European Children's Film Association
Association Européenne du Cinéma pour l'Enfance et la Jeunesse
The 2nd Conference of International Children's Film Festivals in Europe
Krems/Austria, September 1998
For an ethical cinema –
The importance of children's film festivals in the present media
landscape
by Domenico Lucchini (Switzerland, ex-president of ECFA)
”The Cinema must be ethical. A film has a right to exist in so far
as it is necessary for the maker and for the viewer. Otherwise, one should
rather not bother. One cannot and should not waste an occasion as rare and
as beautiful as that of a film. To make a film is a great privilege, one
should not spit in the face of fortune, and one must fight to do it right,
against all odds. Nothing depresses me more than the corruption of good
taste. A large proportion of the images that are presented, even to young
viewers, are ugly and vulgar. Corruption of the public should be a culpable
offence.“
Gianni
Amelio
In these past years, the festivals for children have developed in a relatively
confused manner, partially due to the lack of references, rules and orchestration.
The differences in the diverse approaches, with some excesses and drifting,
risk further compromising the already limited space available for the diffusion
of a quality cinema and the lively cultural milieu of children's cinema.
The organisers of the festivals have therefore decided to meet again to
reflect together and to seek the means for a better co-ordination (schedules,
programmes, marketing, financing, audiences, relationships to other professionals
and new media), but also to favour a certain „moralisation“ of
their approaches. This does not mean the uniformisation of the conditions
and objectives, but the presentation, in their multiplicity, of the whole
range of the festivals targeted at children, attempting to create simultaneously
a network of communications and new possibilities, of cooperation and co-ordination
of the activities, and, above all, a redefinition of the roles within the
changing audio-visual world.
As the etymology suggests, a festival is a celebration, a precise moment
in the course of the year in which people change their daily routine for
something out of the ordinary. But a festival is anticipated, prepared for,
and experienced intensely. At a festival one talks, discusses, appreciates,
and criticises, and, above all, one communicates and exchanges. According
to the definition of the IFFPA (International Federation of Film Producers'
Associations) the end aim of the cinematographic festivals must be that
of contributing to a better comprehension between peoples and to the development
of the art and industry of the cinema“. When exploring a sector such
as that of the children's cinema, an area which does not constitute, as
is gradually becoming clear, a specific genre with its own themes and trends,
it is necessary to choose an artistic approach which is well-defined and
culturally convincing. This allows the purely film-related discussion to
be extended to involve parents, educators, teachers, and the general public
as well, and not just those associated with the industry, to consider and
examine, along with the children, the themes concerning the young and their
relationship to the universe of communication through images.
Festivals in general, and even more so those for children, should contribute
to the development of an open sensibility to the world's problems, teaching,
from not only within the school but also outside, a sense of responsibility
and active personal participation, respect, attention to values, capacity
for dialogue, as well as making a conscious stand on the rights of infants
and children. As prescribed by the „Convention on the Rights of Children“,
ratified by the UN in 1989: „The child has a right to peace and recreation,
the right to devote itself to play, and to participate in cultural and artistic
activities.“ Films for children and festivals for children are a part
of such cultural and artistic activities. They are an integral part of cultural
education in the sense of the democratic postulate „culture for all“.
„Cultural education is aesthetic education, i.e. developing a relationship
to the perceptible environment. Therefore cultural education plays an important
part in the everyday life of children. Playing, contact with different media,
and the acquisition of media content, are meaningful activities in present-day
childhood; i.e.:
„The „cultural competence“ of children refers above all
to media, its availability and content.“ (Jürgen Barthelmes,
Thesen zum Kinderkino, Essay on Children's Cinema).
Similarly, children's festivals, while not neglecting entertainment and
spectacle, should present works with an artistic, sociological, historical
and heritage viewpoint. In addition to presenting recently produced and
distributed films, previews of „majors“, festivals should endeavour
to include unknown filmmakers, limited distribution films, and also normal
repertoire films, but with the addition of homages, backgrounds and retrospectives.
A commitment which would be fulfilled, not just in the organisation of a
real and proper review of films, but also in the organisation of opportunities
for meetings and discussions, and the staging of exhibitions which assimilate
the audio-visual language.
But, above all, the mission of festivals is to arouse and stimulate the
curiosity of the general public, and to endeavour to promote their knowledge
and education. A fundamental prerogative is a basic requirement that present-day
man, and even more so youth, must possess a mental preparation and a critical-cultural
habit for the interpretation of cinematographic works. The cinema phenomena
illuminates the realities of man and the society he has constructed.
lt is a language capable of expressing the joys, hopes and fears of man,
it is an art form for communicating to humanity the richness of an artistic
intuition which expresses itself through images in movement.
