‘Cinema and childhood were made for each other’

COC trailer final from Timo Langer on Vimeo.

Every person on the planet was or is a child, writes filmmaker Mark Cousins. Children are the best of us (Malala Yousafzai), the focus of our concerns (paedophilia, the internet) and our capitalist army (Beliebers, One Directioners). In our art we sentimentalise them (Victorian painting), or see evil in them (Lord of the Flies, The Exorcist, We Need to Talk About Kevin). They swell with our meanings.

In Kurdish northern Iraq several years ago, in a film called The First Movie, I gave little cameras to children and asked them to film their own lives. The results were remarkable – interviews with crying ladies, lots of shots of running (childhood is a running world), and gentle poetics. The First Movie made me think about children and cinema. How good at childhood are films? Why do some countries – Iran, Sweden, Japan, the Czech Republic – excel at films about children?

Movies about children are about attachment, empathy, bonding with things outside of ourselves

To try to answer these questions, I made A Story of Children and Film, a movie that starts with me observing my own niece and nephew and, from this, builds a picture of childhood around the world, using scenes from 53 movies, 26 countries and 11 decades. I excluded devil children movies, and animated films, and focused instead on films like Kes from the UK, Crows from Poland, Bag of Rice from Iran and Moving from Japan, in which the child actor seems less a projection of adult concern, and more like a real kid with her or his own agency.

As we edited together the extracts, I began to realise that such films are amongst the most vivid and innovative in movie history, so have curated a season of 17 of these films, The Cinema of Childhood, which will tour the UK. Most have never been seen here before, all are beautiful and often joyous.

When we watch such films, what do we see? Many things, I think, not only about childhood but about adult life too. Firstly, movies about children are about attachment, empathy, bonding with things outside of ourselves – a bird in Kes, an alien in ET, a balloon in The Red Balloon, etc. Many of the child protagonists teach themselves such empathy, because their parents don’t, or are absent.

The absent parent

This raises the second big human theme in children’s cinema – the absent parent, or loss in general. The dad in ET is absent. Shinji Somai’s masterpiece, Moving, is about a girl, Renko, whose parents are splitting up, and who struggles to let go of that unity.

More than either of these things, kids’ films are about the joy of the moment – riding your bike fast, running through fields, jumping in rivers. Cinema is the great art of the present tense, of abandon – think of Gene Kelly singing and dancing in the rain – and it meets its match in childhood. Kids enjoy the here and now more than adults do, and cinema is effortlessly good at the here and now; because of this, in the last few years I’ve come to think that cinema and childhood were made for each other.

After all, cinema is one of the youngest art forms. Jazz is younger still, but feels far older.

Tilda Swinton and I, in our 8 ½ Foundation, showed films to kids and we noticed the intensity of the wide-eyed connection between a child and the big screen. Add to this the fact that at least 10 per cent of our children are not great at learning through words, but are good at images, and you have a compelling reason to not only make films about kids, but to show them them. I myself found visual learning far more exciting and stimulating in school than verbal learning.

To show kids films is to affirm the millions who are like me, and to nurture their visual talents.

‘These films are as much about class as childhood’

And what about the UK? How good have we been at kids’ cinema? We are middle ranking, I think.

For decades, Iran’s Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults has commissioned and overseen masterpieces by many directors, including Mohammad Ali-Talebi whose films Willow and Wind, The Boot and Bag of Rice all feature in the Cinema of Childhood season. Sweden has also had a strong policy of funding films for young people. In the UK we had the Children’s Film Foundation, which was fine, and movies like The Railway Children are fondly remembered, but Ken Loach’s Kes remains the masterwork.

Lynne Ramsay’s short film Gasman brilliantly frames out the heads of adults to show how a child sees the world, and Danny Boyle’s and Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Millions is lovely. John Boorman’s Hope and Glory is good, and the opening of David Lean’s Great Expectations is a fabulous piece of child Gothic, but perhaps the best British film about childhood is the Bill Douglas Trilogy, made in Scotland in the 1980s.

It’ll come as no surprise that many of these films are as much about class as childhood. Class and reserve, understatement and the stiff upper lip of old have meant that British films haven’t perhaps embraced the anarchy of childhood, the capriciousness, the abandon and mindfulness as much as they could.

But the UK is changing and it is perhaps time for our filmmakers to realise that childhood is one of the greatest movie subjects of all.

For more information on the films shown as part of the season, with spoken introductions by Mark Cousins, go to The Cinema of Childhood website. The chosen films will tour UK cinemas from 11 April. A Story of Children and Film is released by Dogwoof, across the UK from 4 April.