Childhood, Cinema and Film Aesthetics

Book excerpt: Next to love and death, childhood is one of the universal topics of cinema. This book focuses on the relationship between cinema and childhood with regard to the aesthetics, mediality, and cultural history of film. It presents a variety of current positions on three main topics: child figures in film, childhood as the spectators' experience, and the role of childhood in the production process. The contributions cover a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives, such as film theory, psychoanalysis, health science, and film production. They deal with a kaleidoscope of films from the beginnings of film history to the present--experimental, documentary, and fictional. The contributors include: Alejandro Bachmann, Alain Bergala, Christian Bonah, Joël Danet, Bettina Henzler, Vicky Lebeau, Karen Lury, Matthias Müller, and Daniel Wiegand.