Film Landscapes of Global Youth [1 ed.] 103238915X, 9781032389158

Citation preview

Film Landscapes of Global Youth

This book explores the dynamic landscapes of global youth through spatially grounded chapters focused on film and media. It is a collection of incredible works concerning children and young people in, out, and through media as well as an examination of what is possible for the future of research within the intersections of geography, film theory, and children’s studies. It contains contributions from leading academics from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, art, film and media studies, women and gender studies, Indigenous studies, education, and geography, with chapters focused on a spatial area and the representations and relationships of children in that area through film and media. The insights presented also provide a unique and eclectic perspective on the current state of children’s research in relation to the ever-changing media landscape of the 21st century. Film Landscapes of Global Youth approaches the subjects of children and young people in film and media in a way that is not bound by genre, format, medium, or the on-/off-screen binary. Each chapter offers an insightful look at the relationships and portrayals of children and young people in relation to a specific country, culture, or geographic feature. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersections between geography, young lives, and the power of film, television, social media, content creation, and more. Stuart C. Aitken has worked in the fields of film and children’s geographies for over three decades. In 1994 he published two books—Putting Children in Their Place (Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC) and Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film (edited with Leo Zonn, Rowman & Littlefield)—that are considered foundational. He has since published 16 books and over 200 articles that relate to film, media, children’s geographies, child rights, and youth activism. Jacob Rowlett is a PhD candidate whose dissertation focuses on film and media geographies. He is particularly interested in the impact of film in relation to human environments. His research spans across the fields of critical geography, tourism studies, and film theory and history.

Routledge Spaces of Childhood and Youth Series Edited by Peter Kraftl and John Horton

The Routledge Spaces of Childhood and Youth Series provides a forum for original, interdisciplinary and cutting-edge research to explore the lives of children and young people across the social sciences and humanities. Reflecting contemporary interest in spatial processes and metaphors across several disciplines, titles within the series explore a range of ways in which concepts such as space, place, spatiality, geographical scale, movement/mobilities, networks and flows may be deployed in childhood and youth scholarship. This series provides a forum for new theoretical, empirical and methodological perspectives and groundbreaking research that reflects the wealth of research currently being undertaken. Proposals that are crossdisciplinary, comparative and/or use mixed or creative methods are particularly welcomed, as are proposals that offer critical perspectives on the role of spatial theory in understanding children and young people’s lives. The series is aimed at upper-level undergraduates, research students and academics, appealing to geographers as well as the broader social sciences, arts and humanities. Latin American Transnational Children and Youth Experiences of Nature and Place, Culture and Care Across the Americas Edited by Victoria Derr and Yolanda Corona-Caraveo Mapping the Moral Geographies of Education Character, Citizenship and Values Sarah Mills The Space and Power of Young People’s Social Relationships Geographies of Immersion Louise Holt Film Landscapes of Global Youth Imagining Young Lives Edited by Stuart C. Aitken and Jacob Rowlett For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Spaces-ofChildhood-and-Youth-Series/book-series/RSCYS

Film Landscapes of Global Youth Imagining Young Lives

Edited by Stuart C. Aitken and Jacob Rowlett

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Stuart C. Aitken and Jacob Rowlett; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Stuart C. Aitken and Jacob Rowlett to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Aitken, Stuart C., editor. | Rowlett, Jacob, editor. Title: Film landscapes of global youth / edited by Stuart C. Aitken and Jacob Rowlett. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge spaces of childhood and youth series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023047526 (print) | LCCN 2023047527 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032389158 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032389189 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003347446 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and youth. | Youth in motion pictures. | Geographical perception in children. Classification: LCC HQ799.2.M35 F55 2024 (print) | LCC HQ799.2.M35 (ebook) | DDC 302.23083—dc23/eng/20240205 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023047526 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023047527 ISBN: 978-1-032-38915-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-38918-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34744-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors   1 Introducing the Film Landscapes of Global Youth

viii xi 1

STUART C. AITKEN AND JACOB ROWLETT

  2 Anita: Journeying through Landscapes of Loss and Hope in Buenos Aires

12

FERNANDO J. BOSCO

  3 Two Girls, Two Islands, Two Images: New Cinema in the Faroe Islands

24

FIROUZ GAINI

  4 Becoming a Filmmaker, an Adult, and an Italian?: Shooting the New Italian Youth and Their Rites/Rights of Passage

34

LAURA LO PRESTI

  5 Leaves on a Pillow: The Representation of Street Children in the Indonesian Film Daun di Atas Bantal

50

HARRIOT BEAZLEY AND WIRYO WARISNO (HERU)

  6 Portraying Genocide through the Eyes of Children: The Troubled Geographies of Authenticity in Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

63

JAMES A. TYNER

  7 Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Black and Brown Girlhood in the French Banlieue PASCALE JOASSART-MARCELLI

78

vi  Contents   8 Toward a Deterritorialized Nomadism: The Transversal Role of Children in Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) and Life and Nothing More . . . (1992)

92

COLIN GARDNER AND JAMES CRAINE

  9 Indigenous Children in Canadian Cinema: Ethnographic Explorations and National Narratives in the Early Films of Harlan Ingersoll Smith and Alanis Obomsawin

102

ANN MARIE MURNAGHAN AND TYLER MCCREARY

10 Hope through Creation: Celtic Kids and Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells

116

STUART C. AITKEN

11 The (Common) Worlds of Dragons: Nature, Humans, and the Anthropocene in Children’s Films

142

SUSANA CORTÉS-MORALES

12 “A Futuristic Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?”: Race, Class, and Boyhood in Star Trek’s 24th Century

156

DAVID K. SEITZ

13 “Why Are You Here, Rey from Nowhere?”: The Hero’s Journey, Island Storytelling, and the Gendered Roles of Heroes in the Star Wars Saga

166

JACOB ROWLETT

14 Finland Extended: Encounters with Top Gun Films and the Emerging Post-Social Landscapes of Youth

181

RAINE AIAVA AND NOORA PYYRY

15 Cinema Out of Sight: The Role of Film Halls for Street Youth in Harare, Zimbabwe

194

LORRAINE VAN BLERK, WAYNE SHAND AND JANINE HUNTER

16 ‘What Do You See Guys? Comment Down Below’ Children Becoming YouTubers in the Park: Experimentation with Digital Content Creation POLLY JARMAN AND PETER KRAFTL

203

Contents  vii 17 History, Memory, Media: Revisiting the Films from My Research on Children’s Work and Play in Sudan

217

CINDI KATZ

18 Musings and Reflections: Children, Young People, Film

224

TRACEY SKELTON

Bibliography234 Index249

Figures



2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

4.5

4.6

The aftermath of the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires March commemorating the AMIA bombing in 2014 Ragna laughing while teasing her friend Ester by the sea In the kitchen the day after the party The official poster for the film Dreams by the Sea Film still from Me, My Gypsy Family and Woody Allen (2009) featuring the TV screen as a magic threshold space that connects the young girl to the adult world of cinema Film still from Me, Romantic Roma Girl (2014). Similar to the preceding figure, the scene depicting the viewing of Woody Allen’s movie serves as a form of initiation rite, foreshadowing and affirming Laura Halilovic’s destined path as a film director A scene from Me, My Gypsy Family and Woody Allen (2009), where Laura Halilovic is filming with her father’s video camera a wedding in her neighborhood, after confessing to him her wish to become a filmmaker One of the initial scenes of Me, Romantic Roma Girl (2014), where Gioia, the protagonist of the movie, falls asleep during a train journey and dreams of being Little Red Cap happily lost in a pink forest Film stills from one of the initial scenes of Me, My Gypsy Family and Woody Allen (2009). Composition made by the author. Halilovic’s camera zooms in and out on the front and inner pages of her “empty of meaning” Italian ID since she is not legally recognized as an Italian citizen but just as a permitted resident in the country One of the last scenes of Me, Romantic Roma Girl (2014). Gioia and her father sit on a bench, enjoying the landscape view of the urban suburb of Falchera in Turin, which evolves from a taken-for-granted peripheral and ugly space to a place full of stories and expressive potentialities for the unfolding of the protagonist’s identity

14 18 26 28 30 39

40

42

43

45

46

Figures  ix 5.1 Two works of Heru’s artwork. On the left: Bukan Tanding (“It’s not my Fight”). On the right: Bukan dewah (“Angel, not angel”) 7.1 Concrete buildings in a Parisian banlieue 7.2 Dounia seems to be obsessed with making money through any means 7.3 Dounia watches Rebecca drive through the neighborhood in her convertible car with envy 9.1 The information sheet for Christmas at Moose Factory (1971) 10.1 Mechanistic Verticality: The Tower and Walls at Kells’ Abbey. (1A) What is left of the actual tower at Kells; (1B) Brendan climbing a vertical scaffold with the tower behind; (1C) Brendan in the tower 10.2 Site of Columba’s Abbey, Island of Iona 10.3 Horizontal Softening: The Celtic Swirls and Spirals. (3A) Animation from the forest in The Secret of Kells; (3B) Oldgrowth forest near Newgrange (very little exists in present-day Ireland); (3C) Newgrange stone spirals, Bru na Boine 10.4 Facsimile of the Book of Kells 10.5 Cat illumination line drawing based on the Book of Kells 10.6 Moore’s Vision of the Kells’ Monks 10.7 (A and B) Moore’s team using the Book of Kells in their character creation 10.8 Shape-shifting Aisling as wolf (8A) and girl (8B) 10.9 Celtic spirals: Neolithic art at (9A) Newgrange and Moore’s Forest (9B) 10.10 Moore’s team used Newgrange burial mound (10A) as a model for Crom’s cave (10B), including accurate depictions of the winter solstice sunrise that leads Brendan aboveground after his hero’s trial (10C; this animation is the inside of Newgrange burial mound, the outside of which can be seen on Figure 10.3C) 10.11 Moore’s Crom Cruach 10.12 Brendan and Aidan part 10.13 (A) Sixth-century stone dwelling in County Kerry looks out toward the Skellig Michael Islands and (B) Moore’s depiction of Brendan’s stone dwelling takes shape through a montage of the seasons 10.14 (A) The Abbot’s bedroom transformed to light and Celtic spirals by Brendan’s return with the Book of Kells and (B) the Book of Kells’ famous Chi’rho page from the final scene in The Secret of Kells (in the movie, the design is slowly revealed through animation) 13.1 This space along the 600-stair pathway leading up Skellig Michael is the approximate spot where the scene from Star Wars: The Force Awakens was shot. The stairs in the photo lead visitors to the beehive hut village of the monks

61 81 85 87 107

118 121

121 123 123 124 125 128 130

132 134 135 136

137

168

x  Figures 13.2 The beehive huts of the Catholic monks who first began their pilgrimages to Skellig Michael in the 6th century AD. As many as twelve monks lived on the island at the time and would periodically cycle out with others from the mainland. While the island has been beaten and ravaged by storms and harsh ocean conditions, these beehive huts look much the same as they did 1500 years ago 14.1 Top Gun: Maverick theater display 14.2 Affectual map drawn together over the course of three sessions 15.1 Inside a film hall 16.1 “Extending the GoPro and selfie-stick into hedges” 16.2 “What do you see guys? Three screenshots of a film clip from Leo”

173 183 187 195 208 211

Contributors

Stuart C. Aitken is Distinguished Professor and June Burnett Chair of Children, Family and Community at San Diego State University. He has worked in the fields of film and children’s geographies for over three decades. In 1994 Stuart published two books—Putting Children in Their Place (Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC), and Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film (edited with Leo Zonn, Rowman & Littlefield)—that are considered foundational. He has since published 16 books and over 200 articles that relate to film, media, children’s geographies, child rights, and youth activism. Stuart is a Fulbright Research Fellow and has worked for UNICEF as a consultant on numerous occasions. Jacob Rowlett’s research spans across the fields of critical geography, tourism studies, and film theory. His current research seeks to understand the complicated relationships between tourist industries, stakeholders, and tourists themselves when community spaces become entwined with popular culture. In addition to his research, Jacob is engaged with fan communities around the world. He has presented on convention panels at both Star Wars Celebration Europe and San Diego International Comic-Con where he brought a critical cultural geography perspective to pop cultural conversations. Fernando J. Bosco is Professor of Geography at San Diego State University. He works at the intersections of critical urban, social, and political geography. His research interests include the geographic dimensions of social movements and collective action, geographies of children and youth, place, and the politics of memory, geographies of food in urban environments, emotional geographies, geographic thought, and qualitative research methods. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on these topics and emphasizes the importance of community-based geographic research and critically engaged scholarship. He has co-edited several books and written numerous journal articles, book chapters, policy reports, and review articles. Firouz Gaini is Professor of Anthropology and faculty research leader at the University of the Faroe Islands. He studied at universities in Norway, Denmark, and the Faroe Islands. He has done ethnographic fieldwork in France, Japan,

xii  Contributors Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles, chapters, and books exploring young people’s everyday lives, identities, and future perspectives in island communities. He has also published fiction— volumes of shorts stories and essays. He lives in Torshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands, with his family. Laura Lo Presti is Research Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer of Geography at the University of Padua, Italy. Her research is based on a political-cultural approach in the study of geography and cartography with theoretical and methodological contaminations coming from visual studies, mobility and migration studies, contemporary art, and critical theory. She is (co)author of over 40 articles, chapters, books, and other essays. Harriot Beazley is a children’s geographer with a passion for rights-based research with children and young people in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. Her PhD was focused on the geographies and identities of a group of homeless street children in Yogyakarta. She publishes widely on child protection, social inclusion, and gender issues, and has been a technical advisor to AusAID, ACIAR, DEFRA, DFAT, Save the Children, and UNICEF on a variety of projects in Southeast Asia. She is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia) and Co-Editor for the Q1 journal Children’s Geographies. Wiryo Warisno (Heru) is a self-taught artist and works in an abattoir in Victoria, Australia. He was born in Jambi, an Indigenous community in Sumatra, Indonesia. At the age of 9 years, Heru left home and lived with a community of homeless street children who call themselves Anak Girli (Girli children) in Yogyakarta, Central Java. Girli is an acronym of pinggir kali (“river’s edge”), where they lived. While surviving on the streets for 25 years, art, music, and performance became his lifeline. In 2017, he migrated to Australia with his Australian wife and two children. He still considers Anak Girli his family. James A. Tyner is a professor of geography at Kent State University and a fellow of the American Association of Geographers. He is the author of over 20 books, including War, Violence, and Population: Making the Body Count, which received the AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. His honors include the AAG Glenda Laws Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to geographic research on social justice issues. Pascale Joassart-Marcelli is Professor of Geography at San Diego State University where she teaches courses and does research in urban geography, focusing on social inequality in urban landscapes with an emphasis on the experiences of immigrants. Her recent work investigates the role of food in sustaining immigrant communities, providing economic opportunities, and revitalizing neighborhoods.  She is especially interested in understanding the transformation of urban foodscapes and the impacts of food-related gentrification. This current work is a continuation of her earlier research on the informal economy, refugee and immigrant economic integration, and children and community geographies.

Contributors  xiii Colin Gardner is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent monograph is Chaoid Cinema: Deleuze and Guattari and the Topological Vector of Silence, which explores the use of sonic drop-outs in sound films in order to explore different organizations of chaos (Chaoids) that underlie the surface plane of narrative. This builds upon his previous book, Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art, a critical study of Samuel Beckett’s experimental work for film and television and two books on British-based filmmakers: Joseph Losey (2004) and Karel Reisz (2006). James Craine is a professor of geography at California State University, Northridge, working in the human and cultural subfields. He specializes in the geography of media and in cartographic design, applying geovisualization theory to his cartographic seminars. His most recent work is “The Maps with X-Ray Eyes”, a study of the CSUN Sanborn insurance map collection. Ann Marie Murnaghan is Assistant Professor in the Children, Childhood, and Youth Program in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Murnaghan’s research expertise and publications focus on discourses of childhood, children’s worlds, and material cultures in cities. In her current research, Murnaghan examines how museums act as sites of children’s cultures, and how integral these are to the formation of children’s identities, using film studies, critical museology, and participatory, playful methodologies. Tyler McCreary is Associate Professor of Geography at Florida State University and Adjunct Professor of First Nations Studies at University of Northern British Columbia. His scholarship examines how settler colonialism and racial capitalism structure knowledge about land, livelihood, and community life in North America, and how Indigenous peoples respond, resist, and refuse these frames. He has written or edited four books, the most recent being Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities: Colonial Extractivism and Wet’suwet’en Resistance (2024) and Enough! A Modest Political Ecology for an Uncertain Future  (2023, with Mary Lawhon). He has also published over forty journal articles and book chapters. Susana Cortés-Morales is a social anthropologist (Universidad de Chile) and holds a PhD in Education (University of Leeds), based in Santiago, Chile. She has specialized in childhood studies and children’s geographies, conducting research in Chile and the UK around children’s mobilities and spatialities, children’s participation in decision-making and care in families, and the common worlds of children in Chile and Latin America. She is currently a researcher at Universidad Central de Chile. She contributes as part of the editorial board for Children’s Geographies and is a member of Common Worlds Research Collective. David K. Seitz is a critical geographer of liberal multiculturalism with recurring interests in gentrification, immigration, queer community formation, popular culture, and socialist strategy. He is the author of A Different “Trek”: Radical

xiv  Contributors Geographies of “Deep Space Nine” and A House of Prayer for All People: Contesting Citizenship in a Queer Church. Seitz is an associate professor of cultural geography at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and an affiliated faculty in the Cultural Studies Department at Claremont Graduate University. In 2023, he joined the editorial collective of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. Raine Aiava is a PhD student in the Doctoral Program in Political, Societal and Regional Changes at the Department of Geosciences and Geography. Working in the field of human geography, he is part of the research group Affective Geographies and Politics of Education, where his research explores the politics of difference in eventual encounters and emphasizes nonrepresentational and more-than-human perspectives. His current work examines the affectual and political potential of enchantment, love, and learning as re-ontologizing encounters. Noora Pyyry is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Helsinki. Her research deals with youth participation and urban spatial justice as well as with knowing, and educational politics. She uses feminist and nonrepresentational theorization to study the forces that are at work in the various encounters from which knowing, participation, and everyday politics emerge. At the core of her research on knowing is the re-organizing power of enchantment, a radical encounter that makes it possible to rethink the world. Her geographical approach to knowing aims to take into account the various “others” with which humans sense and think. Lorraine van Blerk is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Dundee. Lorraine’s research sits at the intersection of social and development geography researching with young people in the global South experiencing poverty, inequality, and injustice around issues such as homeless and refugee experience. She has methodological expertise in co-produced research and knowledge exchange, qualitative and participatory methods, and collaborative story mapping. She has led several large-scale projects around youth homelessness, as well as projects in eastern and southern Africa examining issues related to refugee youth transitions and sustainable livelihoods. Wayne Shand is an independent researcher and consultant specializing in urban development and participatory approaches to poverty reduction. He holds a PhD from the University of Manchester and is Honorary Research Fellow at Manchester’s Global Development Institute. He undertakes research and public policy design to help make cities more inclusive and sustainable. He is Senior Associate with the International Institute for Environment and Development, working with a range of multilateral, governmental, and community-based organizations on urban development issues. Janine Hunter is Researcher and PhD student at the University of Dundee, specializing in coding and analysis for qualitative participatory projects including

Contributors  xv Growing up on the Streets, in youth transitions and environmental sustainability for refugees, and in secondary data analysis around intergenerational trust and multisystemic resilience. Janine has contributed to policy outputs and coproduced impacts including story maps made with street youth, academic articles on topics including street youth agency, masculinities, sexual health, and peer relationships. Janine is undertaking a part-time PhD on experiences of lasting loving intimate partner relationships among street youth in Ghana. Polly Jarman is a doctoral researcher interested in the geographies of children and young people and geographies of education. In particular, she is interested in the relationship between non-outcomes-based education and encounters with urban woodlands. Her research project uses video technologies and walking ethnography to explore how learning unfolds in such settings. These methods have been undertaken with diverse groups of young people, many with specific special educational needs and disabilities. Working with new materialist and postqualitative theoretical approaches, she considers the material, affective, emotional, and embodied entanglements of young people with these environments. Peter Kraftl is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research looks at children and young people’s everyday lives and experiences of their environments. His work has looked at children’s participation in sustainable urban design, at children’s entanglements with plastics, and at children, environment, and health. He is the author of 10 books and over 100 journal articles and book chapters. His most recent book was After Childhood (2020). Cindi Katz is Professor of Geography, Women’s and Gender Studies, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research concerns social reproduction, the production of nature, the workings of the security state in everyday environments, the privatization of the public environment, the cultural politics of childhood, and the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination. She received Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the AAG in 2021, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2003–4), and the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in Gender Studies at Cambridge University (2011–12). Tracey Skelton currently holds the Endowed Ron Lister Chair at the University of Otago, Ōtepoti/Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Previously, she was Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore where she lived and worked for fifteen and a half years. Prior to that, she was Professor at Loughborough University and Reader at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Her work has always challenged human geography issues related to inequalities, marginalization, and discrimination. Her key areas of expertise are geographies of: children and young people; sexualities; politics; urban studies; disabilities; the Caribbean; gender and race.

1

Introducing the Film Landscapes of Global Youth Stuart C. Aitken and Jacob Rowlett

Imagining Young Lives The geographies of children move in and through spaces of film, television, and media both on and off screens. In an era of politicized children’s media and the rising trend of noxious policies meant to “protect” young lives, it is as important to understand the impact of film and media on young people as it is to understand the nuances and power that comes with portraying young lives on screen. In this book, we see the push and pull of representations and representational relations across screens. The subfields of film and media geography are concerned with not only how images are portrayed and arranged on film but also the cinematic expressions of lived experiences that inhabit daily life. This book aims to channel those conversations around the lives and experiences of children. There are chapters that deal exclusively with the images of children in film and media as well as chapters that are exclusively concerned with the lives of children offscreen and how they tangibly connect to media and its role in their lives. Between it all there is a pulse; a long-overdue investigation into the relationships between young lives, cinema, media, film, portrayal, power, and progress. This book is an action toward further placing children squarely into the fields of film and film geography while also building on the research done throughout film theory and children’s geographies. There is an important geography to the book that helps unite the chapters. It is a geography that focuses on the connectedness of young people in and through space. It is a global geography that notes the importance of what is happening ‘out there’ in a larger world that is more often than not constrained and contextualized by adult sensibilities. It is a local geography that spends time with young people’s communities and sense of place, and it is almost always an emotional geography that reveals something about what the world does, how it acts upon young people, and how they push back, enact ambivalence, and perhaps sometimes acquiesce. In the chapters that follow, there are stories and imaginings from Iran, Finland, Ireland, Sudan, England, Indonesia, Chile, Scotland, Tanzania, The Faroe Islands, France, Argentina, Italy, Canada, and Cambodia. The stories are all about children and young people, some contextualized in our contemporary urban world or rural development, and others contextualized in ancient Celtic landscapes or DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-1

2  Stuart C. Aitken and Jacob Rowlett science-fiction scenarios. Some of the young people are contained by their landscapes, while others embark on journeys or migrations. As readers, we encounter the ways street children survive, how Roma families negotiate non-Roma contexts, how a child with Down syndrome is forced on a precarious journey, the way Indigenous children face changes in how they are represented, the perils of monks and novices battling invaders, of warriors battling dragons, the passions of young people living beside uncertain geopolitical borders, and the resilience of rural children documenting economic restructuring. We encounter the ways young people relate to nature and the non-human, and how they use technology to become more-than-human. Children and Film This is not a book about ‘Children’s Film’ in terms of genre, film boards, and cultured stories although so-called children’s films show up in a couple of the chapters.1 Nor are the chapters focusing on coming-of-age films although contexts of maturation and rites-of-passage show up in some of the work. In what follows there are stories about films made for children, films made about children, and films made by children. There are stories about live-action and animated features, about young adults pushing against their lot or being squashed by an adult-oriented system. There are stories about state-based documentaries and projects to create young documentarians through YouTube. There are stories about Hollywood blockbusters and their effects on young people, and there are stories about independent filmmakers and emerging national cinemas. There are stories about and by young people who subsequently become film stars and movie directors. Some of the stories are largely theoretical or ideological, while others focus on myth. The stories in the chapters that follow come from all over the world; most continents are represented and some of the tales are global in their telling while others focus on islands; still others highlight the politics and cultures of particular nations while others delve into the fantastical. What binds the chapters in this book together has nothing to do with genre, and little to do with culture or territories although both these latter traits show up in all the chapters. In toto, the book portrays the diverse landscapes of global youth and it imagines the young lives lived out, on, with, and through those landscapes. Film Theory There is a long history of academic engagement with film and cinema going back to the early 20th century.2 Christian Metz was primarily interested in the psychology of film, and with this focus he elaborated upon the framing of space for the camera and the rhythm of cinematic narrative in ways that spoke to how we as audiences engaged with the medium. Integrating films for children in scholastic work has a more spotted history, although the cultural production of young people in artistic worlds has a strong lineage, and entwines with the history of educational film.3 Unfortunately, this early infatuation with the potential of cinema as a means of capturing and portraying young lived experiences offsets discussion of the

Introducing the Film Landscapes of Global Youth  3 cultural politics involved in the production and consumption of filmmaking. Much of the early scholarship on children’s art, photography, and filmmaking, following Metz, focused on their seemingly primitive, untrained approach with work that was naïve or whimsical. An interesting work of early film theorists which considered the role of children in film comes from Sergei Eisenstein and his papers concerning Walt Disney and his animation studio. Eisenstein, in a 1941 letter, believes that the Disney cartoons find power and humor with the incompatibility of “childish conceptions of an eccentric clashing with adult reality.”4 Eisenstein felt this power of the Walt Disney animations made them approachable for all ages of audiences but does not further investigate them as a space for children and the storytelling that surrounds young people. It was not until the end of the 20th century that there was a focused engagement in film studies with space and landscapes.5 This involved discussion of national film genres such as the differences between French, Russian, and Italian realism, for example, or the differences between First and Third World cinema. By the 1980s, Marxists like David Harvey and Fredric Jameson were elaborating the complex relations between cinema and postmodern society with an eye toward understanding the production of culture in late capitalism.6 To do so, they drew on the media work of Walter Benjamin, Henri LeFebvre’s ideas about the production of space, and the spatiotemporal work of Henri Bergson.7 Feminist scholars like Anne Friedberg were engaging with cinemas and their space, and Laura Mulvey was critiquing Hollywood movies and the male gaze.8 Kaja Silverman unpacked some of the problematic Freudian and mythic contexts of the male gaze and masculine sexualities in Hollywood movies.9 Giuliana Bruno was combining larger contexts of art and architecture with cinema and streetscapes to say something poignant about women as audiences and spectators.10 More recent work by Slavoj Žižek revitalizes some of the early work bringing together cinema and psychology, specifically the theoretical work of Jaques Lacan, with a decidedly Marxist critique that pulls from earlier cinematic work by Jameson amongst others.11 Psychology and neuroscience come together for Lévy to help us understand how the advancement of digital media and virtualization has intersected with the landscapes of so many aspects of daily life.12 Film geographers have pushed film theory into the spatial studies and placed pins in the map around the world. The works of geographers like Conley, Lukinbeal, Sharp, and Zimmerman have investigated the consequences and connections that filmmaking leaves on spaces through projects that employ techniques ranging from geospatial mapping to mediated cartographies to geopolitical production analysis.13 This book serves as a confluence between these streams of research concerning children and young people, film and media, and geography as well as a closer look at what flows in-between. To Portray the Spaces of Children At the core of the geography of film is the lineage of research into the spaces created within a cinematic context.14 Understanding the spaces of cinematic creation has allowed the expansion toward understanding cinematic spaces of children.

