The 2nd Conference of International Children's Film Festivals in Europe Krems/Austria, September 1998 Philosphical remarks on film festivals for children and young people by Dimitris Spyrou (Greece, film & festival director) In order for a Children's Film Festival to exist, there are certain preconditions. Its three basic ingredients are: a) Children's movies b) Projector machine – sound system – theater c) Audience, and since we are talking about a Children's Festival, the majority of the audience are Children and Young people. The first thing a festival needs are, therefore, the movies. And in order to have a Good Festival we should above all, have good movies. But what do we mean by good movies? What should a member of the selection jury know in order to chose the best movies? Undoubtedly there is no recipe. The only guarantee is his or her culture, the freedom of choice, his or her instinct, his or her ability to see the world through the eyes of a child. And since we are talking about children, please allow me to remind you of a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen: The old man making children to close their eyes and sleep, was holding an umbrella under each one of his armpits. One of the umbrellas had all kinds of pictures painted on its cloth. This one was for good children. He opened it over their heads and they dreamed the most wonderful fairy tales all night. The other umbrella had no pictures. That one was for the bad children. He opened it over their heads and they slept heavily with no dreams what so ever and they had nothing to remember when they woke up in the morning. We may compare children's films with the two umbrellas, that Andersen's Old Man was holding under his armpits. There were films of the „colored” umbrella. These films excite children, they fascinate them, they allow them to dream. There also are films of the „colorless umbrella”. When they see these films, children are bored and when they leave the theater they have nothing to remember, to talk about, to disagree or to agree with. What should films show to children and what should they conceal? I believe that we can tell children everything, so long as we find the proper way. According to a popular song in my country „how can you hide from children? They know everything anyway”. Film history leads us to the conclusion that the element of past experience and children's memories are significant components of film making and are presented in a variety of ways. Hoping not to take too much advantage of your patience , I shall now attempt to analyze the phenomenon: the child in cinematography. I shall use examples from films by well known directors not listed in the category „children's movies directors”. By thus generalizing, I shall also try to explain „How do we determine the border between children's films and adult films?” I believe that we should all agree that the directors' childhood memories often become the lever behind films with obvious (and some times concealed) references to child naiveté and the enigmatic world of childhood. „Even if, for example, there are no children seeing my films, this does not mean that my childhood experiences are not included in them”, was the answer of Rainer Werner Fassbinder to a related question. The child, the archetype form, the incarceration of naiveté, of the primary element and at the same time an agent of happiness and hope, actively fascinates directors and screenwriters. „I know, I know, I know / that a forty year old man / always has clean hands / I too wash my hands twice a day / But only when I see my hands dirty / do I remember / the time when I was a child”. This is how the literary version of Amarcord (1973) by Frederico Fellini and Tonino Guerra, begins. Fellini often referred to the effect the interpretation of his childhood memories had in his work. It is thus obvious, that film makers used material from other arts, literature even psychoanalysis in order to find ways of developing their childhood experience into films. As an example, we recall to your memory the scene where the child plays with a thread in La Luna by B. Bertolucci, which is an concrete reference to Sigmund Freud's work Beyond the beginning of pleasure. The long and hard way that painting followed in order to approach the child and its world in various ways, that, finally, in the early years of our century led to various perceptions and interpretations was especially valuable in cinematography. Films did not have to go through the child with the flower phase, this painting cliché of the 19th century, in order to imply the relation between the flower and the sensitive child. Cinematography has the luck and the luxury to observe the timid appearance of the child in the Yard of the Dutch House, a 1658 painting by Peter de Hooh, and with a long jump it reaches the baroque painting Morning Washing by Sarden, were children behave like adults and adults want to see children as their mirrors. And then, by loping 107 years, films wonder „why does the girl in have an exploratory look?” in the Girl with the pricket, the famous painting by Von Mendsel, the painter - observer of the light and the ambiance. And then it observes the multitude of paintings tracing various aspects of the child in the framework of the multiplicity and polyphony of the artistic expressions and in relation to the dynamic of different factors (historical circumstances, social structure, ideological considerations, foreign influences) that form societies. The great film makers transform the memory of childhood play to an exercise of creative imagination for the young and the old. They are fascinated by the sense