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
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:
- Stick together
with the festival staff, with the people who work for the festival,
and share the festival's philosophy with them. The festival staff should
love its work and this feeling could create a very friendly atmosphere.
- Before
the festival, the organizers should be in contact with educators and
invite them to participate to the whole procedure. Because, you see,
we shouldn't decide for them without them. The organizers should make
educators understand how important a festival is, its cultural dimension.
So the educators can talk to the children about the festival, providing
them the right information.
- To do everything
possible to secure perfect screening conditions. Thus, the imagination,
the effort and the agony and hope of all those participating in the
making of each film: the producer, the screenwriter, the director, the
actors, the members of the film crew, the technicians of the photography,
editing and sound labs, will not be undermined. Thus, the sense of taste
of the audience will not be insulted.
- Prepare
a high quality press material for newspapers, magazines, TV and radio
stations. And to do that, the organizers should find a way to make the
festival look attractive for the Press.
- During
the Festival, there should be a warm atmosphere, in order for all the
participants to spend a pleasant week and to have a perfect organization
so as to provide the creators the possibility to communicate with the
audience, the reporters, their colleagues form other films, the distributors.
Thus, in this agreeable atmosphere, film makers may be rewarded for
their pains, to find new partners, to begin contemplating new films,
to make new plans.
- Young spectators,
will be able to see films, discuss them with their makers, to understand
how people of their age live in other countries, and to realize that
Earth is only a big garden we inherited from our ancestors and we temporarily
use, and that we have to pass it to our offspring even better.
- I believe
that in a children's festival, everybody should have there attention
turned to children. Children should be the stars of the festival. Rivalries,
stardom and glamour, have no place in a children's festival.
- Finally, I think a Film Festival for Children and Young People could be successful if all the above mentioned things happen.
This is the Festival of my dreams.
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