4  Stuart C. Aitken and Jacob Rowlett Drawing on geographic concepts, researchers are able to analyze children’s spaces as well as the intentionality and choices of filmmakers. Connecting the worlds of cultural geography and film studies, Owain Jones states that a “film can show the child in motion and in relation in place and landscapes” in a language that cannot be captured by any other medium.15 Authors such as Zhenhui Yan would expand on this notion further by looking at cinematic landscapes as expressions of children’s geographies in works like her article examining filmic representations of grasslands as transitional spaces of play in Mongolia.16 This volume is possible thanks to the common languages that researchers have found between the subfields of children’s and film geographies and the work that has been done to advance the conversations around cinematic spaces of children and young people. In this book, we encounter the stories of children set against landscapes of pain, hope, resilience, joy, and more. Using the power of historical fiction, Bosco examines the shattered landscapes of a young person facing their own challenges as well as the disconnect caused by the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. Tyner takes a historical fiction approach in his chapter as he investigates the limits of memory and the responsibilities of storytelling in relation to the film adaptation of Loung Ung’s “First They Killed My Father.” In his chapter, Aitken uses Tom Moore’s retelling of the creation of the early medieval Book of Kells and its rescue from Norse invaders to enlarge a young novice monk’s engagement with nature and his growth as a spiritual leader. A powerful theme in cinematic portrayals of children comes from the pain and changes that come with the growth from youth to adulthood. In his article “Growing Up Urban: The City, the Cinema, and American Youth,” James A. Clapp discussed the evolution of the “urban youth” in American cities throughout the 20th-century cinema.17 A major running theme that Clapp discovered was the portrayal of the struggle young people feel against the environments of their youth, the strain to pull away from youth but push against adulthood. In our book, this struggle is highlighted in Joassart-Marcelli’s chapter on young women living in the French Banlieue as well as in Gaini’s chapter analyzing two road trip movies featuring young women in the Faroe Islands. These two chapters serve not only as explorations of the “coming-of-age” trope in cinema but also as investigations of gender, race, and girlhood in the face of adolescence in the adult world. While those chapters deal with similar themes across the works of multiple filmmakers, in Chapter 8, from Gardner and Craine, we take a look at the work of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami in relation to the transversal paths of children in two of his films. Gardner and Craine recognize the political backdrops that influenced the filmmaking of Kiarostami that could not be wholly divorced from the political interests of his home nation. Similarly, Murnaghan and McCreary investigate the racialized portrayals of Indigenous children in the films of Harlan Ingersoll Smith and Alanis Obomsawin in their chapter that challenges documentary filmmaking representations in relation to Canadian colonialism. Challenging documentary and non-fiction filmmaking is crucial toward crafting an understanding of the realities of children through film. In her previous work

Introducing the Film Landscapes of Global Youth  5 on children in documentary films, Cindi Katz has discussed the portrayal of children and parent/child relationships in the films “Waiting for Superman” and “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” In this book, Katz turns the camera around on herself and her ethnographic participants as she looks back on the early research films produced by herself and Mark LaPore concerning the lives of and works of Sudanese children in the early 1980s. Globalized Media Previous research on the geographies of children and media have often been concerned with the saturation of media into the lives of young people. Beyond geography, the influence on children of film, television, and now social media has been a concern for researchers. There is a fearful instinct amongst many adults to gravitate toward hostility that perhaps the media consumed by our youngest populations could sweep their susceptible minds out to a deviant sea like a rip current a parent or guardian or society is unable to fight. This instinct, however, betrays a more interesting and nuanced understanding of the ways children interact and pass through media in a globalized context. Children, around the world, are finding new stories and new opportunities to interact with virtual media. In “Childhood in the Age of Global Media,” Buckingham cautions against concerns that globalized media will lead to a “one way process of domination” on children but instead highlights that globalized film and media is more of a link between children rather than a cultural-contesting force. In this book, we touch on the impact of global media concerning corporate capitalist media products such as the Top Gun, How to Train Your Dragon, and Star Wars franchises. Within these chapters, however, we investigate the messages and storytelling perspectives of these filmmakers as well as the ways children are capable of bobbing and weaving through messy, often politicized, narrative choices. We also challenge and highlight the roles children engage with as both viewers and participants in global media. Children and young people, far from passive engagers with media, develop powerful perspectives and critiques of the films and content with which they interact. They are capable of redefining filmmaking techniques, choices, and even the spaces of film viewing themselves. Media Aesthetic A crucial component within the relationships young people share with film and media comes from their roles as both consumer and, oftentimes, creator. Previous research concerning children and media reverberates between treating young viewers as impressionable targets or invaluable laborers. In some early work on media aesthetics, Aitken noted that children are contextualized as both economic consumers and commodified packages.18 David Oldman cautions that, as long as capital controls production, children will exist as a hidden ‘class to be exploited’.19 In the world of fandom studies, Rahma Sugihartati investigated the middle ground

6  Stuart C. Aitken and Jacob Rowlett between these dynamics concerning “prosumers” or young consumers who themselves produce online content which can sometimes prove extremely valuable for media production companies. This “free digital labor” has only grown as social media websites and services have expanded. With this expansion, digital content production has taken on an aesthetic value of its own such as discussed in Jarman and Kraftl’s work in Chapter 16 in which children are given the tools and means to produce their own online content during a series of nature walks. Beyond the roles young people can play as the creators of YouTube or TikTok videos, they investigate the boundaries between gender, identity, and age concerning young people inspired to become filmmakers. Laura Lo Presti accomplishes this in her chapter concerning the films of an Italian filmmaker reflecting on her past and her identity in her filmography. In and Out of Cinema The connections and social realities between young people and cinema go far beyond the possibilities of a young person with a camera, however, and we look into the tangential and powerful impacts cinema can have from unexpected positions. The impacts of media (particularly global media exported to local communities around the world) often lead to processes of “hybridization” between the works themselves and the values and realities of the communities where they land. Rather than the homegrown sociopolitical values of a certain media producer getting copy/ pasted onto children around the world, there is much more of a conversational and rationalized response from young people. In Aiava and Pyyry’s chapter, the authors confront this response through interactions with young people following viewings of the films Top Gun (1986) as well as Top Gun: Maverick (2022) which was playing in cinemas at the time. The role of cinema itself, and the ubiquitous movie theater, is also challenged and investigated in this book as the meaning of a place for film viewing is proven malleable and adjustable around the world. Early in feminist film theory, Ann Friedberg argued that the flâneuse (literally, street walker) in French literature was not only countered by Benjamin’s flâneuse, and not only joined him strolling and window shopping in arcades, but she also found sanctuary in the darkness and fantasy of cinema theaters.20 van Blerk, Shand, and Hunter take the idea of cinema has sanctuary to another level in their chapter on local film halls in Zimbabwe. What they find is the film hall as a space of cultural, social, and political interaction plays a very unique role juxtaposed against a space for cinema. What we discover in this work is that the lives of young people are constantly moving through and around cinema, and cinema and media move through them as well, leaving lasting impacts and even scars. Nowhere is this more evident in the chapter from Beazley and Warisno where we experience a firsthand account of the difficult contexts of street children who experience stardom through films made of their plight. Beazley, the ethnographer, and Warisno, the streetchild and filmstar, elaborate the complexities and cautionary tales of cinema moving through and with young people.

Introducing the Film Landscapes of Global Youth  7 Genre Filmmaking As previously mentioned, this book is not bound by the constraints of film genre or video medium. We explore stories across and through genres that blend through categories such as animation, fantasy, science fiction, and more. We also do not shy away from the scales of film production: we discuss classroom projects with GoPros, through small independent films with relatively small budgets, and all the way up to some of the most expensive films and franchises. A few of the chapters discussed in this book are concerned with properties that garner massive international audiences and “fandom” communities. Fandoms that generate large online communities are often the intellectual property of massive media conglomerates. As corporate late-capitalist media products, there are often values and themes conveyed in the storytelling that prove hollow or insufficient in material progress. Researchers like Koushik and Reed (2018) have explored films that employ “commodity feminism” as ways of harnessing the aesthetic of progressive feminist values but with little tangible meaning underneath the surface. The gendered aspects of blockbuster storytelling are explored further in Rowlett’s chapter concerning the sequel films of the “Star Wars” franchise. Here, he takes a look at how cultural touchstone franchises, bolstered by corporate media interests, evolve and repackage familiar coming-of-age tropes for new generations and faces of young people. In another “Star”-centered universe, Chapter 12 sees Seitz draw literary parallels between classic characters of American literature and the 24th-century children of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” Seitz’s chapter provides an invaluable discussion on the possibilities of long-form storytelling and characterization provided by “Deep Space Nine’s” format as a syndicated television program of 1990s that is lauded for its social and political commentary. While investigation can sometimes prove a film’s thematic or social politics shallow, films for children can also prove a valuable vessel for social and political critique. In her chapter concerning the How to Train Your Dragon franchise and the role of dragons throughout animated films, Cortés-Morales investigates the role of humanities and the Anthropocene as both harbingers of cataclysm and protectors of the sacred. In addition to Cortés-Morales’s work on animated worlds of the mystical, Chapter 10 looks at the historical fantasy of Tomm Moore’s animated film “The Secret of Kells” as Aitken illuminates the role enchantment plays in the power of creation. Through these chapters concerning animation, we are able to challenge the tropes and stigmas that often plague animated filmmaking by exploring the roles of children beyond passive audience members or as a “target audience.” Instead, we look at the creation of children on screen through animation and the lives that are crafted from these images. Conclusion The connection between film and young people is long-lived and enduring. Given the ubiquity of screens and moving images, understanding child/film relations is perhaps more pressing now than ever, both in terms of their substance, what the

8  Stuart C. Aitken and Jacob Rowlett connections do for children and young people, what the connections represent, and how young people move in, on, through, and out of the images. In this book we have challenged and explored portrayals of children in film and media while also pushing toward a greater understanding of the lives of young people outside of the screens and theaters. Crucially, we have approached this project as a means of connecting cinema around the world in conjunction with different young lives from different countries. By doing this, we have assembled a makeshift global map of the cinematic, mediated, and mediatized lives of young people. The authors in this book have covered a wide-ranging scope of techniques and analytical approaches with some that place films-as-texts as well as some that center the stories of children against the media. The authors have also approached their chapters with varying levels of scale with some examining the intimate lives of cinematic characters and others approaching the narratives of commodified global filmmaking. In the final chapter of this volume, Tracey Skelton engages with our authors as she reflects on each chapter and muses on their connections in impacts. In many ways, her chapter is an exercise in embracing the imagined lives of young people and the different stories and spaces that are made possible on and off the screen. We invite our readers to follow in Skelton’s footsteps and draw their own thematic and spatial connections between the wide-ranging topics and conversations our chapters present. This book serves not only as an examination of the incredible work being done concerning the lives of children in/out/through media but also as an example of what is possible for the future of research within the intersections of geography, film theory, and children’s studies. Notes 1 In putting together a monograph in 2017 on ‘The Children’s Film’, Noel Brown (2017) notes that although various articles and essays have been written about the genre, and comprises a large volume of work, it is nonetheless an understudied subject of enquiry. He provides an overview of the historical, cultural, and national context of films made specifically for children. 2 In Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, and also Language and Cinema (Metz 1974), Christian Metz draws upon the Lacanian “mirror phase” to illustrate the childlike ways in which film viewers perceive the imaginary on screen (Lacan 1978, 1983). Theorist Walter Benjamin (2008) advocated for an approach to film study that acknowledged the material realities of film production and the understanding of the self in relation to film. Other early theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein explored the power of montage, a technical manipulation of space-time through cinema. 3 One of the first evocations of the use of geographic films for educational purposes dates from a 1950s series of articles in The Geographical Magazine. In collaboration with Dr Roger Manvell, director of the British Film Academy, the series’ writers emphasized the national character and factual basis of filmmaking. Although the articles did not preclude the geographic use of narrative films, their primary focus was on documentary films (Manvell 1956a, 1956b; Wright 1956; Knight 1957). The only article in the series which focused upon geographic education deals exclusively with non-fictional representations (Cons 1959). Even when the writers were discussing a fiction film, the realism of the

Introducing the Film Landscapes of Global Youth  9

4 5

6

7

8

9 10 11

12 13

14

15 16

representation was highlighted as its most significant contribution to geography. The articles on feature films (e.g. Griffith 1953; Manvell 1953; Koval 1954) evaluated national film industries according to the extent to which their products dealt effectively with the culture, customs, and behaviors of the everyday lives of people in the country portrayed. Most of the articles in the series were accounts of documentary films and what Manvell (1956a, p. 420) called the global development of a “visual network . . . capable of projecting the indigenous portraiture of mankind through motion picture”. Eisenstein, S. et al. (1986) Eisenstein on Disney. Kolkata: Seagull Books. Aitken and Zonn (1993, 1994) were the first geographers to publish extensively on film. They edited a collection of essays that specifically focused on geographies of film. This was followed closely by David Clarke’s (1997) Cinematic City and culminating in Creswell and Dixon’s (2002) engagement of film from the perspective of mobility and identity collection of essays on. In The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey (1989) unpacks capitalist relations around images and superficiality of the spectacle. In The Geopolitical Aesthetic Jameson (1992) elaborates a number of themes from global cinema and particularly intrigued by the idea of cognitive images, loosely based on the work of Kevin Lynch as a tool for understanding the political unconscious, a concept he developed in earlier work (Jameson 1991). See Benjamin’s essay: Benjamin, W. (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Translated by J.A. Underwood. London: Penguin Books; Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford, England: Blackwell; Bergson, H. and F.L. Pogson (1959) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. 7th impr ed. Crows Nest: George Allen and Unwin, Etc. Friedberg (1993) Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press; Mulvey (1990) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In P. Erens (Ed) Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, pp. 28–40. Bloomington, TN: Indiana University Press. Silverman (1988) The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice In Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bruno (2002) Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York: Verso. See: Žižek (2000). The Fragile Absolute or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London and New York: Verso); Lacan (1978) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: W W Norton; Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London, New York.; Jameson, F. (1992) The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lévy, P. (1998) Becoming Virtual, Reality in the Digital Age. New York: Plenum Trade. See: Conley, T. (2007) Cartographic Cinema. NED-New ed. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv9qt; The special edition of GeoJournal: Lukinbeal, C. & Sommerlad, E. (2022) Doing Film Geography. GeoJournal  87(Suppl 1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-022-10651-2; Lukinbeal, C. & Zimmermann, S. (2006) Film Geography: A New Subfield (Filmgeographie: Ein Neues Teilgebiet). Erdkunde 60(4), 315–325. www.jstor.org/stable/25647919. Aitken, S.C. & Zonn, L.E. (1994) Representing the Place Pastiche. In: S.C. Aitken & L.E. Zonn (Eds) Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, pp. 3–25. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield; Bruno, G. (1987) Ramble City: Postmodernism and “Blade Runner”. October 41, 61. Jones, O. (2013) ‘I was Born But . . .’: Children as Other/Nonrepresentational Subjects in Emotional and Affective Registers as Depicted in Film. Emotion, Space and Society 9, 4–12. Zhenhui, Y. (2019) Grasslands as Transitional Spaces of Play: Mongol Children’s Reimagination of the World in Cinematic Representation. Children’s Geographies 18(1), 69–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1598544

10  Stuart C. Aitken and Jacob Rowlett 17 Clapp, J.A. (2007) Growing Up Urban: The City, the Cinema, and American Youth. The Journal of Popular Culture 40, 601–629. 18 Aitken 2001, p. 148. 19 Oldman (1994) 20 Friedberg (1993) Window Shopping: Cinema A11d The Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bibliography Aitken, S.C. (2001) Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Aitken, S.C. & Zonn, L.E. (1993) Weir(D) Sex: Representation of Gender-Environment Relations. In: Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli, Environment and Planning D, Society and Space, 11, pp. 191–212. London, UK: SAGE Publications. Aitken, S.C. & Zonn, L.E. (1994) Representing The Place Pastiche. In: S.C. Aitken & L.E. Zonn (Eds) Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, pp. 3–25. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Benjamin, W. (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducability and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bergson, H. (1903/1999) An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T.E. Hulme. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company. Bergson, H., & Pogson, F.L. (1959) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. 7th impr ed. Crows Nest: George Allen and Unwin, Etc. Brown, N. (2017) The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation, and Narrative. New York City: Wallflower Press. Bruno, G. (1987) Ramble City: Postmodernism and “Blade Runner”. October 41, 61. Bruno, G. (1991) Heresies: The Body of Pasolini’s Semiotics. Cinema Journal 30, 29–43. Bruno, G. (1993) Street Walking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bruno, G. (2002) Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York: Verso. Clarke, D.B. (ed.) (1997) The Cinematic City. London: Routledge. Conley, T. (2007) Cartographic Cinema. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Cons, G.J. (1959) The Geographical Film in Education. The Geographical Magazine, pp. 456–466. Cresswell, T. & Dixon, D. (2002) Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Eisenstein, S. (1943) The Film Sense. London: Faber and Faber. Eisenstein, S. (1949) Film Form. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Eisenstein, S. et al. (1986) Eisenstein on Disney. Kolkata: Seagull Books. Friedberg, A. (1993) Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University of California Press. Griffith, R. (1953) America on the Screen. The Geographical Magazine, 26, pp. 443–454. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (1992) The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jones, O. (2013) ‘I was Born But . . .’: Children as Other/Nonrepresentational Subjects in Emotional and Affective Registers as Depicted in Film. Emotion, Space and Society 9, 4–12. Katz, C. (2018) The Angel of Geography: Superman, Tiger Mother, Aspiration Management, and the Child as Waste. Progress in Human Geography 42(5), 723–740.

Introducing the Film Landscapes of Global Youth  11 Knight, A. (1957) Geography and the Documentary Film: The United States. The Geographical Magazine, 30, pp. 290–230; at I. Koushik, K. & Reed, A. (2018) Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Beauty and the Beast, and Disney’s Commodification of Feminism: A  Political Economic Analysis.  Social Sciences  7(11), 237.  https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7110237 Koval, F. (1954) The rise and fall of German film-making. The Geographical Magazine, 26, pp. 575–584. Lacan, J. (1978) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: W W Norton. Lacan, J. (1983) Feminine Sexuality, Edited by J. Mitchel, J. Rose, Translated by J. Rose. New York: W W Norton. Lévy, P. (1998) Becoming Virtual, Reality in the Digital Age. New York: Plenum Trade. Lukinbeal, C. & Sommerlad, E. (2022) Doing Film Geography. GeoJournal 87(Suppl 1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708 Lukinbeal, C. & Zimmermann, S. (2006) Film Geography: A New Subfield (Filmgeographie: Ein Neues Teilgebiet). Erdkunde 60(4), 315–325. www.jstor.org/stable/25647919. Manvell, R. (1953) The Geography of Film-Making. The Geographical Magazine, 25, pp. 640–650. Manvell, R. (1956a) Geography and the Documentary Film. The Geographical Magazine, 29, pp. 417–422. Manvell, R. (1956b) Robert Flaherty, Geographer. The Geographical Magazine, 29, pp. 491–500. Metz, C. (1974) Language and Cinema. The Hague: Mouton. Mulvey, L. (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16(3), 6–18. ———. (1990) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In: P. Erens (Ed) Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, pp. 28–40. Bloomington, TN: Indiana University Press. Oldman, D. (1994). Adult-Child Relations as Class Relations. In: J. Qvortrup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta & H. Wintersberger (Eds) Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics, pp. 43–58. Aldershot: Averbury Press. Rose, G. (2001) Visual Methodologies. London: Sage Publications. Silverman, K. (1988) The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Wright, B. (1956) Geography and the Documentary Film: Britain, Since 1945. The Geographical Magazine, 29, pp. 586–595. Zhenhui, Y. (2019) Grasslands as Transitional Spaces of Play: Mongol Children’s Reimagination of the World in Cinematic Representation. Children’s Geographies 18(1), 69–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1598544 Žižek, S. (2000) The Fragile Absolute or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London and New York: Verso.

2 Anita Journeying through Landscapes of Loss and Hope in Buenos Aires Fernando J. Bosco

Anita and Dora, her mother, live in an apartment above the family’s stationery store in the main Jewish enclave of Buenos Aires. Anita is a young adult woman with Down syndrome and her mother tends to her constantly. They sleep in beds next to each other, and Dora sings to Anita every night until she falls asleep. She wakes Anita up every day, makes her breakfast, and helps her bathe. Anita and Dora often walk through their neighborhood. They also visit the Jewish cemetery not far from their home, the resting place of Anita’s father. Dora is very protective of Anita, always fearing that something bad could happen to her if they were to be separated. Anita loves her adult brother Ariel, who visits on Sundays for lunch, plays with her, and promises, someday, to take her to the zoo. One morning, while at the family store downstairs, Dora asks Anita to stay put for a few minutes. Dora needs to walk just a couple of blocks to the headquarters of AMIA (the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association) to retrieve the pension she receives each month. Dora makes sure she leaves Anita with clear instructions on how to behave for the short time she will be alone. Dora tells Anita to pay attention to the large clock on the wall, telling her that when the big hand of the clock reaches the number 12, she would be back with her. But Anita does not pay attention to her mother. As soon as Dora leaves, she gets a stepladder and begins climbing to reach and re-arrange products on the display shelves of the stationery store. It is now a few minutes from the time Dora said she would be back. Suddenly, as Anita steps up on the ladder and reaches upward toward the shelves, an explosion rocks the neighborhood. The store windows shatter and smoke, dust, and destruction fill the family store. Anita falls down the ladder as the explosion occurs. The clock stops working. The family store and the neighborhood are in shambles. Anita emerges from the rubble, crawling, dirty, blood dripping from her forehead. She is confused and hurt and, as she stumbles out from the store and onto the sidewalk, finds a familiar place in ruins.1 Passersby are walking away from the explosion site, running, screaming, and bleeding. Anita, alone on the street, begins to walk with strangers who offer her a hand to get her away from the chaos and destruction. A bus stops to help people get away from the chaotic scene. People get on the bus, including Anita. The bus pulls away from the neighborhood and Anita begins an unexpected journey through the city.2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-2

Anita  13 Contextualizing Anita July 18, 1994, was a day of tragedy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At around 9:53 in the morning, a suicide bomber ran a van loaded with explosives into the building that housed AMIA—a Jewish community center—killing over eighty people and injuring more than three hundred. This was the deadliest terrorist attack in the Argentine history, following a previous bomb attack against the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, which also killed and injured over two hundred people. Both attacks targeted the Argentine Jewish community, the sixth largest in the world outside Israel. This winter morning in Buenos Aires provides the temporal and geographical setting for the film Anita, a fictional story about a young Jewish woman with Down syndrome whose world is literally shattered by the event, causing her to get lost in the city and beginning a journey filled with loss and discovery. The Argentine film, by director Marcos Carnevale, was released in 2009 and casts Alejandra Manzo, a non-professional actor with Down syndrome in the leading role as Anita Feldman, together with an ensemble of well-known Argentine film stars. The opening paragraphs in this chapter are a summary of the first twenty minutes of the film, which centers on Anita’s daily routine and family and home life. The film’s narrative changes after the depiction of the explosion, setting in motion Anita’s journey.3 Carnevale’s film is interesting because of the ways in which it uses a real-world tragic event in Argentine history as the point of departure to tell the fictional story of Anita’s journey as she gets lost in the city. By using the AMIA bombing as the entry point, the film connects with other Argentine films of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that have attempted to construct collective cultural memory by focusing on the trauma caused by the human rights abuses of the last military dictatorship and the forced disappearance of thousands of people in the country. In the case of Anita, the director draws a parallel between the disappearances of people in the 1970s with the killing of Jewish people in the 1990s bombings.4 The film attempts to connect the themes of memory and trauma of post-dictatorship Argentine cinema with the trauma memory of the AMIA bombing, framing the experiences of Jewish loss as an issue of national significance that parallels the disappearances during the dictatorship.5 Significantly, Anita features actor Norma Aleandro as Dora, Anita’s mother. Aleandro played the main protagonist in the 1985 Argentine film The Official Story, by director Luis Puenzo, which was the Oscar winner for best foreign film at the 58th Academy Awards in 1986. In The Official Story, the character played by Norma Aleandro joins the plight of mothers searching for their missing sons and daughters, victims of military violence during Argentina’s last military dictatorship.6 In Anita, Aleandro plays Dora, Anita’s mother, thus reversing who is searching for whom because it is now Anita, the daughter, who is searching for her missing mother. Known to the viewer, but unknown to the main protagonist, Anita, until the end of the film, is the fact that her mother Dora has died in the explosion. While the film focuses mostly on Anita’s accidental journey as she searches for her mother,

14  Fernando J. Bosco

Figure 2.1  The aftermath of the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires (Source: Agencia Noticias Argentinas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://upload. wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Panorama_general_del_atentado_a_la_AMIA.jpg_)

