mark Kermode, The Exorcist (London, 2003), pp. 64–5.

210

31 Blatty, cited in ibid., p. 107. The scene was cut from the

original version of The Exorcist, a cut that, perhaps, helped to establish its reputation as one of the classics of traumatized vision in cinema (with the introduction of the Video Recordings Act in the uk in 1984, the film was more or less banished from public view until its re-release on video in 1999). Certainly, the reputation of this film derives, at least in part, from the circulation of more or less public narratives that detail its effect on its audiences – what these images, and sounds, do to those who venture to watch the film. Stories abound of spectators fainting and vomiting during screenings, of the nightmarish distress suffered by its luckless audiences. Before The Exorcist opened in Reading, a telephone helpline manned by six clergymen was set up to counsel fearful spectators – just days before a report carried by The Times in May 1974 that a 16-year-old naval rating had fallen to his death from a second-floor barrack window. At the inquest, it was noted that he had been suffering from nightmares since watching Friedkin’s film two days earlier. In 1975 the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease carried a paper by James C. Bozzuto detailing his treatment of four patients suffering from what he described as ‘cinematic neurosis’ following a viewing of The Exorcist. ‘Following the distribution and release of the movie, “The Exorcist”, is how Bozzuto begins his intervention, ‘numerous cases of traumatic neurosis and even psychosis were supposedly noted’: Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, clxi/1, 1975, p. 43. 32 Brigitte Peucker, ‘Kubrick and Kafka: The Corporeal Uncanny’, Modernism / Modernity, viii/4 (2001), p. 667. 33 Joseph Goebbels, cited in Gunning, The Films of Fritz

211

Lang, p. 192.

34 Jay W. Baird (‘From Berlin to Neubabelsberg: Nazi Film

35 36 37 38 39

40

Propaganda and Hitler Youth Quex’, Journal of Contemporary History, xviii/1 (1983), p. 495) cites the German historian Gerhard Reinhard Ritter in support of this point: ‘The nature of the German is not without reason also a symbol of eternal growth. It is represented most beautifully and significantly in the type of the German youth. Why otherwise would so many great masters of our history have been able to choose as the incarnation of the German people a youth as symbol – Siegfried, Parsifal, Horst Wessel! All of these representations involve the Faustian thought of the eternal seeker in a significant way.’ Gerhard Ritter, Die geschlechtiche Frage in der deutschen Volkserziehung (Berlin and Cologne, 1936), p. 207. Goebbels, cited in Eric Rentschler, ‘Emotional Engineering: Hitler Youth Quex’, in Modernism / Modernity, ii/3 (1995), p. 24. Goebbels, cited in Baird, ‘From Berlin to Neubabelsberg’, p. 500. Baird, ‘From Berlin to Neubabelsberg’, p. 511. Rentschler, ‘Emotional Engineering’, p. 35. Bahman Ghobadi, in interview with Marie Valla, ‘Death Is a Better World’, Newsweek (21 January 2005). The official website for Bahman Ghobadi’s cinema (www.mijfilm.com) is an invaluable resource, including filmography, reviews and a number of interviews with the director. John Searle, The Social Construction of Reality (Harmondsworth, 1995), cited in Adam Phillips, ‘Children Again’, New Formations: The Ruins of Childhood, xlii (2001), p. 15.

212

41 Ghobadi, in interview with Marie Valla, ‘Death is a Better

World’. 42 Ibid. conclusion

1 Susan Sontag, ‘Bergman’s Persona’, in Ingmar Bergman’s

Persona, ed. Lloyd Michaels (Cambridge, 2000), p. 75.

2 Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman (New York, 1973),

p. 196.

3 Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography

(London, 1988). p. 16.

4 ‘Audio Commentary with Director’, Tarnation, Tarnation

Films 2004. All comments by Caouette are made during his Director’s Commentary. 5 For further reflection on the need for such a retort, see Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London and New York, 2005).

select bibliography

Adriana Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (Montreal, 2006) Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York, 1986) Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1995) Noël Burch, Life to those Shadows (London, 1990) Lesley Caldwell, The Elusive Child (London and New York, 2002) Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London, 1995) Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford, 1988) Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London, 2004) Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Illinois, 1991) Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London, 2000) Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarrie and Karthryn H. Fuller, Children

