Representations of The Child in Latin American Cinema

这个项目展示了自1990年以来围绕儿童不断变化的话语如何影响他们在拉丁美洲的电影表现，那里的电影长期以来一直喜欢以儿童为中心的叙事。《联合国儿童权利公约》重新激发了人们对代表拉丁美洲最贫穷儿童的兴趣，并掀起了关于这类儿童的现实主义电影的热潮，而地区和国家一级关于失踪儿童和街头儿童等问题的公开辩论对电影制作产生了重大影响。该项目的核心是这样一种想法，即将儿童作为权利主体的论述结构已经导致了表征策略的转变，制作的电影赋予儿童机构和经验以特权，而不是传统地将儿童用作探索成人优先事项的密码。这项研究比较了阿根廷、巴西、哥伦比亚和墨西哥等国的电影。这项研究的问题是，儿童在拉美电影中有哪些代表性用途，在儿童视角的创建过程中使用了哪些叙事和文体技巧，以及这些表现是如何确认或破坏儿童作为他者的地位的，借鉴了儿童研究、女孩研究和最近的电影理论。它认为，不断变化的儿童代表政治是理解当代拉丁美洲国家与儿童传统上代表的问题的关系的关键，这些问题包括现代性、民族、过去和未来。这项研究包括四章：《边缘的儿童》考察了20世纪90年代以边缘儿童为中心的拉丁美洲电影(例如，西西里奥，[Novoa，1994])，除了表现儿童痛苦和情感问题和旁观性问题的伦理之外，还注意到对“问题”和“危险”儿童的话语建构；《童年和电影之旅》探讨的电影描述了20世纪90年代末和21世纪初旅行的儿童，要么横跨国家领土(通常与寻找父亲有关，就像在中央做巴西[Salles，1998])，而城市来回来回从根本上破坏了传统的身份叙事；《幽灵和目击者》讨论了像厄尔尼诺·佩斯(Puenzo，2009)这样的电影，这些电影将儿童描绘成神秘或幽灵的记忆地点和/或政治或个人创伤的见证者；《酷儿与未来》提出，在拉丁美洲电影中，女孩作为不受控制的欲望的主题出现，颠覆了父权-异性恋的母体和未来的象征，讨论了这类电影如何像拉尼娜·圣诞老人(Martel 2004)那样古怪的代表性规范。近年来，在电影中对儿童做了重要的工作，产生了关于儿童在电影中的用途以及他们对成人文化的看法的新问题。这项研究的原因是，人们对儿童与文化和政治的关系越来越感兴趣，而且不同学科的学者认为，对现代文化中性别结构角色的那种审视应该迫切地应用于儿童文化，特别是在拉丁美洲的研究中，尽管拉美大陆一半的人口不到18岁，但在当代的学术研究中，儿童是稀缺的。许多拉美电影都是关于儿童的，但与性别或种族等类别相比，儿童的角色在评论工作中很少受到关注。这些研究往往集中在街头儿童身上，本质上是关于班级而不是童年。这项研究将看到儿童贫穷和无家可归的表现以及儿童的其他表现，因此将处于独特的地位来询问(呼应Lebeau)儿童对于拉丁美洲电影来说是什么(不仅仅是强调社会边缘化的手段)；拉丁美洲电影想要儿童什么，这对理解当代拉丁美洲国家的文化认同至关重要。

This project shows how shifting discourses around the child since 1990 have influenced their filmic representation in Latin America, where cinema has long been fond of child-centred narratives. The 1989 UN Convention on child rights led to renewed interest in representing the poorest children in Latin America, and an upsurge in realist films about such children, whilst public debates at regional and national levels over, for example, disappeared children and street children have influenced filmmaking significantly. At the project's centre is the idea that the discursive construction of the child as subject of rights has produced a shift in representational strategies, producing films which privilege child agency and experience by contrast with traditional uses of children as ciphers for exploring adult preoccupations. The study compares films from countries including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.The study asks what representational uses the child has in Latin American film, what narrative and stylistic techniques are at play in the creation of the child's perspective, and how these representations confirm or disrupt the child's status as 'other', drawing on work in childhood studies, girls' studies and recent film theory. It argues that a changing politics of child-representation is key to understanding contemporary Latin American countries' relationship to the issues children have traditionally represented, among them, modernity, nation, past and future. The study comprises four chapters: 'Children on the edge' examines Latin American films centring on marginal children in the 1990s (e.g. Sicario, [Novoa, 1994]), paying attention to the discursive construction of the 'problem' and the 'at risk' child in addition to the ethics of representing child suffering and questions of emotion and spectatorship; 'Childhood and cinematic journeys' explores films depicting travelling children in the late 1990s and early 2000s, either across the national territory (often linked to a search for the father, as in Central do Brasil [Salles, 1998]), whilst urban to-ing and fro-ing radically undermines conventional identity narratives; 'Ghosts and witnesses' discusses films like El niño pez (Puenzo, 2009) which figure children as uncanny or ghostly loci of memory and/or witnesses to political or personal trauma; and 'Queer children and the future' proposes the advent of the girl-child within Latin American film as subject of unregulated desire disruptive of the patriarchal-heterosexual matrix and symbol of the future, discussing how such films queer representational norms, as in La niña santa (Martel 2004).In recent years, significant work has been done on the child in film, and new questions generated about cinematic uses of the child and what they say about adult culture. This research is informed by the growing interest in children's relationship to culture and politics and the belief amongst scholars of various disciplines that the kind of scrutiny that has been applied to the structural role of gender in modern culture should with urgency be applied to that of childhood, especially in Latin American studies where the child is scarce in contemporary scholarship despite the fact that half the continent's population is under 18. Many Latin American films are about children, yet the role of the child has received scant attention in critical work by contrast with categories such as gender or race. What studies there are tend to focus on street children, and are essentially about class rather than childhood. This study will see representations of child poverty and homelessness alongside other representations of the child, and will therefore be in a unique position to ask (echoing Lebeau) what the child is for Latin American cinema (beyond simply a means to highlight social marginalization); what Latin American cinema wants of thechild, which is vital to an understanding of cultural identity in contemporary Latin American countries.