Anita  15 the film also features a parallel and intermingled story centered on Ariel, Anita’s brother, who is also suffering because of the death of his mother and because of Anita’s disappearance during the explosion. Ariel believes Anita has also died and it is not until the last scenes of the film that he learns that she survived and begins searching for clues as to Anita’s whereabouts. Argentine Collective Memory and Anita’s Journey The tragic events of the AMIA bombings that frame the film Anita have caught the attention of several scholars. For some, the violent nature of the attack on the Argentine Jewish community and the lack of justice up to today have made this event “.  .  . a key turning point for Jewish life in Argentina, as witnessed in its impact on the community’s political activism, literary and musical production, and the rhythms of everyday life”.7 Anita thus joins other Argentine contemporary films of the new Argentine cinema genre8 that act as “technologies of memory” because they contribute to the creation of collective cultural practices of remembrance regarding the country’s recent violent past.9 In this chapter, I  want to pick on these important themes and connect them with the fictional part of Carnevale’s film: Anita’s journey through the vast Buenos Aires metropolitan area. I draw on the notion of journeying as an avenue to explore the main character’s spatiotemporal relationships to the everyday geographies of a global Latin American city.10 The concept of journeying emphasizes mobility, exploration, escape, and boundary crossing.11 It draws attention to the personal transformation and new knowledge that arises from different social and spatiotemporal interactions as people move from one place to the other.12 In the film, Anita’s journey provides a lens through which we can see the realities of contemporary Argentine urban life. Specifically, the film allows us to see how a young woman, who until that day had been loved and protected, begins to experience what a large proportion of the population in Buenos Aires live and feel on a daily basis: loneliness, exclusion, hunger, a longing for home and shelter, and care and love. Because Anita’s character is conceived as a young woman with childlike qualities—she is innocent, is vulnerable, and depends on adults for routine daily tasks—the film effectively works as a child-centered narrative and journey.13 Journeys are also a common narrative device used in films, in particular in the “road movie” genre that is preeminent in contemporary Latin American cinema. The road movie genre from Latin America differs from the classic Hollywood one in that it has a more intentional social and political agenda.14 For example, The Motorcycle Diaries, the 2004 film by director Walter Salles, portrays landscapes of poverty and inequality across South America by following the motorcycle travels of the future revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara and his companion. Moreover, road movies from Latin America often use mobility to explore the transformation of national identities, as protagonists travel along one or more countries.15 I argue that Anita can be read as a different kind of Latin American road movie. First, it is an urban road movie, or perhaps an urban street movie.16 Rather than traveling through vast and changing natural landscapes, Anita’s journey takes us through one

16  Fernando J. Bosco of the largest metropolitan areas in Latin America, allowing us to see how changing urban forms and landscapes relate to varying social and emotional geographies of class, race, and gender. Second, Anita’s journey does not involve cars or motorcycles traversing long stretches of roads and highways. Instead, and despite her limitations as a young woman with Down syndrome, Anita walks across the city by herself or with the people she accidentally meets. A few times in the film Anita also moves across Buenos Aires in city buses or in vehicles, aided by others. Finally, it is a female-centered urban road movie, lived and told through the experiences of a young woman. But as with other Latin American road movies, Anita has a clear social and political message. Seeing and Feeling the City through Anita’s Journey Anita’s journey makes her confront and discover a world unknown to her, traversing different parts of the city characterized by racial, gender, and class inequality. Anita’s journey is depicted as a series of encounters with people and places that progressively take Anita further away from her neighborhood and from her familiar places. Each encounter creates a mini-story within the larger narrative of the film, allowing the viewer to experience a more intimate depiction of the emotional connections between Anita and the people she meets. Each encounter and mini-story are demarcated by depictions of Anita arriving or leaving a particular place. The following descriptions of these mini-stories are meant to evoke key themes that tie the film together, including fatherhood, motherhood and family, the impacts of the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s on Argentine society that lead to an increase in urban poverty and the informal economy, the transformation of Argentina into a multicultural society, and the trauma and legacy of terrorism (both state-sponsored and otherwise) on the fabric of urban life and politics and Argentine society more generally. Anita and Felix

Anita first meets Felix. He is a failed photojournalist and an alcoholic who is dealing with a divorce and his failures as a father—he lost custody of his son and his ex-wife tells him he is unable to take care of anyone. Anita and Felix have a chance encounter in the street, in a neighborhood that is depicted as not too different, and not too far, from where Anita has got lost. Felix tries to help Anita telephone her mother—first at a bar and then his apartment. When this fails because the phones are not working and Anita does not even know the name or the phone number of her mother, Felix lets Anita stay. His apartment is messy, but he gives her whatever food he can find in his refrigerator and offers Anita his son’s empty bedroom to spend the night. Felix sends her away the next morning, but Anita spends the day and night outside Felix’s apartment, in the cold and without food, waiting for the only person she now knows in this world. When he returns home, Felix attempts to hide and to ignore her. As he drinks, he knows Anita is shivering in the cold outside. He breaks down. Anita’s loneliness and vulnerabilities make him confront his own

Anita  17 failures as a husband and as a father. Felix lets Anita in and, crying, he confesses to her that he is lost too. The scene shows a fragile emotional bond that develops between two vulnerable and lost people. Anita is accepting of Felix despite his alcoholism; in turn, Anita’s presence allows Felix to feel like a father again. Anita finds a father figure for a short time and someone who can take care of her. However, Felix cannot deal with his marital and labor problems, and he is overwhelmed by his alcohol use. He feels unable and afraid to take care of Anita so, the next day, he lies to her and abandons Anita on a city bus. The entire sequence of scenes involving Felix can be interpreted as portraying the crisis of traditional masculinity and family structure in Argentina, in the sense that Felix is unable to provide for his family as he has failed professionally and personally. This in turn can be tied to the effects of neoliberal economic policies adopted in Argentina in the 1990s that led to high unemployment—especially among adult men who were unable to adapt to new labor market realities and thus unable to fulfill their roles as husbands and fathers.17 Mixing Fiction and Reality in Anita’s Journey

In the next scenes, the film once again connects Anita’s fictional journey with real events that took place in Buenos Aires after the explosion of the Jewish community center in 1994. As Anita continues walking and getting further away in the city, she runs into a demonstration organized by relatives and friends of victims affected by the bombing of AMIA. She does not know why people are marching and she has no actual understanding of the explosion and what has happened in the city. She accidentally mingles with people in the demonstration. Despite the crowd, no one sees or recognizes her. These scenes fuse fiction and reality similarly to the beginning of the film.18 The demonstrations portrayed did take place in Buenos Aires in the aftermath of the bombing and they showcase how pain and trauma are embedded in the everyday social and political landscapes of the city. In fact, the demonstrations in memory of those who perished during the attack have continued over the years. By re-enacting these marches within the story of Anita’s journey, the film also creates an explicit link to the weekly marches that human right activists such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been conducting in the main square in Buenos Aires for decades, demanding truth and justice for the disappeared of the dictatorship.19 The film now portrays Anita and the other victims of the AMIA bombing as a new group of disappeared or vanished people for whom there would be no justice, showing the viewer that the same mistakes of the past are being repeated. A Chinese Family and a Grocery Store

The next scenes in Anita’s journey show her discovering others who are excluded or marginalized in the city. First, Anita playfully attempts to imitate the dance of an indigenous person who is playing music outside a church, begging for money. Anita’s childish play angers the beggar, who flees the scene. Anita, however, succeeds in getting some change, which allows her to walk into a Chinese family-run

18  Fernando J. Bosco grocery store to buy some pastries. She had been previously kicked out of the store when she attempted to take something without paying. Paralleling the scenes outside Felix’s apartment, Anita spends a day and night outside of the Chinese grocery store, because she discovers this to be a place of food provisioning but also hoping to find shelter and make human connections. After Anita refuses to leave the area when she is kicked out by the woman who runs the store, the matriarch and grandmother of the family tells her daughter to let Anita in. The grandmother invites Anita to sit for dinner with them, and then to spend the night. Anita is now immersed in a different culture. As she spends time with the Chinese family, she witnesses intergenerational conflict between the immigrant grandmother, her daughter, and her teenage son—who is portrayed as being a first-generation Argentine young person of Chinese origin. Anita also begins to relate to the teenage boy, and they are shown as becoming friends. Anita also helps with tasks at the grocery store, as is expected of all members of the family. Anita does not mind the cultural differences of the host family and is very receptive to a new routine. Similarly, the family, and the teenage boy in particular, are accepting and also welcoming of Anita. The scenes of Anita’s experiencing a new culture and friendship, a different family life, and the daily working lives of this family is a way for the film to portray the social geographies of recent immigrants who are still marginalized in Argentina. The integration and acceptance of Anita and the Chinese family works

Figure 2.2  March commemorating the AMIA bombing in 2014 (Source: Jaluj https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2014_Marcha_conmemorando_el_Atentado_ a_la_AMIA_01.JPG)

Anita  19 to tell the viewer that “others” who are different also belong in the everyday spaces of life in city. These scenes also work as a corrective of the exclusion of many non-European immigrants in Argentina and thus they are tied to the social and political messages of the film. Showing the Chinese family—and by extension all new immigrants—as working people who welcome, relate, and help a lost young Jewish woman is a way to highlight the realities of a new multicultural city and country. This is important given that many parts of Argentine society still envision the country as a modern nation built by Spanish, Italian, and other European immigrants during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ignoring both the pre-colonial indigenous past—represented by the beggar outside the church—and the contemporary multicultural and cosmopolitan present. Urban Violence, Informality, and Street Children

Anita confronts the routines of urban violence and poverty in the city in the next sequence of scenes. As we witness Anita and the teenage boy in the grocery store laugh and dance to a cumbia20 a robber enters the grocery store, pulls a gun on the teenage boy, and demands money. Anita manages to escape, running away in fear amid the confusion during the holdup. This marks the end of her stay with the Chinese family and the beginning of more hardship in the city. She is now further away from her neighborhood than ever before. Anita finds herself in a warehouse district at night. It is raining, she is sick, and she tries to find shelter. She falls asleep, over a pile of trash under a train bridge. Anita is now portrayed as another child in the street trying to survive without shelter, like so many street children in Latin America.21 Showing the precarity of Buenos Aires’ informal economy, we see three men who are picking through trash attempting to find something of value to either sell or use. One of them finds Anita, who is barely conscious. They help each other carry Anita to their old truck, which is barely holding together and is full of discarded items they have been collecting through the city to make a living. Not knowing what to do with Anita, one of them suggests taking her to his sister Nori’s house, because she is a nurse who perhaps could take care of her and give her some medicine. As the men carry Anita away, we begin to see the changing urban and social geographies of Buenos Aires. Further away from the central business district and areas of middle-class housing, Anita and the men arrive to a neighborhood of modest housing and unpaved streets in the outskirts of the city. Anita is now on the suburbs of Buenos Aires, zones of working-class families who struggle to make ends meet and of recent rural to urban migrants. The contrast with Anita’s home and orderly neighborhood depicted at the beginning of the film is meant to show that Anita is very far from home and in an unfamiliar place as well as the large socio-spatial disparities in Buenos Aires. Nori, a Surrogate Mother Figure

Anita meets Nori, who helps Anita recover from her fever and slowly becomes Anita’s caretaker and surrogate mother for the rest of the film. As scenes of daily

20  Fernando J. Bosco life between Anita and Nori unfold, we again see a parallel with previous scenes but in a different home setting—Nori’s home is very modest, fitting with the neighborhood. For example, Nori helps Anita with her bath, as did her mother at home and Felix when she first got lost. Similarly, when Nori leaves for work, Anita is worried that she will not come back—this is what happened when she was left alone at the family store prior to the explosion and when she was abandoned by Felix. Nori reassures Anita that she will return but asks her not to move and to stay inside the house. The next scenes parallel the scenes just prior to the explosion when Dora left Anita alone in the family store. We see Anita forcing herself to obey Nori’s orders. Children come to the window and ask her to come out and play, but she sends them away. Anita wants to make sure she pleases Nori, so she innocently interprets her words literally: she never moves during the hours that Nori is away. As a result, she soils herself and the sofa. Nori becomes very angry when she returns—she has not even finished paying for the sofa. Anita cries and begs Nori for forgiveness. A few scenes later, we see Nori returning home again, late, after another day of work, perhaps drunk. Nori trips, falls, and hurts her lips and mouth. It is now Anita who helps her, carrying her to the bathroom and tending to her wounds. Nori breaks down crying and it is now Anita who consoles her and sings her to sleep. Their roles have been reversed: Anita is now the caretaker for the first time in the film. With this sequence of scenes, we continue to see the search for family and the importance of motherhood as important themes in the film. Nori has developed strong maternal feelings for Anita. Before Anita arrived, Nori was portrayed as a tough middle-aged woman who lived alone and was not particularly friendly. But Anita has become an agent of hope in Nori’s life, and the film shows how new families can be formed when vulnerable and lonely people support each other. Nori’s portrayal as a successful surrogate mother contrasts Felix’s portrayal as a failed father. In this way, the film elevates motherhood in a way that resonates with common norms in Argentine society. At the same time, these scenes also make the film a coming-of-age story because, with the role reversal, Anita becomes responsible and acts as an adult. Importantly, seeing Anita crossing the boundaries between childhood and adulthood and taking care of Nori is crucial for how it positively shifts the representation of people with Down syndrome as able. A Reunion, a Goodbye, and the End of a Journey

As the film approaches the end, the people and places of Anita’s accidental journey begin to come together. Felix, who is at a newspaper searching for a job, recognizes Anita among the photographs of people who have died or disappeared after the AMIA explosion. He also realizes that her family assumed she was dead. He confesses to people searching for AMIAs victims, including Anita’s brother Ariel, that he had spent time with Anita after the bombing. However, he is unable to tell them the truth—that he abandoned her on a city bus. Anita’s photo then appears on the television news and Nori and her brother learn the truth about Anita. Nori is conflicted about letting Anita go, but finally contacts Ariel, who travels alone to Nori’s suburban neighborhood to fetch Anita. While reunited with her brother, Anita realizes that she will be separated from Nori, who is heartbroken. However,

Anita  21 picking up on the theme of new family structures, Ariel tells Nori that she is welcome to visit Anita in the city anytime. Here, we see what is left of a broken Jewish middle-class family welcoming a non-Jewish lower-class woman as a new mother figure for Anita, and Anita as the bond that makes that possible. Anita’s journey ends as Anita and Ariel arrive back to their empty family store. Ariel explains to her that her mother has died. We see Anita struggling to understand the concept of death and asking about the explosion. The film ends connecting Anita’s journey to the realities of the AMIA bombing. Through the questions of Anita and the struggle Ariel has in trying to answer them, the film projects the pain and questions that enveloped the Argentine Jewish community and broader society at that time: why was there a bomb? why is there so much hate? why did people die? As Ariel struggles to respond, Anita finds the store clock that had stopped that morning in July. She slowly moves the long hand to the time when her mom should have come back: 10 am, 7 minutes after the explosion. Anita’s journey has ended. Conclusion Reading the film Anita through the notion of journeying and as an atypical Latin American road movie allows us to see a young woman’s personal transformation and the impact that she has on others who she meets. As the film progresses, Anita becomes a source of hope and an agent of change for the people she encounters in her accidental journey. Anita’s encounters with people who are experiencing their own losses and misfortunes are a way to portray the material, social, and emotional ways in which young people relate to others in the city. By choosing to show the social and spatial inequalities of Buenos Aires through the eyes of a young woman, the film follows other canonical works of Latin American and Latino/a/x fiction and film that often employ young people as central characters to reflect upon significant social issues.22 Additionally, by focusing on the journey and seeing and feeling the city through Anita’s eyes, Carnevale’s film provides a rich and textured account of the urban and social geographies of Buenos Aires and of contemporary Argentina. At the same time, by showing how other adults who are also vulnerable and marginalized attempt to help and care for Anita, the film offers a message of hope to Argentine society. Despite their many differences, people can come together to care for each in times of tragedy. Like the disappeared victims of past violence—those killed by state-sponsored terrorism during the last military dictatorship and those killed by the terrorist bombing portrayed in this film—those who are also often invisible—the unemployed, immigrants, the poor, the lonely—become visible through Anita’s journey and are given centrality in imagining Argentina’s future. Notes 1 This is an important theme in the book. Other chapters in the collection focus on young people experiencing the changes in familiar places: In Chapter 5, geographies of a Familiar Cambodia change dramatically for a young girl during the Khmer Rouge genocide; in Chapter  8, the young boys in Kiarostami’s films experience what Gardner and Craine call transversal deterritorialization; in Chapter 10, Aitken exposes the ways

22  Fernando J. Bosco

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

Tomm Moore and his collaborates portray the ways a young Irish monk experiences the familiarity of his world change with Celtic magic; in Chapter 11, the world is seen very differently through a GoPro camera as young YouTubers use them as cybernetic extensions of their bodies. Other journeys are found in chapters 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 13. Several of the chapters in the book focus on children or young people embarking on journeys that are ultimately transformative, including Gaini (Chapter 3), Tyner (Chapter  6), Gardner and Craine (Chapter  8), and Aitken (Chapter  10). Tyner’s chapter is particularly resonant because it too is a representation of a young woman’s confusion, perspective, and transition through a landscape of violence. Vohnsen, Mirna. “Revisiting the AMIA Bombing in Marcos Carnevale’s Anita.” In Evolving Images: Jewish Latin American Cinema, pp. 73–88. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pridgeon, Stephanie. “Portrayals of Jews in contemporary Argentine cinema: Rethinking argentinidad by Mirna Vohnsen.”  Revista de Estudios Hispánicos  54, no. 3 (2020): 881–882. Bosco, Fernando J. “Place, space, networks, and the sustainability of collective action: The Madres de Plaza de Mayo.” Global Networks 1, no. 4 (2001): 307–329. Levine, Annette, and Natasha Zaretsky, eds. Landscapes of Memory and Impunity: The Aftermath of the AMIA Bombing in Jewish Argentina. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Aguilar, Gonzalo. “New Argentine cinema: The people’s presence.”  ReVista Harvard Review of Latin America 8, no. 3 (2009) Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. California: University of California Press, 1997. Compare this to Aitken’s (Chapter 10) description of how Tomm Moore uses Brendan’s journeying as a way to explore his inner fears initially and latterly to contextualize his spiritual life in the world. Valentine, Gill. “Boundary crossings: Transitions from childhood to adulthood.” Children’s Geographies 1, no. 1 (2003): 37–52. Carubia, Josephine. “Sign processes of journeying and destination.” Semiotics (2007): 32–46. Vohnsen, Mirna. “Anita.” In Directory of World Cinema: Argentina 2, edited by Beatriz Urraca and Gary Kramer, pp. 147–148. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2016. Shaw, Deborah, ed. Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. Archer, Neil. The Road Movie: in Search of Meaning. London: Wallflower, 2016. It is worth comparing this distinction in the road movie genre with Gaini’s Chapter (3) focusing on girls on a road trip across an island archipelago. Further, like Anita, the young women protagonists in the films Gaini discusses meet a variety of characters on the road, each of which changes their perspectives. Portes, Alejandro, and Kelly Hoffman. “Latin American class structures: Their composition and change during the Neoliberal Era.” Latin American Research Review 38, no. 1 (2003): 41–82. Compare this to Tyner’s discussion (Chapter 6) of the way fact and fiction are mixed. In First They Killed My Father, where the reality of the Cambodian genocide plays alongside Ung’s (lack of) comprehension as to what is going on. Bosco, Fernando J. “The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and three decades of human rights’ activism: Embeddedness, emotions, and social movements.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96, no. 2 (2006): 342–365. Cumbia is a musical genre that blends indigenous, African, and European elements and that is typically associated with the lower and working classes in Argentina. Swanson, Kate. Begging as a Path to Progress: Indigenous Women and Children and the Struggle for Ecuador’s Urban Spaces. Vol. 2. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2010.

Anita  23 22 Reynolds, Lauren Gabrielle Judy.  Subjectivity in Flux: Youth in Latin American and Latino Literature (Diss). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University, 2017.

Bibliography Aguilar, Gonzalo. “New Argentine cinema: The people’s presence.” ReVista Harvard Review of Latin America 8, no. 3 (2009). Archer, Neil. The Road Movie: IN Search of Meaning. London: Wallflower, 2016. Bosco, Fernando J. “Place, space, networks, and the sustainability of collective action: The Madres de Plaza de Mayo.” Global Networks 1, no. 4 (2001): 307–329. Bosco, Fernando J. “The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and three decades of human rights’ activism: Embeddedness, emotions, and social movements.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96, no. 2 (2006): 342–365. Carubia, Josephine. “Sign processes of journeying and destination.”  Semiotics  (2007): 32–46. Levine, Annette, and Natasha Zaretsky, eds. Landscapes of Memory and Impunity: The Aftermath of the AMIA Bombing in Jewish Argentina. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Portes, Alejandro, and Kelly Hoffman. “Latin American class structures: Their composition and change during the Neoliberal Era.” Latin American Research Review 38, no. 1 (2003): 41–82. Pridgeon, Stephanie. “Portrayals of Jews in contemporary Argentine cinema: Re-thinking argentinidad by Mirna Vohnsen.”  Revista de Estudios Hispánicos  54, no. 3 (2020): 881–882. Reynolds, Lauren Gabrielle Judy. Subjectivity in Flux: Youth in Latin American and Latino Literature (Diss). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University, 2017. Shaw, Deborah, ed. Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. Swanson, Kate. Begging as a Path to Progress: Indigenous Women and Children and the Struggle for Ecuador’s Urban Spaces, Vol. 2. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Valentine, Gill. “Boundary crossings: Transitions from childhood to adulthood.” Children’s Geographies 1, no. 1 (2003): 37–52. Vohnsen, Mirna. “Anita.” In Directory of World Cinema: Argentina 2, edited by Beatriz Urraca and Gary Kramer, pp. 147–148. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2016. Vohnsen, Mirna. “Revisiting the AMIA bombing in Marcos Carnevale’s Anita.” In Evolving Images: Jewish Latin American Cinema, pp.  73–88. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2017.

3

Two Girls, Two Islands, Two Images New Cinema in the Faroe Islands Firouz Gaini

In this chapter, I will explore and analyze Faroese cinema with focus on two feature films: Bye Bye Blue Bird by Katrin Ottarsdóttir (1999) and Dreams by the Sea [Dreymar við Havið] by Sakaris Stórá (2017).1 Living on an island, more specifically by the shore of a small and sparsely populated island, is a special experience influencing people’s dreams and imaginaries about the island’s relation to the rest of the world. I argue that young people’s lives are symbolically shuttling between two islands, the place of birth and the place of the future imagination. The Faroes (Føroyar in Faroese), an autonomous region in the Kingdom of Denmark, is an island community in the North Atlantic Ocean, located between Scotland, Iceland, and Norway. In geographical terms, it is a quite isolated community, with roughly 350 kilometers to its nearest neighbor, Shetland. The islands, covering 1,400 square kilometers of land area, were settled by Norse Vikings during the 9th century, but new research suggests that people from Ireland and Great Britain had periodically lived in the islands from as early as the 5th or 6th century AD. The archipelago, with some 53,000 inhabitants, of which more than 20,000 live in the capital region, is today a modern society with a high standard of living. More than 90% of the export incomes derive from fishery products. Almost 95 percent of the population is Christian, and roughly 75 percent of the islanders are members of the (Lutheran) state church—Church of the Faroe Islands. It is a society in transition, facing challenges related to its small scale, demographic composition, and relatively peripheral location, all of which have an impact on young people’s everyday lives, identities, and future visions.2,3 Rannvá and Barba Comfortably seated, deep in the soft zebra-covered back seat of an old blue Ford Granada, with a young unemployed fisherman at the wheel, two restless city girls plunge into a journey across the islands they suddenly departed in their childhood and adolescence. The melancholic driver, wearing blue jeans and a worn sky-blue shirt under a slightly oversized brown leather waistcoat, holds the gray imitationwool steering wheel cover with his steady right hand while his left elbow sticks out of the open side window. He peeks, a bit troubled, through the rear-view mirror under the car ceiling, at the outlandish girls, Rannvá and Barba, who joined DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-3

Two Girls, Two Islands, Two Images  25 him on his secretive road trip toward the north of the archipelago. Rannvá has garish orange hair with two funny knots on the top and is wearing a long mossgreen and purple coat made of furry fabric over a strange faux leather turtleneck bodysuit. Barba has punk-style short black (pageboy) hair, black makeup on a pale doll face, and a red leather jacket over a green patterned jumpsuit. Throughout the journey, the girls constantly change burlesque attire covering the whole color spectrum (even if their handy retro suitcases of course are far too small to carry such a collection), switch between languages (Faroese, English, French, and Danish) in mocking chat about the simple ‘locals’, and remind each other of their special alien (non-island and non-rural) identity. Rúni is a down-to-earth fisherman with the familiar moustache and uncombed hair signaling rural virility and resilience. He convoys the girls through the majestic mountainous landscape of the remote archipelago, and is the prime witness through the rear-view mirror of the abyssal memories of the girls’ past to their painful and deeply transformative odyssey into the islands. The nucleus pair, Rannvá and Barba, representing an island in the island, and a whirlwind of a Tango in the decelerating environment of the unhurried Faroese chain dance, struggle in vain to maintain an image of the islands as inferior and only worth a short non-binding visit. “Blablabla . . . did you not learn anything else in your big world?”, Rúni says angrily after yet another tirade of cynical remarks from the back seat of his car. In time, immersed by the nature surrounding them, the small sleepy villages with their colorful family houses with inquiring eyes in the windows, the lazy sheep in the wet grass in the misty valleys, the girls lose more and more of the protective mantle that had kept them detached from the islanders, before finally also collapsing as inseparable twin souls keeping, as Rannvá naively wanted to believe, “no secrets from each other”. The road trip with its detours and breaks, as well as confrontations with relatives and friends from their unsettled island-past, divides the drifting girls into two islands. The girls discover that they are not as exotic and different from the ‘uncultivated’ islanders as they had imagined in the beginning, yet uncovered secrets also lay bare the girls’ dissimilar emotional and consanguineal bonds to the islands. Barba left the islands as a small child while Rannvá was in her late teens when she decided to say ‘bye, bye’ to her native islands. Secrets, the film Bye Bye Blue Bird demonstrates convincingly, are common in the Faroes. Some secrets are public, some are shared in small groups, and others are kept in the shade forever. Some are tacit while others are voiced behind the backs of the victims. The islanders, including Rannvá, are accustomed to the ambiguous and multi-layered nature of conversation in the islands, but Barba suffers from the lack of explicit and direct information in her query with locals. Bye Bye Blue Bird was the first feature film narrating the identities of young people from the Faroes through the optic of ruralurban and island-continent contrasts and interrelations. Its style and language were quite shocking to many Faroese viewers two decades ago, many of whom, I guess, did not feel prepared for the provocative and vulgar ‘invasion’ of two anarchic girls destabilizing and violently unwrapping their native island community. The film itself represented, ironically, a kind of Crystal Ball smuggled into the islands to foretell many of the approaching cultural dilemmas and conflicts, indeed in a