214

and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (Cambridge, 1996) Allan Langdale, ed., Hugo Münsterberg on Film. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York and London, 2002) Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man (Minneapolis and London, 2005) Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York, 1990) Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London and New York, 2005) Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia, 1993) Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth-century Photography (Manchester and New York, 1998) Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority 1780‒1930 (London and Harvard, 1995) Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (London, 1990)

acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the Research Fund of the School of Humanities, University of Sussex. My thanks, too, to Michelle O’Malley for her invaluable advice. Work-in-progress has been delivered in a variety of contexts and to a number of different audiences. My thanks to all of them, in particular to Elizabeth Cowie, Mary Jacobus, Martin Lefebvre and Marquard Smith for invitations that helped to generate, and sustain, my thinking on childhood and the image. A number of people, both colleagues and friends, have made invaluable contributions to this book. My thanks to Vivian Constantinopoulos, who first suggested the book to me and to Marquard, again, and to Lindsay Smith for the conversations that convinced me to do it. For their time, ideas, patience, wit, and ongoing support, my warmest thanks to Vincent Quinn, John Shire, David Marriott, Alan Sinfield, Amber Jacobs, Matthew Bennett, Michael Paine, Peter Boxall, Jacqueline Rose, Laura Marcus, Susan Hayward, Sophie Thomas, Nicholas Royle, Andrew Hadfield, Howard Jacobs (Cinema Xanadu is a delight), Paul Myerscough, Gordon Hon. Particular thanks are due to Graeme Pedlingham and Louissa Reynolds for their support in the final stages of producing the manuscript. Special thanks to Adriana Benzaquén who made available the manuscript of Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disap-

216

pointment in the Study of Human Nature (subsequently published by McGill-Queens University Press, 2006). Her chapters on Kaspar Hauser and Victor were an invaluable resource in writing this book. My thanks, too, to Dan North for his comments on Premiers pas de bébé, to Tim Huntley for introducing me to Tanovic’s L’Enfer and to Mike and John in the video shop for maintaining such a fine collection of films (particular thanks to Mike for recommending Innocence, amongst other things). I am also deeply grateful to Bahman Ghobadi for his generosity. The book would not have been possible without the support of Doreen Lebeau (whose faith appears to be unshakeable), Gary Lebeau, Jenny Lebeau, Terry Lebeau, Ersilia Norton, Adelita PageRubio, Paul Page-Rubio. To Ella and her friends – especially, Maia, Mattie and Portia – my special thanks (cinema really is different from television!). Vincent, John and David, you know what I owe you.

photo acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Artificial Eye Film Co. Ltd: p. 119; Arrow Films: pp. 34, 143; Jonathan Caouette: p. 190; photo courtesy of Andrew Edmunds: p. 12; Everett Collection/Rex Features: p. 109 (420623A); Bahman Ghobadi/ Mij Film: pp. 178, 179, 180; Kino International: pp. 10, 22, 38, 105; photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, dc: p. 8; Mary Pickford Company: p. 93; Momentum Pictures: p. 134; ruscico: pp. 145, 147; Tartan Films: pp. 140, 183, 185, 187; reproduced with kind permission of Unilever plc: p. 29.

index

Adorno, Theodor, 47 Alice in Wonderland 10, 107 Andreas-Salomé, Lou 46 animated photographs 13, 18, 27, 29, 31–40, 184 Animated Pictures 8 Argent de poche, L’ 72–5, 75, 85 Aristotle 136 As Seen Through a Telescope 105 Babies Quarrel 38 Baby Doll 96–7, 96, 97 Baby Burlesks (Charles Lamont) 94–5 Bad Education 15 Balint, Enid 69 Bazin, André 22, 38 Benzaquèn, Adriana 58, 69 Bergman, Ingmar 15, 138, 181–9

Big Swallow, The 36 Biograph 10–11, 24, 26, 27, 37, 91 Blanchot, Michel 65 Brooke, Michael 36 Burch, Noël 22, 32 Butler, Judith 138 Caldwell, Lesley 10 Capturing the Friedmans 124, 190–91 Carroll, Lewis 10, 97, 107, 150 censorship 51, 53, 95, 111–34, 153–4 ‘Child Life’/Child Pictures 8, 10, 13, 24–40, 74–5, 91, 153 Child Pornography Prevention Act 114–20 child protection 19, 114–35 Children of Rome, Open City 34

219

Cinema Paradiso 15 Come and See 143–9, 145, 147 Comolli, Jean-Louis 13, 40 creativity 15–16 Cry Baby 37 Darwin, Charles 9 death 19, 42, 52, 55, 84, 125–6, 131, 134–9, 152, 154–91 Dijkstra, Bram 92 documentary film 18, 146–8, 151, 177, 189–91 Don’t Look Now 125–6 Duhamel, Georges 46 Edison Film Co., 24, 26–30, 35, 37, 105, 151 Eigen, Michael 63 Eliot, T. S. 21 Enfant sauvage, L’ 69–84, 76, 77 Enfer, L’ 132–4, 134 Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, The 17, 57–69, 79 Enlightenment 72– 85 Exorcist, The 168–71 face 18, 34, 35–55, 57–85, 146–7 Fallen Idol, The 41, 42–4 Fanny and Alexander 15 fascination 17, 45, 47, 49, 69, 98

