© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Children, emotion and viewing in contemporary European film
Reader in Contemporary French Literature and Film at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent book, Cinema's Missing Children, was published by Wallflower in 2003. She has written a study of the films of Alain Resnais, forthcoming in 2006, and is currently working on a volume on Atom Egoyan
Drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum on the emotions, and of Laura U. Marks on touch, and in the context of explorations of the politics of childhood, this paper interweaves discussion of recent films of two European directors, Lukas Moodysson and Sandrine Veysset. It argues that Lilya 4-ever (2003) and Martha ... Martha (2001) are representative of a current trend in European cinema; these films are seen to coincide in their attempts to offer new representations of a child's subjectivity, new filmic apprehensions, or imprints, of child identities. In their move to mould the medium to child perceptions, they each independently move to make use of certain tropes and devices which can be associated with child subjectivity, and they each attempt to shock the (adult) viewer emotively, to break down the division between the viewer and the child viewed, to bring the viewer up close to the image, disallowing distance. Both directors, avoiding the pictorialization and idealization of the child identified by Anne Higonnet, Patricia Holland and others, make use of cinema's potential to evoke touch, the tactile, the haptic, drawing attention to space, its navigation and inhabitation, kinesthesis, containment, cocooning, creating an immersive, emotive and overwhelming viewing experience.