26  Firouz Gaini

Figure 3.1  Ragna laughing while teasing her friend Ester by the sea

caricatural and melodramatic fashion, that most people, deep down inside, probably already were perfectly aware of. The film, which takes the surrealism and hedonism of urban underground subcultures to the small wind-swept islands of the North, and which puts the eccentric female rebels in the middle of a traditionally male-dominated landscape, represents a clash between dreams and realities, between tolerance and insularity, among the islanders of the North. Nevertheless, the girls’ arrogance toward the locals is too self-congratulatory, their style too extravagant, and their behavior too frenetic. They might as well have been from another planet; hence their non-island identity project falls to pieces on the formative road trip toward adulthood and conciliation.4 Ester and Ragna In the Faroese film Dreams by the Sea (2017), we meet another curious pair of girls, Ester and Ragna, in the lead roles. The noise and surprising twists of Bye Bye Blue Bird, with its incessant movements through space, are here swapped with the humdrum tranquility of an anonymous small island village. Ester is a sixteen-yearold girl from a religious family that has lived in the village throughout her life. She is longing for change, for something surprising and stimulating to materialize and blow her mind. “Then everything’s possible,” she answers shyly, when Ragna with a twinkle in her eye asks Ester why she says that she wants to move away (‘anywhere’ away from the island). Ester looks sad and lifeless, tired of a place that seems to prepare for a future representing a perfect replication of the past, and where people every day reiterate yesterday’s ‘news’ to each other. Instead of meeting unruly Rannvá and Barba in their freakish dresses, Ester meets Ragna, a peer sharing her cheerless girlish look, but not because they have similar lives. Ragna, a self-controlled girl matured by hard-won life lessons, has just moved to the village

Two Girls, Two Islands, Two Images  27 together with her alcoholic mother and little brother. She is used to moving from place to place, because of her mother’s lifestyle and abuse. Both girls could indeed, hypothetically, have escaped to another country, just like Rannvá and Barba in Bye Bye Blue Bird, as well as many other young islanders, but they stay. Ester and Ragna become friends and share dreams by the sea. Their differences, somehow symbolizing submerged coexisting oppositions in the minds of the islanders, who normally avoid open talk about social rupture in their society, is what draws the introverted peers together. They need each other in a village community with very limited space for young people. Ragna is Ester’s gateway to the exciting yet dangerous universe outside of the insular religious family and congregation in the village. She represents another island in the islands. Ester’s conservative family, on the other hand, gives Ragna the relieving sense of stability and continuity that she has been searching for. While Bye Bye Blue Bird focused on the tension between the Faroes and the rest of the world, the film about Ester and Ragna discusses the tension between the small village and the city within the Faroes. Ester and Ragna are not rebels, but they both have dreams and hopes for another tomorrow. Ester lives a protected mundane life as the daughter of the popular leaders of the local Christian congregation, while Ragna belongs to a fragmented and marginalized family that people ‘talk about’ and avoid too much interaction with. Both girls, albeit from different social and cultural positions, experience the predicaments of the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood in the context of a small island community advancing a returning query: should I leave, or should I stay? What is awaiting on the other side of the sea? In Dreams by the Sea, there is no car penetrating the landscape, creating carnivalesque movements and wavering turns, as Bye Bye Blue Bird’s cinematography offers its viewers, and nature seems frozen, or timeless, with only the harmless waves at the rocky seashore, watched over by drifting clouds, hinting the passage of time. The film represents an Insider’s honest guide to everyday life in a small village, in stark contrast to productions branding exotic and ‘authentic’ small islands on behalf of the tourist industry, by an instructor intentionally downplaying the meaning of the natural surroundings and, alternatively, emphasizing the islanders’ feelings and dreams in relation to their social realities and imagined isolation. Dreams by the Sea, says the young talented film director Sakaris Stórá, who himself grew up in a small Faroese village, aims to “bring out the unsaid” and to encourage people “to accept themselves”. When I met Sakaris for a chat about his films at Café Paname in Torshavn, he shared his reflections on the connection between islands and youth with me. According to Sakaris, they belong together. The island is a metaphor for the youth. Let us now dig into the question about islands: what is the role of the island in contemporary Faroese cinema? Departures and Arrivals The official film posters promoting Bye Bye Blue Bird and Dreams by the Sea picture two girls with the endless ocean in the background. Ester and Ragna are happy and smiling in the magic summer night, while Rannvá and Barba are sitting

28  Firouz Gaini

Figure 3.2  In the kitchen the day after the party

on a large suitcase by the side of a road waiting for someone to come. With their backs turned to the sea, the young women try to forget, for a fleeting moment, what is never far away. They are living and dreaming at the edge of the island, and the sea is the symbol of imagined altered islands that people can flee to when island life becomes too condensed and sticky. Ester and Ragna, with arms around each other’s shoulders, are carefree and intoxicated on the poster, but Rannvá and Barba look abandoned and rather anxious on the empty village road. You could say that the film posters echo the multifaceted nature of an island, maybe first and foremost the dualism between openness and closedness in relation to oceanic isolation, which is also the source of common representations of islands-as-paradise versus islands-as-prison.5 Sometimes it feels like a prison, and sometimes it is enjoyed as paradise on earth. The island is a rich metaphor in Faroese cinematography, crafting the complicated and shifting relationship between the Faroese girls embodying the schism between home and away, roots and routes, hence also narrating young people’s maneuvering between individual dreams and collective expectations. The seashore, as in the mentioned film posters, is essential here, because the littoral landscape is where hybridity and change are “most easily imagined.”6 Living on small islands is always equivalent to living close to the coast, which is a precarious zone of exchange associated with arrivals and departures.7 “Use your wings!”, Ragna shouts from the deck of the ferry leaving the harbor of the village in the final scene of the film. She is looking at Ester, standing on large rocks on the shore to get a glimpse of the exit, who is remaining on the small island. The stage of the final scene of Bye Bye Blue Bird is also set on a place of transit: the tiny airport of the archipelago. Barba, together with her little daughter (a child that Rannvá did not know about before the enlightening road trip), is standing inside the open airplane door waving ‘bye bye’ to her friend, who left the plane in the very last seconds before departure to stay and be reunited with her mother. “Perhaps these

Two Girls, Two Islands, Two Images  29 tiny islands are not only for birds that can fly away, perhaps they’re also for people who don’t want to fly away”, Barba shouts in uplifting response to something Rannvá had said about the islands in a dark moment during their bumpy road trip that now has come to an end. Departures and arrivals are always central to life on the islands, but they are open ended, not irreversible, and both stayers and leavers are strongly affected by the messiness of different forms of movement and stasis.8 The return to the Faroes, after long years abroad, is also a central theme in contemporary Faroese arts and literature, for instance in the novel Island by Siri R. Hjelm Jacobsen,9 which poetically connects the islanders to their mountains, rivers, fjords, and islands. “Deep under the sea, all land masses meet”, and the “tectonic plates converse in mumbling dialogue.”10 From this perspective, the islands and the islanders are inseparable parts of the same organism, a landscape with human and non-human forms of life that cannot be understood without attention to the natureculture continuum of island living.11 Everything seems to be shared and sticky, like the ring of dancers in a Faroese party. The dancers are like copies of each other, engaged in synchronized slow dance steps and monotonous chant, handin-hand, yet all with their unique appearance. “The moment the wheels hit the landing strip”, says Siri referring to the incoming airliner, “everybody on the islands knows that you’ve arrived.”12 The individuality and privacy of urban living abroad vanish, and you melt into the assemblage of islands. The Island and the Rest In rhapsodical Faroese cinematography, for instance Bye Bye Blue Bird and Dreams by the Sea, the viewer obtains an affectively powerful image of island living as an open-ended collage of bodies and things in rhythmic circulation. In fact, from the island perspective, staying and waiting represent as powerful an action as leaving and flying. Young people from small islands do invest in imagination of how life is beyond the oceanic horizon, like we for instance witness in the chat between Ester and Ragna, but this does not necessarily trigger an urge for geographical relocation, because it might also bolster the emotional attachment to the place called home.13 The small island community is, in brief, paradise when things are on track and hell when things go wrong. Everybody knows practically everything about everybody, even if people very often will pretend that they don’t know the negative rumors about their relatives and co-villagers. Therefore, young islanders—as members of a small society characterized by high level of mutual (person-based) recognizability—will normally work hard to avoid stigma and social isolation from their peers, because there is nowhere to hide in the transparent islands and a very lonesome existence awaits the individual ostracized from the societal collective.14 Rúni, the handsome unemployed fisherman and driver in By Bye Blue Bird, has made life difficult for himself by being too outspoken about fraud and malicious tactics in the Faroese fishing industry. Having accused the powerful fishing companies of serious misconduct in the national radio, Rúni has unofficially been blacklisted by all ship owners in the islands. He is pushed into a corner, but he does not talk about escaping the country. He has not lost hope of getting a new job on a

30  Firouz Gaini

Figure 3.3  The official poster for the film Dreams by the Sea [Source: Ester (Juliett Nattestad) and Ragna (Helena Heðinsdóttir) in the dreamy summer night]

Two Girls, Two Islands, Two Images  31 fishing vessel. Willful stayers rely on micro-utopias of hope. It is, in principle, easy to leave the islands and start afresh elsewhere, but it will also lead to a deep separation from the island as a spatiotemporal ‘throwtogetherness’ of affects, feelings, objects, and relations.15 Returning to the islands later, hardly anyone will ask where you have been or what you have been doing. Rather, they will inquire about your parents and place of birth. In Bye Bye Blue Bird, nobody asks Rannvá and Barba what they have been doing in their life in the city. It doesn’t matter. They have been on the other island—the place that is not the Faroe Islands. This is somehow settled by a silent process at the departure-arrival concourse in the island community: the incoming travelers’ bodies, ideas, affects, and feelings are soaked through the symbolic islandness-elixir attuning and incorporating them to the tick place. Youthful Cinema16 Katrin Ottarsdóttir, who produced Bye Bye Blue Bird, as well as a couple of other films, was making films before modern Faroese cinema was born. Katrin was based in Copenhagen and had herself a history of leaving the small islands when she was young to immerse into subcultures of the large city, the capital of Denmark, which is the prime destination of young Faroese people settling abroad. In Bye Bye Blue Bird, a film with a Fellinian spirit, she takes us on a road trip with stops in conservative religious communities, strange underground bars, traditional wedding parties, masculine fishing ports, and so on. In one of the scenes, a hitchhiker standing on the side of the road enters the car to get a ride to the airport. It is a quiet young woman from a village with a special secret mission to Denmark. Rannvá, getting upset because the stranger does not start chatting as soon as the car is driving, exclaims something about ‘natives’ not being able to engage in conversation and unfairly keeping everything unsaid. The girl, looking straightforward, responds completely unaffectedly: “I’m going to Denmark to get an abortion. I  stole the money from mum and dad. They think I am going to a Christian summer camp .  .  .” Rannvá looks slightly shocked and does not say anything. In this bizarre intermezzo in the long road trip, Katrin plots an outrageous situation difficult to grasp for the general audience, and her aim is to illustrate some of the serious challenges and humiliating dilemmas facing young women in the islands in the same condensed scene. Rúni and Barba are embarrassed (yet not surprised), because of Barba’s behavior provoking the girl to say what she normally would keep secret. While Katrin’s oeuvre can be seen as a special contribution to Faroese cinematography, art house film for the connoisseur of creative independent cinema, the newer productions created by young autodidacts based in the Faroes do indeed have some connections to the main themes of Bye Bye Blue Bird. They are part of a youthful struggle, an unrecognized yet bold countermovement against dominant values and norms in society, manifested in ingenious contemporary arts and culture. The new wave in Faroese cinema started some fifteen years ago with small cameras and micro-budgets, and Sakaris Stóra is one of the protagonists in this generation of pioneering filmmakers. Most of the filmmakers are young and make short and entertaining productions about youth life and the clash between generations in the

32  Firouz Gaini Faroes today. In 2021, an interesting coming-of-age documentary called Cheers [Skál17], also featuring two girls in the lead roles, was released. While Cheers is a documentary, and therefore belonging to another film category, ii fits very well to the assembly of Faroese cultural creations contributing to the silent cultural struggle for societal change.18 Cheers is a poetic cinematographic portrait of a young woman and her best friends—Trygvi (her boyfriend) and Marjun—in a landscape of religion, love, tradition, and modern identity. Dania is not a true rebel, but a 21-year-old village girl hungry for change in her life. Trygvi, a provocative rapper and poet from a secular family in Torshavn, is for Dania what Ragna is for Ester in Dreams by the Sea. Dania is from a conservative Christian community, but she struggles—through her writing and lifestyle—for a future with more personal freedom and tolerance. Trygvi is the other island. The new films from the Faroes use cinematic youthful stories to enrich our understanding of island living in the globalizing world. Sakaris told me that he doesn’t want to focus on the nature surrounding young people, but rather on young people’s sentiments and identities, but the seashore and ocean are always close by. New Faroese cinema aims to de-exoticize the islands and to picture and narrate the stories that too often are— intentionally or unintentionally—kept out of the public eye. Faroese cinema is still young and independent, without any strong stylistic and thematic conventions and restrictions, and this position gives it an advantage as tool for social struggle and youth activism. The two girls embody the helix of juvenile staying and leaving imaginations, the two islands epitomize the protean spiritual dichotomy between the Faroes and the rest of the world, and the two images outline the cinematic synthesis of picturesque and grotesque forms in the Faroese landscape. Notes 1 Katrin, Ottarsdóttir. Bye Bye Blue Bird. Torshavn & Copenhagen: Peter Beck Film, 1999; Stórá, Sakaris. Dreymar við havið. Torshavn & Denmark: Fish & Film, 2017. 2 Firouz, Gaini. Lessons of Islands. Torshavn: Faroe University Press, 2013. 3 There are important connections with Joassart-Marcelli’s Chapter 7 on everyday life for young women in a French banlieue. 4 Compare this to the reconciliation in the Argentinian road movie elaborated by Bosco (Chapter 2). 5 Godfrey, Baldacchino. A World of Islands: An Island Studies Reader. Prince Edward Island: Island Studies Press, 2007. 6 Gillis, John R. The Human Shore. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012, 61. 7 Jonathan, Pugh. Relationality and island studies in the Anthropocene. Island Studies Journal 13, no. 2 (2018). 8 Pedersen, Oliver Clifford and Zittoun, Tania. “I have been born, raised, and lived my whole life here”—Perpetually on the move while remaining still. Integrative Psychological and Behavorial Science 56 (2022), 775–778. 9 Jacobsen, Siri Ranva Hjelm. Island. London: Pushkin Press, 2020. 10 Jacobsen, Siri Ranva Hjelm. Island. London: Pushkin Press, 2020, 70. 11 Rosi, Braidotti. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. 12 Jacobsen, Siri Ranva Hjelm. Island. London: Pushkin Press, 2020, 12. 13 Oliver Clifford, Pedersen and Tania, Zittoun. “I have been born, raised, and lived my whole life here”—Perpetually on the move while remaining still. Integrative Psychological and Behavorial Science (2022), 1–24.

Two Girls, Two Islands, Two Images  33 14 15 16 17

Firouz, Gaini. Lessons of Islands. Torshavn: Faroe University Press, 2013. Doreen, Massey. For Space. London: SAGE, 2005. Compare this to the new, youthful Italian cinema suggested by Lo Presti in Chapter 4. Debell, Cecilie and Tórgarð, Maria. Skál. Torshavn & Copenhagen: Made In Copenhagen Aps, 2021. 18 Firouz, Gaini. De unges stille oprør. Modstand, indflydelse og fremtid på Færøerne. Nordisk Tidsskrift for Ungdomsforskning 2 (2022).

Bibliography Baldacchino, Godfrey. A World of Islands: An Island Studies Reader. Prince Edward Island: Island Studies Press, 2007. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Debell, Cecilie and Tórgarð, Maria. Skál [Film]. Torshavn/Copenhagen: Made in Copenhagen ApS, 2021. Gaini, Firouz. Lessons of Islands. Place and Identity in the Faroe Islands. Torshavn: Faroe University Press, 2013. Gaini, Firouz. Det stille oprør. Modstand, indflydelse og fremtid på Færøerne. Nordisk tidsskrift for ungdomsforskning 3, no. 1 (2022), 29–43. Gillis, John R. The Human Shore. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012. Jacobsen, Siri Ranva Hjelm. Island. Translated by Caroline Waight. London: Pushkin Press, 2020. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: SAGE, 2005. Ottarsdóttir, Katrin. Bye Bye Blue Bird [Film]. Torshavn & Copenhagen: Peter Bech Film, 1999. Pedersen, Oliver Clifford and Zittoun, Tania. “I have been born, raised and lived my whole life here”—Perpetually on the move while remaining still. Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Science 56 (2021), 775–778. Pugh, Jonathan. Relationality and island studies in the Anthropocene. Island Studies Journal 13, no. 2 (2018), 93–110. Stórá, Sakaris. Dreymar við Havið [Film]. Faroe Islands & Denmark: Fish & Film, 2017.

4

Becoming a Filmmaker, an Adult, and an Italian? Shooting the New Italian Youth and Their Rites/Rights of Passage Laura Lo Presti

Introduction “I was born in Italy, I have an Italian ID, but my passport is from Bosnia. Every year, I need to give my fingerprints to renew my residence permit. But my identity is also another one: I am a young Roma girl.”1 It’s 2009 and Laura Halilovic—a young girl living in a council house in Falchera, a peripherical suburb of the city of Turin in Italy, after the family’s decision to move away from a nomad camp—decides to tell her story through a video camera. Produced by Zenit Arti Audiovisive, Me, My Gypsy Family and Woody Allen is a subjective narration of a suspended and often demonized identity, that of a “gipsy” teenager who dreams to become a filmmaker by sending a letter to her favorite director—Woody Allen—and then waiting day by day for a response from him. Such a professional aspiration is contrasted with the decision of her family to arrange a marriage because “she is already 19,” triggering a series of humorous (and often caricatural) sketches that have the purpose of confronting Italian and Romani habits. Now we jump ahead five years to 2014 . . . Laura Halilovic is filming a second movie. The main character is Gioia Tracovic, her alter-ego. She is a 17-year-old girl who discovers in cinema a chance for emancipation, both from the marginal and boring life of the urban periphery in Turin and from the traditional role of women demanded by her community. In this new version of the movie, she attempts to fulfill her dream of becoming a filmmaker with the help of a 40-year-old Italian mechanic and traveler, Alessandro. Alessandro puts her in contact with a bankrupt director, the owner of a small cineclub, who, in exchange for a day as an assistant director on a local movie, will benefit from the details of Gioia’s life to find material for a new documentary. Wounded by a cruel and nationalist cinematographic environment and by the departure of Alessandro, Gioia engages with Elvis, a young Roma boy who, like her, resists many family traditions (such as early marriage) and directs her first amatorial movie, with her father playing the part of Woody Allen.2 Over the past few years, the so-called second generations in Italy have started to appropriate the cinematic tool as a creative entry point to narrate their professional, generational, and political life transitions, giving scholars a reason to think of their work as an expression of an emerging collective subjectivity, the “new Italian youth.” Such a label frequently identifies Italy-born children of immigrants—and DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-4

Becoming a Filmmaker, an Adult, and an Italian?  35 young people who settled in the country after birth—as nationals, despite obstacles concerning the acquisition of citizenship. Focusing specifically on the autobiographic production of Laura Halilovic, the aspirations, expectations, and concerns of a “new Italian” cinemaker will be discussed in relation to three rites/rights of passage (becoming a filmmaker, becoming an adult, and becoming an Italian) and through the performative agencies of threshold spaces and objects.3 Considering the significant literary production of the last few decades of diasporic and migrant writers, many postcolonial scholars had already stressed the emergence of such a new idea of Italianness, conveyed by second generations, for whom belonging is not linked to legal status, but rather to new ways of being Italian, whether by virtue of being born in Italy, through everyday experiences and practices, or through participation in the educational system and a dynamic use of the national language.4 In the wake of the debate arising since 2006 for a possible reform of citizenship, respectful of the ius soli principle,5 one such dynamic practice of ordinary expression of the new Italianness has favorably emerged with audiovisual and cinematographic tools. This unusual entryway to the film industry6 poses also several challenges and opportunities to rethink notions of “migrant cinema” and “accented cinema” through the youth lens (and vice versa).7 In fact, while the first label grasps the film industry’s wider interest in migration, regardless of whether the film is made by autochthonous or immigrant filmmakers, the “accented cinema” more neatly addresses the subject from the point of view of immigrant filmmakers, where the moving image emerges as a performative space in which both their subjective voice and their collective claims can be heard. Nonetheless, although migrant cinema can vaunt a long history in Italy as a genre,8 its critical and engaged voice did not reach the mainstream audience until the outbreak of the so-called European migrant crisis (2014—ongoing). The year 2015 was a turning point in the European and Italian film industries, when increasing attention and funding were put in place to cover refugees’ traumas, obstacles, and reasons for traveling. Even in such an emergential scenario, Italian filmmakers have affirmed themselves as spokespersons of the crisis, obscuring the migrant counterpart residing in the country.9 In Italian film studies, it has been noted from several perspectives that accented filmmakers operate in much weaker and invisibilized (social, political, and economic) contexts.10 For their voices to be acknowledged, cinemakers from different ethnic backgrounds are required to reproduce cultural styles and narrative plots that can be understood by the mainstream national public. For those who remain in peripheral audiovisual productions, potentialities have also been evidenced. Nacify, for instance, does not consider the transgressive force of migrant authors directly in their “accented speech” (e.g., communication of their ethnic diversity through the content of a movie) but in the fact that they are “situated in the interstices of cultures and film practices” and “resonate against the prevailing cinematic production practices, at the same time that they benefit from them”.11 Under these

36  Laura Lo Presti terms, and in contrast to a standard migrant cinema, the production of an accented cinema in Italy has gained scholarly attention as a critical form of “salvage filmmaking”12 or “guerrilla style”—that is, independent and low-budget filmmaking “whereby the filming itself is an act of resistance and therefore laden with political meaning”.13 However, this subaltern resistance makes adult-accented movies a niche genre, raising some skepticism about the transformative effects they can have on mainstream national imagery. When it comes to exploring the role that post-migrant youth play in rewriting the nation through self-produced media representations or even through funding opportunities driven by educational institutions, certain issues need to be attentively recontextualized from the broader conceptual gaze of youth—specifically, the subversive charge and the preoccupation with ethnic identity, belonging, and difficulties in coexisting that are frequently highlighted by film scholars. From the unique perspective of young second-generation filmmakers, the youth lens complicates and extends, adapts, and readapts home/host tensions and encounters by favoring more commercial, entertaining, and enlightening expressive genres. These result from and propel global lifestyles and moods, often privileging the form of seriality besides cinema. This change may be rendered through the notion of postcinema, and, while apparently it softens the original contents and counter-narrative endeavors of accented cinema, it makes way for more global, generation-centered themes, such as love, aspirations, and uncertainty with respect to the future and the social reality in which young people live and (sometimes essentialized, sometimes plural and fluid) experiences of belonging and coexistence. Thus, while becoming more mainstream, youth-accented cinema promises to have a major impact on how several ideas of (hyphenated) Italianness are emplaced through ordinary imaginations and experiences. Shooting Rites/Rights of Passage through Their Accented Spaces To allow for the emergence of the possible aspirations, expectations, and concerns of the “new Italians”, this chapter focuses on the autobiographical productions of Laura Halilovic, a filmmaker of Romani ethnicity born in Italy by parents originally from Bosnia. In her movies, representations of intergenerational conflicts, gendered societal norms, identity, and citizenship issues affect and intersect with the wider aspiration to become a filmmaker, requiring a creative consideration of the concept of transition and its inherent social and cultural act of becoming. However, in youth studies, the notion of transition has been criticized for the prevalence of quantitative approaches that identify the structures of inequality implied in the passage from youth to adulthood.14 As such, it has usually been kept at a distance from a cultural approach that is interested in the performative and representational meaning-making of youth, seen as an ontological and epistemological space of its own that does not necessarily have to be thought of in conjunction with or in opposition to adulthood.15 The cinematic lens allows me to discuss the notion of transition in a more performative way by distinguishing three modes in which the act of becoming somebody emerges in the spatial staging of movies

Becoming a Filmmaker, an Adult, and an Italian?  37 with an ambiguous effect, sometimes liberating, sometimes disciplining. In Laura Halilovic’s autobiographical production, this posture considers a professional transition (from an amateur to a recognized filmmaker), a generational transition (from a child to a young adult), and a legal and cultural transition (from a perceived foreigner to an Italian citizen).16 Although the following paragraphs distinctively address these three aspirational plotlines—becoming a filmmaker, becoming an adult, and becoming an Italian—the analysis of the social and economic production of the young filmmaker, along with a close reading of her audiovisual performances, attempts to unravel the intersection of non-linear, deferred, and even interrupted transitions with their rites and rights of passage. By rites of passage, I  mean the staging of events, routines, rituals, gestures, objects, means of transport, and closed and open spaces that, in an iconic way, embody the above-mentioned transitions and whose symbolic reading falls within the specificity of the cultural research approach to youth.17 From the perspective of a film scholar, such rites may be read via references and tributes to previous or contemporary cinematographic styles. However, as a geographer, I  am interested in recognizing the peculiar material and immaterial forces of spaces in which and through which such transitions occur. Regarding accented cinema production, Nacify noted that a preoccupation with place is, in fact, a defining feature of such films and is expressed through “open and closed space-time (chronotopical) representations.”18 The diegetic space of Halilovic’s movies is indeed anchored to the weaving of material spaces—the house, the nomad camp, public spaces, means of transport, film sets, and the urban fringe—but also immaterial spatialities of dreams and fairy tales. Even the national landscape frequently materializes through dialogues and ekphrastic modes, not just as the stage for discussing questions of identity but also as a constant reminder of “the economic and political framework within which films are produced.”19 Furthermore, objects of various kinds (e.g., TV screens, video cameras, identity cards, letters, paintings, etc.) are treated as threshold spaces, emphasized by different movements of the camera (up-close, stopaction, etc.) that attune the spectator to poignant moments of transition.20 Referring to these also as accented spaces is a way to discuss the transitional and transitive force of such physical representations, which is not just a matter of aesthetics but also a matter of politics, for they open a reflection on the ensuing rights to passage. Passages from childhood to adulthood, from unemployment to job stability, are, in fact, interesting to discover not only because they are condensed within specific accented spatialities, but also because they are discussed by the director in the context of the possibility to become an Italian citizen or to be socially and culturally recognized as such.21 In this respect, the field of citizenship studies has also been affected by a theoretical positioning on cultural performativity, discussing not only the legal and formal challenges that migrant youth must face to acquire citizenship but also the “routines, rituals, norms and habits of the everyday through which subjects become citizens.”22 In the following paragraphs, I juxtapose two audiovisual objects, the documentary Me, My Gypsy Family and Woody Allen (orig. Io, la mia famiglia Rom e Woody Allen, 2009) and the movie Me, Romantic Roma Girl (orig. Io, Rom Romantica,

