Lexington Books
Pages: 514
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-1-4985-6380-2 • Hardback • February 2018 • $172.00 • (£133.00)
978-1-4985-6381-9 • eBook • February 2018 • $163.00 • (£127.00)
Debbie Olson is assistant professor of English at Missouri Valley College.
Introduction
South America
1. “Girls on the Screen: Gender in Contemporary Argentine Cinema” Carolina Rocha
2. “Children in Brazilian Cinematography” Fabiana de Amorim Marcello
3. “From the Countryside to the City: a Boy’s Journey and a World to Know” Lucia Rabello de Castro, Paula Uglione, and Adelaide Rezende de Souza
Africa
4.“Turning the Page: Memories of French Algerian Childhoods on Screen” Christa Jones
5. “Forms and Variations of Children’s Relationship to Space in Francophone African Fiction Films” Caroline Lardy
6. “Surfing to Adulthood: Childhood, Coming of Age and National Transitions in the South African Fiction Film Otelo Burning (2011)” Christine Singer
Middle East
7. “Children’s Groups in the Young State of Israel: Simplicity and Complexity in the Cult Movie Ḥasamba & the Black Handkerchief Gang (1971)” Einat Baram Eshel
8. “’Stolen/Lost Childhood’ and the Inherent Failures of Cinematic Representations: The Case of Palestinian Child Labor” Yoad Eliaz,, Omri Grinberg and Walaa Ghanayim
9. “The Representation of Urban Female Teenagers in Iranian Cinema” Mina Rezaei, Negin Golravesh Fekry, and Seyyed Mohsen Habibi
Southern & Eastern Europe
10. “Lost Boys of the Franco Regime: Masculinity, Memory, and Childhood in Recent Spanish Film” Jessica Davidson
11. “The Figure of the Child as a Contradictory Signifier in Russian Cinema” Michael Brodski
12. “Through a French Lens: Romanian Kids and the Western Narrative of Childhood” Onoriu Colăcel
India
13. “Kaakka Muttai: Tamil Children in Global/World Cinema” Swarnavel Eswaran
14. “‘Cracking’ Nations/notions: A Study of Little Lenny in Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth” Paromita Deb
Japan
15. “Westernization, Identity and Emerging Notions of Childhood in the Films of Ozu Yasujirō” Kelly J. Hansen
16. “Kiku and Isamu: Beyond the Shitty Realism of Mixed Race Orphans in
Postwar Japan” Kaori Mori Want
17. “Abandon the Young in Tokyo: Yoshitarō Nomura’s The Demon and Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows” Kenta McGrath
China
18., “The Abducted Child Movie in Chinese Cinema” Kobe Chan Yan Chuen
19., “The Alternative Viewfinder of History: Child Vision in Chinese and Sinophone Cinema” Belinda Qian He
20. “We are all Useful People”: Useful Children and the Notion of Guai in Transnational Chinese Cinema” Shih-Wen Sue Chen, Sin Wen Lau, and Lennon Yao-chung Chang,
21. “Parable of the Lost Child: Zhang Yimou’s Not One Less” Juanita But
New Zealand
22. “Talking Back to the Mainstream – Pop Culture and the Child in the Films of Taika Waititi” Caroline Grose
A valuable text for readers interested in cinematic representations of childhood. Comprehensive, wide-ranging and truly international in scope, it successfully moves beyond the geopolitical parochialism that has characterized much of the prior scholarship in this area. While encompassing films both iconic and relatively unknown in Western criticism, the basic question of how the screen image of childhood reflects dominant social and cultural practices remains central throughout the book.— Noel Brown, author of "The Children's Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative"
Debbie Olson’s extensive twenty-two chapter collection The Child in World Cinema assembles a range of international scholars to examine representations of children and childhood across the globe. The work importantly extends study on Western media about children and youth to encompass the child image in non-Western cinemas, these spanning from South America, through India to New Zealand. Moving away from Western perceptions of childhood, the broad coverage of this volume not only addresses on-screen culture-specific issues in its subjects of study, including, for example, the one-child policy in China and child abandonment in Japan, but also historical traumas that have shaped portrayals of childhood. The insightful and detailed analyses comprising this anthology make a comprehensive, thorough and significant contribution to international scholarship on children and childhood in cinema and will be invaluable to scholars of child and youth representation, Third World Cinemas, and Childhood Studies. — Fran Pheasant-Kelly, University of Wolverhamption
There is so much to praise in this book with each context bringing something new to the overall view of the child in world cinema.... Overall, this is a multi-layered and variegated volume that impresses in its range and diversity. If anyone is in any doubt as to the richness and energy of the field of the child in world cinema, they should read this book. It will be of interest to scholars and students working in film studies and child studies more generally.
— Children & Society