of the evolutionary character of childhood and of the fact that children are still unshaped. „Children are able to wait, they do not reach to conclusions about people immediately. The way they face the world is a virtual „charming situation” according to Wim Wenders. The emotion that one feels when seeing the world for the first time, may be vividly expressed through the eyes of a child. Wenders, with his film As time goes by (1975-1976) attempts to penetrate both the „innerscape” himself, as well as a real country, Germany, with no prejudices. One of the heroes of this movie, Robert Lander (Hans Zischler) is a scientist working on children's reactions when they learn to write. In a scene of the film he says : „I knew a child that thought that the writing book were streets where letters circulated using a vehicle, the pen. These children do not read the world, they do not only see what they previously thought of (the names of the things, the right words) but the thing it self, wit no prefabricated ideas”. Childhood in the films of great film makers is approached in various ways, always with affection and sincerity. Children gives a pleasant alibi to film makers to be nostalgic, to seek the lost childhood naiveté, an opportunity to express daring questions, a seemly way to criticize authoritative education, family, the system of society, an attempt to read history anew, to avoid commonplace answers. Very often children are considered agents of a primitive force and power, a primary stage of existence affiliated to nature. The six year old Kourmas, in the film The Grey Wolf by Talamous Okeyev, on a script by L. Michalkov, is such sort of a character. The script is based on a novel by Muhtar Auezof, from Kazakstan. Francois Truffaut, in 1969 with his film A wild beast in town tells the story of a boy that in 1798 was found in the Averon woods, and was „domesticated” by Jacques Ytar. Truffaut has often turned to childhood in order to describe how it is perplex and persistent. In 1957, he shot the short film The troublemakers where he presents an aspect of the children, who are cruel because the mysteries of love and death are yet unknown to them. And two years later, he „strikes” again with his formidable The 400 Strikes, his first feature film, that won him the director award in the Cannes Film Festival. It is a perceptive look in the life of children that were „unlucky” enough to be born at the east side, the wrong side of La Seine. The hero of the film, little Antoine, is not a „poor and unfortunate” person, that calls for sympathy, but convinces the spectator that he will be able to win in his life because he dreams and because he revolts. The 400 strikes are the most proud, most stubborn, most hardheaded, in other words the most free thinking film in the world – according to Godard. It would be no exaggeration to say that children became the „bridge” for the French nouvelle vague to meat the German „new sensitivity” and the other national cinematographies to meat Italian new realism. Isn't Ivan's Childhood (1962) by Andrei Tarkovski, the film that made the existence of a Russian nouvelle vague an official fact? Indeed, even the realization of the child's absence, when handled by a film maker as sensitive and talented as the famous Hungarian Martha Mezaros (Adoption, 1975) sheds light to the dark aspects of a woman's personality . When film makers wanted to demonstrate the horror of war, they often turned to children and they made them their main heroes. This choice was not only due to the fact that children better described its results, on their pure and unsullied souls, but also because they looked for a symbol of mirrored life and the future. The Superb Rainbow (1943) by Mark Donskoi. The pioneer nouvelle vague film Forbidden Games (1952) by Réne Clement. The lyric film A Stop Called Sky (1972) by Karel Kachyna, are some of the masterpieces of this spectacular unity. On the Greek side, The Barefoot Battalion by the Greek American film maker Greg Talas (Grigoris Thalassinos). As far as the effect of war on children during the post - war period, we only have to cite Germany Year Zero (1947-1948) by Roberto Rossellini. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) by Victor Erithe, The Blurred River (1981) by Kohei Oguri, The Boy (1969) by Nagisa Oshima and so many others. To close the „war” unity, let us refer to the Golden Phoenix in the Cannes Film Festival, in 1979. The Drum, by Faulker Slendrof. The main hero of the film, based on the allegoric Gunter Gras' book by the same name, is Oscar, a child of premature growth, that refuses to grow up any more than his age of three years, protesting for the imminent rise of nazism. „Oscar, is for me the symbol of refusal and protest”, Slendrof said once. The child, with its inquiring look to the „outer world”, a world it is just starting to discover, often becomes the eye of the camera, when the camera is used by film makers wanting to see the world as seeing it for the first time, to work off stereotypes and to join forces with imagination. Film makers offer children the most valuable things, and like the hippie Venders hero Alice in town, they entrust little Alice with their hair. After this, I believe that we are easily led to the conclusion, that it is extremely hard for the member of a Festival jury, to decide which film would be appropriate for the Festival program and which film should be rejected. After deciding, however, and since films are anyway the most important thing in a festival, the festival organizers should, during the festival but also after the festival's closure, do the following:
This is the Festival of my dreams.
|