38  Laura Lo Presti 2014), both directed by Laura Halilovic, to see how the rites and rights of passage of new Italians emerge through the moving image, while contextualizing them in the broader tension between national and accented cinemas.23 As already introduced, the first audiovisual production is a short documentary (47’) filmed by Halilovic at the age of 19 in a cheerful, diary-like style. This was later transformed into the full-length semi-autobiographical movie Me, Romantic Roma girl (80’). Compared to the 2014 movie, the 2009 documentary is a low-budget production, presenting various stylistic imperfections and amateurishness. In this way, it embodies the “aesthetics and politics of smallness and imperfection,”24 of which Nacify spoke regarding accented cinema. The second movie, produced by Wildside and Rai Cinema with the contribution of MiBACT (in collaboration with the Turin Piedmont Film Commission), is a longer version of the same plot, but also reflects the growth of the director (now 24) and, in many cases, her grown-up views and balanced opinions toward both cultures, Romani and Italian. Becoming a Filmmaker Mr. Woody Allen (mmm, it seems like I am writing to the apartment block administrator), Hello Woody (no, this way it looks like as if he is my cousin) Dear Woody Allen. —Laura Halilovic, Me, My Gypsy Family and Woody Allen

In her movies, Laura Halilovic constructs her professional aspiration—that is, the “becoming a director” plotline—in terms of a predestination condensed by symbolical images, objects, and spatial arrangements that embody specific rites of passage, although they are often interrupted or non-linear, as initially expected. This narrative choice triggers ambivalent feelings about the saving and ransoming power of cinema. The 2009 documentary opens with videos shot by her father when she was little and by which she was enchanted—“Every time I saw a video camera, I  was like .  .  . spellbound”—especially wondering how it was possible to watch herself on a TV screen. The TV screen is a liminal object that brings the world from the outside into the domestic space.25 It acts as a magic portal through which, during her childhood, Halilovic connects serendipitously with the demiurgic figure of Woody Allen (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The letter she writes to him, which constitutes the narratological expedient on which the film’s architecture is built, begins in fact with the memory of such an encounter: “I  remember the day I  first saw you. I  heard a cartoon-like voice coming from the TV. I  came closer and you were there on the screen with those funny glasses. That day, I understood what I would do when I grew up” (see Figure 4.1). Despite the absence of a reply letter from Allen, Laura does not give up and decides to go with a friend to the Venice Film Festival to meet him in person. Not caring about the arrival on the red carpet of stars like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, she

Becoming a Filmmaker, an Adult, and an Italian?  39

Figure 4.1 Film still from Me, My Gypsy Family and Woody Allen (2009) featuring the TV screen as a magic threshold space that connects the young girl to the adult world of cinema (Source: Published with permission of Zenit Arti Audiovisive)

40  Laura Lo Presti

Figure 4.2 Film still from Me, Romantic Roma Girl (2014). Similar to the preceding figure, the scene depicting the viewing of Woody Allen’s movie serves as a form of initiation rite, foreshadowing and affirming Laura Halilovic’s destined path as a film director (Source: Published with permission of Wildside and Rai Cinema)

screams instead when she sees Woody Allen and finds the courage to ask him for an autograph: “He took my pen and gave me an autograph. Then, after smiling at me, he left . . . with my pen!” (director’s voice-over). The comic encounter gives her the confidence needed to confront her beloved father and confess to him that she wants to become a filmmaker. The diary ends with a camera zoom-in on the eyes of the director and her will to start a real movie as she writes the script for a love story. In the 2014 full-length movie adaptation, the obstacles to becoming a director are instead much more emphasized, so the linear paths that should bring the protagonist to affirm herself in the film industry are frequently disregarded. However, despite difficulties, Gioia tends to idealize the world of cinema as an empowering space with respect to the sense of closure that she finds both in her community of origin and in the urban periphery of Turin. The day she manages to appear as an extra for an advertisement, she notices that the director is a woman: The cinema is really cool. They put a dress on you, they do makeup and you become someone else. And the best thing is that a woman is ruling! I would like to be like her. Yelling at a megaphone so that everyone is listening! The protagonist is thus deeply fascinated by the position of command embodied by the director figure rather than that of the celebrity of an actress. This is because she feels unheard and misunderstood in the world of Roma adults who consider their equal only those who, unlike her, have decided to marry young, avoiding contesting traditional rules. The real turning point comes when she watches a DVD of Woody Allen’s Manhattan. In fact, the act of watching the movie again on the TV screen at home provides her with the first ideal plot for her own film (see Figure 4.2). In this

Becoming a Filmmaker, an Adult, and an Italian?  41 respect, Halilovic’s representation, production, and professional life are affected by the fact that she started her career as a young amateur filmmaker, making the search for such a complex recognition a defining feature of her work. What is more interesting to consider is how the specificity of the cinematic medium and the wider imaginary of success that permeates its aura constantly intersect with the generational question of becoming an adult and, more generally, Italian, even in the pragmatic terms of obtaining citizenship. This status is, in this professional context, the necessary condition to benefit from national funds. Becoming a filmmaker is, in fact, a difficult task in Italy, more so for young migrants or second-generation Italians. Although one might argue that young accented filmmakers share the general disaffection of the new generation toward cinema and, in particular, the national one, the right for recognition passes, in this case, through the appropriation of a visual tool that normally would be interdicted to them. As De Franceschi pointed out,26 before the 2016 bill, audiovisual projects financed by the Italian government were intended only for Italian or EU (European Union) citizens, lacking specific positive discrimination initiatives geared toward ethnic minorities and the promotion of cultural diversity. Many movies and documentaries have, in fact, been funded by external prizes instituted for migration themes.27 Since 2016, the possibility of public subsidies has also been extended to those subjected to taxation in Italy as a result of tax residence. Before that, Laura Halilovic’s Me, Romantic Roma Girl was actually one of the first movies to receive funding of 200,000 euros and achieve the recognition of “films of cultural interest” from the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Tourism. Becoming an Adult Here it works like this: at a certain point they say that you are getting old and they look for a husband for you. —Laura Halilovic, Me, Romantic Roma Girl

Generational conflicts, with their contestations or recognitions of transitions, are the other defining feature of Halilovic’s movies, but they cannot be fully comprehended without an intersection with ethnic and gender issues.28 Youth, as a threshold from childhood to adulthood, is represented in both positive and negative terms. The spectator grasps a certain hurry in the protagonist to become an adult to demonstrate that she can provide for her own personal and family fulfillment without necessarily repeating the path assigned by the normative system. Not by chance, as Aitken remarks, young people “are expected to mature into a compliance with hegemonic norms and so they are considered ‘becoming’ adults with political will rather than ‘being’ children without political voice.”29 Both movies reflect this suspended and conflictual condition, where the young girl (be it Laura or Gioia) must convince adults of her maturity in a twofold way: by replicating the behaviors and cultural norms of the previous generation or by challenging them. While the possibility of becoming a director is seen by the family as a childish desire, which in no

42  Laura Lo Presti

Figure 4.3 A  scene from Me, My Gypsy Family and Woody Allen (2009), where Laura Halilovic is filming with her father’s video camera a wedding in her neighborhood, after confessing to him her wish to become a filmmaker (Source: Published with permission of Zenit Arti Audiovisive)

way can complete the transition into the adult world, the narratological framework built on the (constantly deferred) rite of passage of marriage vividly embodies the “becoming adult” plotline. In fact, being a young adult Italian girl of Roma ethnicity puts Laura in the uncomfortable position of having to confront her parents and relatives for her refusal to marry: “At your age, I had already two or three sons,” her mother tells her (Halilovic, 2009). The short-circuit staged by the director is in fact not a trivial one: the right to youth as a space-time of its own is affected here by the fact that, in the Roma tradition, youth is already a state of adulthood, since girls are expected to marry by 16 years old. Furthermore, as the voice-over of Gioia in the 2014 movie makes clear, “girls don’t work in our community. They get married early and have children. But I want a life of my own”—followed by a choral mockery of her female friends and cousins who comment on her: “She is old now, who should take her as a wife?” The 2014 movie begins with a reflection on the transition from child to adult that manifests oneirically during a train journey, when Gioia falls asleep and dreams of being Little Red Cap standing in a pink forest (Figure 4.4). The Grimm version of the fairy tale reproduces the classic scheme of the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. The young girl crosses the threshold of the house to venture into an unknown space, full of risks and perils (the forest) by the order of the mother. This is to learn the hard way (loss of innocence, risk of life) to become a normalized adult, respectful of clan rules. However, the journey of Little Red Cap is slow and

Becoming a Filmmaker, an Adult, and an Italian?  43

Figure 4.4 One of the initial scenes of Me, Romantic Roma Girl (2014), where Gioia, the protagonist of the movie, falls asleep during a train journey and dreams of being Little Red Cap happily lost in a pink forest (Source: Published with permission of Wildside and Rai Cinema)

relaxed. In fact, the red silhouette disappears in the middle of the forest and not at its end, almost as if Gioia wants to enjoy the beauty of the landscape of youth as much as possible. With a zoom-out of the camera, the woody landscape reveals itself as the background of a painting of her home, where a slew of suitors, with their respective families, take turns on Gioia’s sofa to ask for her hand, forcing her first to hide at home and then to run away. In this sense, while childhood is generally framed by Halilovic within the “becoming a filmmaker” line, that is, as a sort of predestinating time in which to decipher signs and images that will prefigure her professional career as a director, the present time of adolescence is lived with much more turbulence and anxiety that follows the “becoming an adult” refrain. Adopting an adult gaze, the girl also refers to her childhood as a space-time replete with nostalgia for the missing presence of kids, freedom, and the spaciousness of play normally associated with the nomad camp from which Halilovic moved away when she was still an infant. This tension—and ambiguity—between open and closed spaces is expressed from the point of view of adults rather than children. Comments on spaces are usually made by her parents and grandmother. The closed space is often considered the Western domesticated space of Gagé (a term used by Roma people to identify non-Roma people), while the open spaces are not necessarily scaremongering and risky places when experienced through the gaze of her Roma identity. The nomad camp is, in particular, presented as a liminal space, enclosing porous elements that can be read at times as open and at other times as closed. Overall, the generational conflict is expressed in light tones in both movies, reaching a final negotiation between the acceptance of the wedding with a member of the Roma community and the possibility of following a Gagé style of life. In truth, in the 2009 documentary, the idea of getting married is not even taken into

44  Laura Lo Presti consideration by the younger Laura to the extent that the wedding of a cousin, not hers, marks the rite of passage toward the creation of a space of self-affirmation and empowerment. This is, in fact, the moment her father decides to give Laura his camera to allow her to take the first shots as an amateur filmmaker, accepting the idea that she may not even get married (see Figure 4.3). Becoming an Italian —Are you Italian? —No. —And from where? —From Falchera. —Right (laughing), because Falchera is not in Italy . . . —Laura Halilovic, Me, Romantic Roma Girl

While generational conflicts and age-centered practices of belonging are the defining features of youth’s representation in movies, we have begun to see that the ethnic “problem,” but also the “richness” of perspectives, it brings to the fore cannot be overlooked in second-generation migrants’ audiovisual productions. This is, however, done in a way that constantly conflates the “becoming an adult” and the “becoming an Italian” plotlines. Despite living and desiring within the imagined landscape of global youth, Laura (and her alter-ego, Gioia) has to struggle day by day with the social, economic, and cultural obstacles posed by the lack of Italian citizenship and social recognition in both communities: for her being a “gipsy” to Italians and for her being a Gagé to Romani people. More interestingly, the multiple identities that she discovers to be fixed in by Roma and Italian adults make her aware of the fact that no one seems to care “about who I really am.”30 In this respect, the heterogeneous identity performed by Halilovic’s autobiographic characters, Laura and Gioia, may be seen broadly as part of “postcolonial ethnic and identity cinema,” which is focused on “the exigencies of life here and now in the country in which the filmmakers reside.”31 The peculiar story of Halilovic feeling herself, depending on the context in which she has to express her identity, both Italian and Roma or Roma alone, complicates such definitions and requires further reflection. As mentioned in the Introduction, the 2009 documentary opens with a telling declaration, unfolded through a sequential pan of her identity card, which is visually the same for national citizens and permit-holding residents (although, invisibly, this last category must be renewed yearly), revealing the absurdity of her suspended condition. The way in which the ID is filmed transforms the paper card into another threshold object, a mobile space in which the material passage from one page to another of the document signals all of Laura’s frustration, whose legal exclusion from the imagined community of “proper” citizens reinforces, as a reaction, a strong defense of her Roma origins (see Figure  4.5). In the 2009 documentary, the young director strongly defends her community and negatively judges Roma’s passivity and refusal to rebel against the commonplace discrimination enacted by Italians.32 For instance, Laura remembers her first day at school, when her schoolmates looked upon her as an alien for being a “gypsy,” despite her

Becoming a Filmmaker, an Adult, and an Italian?  45

Figure 4.5 Film stills from one of the initial scenes of Me, My Gypsy Family and Woody Allen (2009). Composition made by the author. Halilovic’s camera zooms in and out on the front and inner pages of her “empty of meaning” Italian ID since she is not legally recognized as an Italian citizen but just as a permitted resident in the country (Source: Published with permission of Zenit Arti Audiovisive)

mastery of the Italian language. The “politics of the hyphen”33 and the performed tension between Italianness and Romani identity are strategic here in unmasking the fallacy of the stereotypical homogenization of the national body. In the second movie, Italianness is instead set as an objective to reach through everyday practices, rather than by passing through the legal framework. Being Italian is cast more as a modern way of life, an aspiration toward a lifestyle that can be set, often in a caricatural way, against the conservative approach of her family. The dialogue featured in the exergue, which is taken from the 2014 movie, describes Gioia doing a casting for a commercial and reveals, for example, how the scale of the nation can be flattened and superimposed on the local one, the neighborhood, if this is understood more as a status of privilege than as a right. Although the “becoming Italian” rhetoric is used by the protagonist as a ploy to loosen family control rather than a real identity issue, this choice often has the opposite effect, replacing the more positive diversity-oriented accent of the former production with the risk of resituating the hyphenated identity as a lack, a not fully complete identity. Gioia, for instance, reacts this way when her father complains about the fact that she dresses and speaks like Gagé (non-Roma people): “Luckily, I have a friend who is not Roma but free as I would like to be.” The critique addressed against the descent community tends to mirror a track of Italian migrant cinema, which has in general been quite keen in representing young immigrants as Italian to become, producing many plots in which they are judged by the spectator in terms of a path of maturation and growth that assures their deserved belonging or unbelonging to the body of the nation.34 Partly embracing this narrative, the end of the movie shows a family that is willing to learn from their adolescent daughter, respecting her dream of becoming a filmmaker and in the process of accepting her and their Westernization (for example, her parents decide to begin a course of couples therapy). This aspect is at odds with the reality experienced by Laura Halilovic, who complained in several interviews about the lack of communication

46  Laura Lo Presti

Figure 4.6 One of the last scenes of Me, Romantic Roma Girl (2014). Gioia and her father sit on a bench, enjoying the landscape view of the urban suburb of Falchera in Turin, which evolves from a taken-for-granted peripheral and ugly space to a place full of stories and expressive potentialities for the unfolding of the protagonist’s identity (Source: Published with permission of Wildside and Rai Cinema)

between Romani people and Italians, admitting that the Roma community is not happy with her choice to make movies: “In our community, nobody does my job. Cinema is considered pornography. If the director is a woman, even worse.”35 Therefore, the rite and right of passage from foreign to Italian are disregarded, both in reality and in the film. In Me, Romantic Roma Girl, Gioia returns from Rome, where she was able to see Woody Allen from afar, but she also overheard that the director to whom she told her idea for a film set in Manhattan is selling it as his own to a film producer. Disillusioned, Gioia passes from the initial topophobic consideration of her neighborhood as a suffocating and inexpressive place (“Come on, Morena! The truth is that we were born in a shitty place and no one will pull us out of here!”—she says to her Italian best friend), to the revelation that everything she needs for filming her movie is already spatially grounded in Falchera, the local expression of her identity, and, through the camera, she can finally understand who she really is: the place where she lives. As Figure 4.6 shows, Gioia and her father now sit on a bench, enjoying the panoramic view of the urban suburb of Falchera in Turin. What was once dismissed as a peripheral and unattractive space has evolved into a locale teeming with stories and expressive potentialities, serving as a meaningful backdrop for the protagonist’s journey of self-discovery.36 Conclusion This chapter attempted to investigate the intersections of different transitions, or, in other words, the interplay of different spheres of life in the audiovisual productions of Laura Halilovic, an Italian Roma girl. The close reading of specific dialogues and scenes taken from her movies has served two main purposes. First, it helps to specify the complex framework in which ethnic, hyphenated children and youth are placed

Becoming a Filmmaker, an Adult, and an Italian?  47 within both national adultism and their community of origin’s imageries. Young immigrant filmmakers operate in and in collaboration with a national (even local and regional) film industry with its Western conceptualizations of childhood and adulthood, with which they may also (want to or lead to) conform. Also, young, secondgeneration filmmakers are part of an ethnic community of origin, which may be seen and represented in their movies as sensitive to traditional themes concerning collective identity issues such as family, religion, gendered norms, and work. A young filmmaker with a hyphenated background cannot easily isolate from or disentangle these diverse adultist regimes. However, he or she may alternately turn to them for contestation and recognition. Murray and Cortés-Morales, for instance, recognize the insurgent agency of children and young people in the way they, through everyday routines and escamotages, “disturb the linear path of childhood that determines what children can and cannot do.”37 This means, however, that exaltations of their autonomy or agency (even in the context of cinema as actors or directors of movies) should be discussed carefully along with far more structural situating representational forces through which public discourse molds and acts over them, requiring an analysis of “at what scale they operate and in which ways their identities are fixed.”38 Appadurai further stresses the point: “Aspirations are never simply individual .  .  . [t]hey are always formed in interaction and in the thick of social life.”39 Second, in this scenario, framed by both agency and structural forces, youth operates symbolically as a liminal place, since it is not just socially constructed but also politically constrained and culturally performed as an intermediary phase—an ontological transition—that stands between childhood and adulthood. Notes 1 Monologues and dialogues from the movies have been translated from Italian into English by the author. 2 This chapter resonates with the gender and race issues that confront the young women in Joassart-Marcelli’s Chapter 7. 3 It is worth comparing this chapter with Gaini’s Chapter  3 and Murnaghan and McCreary’s Chapter 9, who also spend some time thinking about national cinema as a genre (the Faroe Islands in Chapter 3 and Canadian cinema in Chapter 9). 4 Cristina, Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (Eds.). Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 9. 5 Italian citizenship law is among the strictest in the European Union. Indicating the ius sanguinis (the determination of a person’s nationality based on the nationality of their parents) at the core of citizenship rights, Law No. 91/1992 limits the possibility of being an Italian citizen strictly iure soli (following the right of soil) to children of unknown and stateless persons. What then happens to those children who were born in Italy to foreign parents or who settled in the country after birth? Citizenship, in those cases, is not conceived as a personal right but as a concession and can be requested only after becoming an adult. In the first case, the child must wait for the age of majority (eighteen years old) to ask for citizenship, proving to have legally resided in Italy without interruption until that time. In the second case, a young boy or girl would have to submit a request for naturalization subject to 10 years of continuous residence, for which he or she must prove an income, making it impossible for a foreign minor to become an Italian citizen in their youth. Likewise, no structured laws exist that regulate immigration or that reflect clear integration models. In fact, the migration phenomenon does not seem to have been perceived as a major issue in the country until the 1990s, when Italy—historically known as a sending country of

48  Laura Lo Presti

6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

emigrants—became aware of the larger transformations that had, since the 1970s, turned it into a destination site. According to the latest available data from ISTAT (2019), minors with a migratory family background today exceed one million three hundred and sixteen thousand, accounting for 13% of the underage population. Not only has the rising ethnic diversity of the country not been legitimized by institutional frames, but also very seldom emerges in the mainstream imagery of the national cinema and media culture more broadly. In this context, the storylines of people with migrant, ethnic, or hyphenated backgrounds are usually expressed in dialectical terms by the dominant national narrative, either through the rhetoric of an unresolvable clash of civilizations (e.g., “they” do not want to be like “us”) or through a mandatory naturalization (if “they” want to become “us,” they should put all their effort into losing their tradition and respecting the “new” one). Both can have detrimental effects on how post-migrant children and youth act and think about themselves. The notions of accented cinema and migrant cinema have been introduced by Hamid Nacify. See Hamid, Naficy. An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. See Leonardo, De Franceschi. La cittadinanza come luogo di lotta. Le seconde generazioni in Italia fra cinema e serialità. Ariccia: Aracne, 2018. Suffice it to consider the humanitarian perspective foregrounded in the documentary Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea, 2016), directed by Gianfranco Rosi, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2017, in the emotional wake of the landings of migrants affecting the island of Lampedusa. See De Franceschi, La cittadinanza come luogo di lotta and Mariagiulia, Grassilli. “Migrant cinema: Transnational and guerrilla practices of film production and representation,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 8 (2008): 1237–1255. Nacify, An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, 4. Compare this to Murnaghan and McCreary’s (Chapter 9) treatment of ‘salvage filmmaking’ in the work of Smith and, 25 years later, Obomsawin. The idea of savage filmmaking is discussed by Nacify, An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, while Grassilli, “Migrant Cinema,” 1245, speaks about the notion of guerrilla style. See Dan, Woodman and Andy Bennet (Eds.). Youth Cultures, Transitions, and Generations. Bridging the Gap in Youth Research. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). This is also seen in Aitken’s treatment of youth and adult relations in Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells (Chapter 10). It is worthwhile comparing what happens to the young filmmaker in this chapter to what happens in Beazley and Warisno’s Chapter 5 and Katz’s Chapter 17. Cortés-Morales broaches the issue of youth rights of passage in a very different series of movies in Chapter 11. Nacify, An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, 5. Barbara, Mennel. Cities and Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008, 10. Gaini notices these strategies us in the films he focuses upon (Chapter 3). Compare these similar contexts in Beazley and Warisno (Chapter  5) and JoassartMarcelli (Chapter 7). Isin, Engin F. “Theorising acts of citizenship,” in Acts of Citizenship, edited by Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen. London: Zed Books, 2008, 17. There is a strong parallel to the representation of first nations people in Murnaghan and McCreary (Chapter 9). Nacify, An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, 4–5. Note how this is done with the World Cup soccer games in the films discussed by Gardner and Craine (Chapter 8). De Franceschi, La cittadinanza come luogo di lotta, 253. The Mutti Prize, established in 2008 to contribute to the creation of works by authors of migrant origin, as were followed by Archivio Memorie Migranti, Premio Migrarti, and others.

Becoming a Filmmaker, an Adult, and an Italian?  49 28 This is very much the case for the young women in Joassart-Marcelli’s Chapter 7. 29 Aitken, Stuart C. Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2001, 23. 30 Halilovic, Laura, director. Me Romantic Roma Girl, 2014. Wildside and Rai Cinema, Italy. 31 Nacify, An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, 15. 32 Romani peoples (Roma, Sinti, and Travellers) comprise, in fact, an ethnic and linguistic minority that is not legally recognized in Italy and for which official statistics are lacking, except for the 70,000 individuals with Italian citizenship. Although most of them are sedentary, with forms of nomadism extremely limited, the imagery concerning Roma people is replete with prejudices, which are openly spelled out in Halilovic’s movies. 33 Nacify, An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. 34 De Franceschi, La cittadinanza come luogo di lotta. 35 The interview can be read here: www.comingsoon.it/cinema/news/io-rom-romanticala-commedia-etnica-ispirata-a-una-storia-vera-con-marco/n105005/ 36 In the French film discussed by Joassart-Marcelli, young women reside in a dismissed and somewhat erased peripheral and ugly space (Chapter 7). 37 Lesley, Murray and Susana Cortés-Morales. Children’s Mobilities: Interdependent, Imagined, Relational. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 2. 38 Aitken, Geographies of Young People, 19. 39 Arjun, Appadurai. “The capacity to aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition,” in Culture and Public Action, edited by V. Rao and M. Walton. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 67.