Feuerbach, Anselm Ritter von, 56, 58, 59 Foucault, Michel 99 Frankenstein 50–55, 52, 168 Freud, Sigmund 46, 99–104 The Interpretation of Dreams 102–4 Three Essays on Sexuality 99–102 ‘Genie’ (wild child) 80–83 genocide 139–40, 142–9, 172 Ghobadi, Bahman 176–8 ‘Ginx’s Baby’ 9 Goebbels, Joseph 173–6 Gorer, Geoffrey 150 Gorky, Maxim 23, 26 Grandma’s Reading Glass 40 Greene, Graham 95 Greenaway, Kate 86–91 Gunning, Tom 40, 160, 165 hallucinating baby 102–4 Happiness 120–22, 121 Hauser, Kaspar 17, 56–70, 81 Hepworth, Cecil 36 Herring, Robert 32 Herzog, Werner 17, 57–70 Higgonet, Anne 12, 87 Hitchcock, Alfred 154–8, 161 Hitler, Adolf 146–7, 148, 175

220

Hitler Youth Quex 175–6 Hogarth, William 10–11 Southwark Fair 11, 12 Horkheimer, Max 47 human mind 17–18, 44–55, 68–9, 99, 102–4 image (animation, stillness and movement) 31–40, 139, 171, 181–91 infans/infant 14, 16, 17, 18, 33, 61–85, 86, 91, 95, 100–4, 129, 137, 147 innocence 78–134 Innocence 119–20, 119 international society 19, 135–7 James, Henry 16, 17 Jay, Martin 17 Jenkins, C. Francis 7, 18, 34–5 Kuhn, Reinhard 16 Kaes, Anton 163 Kuntzel, Thierry 164 Lang, Fritz 41, 158–69, 173 Leclaire, Serge 137, 147 Leclerc, Georges-Louis 103 lifelikeness 21–55, 88–9, 154 Lindsay, Vachel 92–3 Little Albert 18

Little Annie Rooney 93 Lolita 108–24, 109, 113, 118, 126–7 loneliness 57, 63 Lubin, Sigmund 24–5, 26, 28, 37, 152 Lumière, Louis 21, 28, 31, 38 Lumière, Auguste, 21, 31 M 125–6, 158–69, 161, 162, 165, 166, 172–4 Making Soap Bubbles 27 Merleau-Ponty, Michel 68, 147 Metz, Christian 13, 44, 66–7 Millais, John Everett (Bubbles) 29 Morin, Edgar 14, 16, 48, 98 mother 56–66 Münsterberg, Hugo 44–112 Muybridge, Edweard 28–30, 90–91 Mysterious Skin 124, 128–31 Nabokov, Vladimir 108–10 pain 135– 41, 149–54 Persona 138–9, 140, 147, 181–9, 183, 185, 187 Peucker, Brigitte 171 photography 7–9, 11, 22, 25, 28, 73, 115–16, 172, 184

221

Pickford, Mary 92–4 pornography 19, 92, 108–22, 150, 155, 191 Prelude, The 62, 73 Premiers pas de bébé 28, 39 Protection of Children Act (1978) 113–20 psychoanalysis 16, 63–8 Quatre Cent Coups, Les 73–5, 79 recognition/reflection 36–7, 62–9 Repas de bébé 21, 22, 23, 26 Robson, Catherine 97 Romanticism 61–9 Rome, Open City 141–2, 143 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 64, 79 Ruskin, John 19, 86–91 Sabotage 154–8, 159, 167 Santner, Eric 68 Sartre, Jean-Paul 135–6 sexuality 19, 42, 55, 86–134 Shining, The 171–2, 172 Sick Kitten, The 11 Sontag, Susan 138–9, 149, 181 spectatorship 13, 25, 27, 44–55, 58–69, 139, 162–3 Spielberg, Steven 70, 141 Spirit of the Beehive, The 50,

50–55, 52, 55 Steedman, Carolyn 8 Studlar, Gaylyn 94 Tarnation 189–91, 190 Teddy Bears, The 106–7 Temple, Shirley 94–6 Tergit, Gabriele 158–9, 167, 173 Terminus 18 Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son 10 Truffaut, François 69–85, 154, 161 Turtles Can Fly 176–80, 178, 179, 180 Twins’ Tea Party (The) 35–9 Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Slavery Days 152 Victorian cinema 8, 10, 14, 21–40, 104 visual pleasure 19, 37, 149–54 Vitascope 30