The cinema entertains, excites, exhalts, presents and represents the things
of life. Children and youth in general often see, reflected in the narrations,
their problems, their most secret aspirations, their difficulties in integrating
and being accepted. Confronting, via a cinematographic work, some of the
problems which interest youth the most can provide an opportunity for dialogue
which would otherwise be impossible, a source of awareness of the reality
which surrounds them, and which they will soon be called upon to experience
at firsthand. The proposals put forward for the Children's Festivals are
based on these fundamental concepts and criteria. The cinema should not,
therefore, have a pedagogic objective in the narrow sense, as it would have
presented in a school context, to be analysed and used as a didactic tool
as part of a cycle of lessons conceived and structured along the lines of
a curriculum with a different scope and content. lt should, rather, be an
occasion to meet and to exchange experiences. Each film therefore ends up
becoming, sometimes despite the author, often despite the public which willingly
flocks to the festival, an inevitable opportunity for communication and
dialogue.
I believe that the cinematographic medium as a communicative art form is
a very valid instrument of cultural information. It is, nevertheless, important
that some degree of selection is made for children.
Rather than create a cinema which is declared as being for children,
I believe that we must bring the children to understand the cinema as a
whole, the grand cinema.
What is important is to graduate this communication according to age: at
all times maintaining the level high, bring the child closer to the better
examples of cinematographic expression. I am convinced that the children
of today have vast capacities for cultural reception, and are capable of
understanding more, of going into the specifics of cinematography. Has nobody
realised that the reader and member of the audience, after many years of
not completely passive practice, have become the reference „experts“
as regards the communicative typologies which have often put us in the role
of user?
Today, the figure of the end-recipient is considered of topical interest,
regaining an active role in the science of communication as well as the
attention of programme producers: on the basis of the emerging social drives
and of theoretical arguments, often neglected in the past, the receiver
is no longer considered as just a simple consumer, a passive client, but
even an equal interlocutor of the mass media. The realistic hypothesis of
placing the end-recipient on an equal footing to the originator, passes
through the study of serious processes of educating consumers in the use
of the media, processes in which the school should be involved in the first
instance. lt also passes through the political invention of new and more
correct modalities of openness of the apparatus with respect to its users:
modalities conscientiously aware of the problems of decentralisation, of
access, of communicative exchange and of participation.
The school, while not surrendering its fundamental mission, must draw closer
to the new audiovisual languages, creating in the process learning situations
which are more stimulating, more original and more participative. The objectives
are straightforward and aimed at all participants as a whole. For the children,
it is a case of inducing a socially responsible behaviour. Bringing the
children to the cinema leads to an education through visual perception,
the tapping of emotions which are individual and yet at the same time collective.
Openness to other worlds, the approach to the unmentionable, awareness of
differences, are sources of material which is richly pedagogic in nature.
Furthermore, this media allows the child to decipher the difference between
fiction and reality. Television counterfeits reality in its imagery –
the cinema presents itself as fiction, and evokes a possible reality. For
teachers, these new practices imply a re-examination of traditional didactic
methods. For the professionals in cinema, the partnership, with respect
to respective missions and reciprocal roles, provides the scope for projects
rich in potential.
The mission of the school finds a complement in the discovery of and initiation
in the language of images, in the predisposition of children to the world
of the future, in the enjoyment of cinematographic culture: conscious of
being free, critical and aware when confronted by images.
Children normally give themselves to a different type of discussion involving
memory, time, the present, history, morality, or whatever. The point is
that the traditional verbal intercourse at root level takes on a basic and
vulgar form, and so if the cinema for children is a lesser genre, the style
should also be lesser. Over time, the child undergoes too many levels of
banality. The easy trap of sentimentalisation, the dull and sugar-sweet
affectation, the banalisation of the adolescent's moral universe, are the
cliches which are invoking a slow and unstoppable decline of the genre.
The director Francois Truffaut, who for his masterpiece films on childhood
can be considered the most authoritative voice on the subject, in an interview
on the subject of the correct methodology for representing children in the
cinema, highlighted two errors which can be easily committed:
the most common and serious would be that of starting a priori from a dramatic
idea, albeit perhaps effective on the level of „fiction“, instead
of from the real problems children have with the world. The other problem
is that of not placing the child truly at the centre of the film, but to
give it a supporting role to the adult star, or worse, to accompany the
child with ponies, dogs, flying reindeer and red balloons! Festivals, while
not renouncing entertainment, should not indulge in sentimentalism or „adultism“,
but should simply help to grow.
On the other hand, the symbols, the codes of every artistic language, are
not dependant on the age of the spectator to whom they are targeted. There
is no difference in the nature of a film made for a child or an adult. At
the level of the themes dealt with, there are none specifically and only
for the child: the questions which cross and shake the world interest the
child closely. Seeing as the languages of the arts function thanks to codes
and conventions which are in constant evolution, the programmes for children
should not only contain repertoire films, but also the more advanced forms
of contemporary creation. On the other hand, the programmer must take account
of a certain number of specific characteristics of the child: its age, its
level of concentration, its capacity (greater or lesser) of conceptualising
its creative potential. Before being a pupil, a child who attends the projection
of a film during school, is, in the theatre, first of all a spectator. And
this status as a spectator is even more pronounced if the child frequents
the cinema on a regular basis. A child's sensibility, history, social class,
imagination, intelligence, emotional and receptive faculties, makes each
child a unique spectator. The meeting between a child and a film must pass,
above all, through the notion of pleasure.