Bibliography Aitken, Stuart C. Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity. London: Routledge, 2001. De Franceschi, Leonardo. La cittadinanza come luogo di lotta. Le seconde generazioni in Italia fra cinema e serialità. Ariccia: Aracne, 2018. Grassilli, Mariagiulia. “Migrant cinema: Transnational and guerrilla practices of film production and representation,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 8 (2008): 1237–1255. Halilovic, Laura, director. Io, la mia famiglia rom e Woody Allen, 2009. Zenit Arti Audiovisive, Italy, colour, 47’. Halilovic, Laura, director. Io Rom Romantica, 2014. Wildside and Rai Cinema, Italy, colour, 80’. Isin, Engin F. “Theorising acts of citizenship,” in Acts of Citizenship, edited by Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen, 15–43. London: Zed Books, 2008. ISTAT (Istituto nazionale di statistica). Identità e percorsi di integrazione delle seconde generazioni in Italia, Rome, 2019. www.integrazionemigranti.gov.it/AnteprimaPDF. aspx?id=1337 Lombardi-Diop, Cristina and Caterina Romeo. Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Mennel, Barbara. Cities and Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008. Murray, Lesley and Susana Cortés-Morales. Children’s mobilities: Interdependent, imagined, relational. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Woodman, Dan and Andy Bennet. Youth Cultures, Transitions, and Generations. Bridging the Gap in Youth Research. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

5

Leaves on a Pillow The Representation of Street Children in the Indonesian Film Daun di Atas Bantal Harriot Beazley and Wiryo Warisno (Heru)

In 1998, three Indonesian street children experienced brief international fame as the lead characters in an award-winning film Daun di Atas Bantal (Leaf on a Pillow). The film was directed by Indonesian film director Garin Nugroho and produced by acclaimed Indonesian actress Christine Hakim. Daun di Atas Bantal is a documentary-style feature film (83 minutes long) about a group of street-connected boys living with an adopted street-trader ‘mother’ (Christine Hakim) in the city of Yogyakarta, in Central Java, Indonesia. The film tells the true story of how three children died in separate incidents while living on the streets of Yogyakarta, shortly before the film was made. Reminiscent of Mira Nair’s Indian film Salaam Bombay (1988), the children who acted in the film were genuine homeless street children, recruited by Nugroho to ‘act’ as the children who had recently died.1 This chapter explores how the film Daun di Atas Bantal was made and the impact the film had on the lives of two of the child ‘actors’ in the film, who are now adults in their late thirties and early forties. The boys are known to me (the lead author) as they were my research participants when I conducted my PhD fieldwork in Yogyakarta over 25 years ago (1995–1997), prior to the film being made (Beazley 1999). My PhD research adopted a participatory child-centred approach and was focused on the geographies and identities of street-connected boys and girls in the city of Yogyakarta, during the twilight years of the dictator President Suharto (1966–1998).2 The chapter provides the background story to the making of the film Daun di Atas Bantal, before examining how the young men/former children who acted in the film perceive the film today. The discussion includes an overview of how the children were recruited to perform their lives by the director Nugroho, how they felt they were treated during and after the making of the film and the impact the film had on their lives. Wiryo Warisno (alias Heru) is co-author of this chapter and was the lead child actor in the film. He is now living in Victoria, Australia, and has assisted with the co-production of knowledge for this chapter, by exploring the dissonant child and adult self-narrative about his past as a former street child (Hanson 2017). Heru has participated in numerous interviews with the lead author, as well as conducting interviews with one other former street boy who also acted in the film. Interviews were focused on the informants’ views of the film, their experiences during and after filming and how it impacted their lives. DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-5

Leaves on a Pillow  51 PhD Study When film director Garin Nugroho arrived in Yogyakarta in 1997 to make his film, the first author was a PhD student researching the lives of street children in the city. At that time I had been living in Yogya since 1995, spending my time, day and night, with a group of children who were connected to an NGO supporting homeless street children, known to the children as Girli. Girli is an acronym of Pinggir Kali meaning ‘river’s edge’ in Indonesian, because the NGO was founded in a slum community on the banks of the river that runs through the city. The children attached to the NGO called themselves Anak Girli (Girli children), and it was this community of children who were the focus of my PhD research. I completed my fieldwork in late 1997, and the PhD thesis in April 1999. The thesis is an examination of how street-connected children in Yogyakarta were living on the edge of society, facing multiple forms of social and spatial exclusion in their everyday lives. Homeless children in my research often had no connection with their families, having experienced alienation from their homes and families, and discrimination from state and society when working on the streets. In the thesis I explored how, despite their social and spatial oppression, boys and girls living on the streets were not passive victims. Instead, they found multiple and resourceful ways to earn money and exercise their own agency from the margins of the global economy, and from the periphery of gendered power relations. This was achieved by ‘winning spaces’ in the city where they could survive and exist, and by constructing their own communities or urban subcultures within Indonesian society. The street boys called themselves Tikyan, which was an acronym of the Indonesian sedikit tapi lumayan (‘a little but enough’). The Tikyan subculture was a collective solution for the dilemmas which the children faced in their everyday lives, and gave them a sense of identity. The analysis explains the process of socialisation to the street—child world, and how the children developed their own code of ethics, norms, values, hierarchies, language and bodily styles, which emerged as a way to resist and subvert their imposed exclusion in the world. I explored the reciprocity and solidarity networks between the street-connected children as a defence against their marginalisation and the harshness of poverty, and as methods of individual survival. In addition, the spatial expressions of their subculture, including territorial issues, were explored; how the children identified with particular areas in the city for different activities; and how their identities shifted in relation to their social and spatial settings.3 During my fieldwork I made close connections with a number of key informants, including Heru who was originally from Jambi in Sumatra, and whose father was from Central Java. I first met Heru when he was a shoeshiner on the main street of Malioboro in 1995, when he was about 12 years old. Two other key informants were Kancil and Sugeng who were a bit younger than Heru and who begged for money at the traffic lights near the kraton (Sultan’s palace). Another key informant for the research was Topo. In early 1997 Topo disappeared from the street, when he was about 13 years old. No one knew where he had gone, but after a while the rumours started to circulate that he had fallen from the roof of a moving freight

52  Harriot Beazley and Wiryo Warisno (Heru) train on his way to the capital city Jakarta, a trip which he made frequently. The train went through a tunnel which he failed to see approaching. I left Yogya in late 1997 and returned to the Australian National University (ANU) to write up my dissertation. A  few months after my return to Australia, Indonesia was in total political and economic crisis as a result of the Asian financial crisis in 1998, which was followed by demonstrations and civil unrest, and the subsequent fall of President Suharto that same year. A major student demonstration triggered the fall of Suharto’s regime, paving the way for a period of Reformasi (Reform) and democracy. In August 1998 I heard about the release of the film Daun di Atas Bantal and how some Anak Girli I knew had been recruited to act in the film, including Heru, Sugeng and Kancil. I managed to see the film at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) International Film Festival in London in November 1999. It was utterly surreal to see the boys I knew so well on the huge silver screen in Pall Mall, especially Heru who was the lead actor in the film. The synopsis of the film in London’s Time Out was as follows: Three street children (Heru, Kancil, Sugeng) struggle to survive in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Their daily lives are bleak; they panhandle to earn a little money and take drugs to escape the squalor. The only positive influence in their lives comes from Asih (Christine Hakim), a merchant who allows them to sleep in her workshop. But with problems of her own—including a freeloading violent ex-husband—there’s little chance that her kindness will be able to alter the children’s tragic futures. (Rotten Tomatoes 1999) At the time I was struck by the extraordinary timing of political events that enabled the film to be shown internationally, which would have never happened if Suharto had still been in power. The film held a strong social message which conveyed the plight of street children during Suharto’s Indonesia, and which aimed at disrupting the dominant discourse of family ties and homogenous Indonesian childhoods. It had a huge impact in Indonesia, and Heru in particular became famous as a result of the film and the character he played in it. Over the subsequent years I stayed connected with Heru and many of the Anak Girli through regular communication via SMS and phone, and then via Facebook, Facetime, Messenger and most recently WhatsApp. In 2001 I returned to Yogyakarta to conduct research focused on the impact of the 1998 political and financial crisis on street children in Indonesia, including Anak Girli. One time I was chatting to some students in Jakarta, telling them about my research. ‘Oh! Like Heru in Daun di Atas Bantal’ they said. I replied yes, but not ‘like’ him, actually him, and his friends. I am not sure who was more surprised; me because they knew of Heru and the film so well, or them because I actually knew the famous Heru. The next time I  visited Yogyakarta in 2004 Heru had become a singer in a famous street band KPJ (Kelompok Penyani Jalanan). Kancil had recently

Leaves on a Pillow  53 married and had left the street to become a fisherman on the Javanese coast. Sugeng was still working on the street. I have returned to Yogyakarta a number of times since then, most recently in 2018, when Heru was living in a small house with his Australian wife and two children. He was still a musician and singer in KPJ and had also started to paint and sell his paintings. Heru is a self-taught artist. His first paintings were created using broken red bricks as ‘paint’, and the city roads as his canvas. Heru would draw on the roads at night and watch his artwork change, as the traffic moved across them in the rain. As he has grown older Heru has sought mentors in local artists, so he could learn to express himself through his art. Daun di Atas Bantal

Indonesian film director Garin Nugroho has been described as a ‘legendary director’ and one of Southeast Asia’s most important filmmakers. His most recent film Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku (Memories of My Body), a coming-of-age film about gender identity, was nominated for an Academy Award (Best International Feature Film) in 2019. However, the film was banned in some Indonesian provinces due to controversial LGBT elements which were considered inappropriate in an Islamic society. Nugroho’s films are well known for making political statements, for seeking to uncover social issues, and for challenging dominant ideological constructions in society. Prior to making the film Daun di Atas Bantal in 1998, Nugroho created an hour-long documentary in 1995 called Dongeng Kancil untuk Kemerdekaan (Kancil’s Tale of Freedom) about the lives of street children in Yogyakarta, including Kancil and Topo. Nugroho followed the children around the city and filmed them as they shone shoes, had fights, smoked, spoke to prostitutes and got high. In 1996, a year after the film was made, I asked Topo about his role in Kancil, and he told me that he had not wanted to do some of the things in the documentary, but that Nugroho had encouraged him to do them. He told me that one scene in particular was taken against his will, when he was made to go and talk to a prostitute late one night. Topo said that he had been really tired that night and was not keen, but Nugroho had insisted. As with many of Nugroho’s other films Kancil was banned by the Suharto regime as it challenged the Suharto’s myth of a developing nation and a stable and flourishing society. One person who had seen the documentary film Kancil before it was banned, and who had been deeply shocked by the reality of street children’s lives, was the Indonesian actress and movie star Christine Hakim. Hakim decided that she wanted to make a commercial film about the street boys, with herself as producer and Nugroho as director.4 In one media interview Hakim explains how she decided to try her hand at producing films during the financial crisis when there were no films being made or roles being offered to her (REF). In subsequent interviews Hakim described how after watching Kancil she could not believe that children were living on the streets in Indonesia, and how she wanted to produce a feature

54  Harriot Beazley and Wiryo Warisno (Heru) film about their lives to raise awareness about the millions of people living in poverty in Indonesia: Through this film I  expressed my concern with social issues, specifically street children. At the time, children were begging on the street and at traffic lights. I had no idea that the problem was serious, so my mission was to make people more aware. (Powell, 2023) In July 1997 Garin Nugroho arrived in Yogyakarta to make Daun di Atas Bantal, and one night I met with him and his film crew in the main street Malioboro. I was hanging out with the children after they had been working, shining shoes for the people and eating at the local lesehan (restaurants). We drank tea and talked about my research and the film he was going to make about the children. He told me that for the story line he was interested in focusing on the lives of three street boys who had died in the past few years. He had heard about Topo’s death, and the deaths of the two other street boys who were connected with the NGO Girli. Nugroho then liaised with the NGO director Didid Adiadanto, who had known all the boys, to finalise the story line. One boy Dodo had been stabbed in the market due to a case of mistaken identity. The NGO was not able to bury his body in the local kampung cemetery as he did not have a formal identity card and was therefore not considered a Muslim or a warga asli (legal resident). Another boy, Untung (Lucky), was killed by insurance scammers who needed a body for a life insurance scam. The third death Nugroho wanted to include in the film was that of Topo, who had fallen from the roof of a train a few months before. In interviews about the film after its release, Nugroho describes how he selected three boys from the existing Girli community to perform the identities of the children who had died. These boys were Kancil and Sugeng (who had appeared in his previous documentary two years before), and Heru. The story line for the film Daun di Atas Bantal was focused on three street boys who live with a street-trader woman, Asih (‘Love’), who takes care of them. The actress for this role was Christine Hakim. The film strongly depicts the precarity of street children’s lives and how they were marginalised, stigmatised and treated during the late 1990s. The boys were directed by Nugroho and Hakim, and instructed to show what it was like to survive on the street. The children in the film live difficult lives, struggling to find enough money to eat every day, and deeply involved in a subculture in which children smoke, drink alcohol, fight between themselves and take drugs. The film also shows the children are surrounded by adult violence, and how they are treated by mainstream society. It interrogates the Indonesian state’s marginalisation of street children because they do not align with a modern nation-state‘s ideal of the nation-state. The fact that the children live away from their families also challenges the importance of family connections, something that is considered essential in Javanese and Indonesian society (Beazley 1999). By doing so the film conveys the idea that street children are directly victimised by the state and society, firmly indicting the Indonesian government for its failure to address the plight of these children.

Leaves on a Pillow  55 Coincidently, the release of the film in 1998 coincided with the overthrow of the Indonesian President Suharto. As a result, it was not subjected to censorship and was the first of Nugroho’s four feature films to secure a general release in Indonesia. It became a huge box-office success. For the first time in 30  years Indonesian society was exposed to the raw poverty and extreme social issues that existed in the country, but which had been covered up by the Suharto regime. As Nugroho explained during an interview soon after the film’s release: It is only by accident that this film can be shown. We made the film during the Suharto regime (1998) but it was released after Suharto’s fall. That changed the situation . . . It became quite famous and a box-office hit. (Uhde 1999) The film screened internationally, including at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1999, the ICA in London and the Tokyo Film Festival. It received numerous awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress (Christine Hakim) at the Asia Pacific International Film Festival (1998); Screen Award Best Asian Feature Film at the Singapore International Film Festival (1999); and Special Jury Prize— Garin Nugroho at the Tokyo International Film Festival (1998). Daun di Atas Bantal catapulted Christine Hakim and Garin Nugroho to fame and acclaim, both in Indonesia and on the international stage. But what about the boys themselves? Following its huge success both Nugroho and Hakim were interviewed about the film, and many interviewers asked about the street boys who acted in the film: Let’s talk a bit about the children in Leaf on a Pillow. Mira Nair once made a film called Salaam Bombay. It is very similar to your film in many ways, especially in that actual street children act in the film. What happened to the children in your film? What are they up to now? Christine Hakim: I  was very very aware of this problem or the possibility of this problem even before we started making the film. Because fame is such a strange thing, it can change everything. We made sure that under no circumstances would we just use the children, pay them and then forget about them. I was determined to follow up as much as possible after the film was over, to ascertain that their lives were taken care of. I wanted that those children should go to school, but some were too old to start and school studies didn’t necessarily suit them considering the way they had grown up. For instance, Heru was interested in music, and we put him in a small music school and kept a check on him. I’ve been to see him there a few times and he is doing well. (Tanvir 2009) Interviewer:

56  Harriot Beazley and Wiryo Warisno (Heru) Twenty-five years later in a recent interview in the Jakarta Post (Powell 2023) Hakim continues this theme: Christine Hakim: I’m so happy I  was able to spread awareness as the social affairs minister saw the film and wanted to make a shelter for street children. They asked for a sequel and I said no. That is a lot of money and I would rather give it to the children. The main problem was educating the parents on how to raise their children and giving them a purposeful life. The following section is from the perspective or Heru, second author (translated by first author) and lead male actor in the film Daun di Atas Bantal. Wiryo Warisno, alias Heru

My name is Wiryo Warisno, but people know me better as Heru, my street name. I started to live in the street world when I left my mother and siblings in Jambi (West Sumatra) for a city that has a kraton (palace) on the island of Java. My main goal was to find my father who my mother said lived there. I was in Grade 2 and so I was only 9 years old. I didn’t know the name of the town, only that it was on Java. Equipped with only a bit of random information I boarded a truck that people said was going to Jakarta. Once we arrived in Jakarta the truck driver took me to the train station and bought me a ticket to Solo, a city with a kraton. After 10–12 hours sitting on the train I got bored and tired, and I got off in a city which I later learned was called Yogyakarta. In Yogyakarta I started to help a pedicab driver with his passengers and to look after his stand when he was driving them around the city. Amazingly one day I was talking to one of the other pedicab drivers about my reasons for being in Yogya. When I told him my father’s name the pedicab driver said he knew my father and he could take me to see him in his village close by. It turned out that Yogyakarta also has a kraton. Unfortunately, when I met my father he was very sick, and after 6 months he died. But I was happy that I could live with him and take care of him for that short time. After he died I decided to leave my father’s village and go back to Yogyakarta, even though his family asked me to stay. I didn’t want to go back to Jambi to my mother either. I wanted to live in my father’s city so I could still visit his grave. I started to become a street citizen, a Tikyan. On the street I started to survive by foraging for food, and then I became a shoe shiner. When I started to feel too embarrassed to shine shoes, I started to busk on the street to earn money. One day a sister on the street asked me to act in a movie. I didn’t really want to do it as I had never acted. I had played a lot of music and watched theatre, but I didn’t know anything about acting. I didn’t really want to play in the movie because they wanted me to play the role of a Tikyan, which is my daily self. But they said I should make the film ‘so you have something to remember’. They told me I had to do it. The title of the film was Leaf on a Pillow, directed by Garin Nugroho. I play with a famous Indonesian film star, and her name is Christine Hakim.

Leaves on a Pillow  57 Mas Kancil and Sugeng were also invited to be in the film. Mas Kancil already knew Garin from the earlier film Kancil. We were told that the film would be about the three boys we knew who had been killed. The film crew rented a house for us to live in, and so they could watch us. They were looking at our characters, but they didn’t tell us anything about what we were doing. They just wanted us to stay in the house for about three months, but I often left as I kept going back to the street to work and to be with my friends. I wanted to sleep on Malioboro, and they would keep coming to look for me. During the filming I often slept under a bridge in the city with my friends who were busking at the traffic lights. I was told not to get drunk and to be back on set the next morning at 8am. We were living on our own at that time, and no one was supporting us. They promised they would pay me for being in the film. There was no contract. I was given Rupiah 900,000 (approx. US$60) and asked for my signature. I was happy to receive the money as I wanted to buy a headstone for my father’s grave. Kancil and Sugeng received Rp 600,000 (approx. US$40) each for their roles. I got a bit more because I was the lead character. During the film I was given a script but as I couldn’t read I was told what I had to do by one of the crew Mas Gun, who helped me. “Don’t look at the camera”, “eat at the food stall”, “now talk to the food stall lady”. They even wanted me to run on the roof of a moving train, which was what I usually did as a Tikyan when shining shoes, running away from the Polsuska (railway police). It was filmed in lots of different places in the city, not where we lived or where we usually spent out time. There was a lot in the film that was not true. Banyak Bullshit (a lot of BS). I wanted to play the role of Topo as he was my friend, but they wanted me to play Untung’s character. I didn’t know Untung very well and he was a bit sakit kepala (had mental health issues), and I didn’t want to act like that. I couldn’t act and so I just played myself, Heru. In the end as my character was so strong they used my name in the film (instead of Untung), and decided to make me ‘Heru’. At the time I didn’t think the film would have an impact on my life. I didn’t feel proud about doing it. I just felt I had to do it because everyone wanted me to. After the film I didn’t have much contact with Mas Garin or Ibu Christine. Sugeng and Kancil went to live with Ibu Christine in Jakarta, but I didn’t want to go. I think Sugeng and Kancil went against their will too, but they were younger than me. She wanted us to be her children, but I was happier on the street and with the NGO Girli. Ibu Christine promised to find me a house to live in and set me up for life, but that never happened. And then there was a problem with Sugeng and Kancil in Jakarta. They wanted to leave Ibu Christine’s house and they asked her for money so they could return home to Yogya. They had no money but she wouldn’t let them leave. So in the end they stole things from her house, a tape recorder and a bike, and then they sold them so they could buy train tickets to return to Yogyakarta. Sometime later Ibu Christine came to Yogyakarta. She invited me to eat at a lesehan (food stall) on Malioboro and she invited all the other Anak Girli to eat. While we were eating and drinking she started to accuse me of being involved in robbing her house. I was really upset; I was being told I was a thief! I started to cry “It was not me”. I couldn’t eat anything. I have never stolen anything from anyone as long

58  Harriot Beazley and Wiryo Warisno (Heru) as I have been on the street. Stealing is forbidden among Tikyan. I was angry with her and shouted at her that I didn’t like her attitude. She accused me of stealing, even though I wasn’t involved. Why was I implicated? That was the last time I saw her. Later, the film was edited and published and released. That’s when I  wasn’t happy. Before no-one knew me but suddenly everywhere I  went I  was known. All over. After the film I was really well known and people started to be difficult towards me. It was not good for me. My friends on the street and other people thought I had a lot of money after I finished as I was an ‘artist’. Even though I had nothing they thought I was hiding it. I spent everything I was given for the film on my father’s headstone, and I went home to Sumatra to give my mother some money (Rp 150,000, approx. US$10.50). I spent the rest of the money on my street brothers, which is what we are expected to do when we make money. But everyday you could see me in the newspaper, magazines and on TV. Journalists would come and find me and I was interviewed a lot, but I was never given any money for it. So, people on the street thought I was rich and famous. “Here’s your photo, can you help me”? Even though I had nothing. I still had to busk to cari nafkah (make a living). The fame and glory of being a movie star turned out to be very short-lived. Within a matter of weeks after the film was a success in the theatres I was back on the street, busking on the bus, being a Tikyan. It was like being punched in the face. My life was much harder after the film because of the way people treated me. I was confused and didn’t know who to talk to. They just showed me up as a street kid, with no respect. They took no responsibility for what happened to me next. Our lives became more difficult, not better. No-one helped me. People just saw me as a street kid. I was ‘famous’ but I had nothing. I still lived on the street. I still busked on the street. They took everything and left me with nothing. Students from the local university wanted to interview me and write their skripsi (dissertation) about me and the film. And art students from the Art School came to find me. A  lot of them started to pretend they came from the street to make their story and work cooler, like Basquiat. But I am the true Basquiat! When the film started to go overseas tourists from Japan came looking for me and wanting to know me. But I was bored of it. I was always fed up with it because I was exhausted by it. They always wanted to know the same thing, and I would always answer “I don’t want to talk about it”. I was also concerned that the film glorified the lives of street children and made a lot of young people want to leave home and live on the street because they thought it was cool. That was a real problem. I now live in a small town in Australia. Everyday I work in a meat processing factory, producing halal meat for export to Indonesia and other Muslim countries. I have recently obtained my Trainee Halal Slaughterman licence, which means I can earn more money than before. In my spare time I paint and write songs. I am happier here as people don’t know me in Australia. I am happy people don’t know me. Kancil

A few years after the film was made Kancil got married and left the street. By 2022 when the research for this chapter took place Kancil was working as a fisherman,

Leaves on a Pillow  59 living in a small rented house on the coast of Central Java, with his wife and two young children. He is very poor and barely makes enough to feed and clothe his family. We had a number of conversations with Kancil via WhatsApp, asking him what he thought about the film, 24 years later. When we asked him whether he thought Daun di Atas Bantal was a good representation of life on the street at that time he replied that “yes, I think it was true to life. It was like that”. When asked if his family knew about the film Kancil explained that his wife had seen the film before he met her, and that he thought it was maybe one of the reasons she liked him when they first met. He reflected that he may not have met his wife if he had not been in the film, and for that reason he liked the film. Kancil also explained how he had shown the film to his children, so that they could see how their father used to live. He said that they had been surprised and that he ‘masuk TV’ (was on TV). Kancil said he wanted his own children to realise how lucky they were, living with their parents in a house, and having food every day, and going to school. During discussions with Kancil he said that he thought that there were a lot of good things about the film, and that he was happy that he was in it. He said he felt proud as he knew that the film had raised awareness among society about the problems faced by children living on the streets at that time. He also said that after the film was released it finally became possible for people without identity cards to receive a proper Muslim burial when they died. He believed that government policy had changed as a direct result of the film. However, not all Kancil’s experiences had been positive. He said that he was not paid very much for his role in the film and that he had found it very hard to live on the street after the film because of the way that people treated him, and the expectations that his friends and other people on the street placed on him were a huge burden: “After the film people were difficult towards me. Everyone thought I was rich. I lost all my money as I had to give it away”. Kancil also explained that at the time he was very malu (shy/ashamed) about the film and that he refused to talk to the press, unlike Heru. He hated all the attention he received which was one reason why after the making of the film Kancil went with Sugeng to live with Christine Hakim in her house in Jakarta. However, Kancil said that he had not really wanted to go and that he was bored there and that after a few months he returned to Yogyakarta to live on the street. He said “I missed my older brothers. It was better on the street”. When asked if he agreed with Heru that the film caused more children to go onto the street after it was released, he replied: “No, kids have problems when they come to the street. It’s not just because they watched the movie”. When asked if he would do the film again, he replied: “No, I would be too malu”. Conclusion

The film Daun di Atas Bantal was released in August 1998 at a critical moment in Indonesia’s history, a time of riots, revolution and the end of the Suharto regime. The premier screening of the film was immediately after President Suharto was forced to resign, after 32 years of authoritarian rule. Due to the timing of its release

60  Harriot Beazley and Wiryo Warisno (Heru) there was no government censorship or control over its distribution, so it was released and screened freely across the country, and internationally. Such freedom meant that mainstream Indonesia gained a glimpse of the stark underbelly of Indonesian society for the first time. The country was exposed to the harsh reality of an impoverished, desperate and marginalised society, which until then had been concealed and obscured from public view by the Suharto regime. After the fall of Suharto the political and financial crisis caused massive social disruption, leading to many more young people and adults leaving their poor neighbourhoods to try and earn a living on the street, not because they had seen the film, but because they needed to survive. However, because of the timing of its release the film created a shock wave throughout the country, capturing Indonesia’s imagination. The main characters performed their street child identities in accordance with their collective subculture, which led to a fascination of street life in Yogyakarta, and a rise in the celebrity status of the boys themselves. The lives of Heru, Kancil and Sugeng became embedded within the Indonesian psyche, creating the myth of the abandoned exiled child who needed to be saved.5 The boys unintentionally shone a light on the experiences of living on the street without family connections or kinship networks—something that is considered essential to Javanese (and Indonesian) society which has a very hierarchical social structure. In a way the film symbolised what Indonesia had become, and what it needed to free itself from. Research within youth studies and children’s geographies increasingly points to the significance of ‘fateful’ or critical’ moments in the life transitions of marginal young people. Such occurrences are often related to exceptional and unpredictable events or encounters at critical moments in their life trajectories. There is little doubt that the film Daun di Atas Bantal was a critical moment in Heru and Kancil’s lives, resulting in them both experiencing unexpected international fame, and changing their daily lives on the street forever. But not all of it was for the good, and neither Heru nor Kancil were able to capitalise on their fame in the long term. Of the three main characters in the film, Kancil is still living a subsistence lifestyle, in spite of the fact that he featured in two films, one to international acclaim. Sugeng is still living and working on the street in Yogyakarta. Meanwhile, Heru is unflinchingly clear in his assessment of the film and the impact it had on his life: ‘Aku benci film itu’ (“I hate that film”). In 2019 Heru moved to Victoria, Australia, with his wife and two children. Today Heru channels his creative talents into his painting, predominantly working with oil and canvas. His artwork reflects his ongoing attempt to express the realities of growing up on the streets of Yogyakarta, and the depth of his and his friends’ lived experiences. Within each piece of Heru’s artwork his experiences come alive through the retelling of his stories. Fragments of trauma blend with Jambi (Sumatran) and Javanese culture and experience, presenting a unique view of life and human relationships, and his intense awareness of how others have treated him in the past. They are often focused on a sense of self-protection and self-earned freedom.

