As its mimetic title might indicate, A Story of Children and Film plays more like an appendix to Mark Cousins’ encyclopaedic The Story of Film
than a fresh project. It’s a welcome added chapter, shrugging off
historiography in order to thematically dart from country to country,
decade to decade, examining cinema’s many depictions of childhood with
characteristically contemplative insight.
Neither confined to nor wary of obvious or mainstream examples,
Cousins shuffles his cine-deck to find the connections between, for
instance, US blockbusters and 30s Japanese cinema (E.T. and Children in the Wind, respectively),
or the ways in which Tom and Jerry cartoons and the early work of Lynne
Ramsay both use the frame to block out the adult world. With excerpts
from 53 films squeezed into 104 curatorial minutes, some readings
inevitably cry out for further elaboration (particularly when discussing
more obscure or harder-to-obtain selections), but such frustrations are
rare; for the most part, this side-odyssey is a stimulating and
perspective-broadening experience.
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