„The cinema, the bearer of dreams, the memory of the world, remains
essential in a period in which the television has the tendency to make the
desires and tastes of children uniform. Hence the necessity of exposing
the young spectator, from his most tender age, good films originating from
all around the world (short length films, documentaries, fiction, masterpieces
from the history of the cinema), to allow it to find gradually for itself
its own space within the world of cinema.“ (Ginette Dislaire, Ecole
et cinema: Choisir un film pour les enfants).
The problem is to define, if possible, the centre of this network of planning:
the cinema for children. And if today, the cinema for children no longer
exists, and, perhaps, not even the children, the adolescents? Pre-adolescence
appears, in the eyes of the culture industry, information systems and consumer
promotion mechanisms, as an irregularity which must be controlled even at
the cost of denying it.
„Childhood, as a cultural product, rather than as a fact of nature,
is therefore disappearing“
Also as a result of the strong impact of television which „superimposes
the knowledge of the adults onto that of the children via its images, and
has annulled the code that separates the two age groups, the code which
distinguished them by attributing to the one and to the other different
statuses and roles“ (Marina DAmato, Childhood and Prejudice, Rome,
1993). Towards the end of the seventies, the concept of the breakdown of
the prevailing codes and paradigms ruling the classification of the works
destined for children was considered positive, because it induced an openness
to a higher level of civilisation, because it re-integrated childhood into
the world, kept it within the course of time, restoring complete citizenship
rights to the „children“. At the end of the eighties, abetted
by the medium of mediums – the television – it is this completely
liberated space which appears to go into crisis as a result of the indifference
to the differences which legitimate everything and, equivalating all subjects
to the zero ideological degree, nullifies the point of communication and
transforms it into a colossal, metalinguistic, self- referential jam. At
this point, as radically affirmed by the organisers of an important festival,
such as Giffoni, it is possible to assert that the cinema for children no
longer exists, for the simple reason that all cinema is for children, absolute
protagonists, on and off the screen, of the third age of the cinema?
Or even, as some sociologists maintain, „suppress youth“ (Gianni
Borgna, The Myth of Youth, Laterza 1997), abolish it by decree? Was Croce
right, and the young man must simply force himself to become adult? And
is it better to return to Nestor as the ideal model?
We believe that the banner of childhood and youth has a perennial value.
However, in the era of globalisation it is necessary to adapt, keep up to
date. So in the audio-visual sector, and, more specifically, the cinema,
it has become a power play for the festivals to enlarge their range as far
as including works not reportedly destined for children (often entering
into competition with other festivals) attempting in this way to escape
the „trap“ of industrial codes.
On the other hand, by the very nature of the cinematographic product, the
children's festival, and therefore any other festival, must be able to measure
itself against the industrial character of the cinema, and not be indifferent
to the range of offers available on the free market – which it must
obviously be able to look at with careful scrutiny to extract the quality
(definable only in relation to our project) from the quantity.
As asserted this year by the director of the Festival of Locarno, Marco
Müller, with reference to some driving ideas of a „new cinema“
and its programming: „Thanks to the formulation of some proposals,
options, narrative models and outlines of genre, there has been a renewed
vigour in the more vital area of experience of elaborating strategies for
continuing to communicate with very diverse groups of spectators. There
is no need to be fettered by formulas of entertainment and spectacle which
are too mediocre or unwanted to couple politics and popularity, analysis
and denunciation, precision of dialogue and the joy of the screen (this
has resulted in a new association between aesthetics and industry, which
goes well beyond the traditional dialectic of author-professional, author-genre)“.
(Marco Müller, Catalogue of the Locarno International Film Festival,
1998).
Remaining within this process means choosing films for children without
having to follow the fashions imposed by the market, but also without forgetting
the visual communication languages as codified by the market. Let's try
to explain. The children are among the major „consumers“ of video-films,
and, potentially, among the most frequent visitors to the cinema. To be
able to determine their tastes, their tendencies, is certainly a culturally
meaningful operation, but is also important on the commercial level. At
present there is no market for cinema for children. Lost behind the rhetoric
of the genre, today it occurs in church halls or in exclusive clubs of „cinema
d'essai“, before letting itself die in the enchantment of television.
What to do?
We should create a market or at least a network for the distribution
and diffusion of the works presented at the various festivals. Certainly
not an easy operation which passes necessarily through meticulous care of
the films presented. lt would involve adopting the films, promoting them
on the national and international scene, creating an appropriate network,
attempting to gain access, penetrating established resistance and misunderstandings,
to the commercial network, and, where possible, that of television.
In short, to become accomplices of all those who make films: from the producer,
the director, to the distributor, as it is within this network that the
cinematographic works live, or die.
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