Leaves on a Pillow  61

Figure 5.1 Two works of Heru’s artwork. On the left: Bukan Tanding (“It’s not my Fight”). On the right: Bukan dewah (“Angel, not angel”) (Source: Photograph provided by authors)

When considering the inclusion of marginalised street children in the film from a child rights perspective, according to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), there are many questions to be asked: The way the children were recruited, against their will; the roles they were asked to play; the way that their time was controlled; their lack of adult protection, mentoring or support; their meagre payment; their treatment after the film was completed; and how Heru was left to fend for himself and his ‘fame’. All these issues raise substantial ethical concerns. With the benefit of 25 years of hindsight it is clear to see that children’s rights were breached significantly in the pursuit of the production of a good movie. It is also evident that the film had a huge impact on the children’s lives, but that they did not benefit from its success to the extent that they should have done, in spite of the Hakim and Nugroho’s claims. Hakim and Nugroho, on the other hand, have never looked back. Notes 1 This chapter engages directly with young people as part of its process, and so relates to van Der Beck (Chapter  15), Aiava and Pyryy (Chapter  14), Jarman and Kraftl (Chapter 16) and Katz (Chapter 17) in the sense that the chapter is created with a young person or people. This chapter differs because of Warisno’s co-authorship and his starring role

62  Harriot Beazley and Wiryo Warisno (Heru) in a film from 1998. The chapter also relates to Lo Presti’s work (Chapter 4) because it involves a young person gaining stardom through film. 2 This chapter connects in important ways to Katz (Chapter  17), van Blerk, Shand and Hunter (Chapter 15) and Jarman and Kraftl (Chapter 16) as each involves (albeit differently) ethnographic research and film. 3 Compare with Katz’s discussion of the fluidity between her ethnographic participants, her videographer and herself. Note also the connections between Katz and Beazley as they reflect on work done quite some time ago (Chapter 17). 4 Compare this to Tyner’s discussion of Angela Jolie as an actor and film director (Chapter 6). 5 This relates to the Salvage filmmaking described by Lo Presti (Chapter 4) and Murnaghan and McCreary (Chapter 9).

Bibliography Beazley, H. 1999. ‘A little but enough’: Street children’s subcultures in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. https:// doi.org/10.25911/5d78db149c5f7 Hanson, K. 2017. “Embracing the past: ‘Been’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming children.” Childhood 24(3): 281–285. Nair, M. 1988. Salaam Bombay. India/France/UK. Nugroho, G. 1998. Daun Di Atas Bantal. (Leaf on a Pillow). Indonesia: PT Christine Hakim Film. Powell, Z. 2023. “Indonesian icons: Christine Hakim, the Grande Dame of Indonesian Cinema.” Jakarta Post, February  24th. www.thejakartapost.com/culture/2023/02/24/ indonesian-icons-christine-hakim-the-grande-dame-of-indonesian-cinema.html Rotten Tomatoes. 1999. www.rottentomatoes.com/m/daun-di-atas-bantal-leaf-on-a-pillow Tanvir, K. 2009. “Interview: Christine Hakim.” Widescreen 1(1). https://widescreenjournal. files.wordpress.com/2021002F06/interview-christine-hakim.pdf Uhde, J. 1999. “Indonesian director Garin Nugroho.” Kinema Spring Issue. https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/kinema/article/view/897/884 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. 1989. www.unicef.org.au/ united-nations-convention-on-the-rights-of-the-child

6

Portraying Genocide through the Eyes of Children The Troubled Geographies of Authenticity in Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers James A. Tyner

Introduction On April 17, 1975, soldiers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), better known as the Khmer Rouge, entered Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh. Within hours, heavily armed cadre—many of whom were child-soldiers—began forcibly evacuating the city. For many men, women, and children—including a young girl named Loung Ung—this day marked the beginning of the Cambodian genocide. Such is the narrative of the 2017 Netflix film First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers.1 Directed by Angelina Jolie, the film hews closely to Loung Ung’s (2000) autobiography of the same name.2 Written as an adult, Ung’s memoir received much acclaim and was a national bestseller. Indeed, while Ung’s narrative is among several memoirs published by Cambodian-American survivors of the genocide, it has—with the exception of Ngor’s autobiography and the Killing Fields movie that derived from it—received by far the most attention.3 The memoir, however, is not without its detractors, especially within the Cambodian-American diasporic community.4 Sody Lay, for example, is particularly scathing in his review of Ung’s memoir, accusing her of delivering “a sensationalization and over-dramatization of the Killing Fields experience.”5 Notably, Lay’s criticism stems from the fact that Ung’s memories are drawn from her childhood experiences of the genocide. “Being so young,” Lay charges, “Ung’s ‘memory’ is suspect, and her book seems to be based more on imagination than any kind of real memory.”6 By extension, the film only deepens these suspicions in that it depicts the experiences of genocide perceived only through the eyes of a young child. Historical and geopolitical context is patchy at best—introduced largely through snippets of ‘adult’ conversations overheard by Ung as a child.7 To date, significant attention has focused both on Ung’s memoir and its cinematic sibling.8 In this brief chapter I contribute to this literature but do so in an attempt to place genocide studies in conversation with the subfield of children’s geographies.9 Ung’s filmic depiction of her everyday experiences of surviving genocide raises several concerns that coalesce around the struggle to articulate and DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-6

64  James A. Tyner authenticate the unimaginable. As Eva Hoffman observes, “There is no collapse of meaning like that of genocide.”10 And yet, through the prism of Ung’s childhood eyes, a world of unthinkable horrors comes into focus and, with it, an expository clarity that transcends a simple dichotomy of authentic and in-authentic.11 Simply stated, First They Killed My Father depicts a young girl’s geography of everyday death. Filmic Representations of Authenticity12 The practice of representing history on film brings into conversation a cluster of concerns that center on the matter of authenticity.13 As Dominic Lees explains, “popular understandings of authenticity in historical film centers on the notion of a truthful representation of historical reality, and rests on a value system that emphasizes fidelity to the past.”14 However, historians have long critiqued the apparent truthfulness depicted in film, noting that filmmakers often take considerable poetic license to ‘tell a story.’ The mainstream ‘historical film,’ for example, “tells history as a story, a tale with a beginning, middle, and an end. A tale that leaves you with a moral message and (usually) a feeling of uplift.”15 In fact, as Robert Rosenstone notes, “no matter what the historical film, be the subject matter slavery, the Holocaust, or the Khmer Rouge, the message delivered on the screen is almost always that things are getting better or have gotten better or both.” To that end, even documentary historical films demonstrate a structure of directorial discretion behind the façade of cinematic realism. Indeed, Rosenstone warns of the fundamental fiction that underlies the standard historical film—the notion that we can somehow look through the window of the screen directly at a ‘real’ world, present or past.16 Testimonial films, such as First They Killed My Father, straddle this divide. Bluntly stated, testimonial films are not historical fictions, but neither are these documentaries. Following Sara Jones “the eyewitness has become near-ubiquitous in popular and public history, as the testimony of those who ‘were there as it happened’ is incorporated into documentary films, museums, memorials, archives, internet and autobiographical writing in all its forms.”17 Jones underscores that “the power of the eyewitness lies undoubtedly in the perceived authenticity of the stories they tell—the sense that they must know what it was like because they were there and the promise that this experience can be transmitted to the listener, reader, visitor or viewer.”18 Given this scholarly miasma, it is helpful to question what is meant by the term ‘authenticity’? A  common-sense understanding, Jones offers, is straightforward: to be authentic, the witness must have genuinely experienced the events that he or she recounts.19 However, in many filmic representations of historical, traumatic events, it is helpful to work through two distinct understandings of authenticity: the first relating to the referentiality of events and objects, and the second to the affective response of the viewer.20 Building on the work of Pirker and Rüdiger,21 Jones explains that the first mode, that of the authentic witness, “the filmic representation of the past is meant to function indexically in a similar way to the eyewitness or original artefact.”22 In other words, the film’s character is the eyewitness and the

Portraying Genocide through the Eyes of Children  65 viewer learns about the traumatic experiences through the character’s persona. The second mode, the authentic experience, serves a different function, in that the main character expresses or evokes the experience of living through a traumatic event. In this case, according to Jones, the appeals to an affective response in the viewer, ‘universal’ emotions and a sense of history without accuracy, can be understood as a form of experiential authenticity in which the subjectivity of the viewer is the focus, not the objective portrayal of the past.23 This second mode of authenticity is important, Jones explains, for if we start to think about authenticity outside the realm of witnessing, we can observe that we often consider something to be “authentic,” when it does not, in fact, possess “historical genuineness”—from reconstructed scenes in living history museums to historical feature films that stick closely to what is known about a particular period or set of events.24 Later, I  return to this distinction and suggest that First They Killed My Father evokes the authentic experiences of a young girl living and surviving amidst war and genocide. More adroitly, the film evokes one child’s struggle to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible as her everyday geographies are violently overturned. The Cambodian Genocide Produced as an authentic portrayal of a survivors’ firsthand experiences, First They Killed My Father appears as a genuine and accurate account of an historical event, in this case, the Cambodian genocide. Indeed, a cinematic preface states that the film is based on a true story and, for that reason, many viewers are likely to take the film at face value.25 With this framing, the film is transformed into an historical film and demands to be viewed as such. That said, the film is not a documentary and provides only a limited engagement with the historical understanding of the Cambodian genocide—a limitation hidden behind the edifice of authenticity. The broad coordinates of the Cambodian genocide are largely documented and understood.26 Between 1975 and 1979, the CPK sought to establish a new society governed by a self-styled Marxist-Leninist inspired vision of collective ownership. In the process, upward of two million people perished, through disease, famine, torture, murder, and execution. That said, there remain several areas of contention among scholars of the genocide. Most notably, a widely held—and erroneous— presumption is that senior leaders of the CPK sought to turn back the wheels of time and recreate an agrarian utopia modeled after the Angkorian Empire that lasted from the 9th through the 14th centuries. Far from an anachronistic project, however, the Party attempted to modernize rapidly. This entailed the wholesale uprooting and conversion of traditional farming practices into an agrarian system

66  James A. Tyner that would feed the buildup of industry. In so doing, the CPK followed in the footsteps of their Soviet and Chinese predecessors.27 As discussed below, First They Killed My Father provides a minimalist historical account of the Cambodian genocide with any exposition relayed intermittently via adult conversations overheard by Ung. The problematic historical accuracy of the film is thus two-hold. Firstly, the adults portrayed in the film are not those of highranking CPK officials; these individuals were not privy to the policy-making that shaped the topography of genocide. Secondly, even such speculations forwarded by adults are filtered through Ung’s perception. On the one hand, this approach effectively captures the bewilderment experienced by Ung—who looks on in horror and disbelief as her father, mother, and two siblings perish. On the other hand, viewers who are emotionally tied to Ung are equally confused. The consequence is that the film inadvertently forwards another long-standing myth of the Cambodian genocide, namely that the Khmer Rouge were irrational monsters who imposed harsh and brutal policies and seemingly killed without reason. The historical reality was quite different and, in many respects, was more horrific in that the Khmer Rouge were very much intentional and deliberate in their genocidal actions. In the film, forced labor on rice paddies features prominently. Contrary to the explanation forwarded by the central figures, however, the Khmer Rouge were thoroughly modernist in their transformation of Cambodia’s economic structure. Two objectives figured prominently in the CPK state economic planning: the necessity to raise the people’s standard of living quickly and to increase capital from agriculture in order to modernize industry.28 Both were to be achieved through the development of an economic strategy of import substitution industrialization (ISI). Such an approach is readily evident in surviving CPK documents. Minutes from a meeting held on May 8, 1976, for example, indicate, “We will decrease importing items next year, including cotton and jute, because we are working hard to produce ours. We will import only some important items such as chemical fertilizer, plastic, acid, iron factory, and other raw materials.”29 To promote effectively a program of ISI, Party leaders determined what they could produce locally and they had to import. The CPK officials saw Democratic Kampuchea brimming with “such things as land, livestock, natural resource, water sources such as lakes, river and ponds” and that these afforded them “great advantages compared with China, Vietnam, or Africa.”30 However, senior planners of the CPK determined agriculture to be their comparative advantage. As indicated in the Four-Year Plan, “We stand on agriculture as the basis, so as to collect agricultural capital with which to strengthen and expand industry.”31 Officials postulated they could “export and sell many products such as kapok, shrimp, squid, elephant fish, and turtles” in order to “earn foreign exchange.”32 Indeed, so optimistic were Party leaders, they expounded, “There are great possibilities for exporting peanuts, wheat, corn, sesame, and beans. The objective would be to save up these products for export.”33 Ominously, the report cautions, “Almost anything can be exported, so long as we don’t consume it ourselves, but set it aside.”34 In their attempt to transform rapidly the country’s traditional farming sector, Party members focused on those agricultural commodities that would ensure the

Portraying Genocide through the Eyes of Children  67 best return for their investments. It was essential, the CPK explained, “to promote all kinds of variety in planting by every means and method” in order to solve the needs of the people, but especially to “concentrate on crops which can give yields for export and sale abroad .  .  . in order to be able to find the maximum capital annually.”35 To this end, for the CPK, rice reigned supreme. For Party leaders, the decision was profit-oriented: For 100,000 tons of milled rice, we would get US$20  million; if we had 500,000 tons we’d get $100 million. . . . We must increase rice production in order to obtain capital. Other products, which are only complimentary, will be increased in the future.36 Revenue derived from the international exchange of rice exports would, in turn, fund the modernization of Democratic Kampuchea’s industrial sector. This policy introduced a fatal contradiction that was manifest in widespread famine. To increase foreign revenues, the Khmer Rouge leadership suspended currency and introduced food rations based, in part, on an age-based division of labor.37 Workers were classified as either kemlang ping (full-strength) or kemlang ksaoy (weak strength), with the former consisting mostly of adults and the latter consisting of small children and the elderly. Those designated as full-strength were further classified into two subgroups: kemlang 1, which consisted of young, able-bodied, single men and women who comprised mobile work brigades (kong chhlat), and kemlang 2, composed of married, able-bodied men and women who were divided by sex but generally worked closer to the village. The heaviest tasks were generally reserved for kemlang 1 people. These work teams were segregated by sex; males belonged to kong boroh and females belonged to kong neary. These brigades were set to work primarily on land-clearance, the digging of canals and reservoirs, and the construction of dams and dikes. As the name implies, people assigned to mobile work brigades often lived outside of villages, in temporary work-camps also segregated by sex. Kemlang 2 workers labored closer to their villages, and performed tasks such as local wood-cutting (for building materials or fuel), preparation and cultivation of agricultural fields, and maintenance of irrigation schemes. These tasks were also, but not always, segregated by sex; women, for example, reaped rice while threshing was performed by men.38 Lastly, the ‘weak-strength’ laborers (kemlang 3) were tasked with lighter tasks. Elderly workers were grouped into work teams known generically as senah chun; male groups were termed senah chun boroh and female groups senah chun neary. Duties for members of senah chun groups included sewing, gardening, collecting of small pieces of wood, and care for children. Depending on the conditions and the attitudes of the cooperative chief, some elderly workers might be required to labor in the rice fields or engage in other, more strenuous activities. Children under 14 years of age were assigned to work groups known as kong komar, with boys and girls separated into kong komara and kong khomarei, respectively. Children were responsible for watching after cows and water buffaloes, light digging in gardens and fields, collecting firewood, and gathering cow dung for fertilizer.39 Subsequently, a four-fold system

68  James A. Tyner was devised to distribute food rations based on the type of workforce. Those workers classified in the ‘number 1 system’ (robob) would be allocated three cans of rice per day; those in the ‘number 2 system’, two and one-half cans; those in the ‘number 3 system’, two cans’; and those in the ‘number 4 system’, one and onehalf cans. The ‘cans’ used for measurement were most often Nestlé’s condensed milk cans; each can contained approximately 200 grams of rice.40 Effectively, the political economy of Democratic Kampuchea placed the majority of the population between the teeth of two powerful forces: (1) a demand for surplus rice and agricultural inputs that justified draconian labor policies and (2) a rationing system that winnowed away every excess grain of rice. In a planning document prepared in 1976, the CPK leadership proposed that, from 1977 onward, “The [food] ration for the people will average . . . 312 kilograms of rice per person per year throughout the country.” This amount translates to roughly 0.85 kilograms per day.41 For workers, the result was an institutional arrangement which could not (and would not) respond to deteriorating conditions as these became more pronounced. As people became weakened through malnutrition, starvation, and disease, their work productivity declined; when productivity declined, local cadre were forced to appropriate ever-greater quantities of rice to satisfy quotas established by officials at the upper echelons.42 Subsequently, to maintain discipline— and to punish those workers deemed lazy or traitorous—an elaborate security apparatus was established.43 Throughout First They Killed My Father, the brutality of the Khmer Rouge discipline is graphically portrayed, depicting the forced labor, imposed food rations, arrests, torture, and killings as nothing more than senseless acts of violence. The reality was far grimmer, for underlying the ruthlessness of the Khmer Rouge was the imposition and enforcement of deliberate and calculated policies that resulted in the premature death of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. The Narrative of Loung Ung Before we consider the film, it is necessary to keep in mind that the project began as a memoir, that is, an act of intimate writing.44 Following Courtney Donovan and Pamela Moss, intimate writings (which includes diaries, autobiographies, and memoirs) “create a private sensibility through their narrative and close connections with the reader.”45 As such, these writings demonstrate how subjects cross multiple boundaries, bringing forth different political and personal constellations through the lens of individual experiences.46 In other words, moving beyond simple narration to bearing witness, intimate writings bring history into the present and “embod[y] a resolution of not necessarily knowing but actively acquiring an understanding of what not knowing means.”47 Jolie’s cinematic rendition of Ung’s memoir unapologetically retains a singular focus on events from Ung’s point of view. As David Sims writes, “Jolie’s masterstroke is that she never departs from the gaze of her young protagonist.”48 In doing so, however, the reflexivity present in Ung’s memoir is lost. This is significant, in that it further troubles the imbrication of film as authentic witness or representative of an authentic experience.49

Portraying Genocide through the Eyes of Children  69 The film opens with a montage of contemporaneous news footage: of US President Richard Nixon’s pledge of neutrality; of Cambodia’s head-of-state Norodom Sihanouk lamenting the expansion of war into his country; and of the incessant carpet bombing of Cambodia by the US planes. Steadily, the scene shifts to a television screen where the news footage is playing; and reflected on the screen, superimposed by images of war and destruction, is the ghostly figure of a young girl: Loung Ung (portrayed by Sareum Srey Moch). Effectively, the opening scene establishes the phantom-like intimacy of Ung and the genocide and, by extension, the intimacy between Ung and the audience. For while Ung sees her unnerving reflection against the backdrop of violent geopolitics, we also see her. From this intimate beginning, the narrative unfolds in quick succession. As the daughter of a military officer, Loung appears living a rather privileged life. Her childhood geographies are comfortable and secure, with tables laden with bountiful food. In April 1975, however, Loung’s everyday life was far removed from most inhabitants of Phnom Penh. Since 1970, following a coup against Sihanouk, the country had been plunged into civil war. By 1973, the population of the capital city had swollen three-fold with the arrival of rural peasants, forced to flee armed conflict and the US aerial bombing. Makeshift refugee camps were established both in and around Phnom Penh; hunger and disease were rampant. Ung, however, is oblivious to these conditions, and, by extension, so too is the audience unaware of the discrepancy between Loung’s soon-to-be-shattered life and those of hundreds of thousands of other Cambodians. This, in fact, is a point of contention raised by Lay, who notes that “Ung’s family owned three cars, including one given to her teenage brother as a gift.”50 Taking exception to Ung’s portrayal of her family as “middle class,” Lay explains: “Such decadence was enjoyed only by either the old elite or the nouveau rich, many of the latter having gained their new-found wealth through corruption.”51 Following the fall of Phnom Penh, Loung and her family are forced to evacuate the city. The film effectively captures the confusion—the fear and uncertainty— as hundreds of thousands of people are marched at gunpoint toward destinations unknown. Throughout the three-day march, Loung observes a series of seemingly incomprehensible acts, including her father secretively burning his identification papers. Notably, a dominant trope during this part of the film is Loung’s recurrent dream of returning home. She asks her dad, sadly, why can’t they just go back. Eventually, the family is relocated to a makeshift work-camp—arguably the most intense spatial rupture of Loung’s life. Loung, her parents, and her siblings are assigned to work details, and the film depicts the steadily deteriorating conditions: malnutrition, hunger, and disease. Here, Timothy Williams is correct that the film does justice to the perspective of the girl and her family as the totalitarian nature of the Khmer Rouge regime and coping strategies with this are only discovered throughout the film; it is thus a more realistic depiction of most Cambodians’ experience with the regime.52

70  James A. Tyner This is to say, neither Ung nor her family readily understood why they were forced to labor or why they received insufficient food rations or why men, women, and children were punished seemingly for no reason. We, the audience, are witness to Loung’s authentic experience as her once-secure childhood geographies are transformed into a series of overlapping spaces of fear and loss. Intermittent dreams and flashbacks provide a running commentary, juxtaposing Ung’s present reality with her past everyday life. Loung learns of her father’s death (portrayed as a dream sequence) and, later, is recruited as a cadre of the Khmer Rouge and trained to fight against the Vietnamese. Loung (and the audience) does not know why the Vietnamese pose a threat. However, after learning of the death of her mother and youngest sister, Loung is transformed into a child soldier. This is a pivotable moment of the film—one that touches on the very-real challenges of separating ‘victims’ from ‘perpetrators.’ As Meng-Try Ea and Sorya Sim document, many children were recruited and indoctrinated into the ranks of the Khmer Rouge; and many would subsequently commit atrocities against their own people.53 Notably, Loung is continually portrayed as a victim, and yet this sequence highlights how individuals could be both victims and perpetrators.54 Toward the climax of the film, when Vietnamese soldiers are shown invading Cambodia, Loung chooses to flee rather than fight. This scene, in particular, has been critiqued for its “Hollywood-esque, sensationalist turn” with graphic depictions of people stepping on landmines and exploding.55 Loung, however, is able to escape and subsequently reunites with her surviving siblings in a refugee camp. In her production of the film, Angelina Jolie went to considerable lengths to not recreate a ‘white savior’ story or a Hollywood whitewashing of the film. For example, all filming was done in Cambodia instead of on a Hollywood set or some other foreign location; in addition, the actors are all Cambodian and the entire story is in the Khmer language with English subtitles.56 This sensitivity was not happenstance. Jolie has a long and notable history of charitable work in Cambodia, a journey that began with the filming of Tomb Raider (2001), in which she starred. Following the release of Tomb Raider, for example, Jolie was named a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador and dedicated herself to educating the public on the plight of refugees around the world. Subsequently, Jolie has engaged in a variety of humanitarian projects in Cambodia and beyond, including the establishment of the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation, named after her adopted Cambodian son and dedicated to the conservation of natural resources, the protection of wildlife, and the eradication of rural poverty. Jolie’s directorial approach contributes to the film’s authenticity. The result, Sims explains, is a film “told from a child’s-eye view, with the camera frequently focusing on Loung’s open, sweet face and then cutting to whatever nightmare she’s seeing.”57 Eric Kohn concurs, noting that Loung, lacking the maturity to respond to her world, can only watch and process; the film thus becomes a meditation on witnessing history without having the tools to comprehend it.58

Portraying Genocide through the Eyes of Children  71 Discussion and Conclusion Neither the film nor the memoir are heralded as historically accurate accounts of the Cambodian genocide; indeed, both media are presented as narratives based on true stories.59 And yet, as a narrative retold by a survivor, an eyewitness, both media are burdened with the expectation of authenticity, that is, a perceived obligation to speak truthfully. Here, it is helpful to consider Bunkong Tuon’s distinction between ‘emotional’ and ‘factual’ truth. According to Tuon, Ung’s need (as an adult) to work through the traumas—her emotional truth—originating in the Cambodian genocide often overshadows her responsibility to represent accurately what happened—the factual truth—under the Khmer Rouge regime.60 Yet, not only for scholars but also for other survivors, this hybridity remains a central tension when interpreting the film. Combining elements of both modes of authenticity— the authentic witness and the authentic experience—the film succeeds in highlighting the difficult terrain of negotiating traumatic memories. As Tuon elaborates, Ung’s post-childhood narrative of her experiences as a young girl succeeds in bearing witness to the destruction by the Khmer Rouge, a destruction that impedes the survivor’s ability to create the kind of narrative that can be used as straightforward evidence against the Khmer Rouge and as a pedagogical resource for the younger generation.61 Indeed, the film effectively demonstrates—but does not document—the pain and sorrow and fear of imminent death. In so doing, the film captures what I term elsewhere the ‘geography of everyday death’.62 It is common to conceive of the everyday as the banal, routine activities and tasks that occupy our daily lives.63 As Henri Lefebvre writes, It is in everyday life that the sum total of relations that make the human—and every human being—a whole takes its shape and form. In it are expressed and fulfilled those relations that bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a certain manner which is always partial and incomplete: friendship, comradeship, love, the need to communicate, play, etc.64 Importantly, the everyday is where life is actually lived and felt, for as Anderson and Smith explain, “to neglect the emotions is to exclude a key set of relations which lives are lived and societies made.”65 With war and genocide, however, the geography of everyday life is transformed into a geography of everyday death, a transformation whereby one’s day-to-day activities and relations are mediated by the possibility of violent and premature death. Through cinematic representations of disease, starvation, torture, and murder, First They Killed My Father calls attention to the emotions and embodiment of genocide. The intimate portrayal of Loung as a child, of her patchwork memories and limited comprehension of trauma and tragedy, grounds the genocide with empathy and sensitivity. By portraying a child’s experiences of everyday death, the film underscores how seemingly distant

72  James A. Tyner geopolitical decisions permeate one’s life in the material and emotional realities of the everyday, frequently in incomprehensible ways. This is not without risks. As a form of testimonial representation, the film asserts its credentials as both authentic witness and purveyor of authentic experience. For some critics of the film (and memoir), historical accuracy must not be sacrificed for the sake of a story. As noted by several commentators on Cambodian-American literature and, specifically, of representations of the genocide, the “need for evidence and testimony of Khmer Rouge war crimes constitutes a significant part of these memoirs.”66 Tuon expounds on this point, noting that the subject of the testimonial is large-scale injustice; the narrator is a survivor of this injustice; the narrator belongs to an oppressed group; the narrator calls for intervention from an international community outside of the jurisdiction of the government where the injustice takes place; and the ultimate motivation behind the writing is political change, whereby the oppressive condition will be ameliorated.67 To that point, George Yúdice explains, “Truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or in exorcising and setting aright official history.”68 This has profound implications when, in attempting to illuminate the emotive experience of exploitation and oppression, a degree of creative or poetic license is taken and history is rendered as a narrative “of triumph, anguish, joy, despair, adventure, suffering, and heroism.”69 In the end, as Rosenstone asks: Does film add to our understanding of the past by making us feel immediately and deeply about particular historical people, events, and situations?70 Ultimately, I  suggest, the film does, in that it foregrounds one particular child’s own upturned lifeworld set against the tumultuous and traumatic background of genocide. Notes 1 This chapter connects with Chapter 2 where Bosco tells the story of a young girl experiencing place-upsetting violence. 2 Ung, L. (2000). First they killed my father: A daughter of Cambodia remembers. Harper. 3 May, S. (1986). Cambodian witness: The autobiography of Someth May. Cornell University Press; Ngor, H. (1987). A Cambodian odyssey: Survival in the Killing Fields. Macmillan; Him, C. (2000). When broken glass gloats: Growing up under the Khmer Rouge. Norton; Seng, V. (2005). The price we paid: A life experience in the Khmer Rouge regime. iUniverse; and Siv, S. (2008). Golden bones: An extraordinary journey from Hell in Cambodia to a new life in America. HarperCollins. 4 Tuon, B. (2013). Inaccuracy and testimonial literature: The case of Loung Ung’s First they killed my father: A daughter of Cambodia remembers. MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 38(3), 107–125; at 173. 5 Lay, S. (2001). The Cambodian tragedy: Its writers and representations. Amerasia Journal, 27(2), 171–182; at 173. 6 Lay, Cambodian tragedy, 173.

