Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema

Debbie C. Olson, Andrew Scahill

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780739170267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Children have been a part of the cinematic landscape since the silent film era, yet children are rarely a part of the theoretical landscape of film analysis. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Debbie C. Olson and Andrew Scahill, seeks to remedy that oversight. Throughout the over one-hundred year history of cinema, the image of the child has been inextricably bound to filmic storytelling and has been equally bound to notions of romantic innocence and purity. This collection reveals, however, that there is a body of work that provides a counter note of darkness to the traditional portraits of sweetness and light. Particularly since the mid-twentieth century, there are a growing number of cinematic works that depict childhood has as a site of knowingness, despair, sexuality, death, and madness. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema challenges notions of the innocent child through an exploration of the dark side of childhood in contemporary cinema. The contributors to this multidisciplinary study offer a global perspective that explores the multiple conditions of marginalized childhood as cinematically imagined within political, geographical, sociological, and cultural contexts.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “I See Dead People”
• Chapter 2: “I Can’t Go On, I Must Go On”
• Chapter 3: Wednesday’s Child
• Chapter 4: Wonka, Freud, and the Child Within
• Chapter 5: “It’s all for you, Damien!”
• Chapter 6: Written on the Child
• Chapter 7: The Ideal Immigrant is a Child
• Chapter 8: Representations of African Childhood in Conflict and Post-Conflict Contexts
• Chapter 9: Displacing Red Childhood
• Chapter 10: Batteries Are Running Down
• Chapter 11: A Krank’s Dream
• Chapter 12: Childhood, Ghost Images, and the Heterotopian Spaces of Cinema
• Chapter 13: The Hitchcock Imp
• Chapter 14: Experiencing Hüzün/Pooch through the Loss of Life, Limb, and Love in Turtles Can Fly
• About the Contributors