Portraying Genocide through the Eyes of Children  73 7 This is true also of the stories articulated by Gardner and Craine (Chapter 8) and Aitken (Chapter 10) 8 Lay, Cambodian tragedy; Tuon, Inaccuracy and testimonial; Williams, T. (2018). Film review: First they killed my father: A daughter of Cambodia remembers. Genocide Studies and Prevention, 12(1), 113–114; Ifianti, T., and Rahman, A.K. (2020). Analysis of characterization of the main characters of ‘First they killed my father’ movie by Angelina Jolie. Journey, 3(1), 19–25; and Harris, B. (2021). Teaching Cambodian genocide through film. Education about Asia, 26(2), 12–17. 9 Aitken, S.C. (1994). Putting children in their place. Association of American Geographers; Holloway, S.L. (2014). Changing children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 12(4), 377–392; and Aitken, S.C. (2018). Children’s geographies: Tracing the evolution and involution of a concept. Geographical Review, 108(1), 3–23. 10 Hoffman, E. (2004). After such knowledge: Memory, history, and the legacy of the Holocaust. Public Affairs, at 43. 11 Like Bosco (Chapter 2), Tyner makes pains to describe how the filmmaker portrays the transformations from the perspective of a traumatized young girl. 12 It is worth comparing what Tyner is doing here with the ideas of authenticity in the documentary films discussed by Murnaghan and McCreary (Chapter 9). 13 Lees, D. (2016). Cinema and authenticity: Anxieties in the making of historical film. Journal of Media Practice, 17(2–3), 199–212; at 199. See also Rosenstone, R.A. (2001). The historical film: Looking at the past in a postliterate age. In M. Landy (Ed.), The historical film: History and memory in media (pp.  50–66). Rutgers University Press; Stubbs, J. (2013). Historical film: A critical introduction. Bloomsbury; and Kansteiner, W. (2018). History, memory, and film: A  love/hate triangle. Memory Studies 11(2), 131–136. 14 Lees, Cinema and authenticity, 200. 15 Rosenstone, The historical film, 55. 16 Rosenstone, The historical film, 54. 17 Jones, S. (2017). Mediated immediacy: Constructing authentic testimony in audiovisual media, Rethinking History, 21(2), 135–153; at 136. 18 Jones, Mediated immediacy, 136. 19 Jones, Mediated immediacy, 140. 20 Jones, S. (2012). Memory on film: Testimony and constructions of authenticity in documentaries about the German Democratic Republic. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(2), 194–210; at 196. 21 Pirker, E.U. and Rüdiger, M. (2010). Authentizitätsfiktionen in populären Geschichtskulturen: Annäherungen [Fictions of authenticity in popular history cultures: Approaches]. In E.U. Pirker, M. Rüdiger, C. Klein, T. Leiendecker, C. Oesterle, M. Sénécheau and M. Uike-Bormann (Eds.), Echte Geschichte: Authentizitätsfiktionen in populären Geschichtskulturen (pp. 11–30). Transcript Verlag. 22 Jones, Memory on film, 196. 23 Jones, Memory on film, 196. 24 Jones, Mediated immediacy, 140. 25 Harris, Teaching Cambodian genocide, 16. 26 Etcheson, C. (1984). The Rise and demise of Democratic Kampuchea. Westview Press; Vickery, M. (1984). Cambodia 1975–1982. Silkworm Books; Chandler, D. (1991). The tragedy of Cambodian history: Politics, war, and revolution since 1945. Yale University Press; Kiernan, B. (1996). The Pol Pot regime: Policies, race and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Yale University Press; Hinton, A. (2005). Why did they kill? Cambodia in the shadow of genocide. University of California Press; Short, P. (2005). Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. Macmillan; and Dy, K. (2007). A history of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979). Documentation Center of Cambodia.

74  James A. Tyner 27 Mertha, A. (2014). Brother in arms: Chinese aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. Cornell University Press; Tyner, J.A. (2017). From rice fields to killing fields: Nature, life, and labor under the Khmer Rouge. Syracuse University Press; and Tyner, J.A. (2021). Red harvests: Agrarian capitalism and genocide in Democratic Kampuchea. West Virginia University Press. 28 Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). (1988). The party’s four-year plan to build socialism in all fields, 1977–1980. In D. Chandler, B. Kiernan and C. Boua (Eds.), Pol Pot plans the future: Confidential leadership documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977 (pp. 120–163). Yale University Southeast Asian Studies; at 51. 29 Document No. D00698, “Cooperation with the Ministry of Commerce,” archived at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. 30 CPK, The party’s four-year plan, 46. 31 CPK, The party’s four-year plan, 46. 32 Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). (1988). Report of activities of the party center according to the general political tasks of 1976. In D. Chandler, B. Kiernan and C. Boua (Eds.), Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977 (pp. 182–212). Yale University Southeast Asian Studies; at 200. 33 CPK, Report of activities, 200. 34 CPK, Report of activities, 200. 35 Document No. E3/4, “Revolutionary Flag Issue 7, July 1976,” archived by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) at www.eccc.gov.kh/en. 36 CPK, The party’s four-year plan, 51. 37 Tyner, From rice fields to killing fields; Tyner, Red harvests; and Woolford, A., June, W., and Um, S. (2021). We planted rice and killed people: Symbiogenetic destruction in the Cambodian genocide. Genocide Studies and Prevention, 15(1), 44–67. 38 Twining, C.H. (1989). The economy. In K. Jackson (Ed.), Cambodia, 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death (pp. 109–150). Princeton University Press; at 127–128. 39 Mam, K. (2004). The endurance of the Cambodian family under the Khmer Rouge regime. In S.E. Cook (Ed.), Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives (pp. 127–171). Yale Center for International and Area Studies; at 134–135. 40 CPK, The party’s four-year plan, 51. 41 CPK, The party’s four-year plan, 51. 42 Tyner, J.A. (2018). The politics of lists: Bureaucracy and genocide under the Khmer Rouge. West Virginia University Press; at 86. 43 Chandler, D. (1999). Voices from S-21: Terror and history in Pol Pot’s secret prison. University of California Press; Ea, M-T. (2005). The chain of terror: The Khmer Rouge southwest zone security system. Documentation Center of Cambodia; and Tyner, The politics of lists. 44 Moss, P., and Donovan, C. (Eds.) (2017). Writing intimacy into feminist geography. Routledge. 45 Donovan, C., and Moss, P. (2017). Muddling intimacy methodologically. In P. Moss and C. Donovan (Eds.), Writing intimacy into feminist geography (pp. 3–30). Routledge; at 17. 46 Moss, P., and Besio, K. (2019). Auto-methods in feminist geography.  GeoHumanities, 5(2), 313–325; at 316. 47 Henkin, S. (2017). Bearing witness to geographies of life and death: Intimate writing and violent geographies. In P. Moss and C. Donovan (Eds.), Writing intimacy into feminist geography (pp. 173–179). Routledge; at 177. 48 Sims, D. (2022). First they killed my father is a surprising, devastating triumph. The Atlantic, September  15, 2017. www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/09/ first-they-killed-my-father-is-a-surprising-devasting-triump/540018/ (Accessed October 25, 2022). 49 It is worth contrasting the role of Jolie in this film and the role of the director and famous actress in the film described by Beazley and Warisno (Chapter 5). who are the witnesses, what are their experiences, and how authentic is their witness?

Portraying Genocide through the Eyes of Children  75 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Lay, Cambodian tragedy, 175. Lay, Cambodian tragedy, 175. Williams, Film review, 113. Ea, M-T., and Sim, S. (2001). Victims and perpetrators? Testimony of young Khmer Rouge comrades. Documentation Center of Cambodia. Williams, Film review, 114. Williams, Film review, 114. Harris, Teaching Cambodia, 16; see also Russian, A. (2018). All about Angelina Jolie’s connection to Cambodia that led to her Golden Globe nominated film. People. https:// people.com/movies/angelina-jolie-cambodia-golden-globe/ (Accessed October  1, 2022). Sims, First they killed my father, n.p. Kohn, E. (2017). ‘First they killed my father’ review: Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian drama is her best film. IndieWire, September 2. www.indiewire.com/2017/09/first-theykilled-my-father-review-angelina-jolie-netflix-telluride-1201872312 (Accessed October 25, 2022). There is a close connection here to Beazley and Warisno’s story about the filming of street children, which also poignantly presents narratives based on true, and sometimes horrific, contexts (Chapter 5). Tuon, Inaccuracy and testimonial, 108. Tuon, Inaccuracy and testimonial, 108. Tyner, J.A., and Henkin, S. (2015). Feminist geopolitics, everyday death, and the emotional geographies of Dang Thuy Tram. Gender, Place & Culture, 22(2), 288–303. Highmore, B. (2001). Everyday life and cultural theory: An introduction. Routledge; and Burkitt, I. (2004). The time and space of everyday life. Cultural Studies, 18(2–3), 211–227. Lefebvre, H. (1991). Critique of everyday life: Volume I, trans. J. Moore. Verso; at 97. Anderson, K., and Smith, S.J. (2001). Emotional geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26(1), 7–10; at 7. Kim, S.J. (2017). Cambodian American memoirs and the politics of narrative strategies. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 9(1–2), 27–49; at 31. Tuon, Inaccuracy and testimonial, 111. Yúdice, G. (1991). Testimonio and postmodernism. Latin American Perspectives, 18(3), 15–31; at 17. Rosenstone, The historical film, 56. A question that is worth posing for Murnaghan and McCreary’s work also (Chapter 9).

Bibliography Aitken, S.C. (1994). Putting children in their place. Association of American Geographers. Aitken, S.C. (2018). Children’s geographies: Tracing the evolution and involution of a concept. Geographical Review, 108(1), 3–23. Anderson, K., and Smith, S.J. (2001). Emotional geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26(1), 7–10; at 7. Burkitt, I. (2004). The time and space of everyday life. Cultural Studies, 18(2–3), 211–227. Chandler, D. (1991). The tragedy of Cambodian history: Politics, war, and revolution since 1945. Yale University Press. Chandler, D. (1999). Voices from S-21: Terror and history in Pol Pot’s secret prison. University of California Press. Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). (1988). Report of activities of the party center according to the general political tasks of 1976. In D. Chandler, B. Kiernan and C. Boua (Eds.), Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977 (pp. 182–212). Yale University Southeast Asian Studies; at 200.

76  James A. Tyner Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). (1988). The party’s four-year plan to build socialism in all fields, 1977–1980. In D. Chandler, B. Kiernan and C. Boua (Eds.), Pol Pot plans the puture: Confidential leadership documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977 (pp. 120–163). Yale University Southeast Asian Studies. Document No. D00698, “Cooperation with the Ministry of Commerce,” archived at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. Document No. E3/4, “Revolutionary Flag Issue 7, July 1976,” archived by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) at www.eccc.gov.kh/en. Donovan, C., and Moss, P. (2017). Muddling intimacy methodologically. In P. Moss and C. Donovan (Eds.), Writing intimacy into feminist geography (pp. 3–30). Routledge; at 17. Dy, K. (2007). A history of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979). Documentation Center of Cambodia. Ea, M.-T. (2005). The chain of terror: The Khmer Rouge southwest zone security system. Documentation Center of Cambodia; and Tyner, The Politics of Lists. Ea, M.-T., and Sim, S. (2001). Victims and perpetrators? Testimony of young Khmer Rouge comrades. Documentation Center of Cambodia. Etcheson, C. (1984). The Rise and demise of Democratic Kampuchea. Westview Press. Harris, B. (2021). Teaching Cambodian genocide through film. Education about Asia, 26(2), 12–17. Henkin, S. (2017). Bearing witness to geographies of life and death: Intimate writing and violent geographies. In P. Moss and C. Donovan (Eds.), Writing intimacy into feminist geography (pp. 173–179). Routledge; at 177. Highmore, B. (2001). Everyday life and cultural theory: An introduction. Routledge. Him, C. (2000). When broken glass gloats: Growing up under the Khmer Rouge. Norton. Hinton, A. (2005). Why did they kill? Cambodia in the shadow of genocide. University of California Press. Hoffman, E. (2004). After such knowledge: Memory, history, and the legacy of the Holocaust. Public Affairs, at 43. Holloway, S.L. (2014). Changing children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 12(4), 377–392. Ifianti, T., and Rahman, A.K. (2020). Analysis of characterization of the main characters of ‘First they killed my father’ movie by Angelina Jolie. Journey, 3(1), 19–25. Jones, S. (2012). Memory on film: Testimony and constructions of authenticity in documentaries about the German Democratic Republic. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(2), 194–210; at 196. Jones, S. (2017) Mediated immediacy: constructing authentic testimony in audio-visual media, Rethinking History, 21:2, 135–153, DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2017.1305726 Kansteiner, W. (2018). History, memory, and film: A  love/hate triangle. Memory Studies 11(2), 131–136. Kiernan, B. (1996). The Pol Pot regime: Policies, race and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Yale University Press. Kim, S.J. (2017). Cambodian American memoirs and the politics of narrative strategies. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 9(1–2), 27–49; at 31. Kohn, E. (2017). ‘First they killed my father’ review: Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian drama is her best film. IndieWire, September 2. www.indiewire.com/2017/09/first-they-killed-myfather-review-angelina-jolie-netflix-telluride-1201872312 (Accessed October 25, 2022). Lay, S. (2001). The Cambodian tragedy: Its writers and representations. Amerasia Journal, 27(2), 171–182; at 173. Lees, D. (2016). Cinema and authenticity: Anxieties in the making of historical film. Journal of Media Practice, 17(2–3), 199–212. Lefebvre, H. (1991). Critique of everyday life: Volume I, trans. J. Moore. Verso; at 97. Mam, K. (2004). The endurance of the Cambodian family under the Khmer Rouge regime. In S.E. Cook (Ed.), Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives (pp. 127–171). Yale Center for International and Area Studies; at 134–135. May, S. (1986). Cambodian witness: The autobiography of Someth May. Cornell University Press.

Portraying Genocide through the Eyes of Children  77 Mertha, A. (2014). Brother in arms: Chinese aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. Cornell University Press. Moss, P., and Besio, K. (2019). Auto-methods in feminist geography. GeoHumanities, 5(2), 313–325; at 316. Moss, P., and Donovan, C. (Eds.) (2017). Writing intimacy into feminist geography. Routledge. Ngor, H. (1987). A Cambodian odyssey: Survival in the Killing Fields. Macmillan. Pirker, E.U. and Rüdiger, M. (2010). Authentizitätsfiktionen in populären Geschichtskulturen: Annäherungen [Fictions of authenticity in popular history cultures: Approaches]. In E.U. Pirker, M. Rüdiger, C. Klein, T. Leiendecker, C. Oesterle, M. Sénécheau and M. Uike-Bormann (Eds.), Echte Geschichte: Authentizitätsfiktionen in populären Geschichtskulturen (pp. 11–30). Transcript Verlag. Rosenstone, R.A. (2001). The historical film: Looking at the past in a postliterate age. In M. Landy (Ed.), The historical film: History and memory in media (pp. 50–66). Rutgers University Press. Russian, A. (2018). All about Angelina Jolie’s connection to Cambodia that led to her Golden Globe nominated film. People. https://people.com/movies/angelina-jolie-cambodiagolden-globe/ (Accessed October 1, 2022). Seng, V. (2005). The price we paid: A life experience in the Khmer Rouge regime. iUniverse. Short, P. (2005). Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. Macmillan. Sims, D. (2022). First they killed my father is a surprising, devastating triumph. The Atlantic, September 15, 2017. www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/09/first-theykilled-my-father-is-a-surprising-devasting-triump/540018/ (Accessed October 25, 2022). Siv, S. (2008). Golden bones: An extraordinary journey from Hell in Cambodia to a new life in America. HarperCollins. Stubbs, J. (2013). Historical film: A critical introduction. Bloomsbury. Tuon, B. (2013). Inaccuracy and testimonial literature: The case of Loung Ung’s First they killed my father: A daughter of Cambodia remembers. MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 38(3), 107–125; at 173. Twining, C.H. (1989). The economy. In K. Jackson (Ed.), Cambodia, 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death (pp. 109–150). Princeton University Press; at 127–128. Tyner, J.A. (2017). From rice fields to killing fields: Nature, life, and labor under the Khmer Rouge. Syracuse University Press Tyner, J.A. (2018). The politics of lists: Bureaucracy and genocide under the Khmer Rouge. West Virginia University Press; at 86. Tyner, J.A. (2021). Red harvests: Agrarian capitalism and genocide in Democratic Kampuchea. West Virginia University Press. Tyner, J.A., and Henkin, S. (2015). Feminist geopolitics, everyday death, and the emotional geographies of Dang Thuy Tram. Gender, Place & Culture, 22(2), 288–303. Ung, L. (2000). First they killed my father: A daughter of Cambodia remembers. Harper. Vickery, M. (1984). Cambodia 1975–1982. Silkworm Books. Williams, T. (2018). Film review: First they killed my father: A daughter of Cambodia remembers. Genocide Studies and Prevention, 12(1), 113–114. Woolford, A., June, W., and Um, S. (2021). We planted rice and killed people: Symbiogenetic destruction in the Cambodian genocide. Genocide Studies and Prevention, 15(1), 44–67. Yúdice, G. (1991). Testimonio and postmodernism. Latin American Perspectives, 18(3), 15–31; at 17.

7

Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Black and Brown Girlhood in the French Banlieue Pascale Joassart-Marcelli

In France, few places are more stigmatized than the banlieue—areas at the periphery of large cities where poverty, crime, unemployment, and now Islamic extremism seemingly coalesce amidst dilapidated housing projects built decades ago under more hopeful social and economic circumstances to house immigrant and working-class families in proximity to low-wage manufacturing and service jobs. Described in the media with terms such as “at risk,” “powder kegs,” and “lost from the republic,” these areas appear to be primarily inhabited by violent boys and young men, most of whom are children of immigrants from former French colonies like Algeria, Morocco, and Senegal, who are allegedly more interested in burning cars than integrating into French society. Girls presumably don’t belong in the banlieue. The heavy stigma of these pathological environments translates into perceptions of banlieue youths as different, idle, rebellious, and violent1—characteristics rarely attributed to girls who tend to be perceived as victims rather than perpetrators of violence.2 Growing up in such dangerous places, young people are both pitied and feared as doomed to deviance, fueling intense political debates about how to address the ever-shifting “malaise des banlieues.” While pundits on the left deplore the circumstances that constrict young people to lives of petty crimes and violence, those on the right argue that such behavior presents an imminent threat to the French Republic and its ideal of citizenship.3 Although quite different, both perspectives view young people from a place of marginality and abnormality that foretells social failure. As is the case with “ghettos” around the world, however, most people in France have never set foot in a banlieue and therefore get their perception of young “banlieusards” from the media, including news and films. Although some critics have claimed that the “banlieue genre” has been overdone, as if such places could only inspire a limited number of stories, recent years have witnessed the continued production of films that both reproduce and challenge dominant images of young people in French banlieues.4 In this chapter, I focus on two acclaimed films, Girlhood5 and Divines,6 that have turned the camera on girls in Parisian banlieues, breaking from a long cinematographic tradition of violent films about young men and offering previously unheard narratives about Black and Brown girlhoods in these unique spaces. DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-7

Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Black and Brown Girlhood

79

Girlhood (Sciamma 2014) (or Bande de Filles, which translates into Girl Gang) tells the story of Marieme (Karidja Touré), a 16-year-old Black girl who joins a girl gang, as she faces abuse by her older brother, neglect by her overworked mother, and rejection from her school. Through her relationships with Lady (Assa Sylla), Adiatou (Lindsay Karamoh), and Fily (Mariétou Touré), Marieme explores alternative ways of being, including different performances of gender norms that challenge the stigma of the banlieue girl, and becomes Vic—a more assertive and independent young woman.7 Divines (Benyamina 2016) follows Dounia (Oulaya Amamra), a Maghrebi girl of a similar age, and Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena), her Senegalese best friend, as they turn from shoplifting to drug dealing for local gang leader Rebecca (Jisca Kalvanda), who drives a fancy car and vacations in Thailand. The girls believe that working for Rebecca will get them one step closer to becoming rich. Dounia lives in what she calls a “Roma camp” along the banlieue’s train tracks with her alcoholic mother and transgender relative. Her anger at her circumstances fuels her determination to make “money, money, money!”, as in the hip-hop song that she regularly sings. Like Marieme, Dounia pushes back against the gender expectations that come with the transition into womanhood through her relationships with her best friend. Both films center on girl or young woman protagonists and their negotiation of gender, race, class, and space as they refuse constrained mobilities and prescribed identities in heavily stigmatized environments, raising questions about the subversive and emancipatory role of friendship. They also distinguish themselves by their female gaze and the unique way they approach male characters from a certain distance. Neither sensational nor romantic, these coming-of-age stories provide poignant and allegedly realistic illustrations of how Black and Brown adolescent girls experience and navigate their banlieue and the violence and suffering that come with racism, misogyny, poverty, and social exclusion. With an intense focus on bodily performances and the interactions between bodies and space rather than on identities, the two films produce cinematic counter-cartographies that seek to challenge the banlieue “story-so-far” and echo notions of “Black fugitivity,” which emphasizes refusal and disengagement as strategic responses in the face of historical and contemporary forced containment of Black people in places such as plantations, prisons, schools, as well as urban ghettos and banlieues.8,9 All films generate maps or geographic stories that have the potential to expand spatial knowledge by allowing the viewer to experience distant and imagined places emotionally and cognitively through the weaving together of moving images.10 Such cinematic cartographies can be transformative. Although the power of cartography is not a new idea to critical geographers, it is finding applications in new areas, particularly in the context of race and gender. For instance, Butler uses the term “Black girl cartographies” to describe a praxis-oriented framework used in education to enable Black girls and Black girl researchers to generate new maps of Black girlhood while simultaneously creating space.11 The project of Black girl cartography, which consists of reflexive and often autoethnographic work of mapping Black girl stories in ways that provoke questions about race, place, and gender, is particularly relevant to the two films in consideration here. In producing

80  Pascale Joassart-Marcelli counter-cartographies, films too can provoke questions and unsettle ways of seeing, thinking, and being. I am particularly interested in how these films go beyond the “stories told so far”—not only for viewers like me who need to hear those stories, but also for girls like Dounia, Maimouna, Rebecca, Marieme, Adiatou, Lady, Fily, and Bébé who rarely see themselves in films. I will focus on three cartographic aspects—locating, navigating, and charting— which Divines and Girlhood illustrate heartrendingly. First, I  will describe how the films help “locate” Black and Brown girlhood in the Parisian banlieue, shedding light on the socio-spatial processes that produce the banlieue and shape the experiences of Marieme, Dounia, and their friends. Second, I will draw attention to how Black and Brown girls in the films actively respond to these circumstances and “navigate” the intersecting constraints of class, race, and gender in that setting, emphasizing their resilience, agency, and creativity. Third, I  will focus on how the main characters of the films “chart” what might be interpreted as “fugitive spaces” for self-knowledge, self-love, and healing through friendship, thereby refusing what is and disengaging with oppressive structures, at least temporarily. I conclude with a discussion of practices of refusal and disengagement and their relationship to the related political notion of resistance as different forms of placebased responses to oppression and suffering. Locating the French Banlieue By most accounts, the banlieue is not part of the city. A short train ride beyond the modern freeways that encircle the core of Paris, it is invisible to most center city residents and visitors who see no reason to venture out to the periphery. Aesthetically, the banlieue stands out by its excess of concrete and sense of social abandonment because of deteriorating modernist tower blocks, treeless playgrounds, aging shopping centers, ramshackle schools, empty parking lots, and unlit passageways that contrast sharply with the sophisticated urban landscape of central Paris with its grand architecture, lively boutiques and cafés, and fashionable white dwellers. Both Divines and Girlhood bask in the gray aesthetic of the banlieue, revealing it as a separate space of containment from which inhabitants have limited mobility and access to Paris. Most of the scenes are filmed in the banlieue, in either decrepit public spaces or cramped private dwellings that provide little escape. Indeed, the films’ protagonists rarely leave their suburb, suggesting that the banlieue is inescapable. When they do, there is an ambivalent sense of both fear and freedom caused by their obvious lack of belonging, which allows the girls to perform new ways of being while simultaneously suggesting fleetingness and even impending doom. For example, in Girlhood, the four-girl gang takes a couple of train trips to Paris, one to shop in the underground mall of Les Halles and the other to hang out and dance at the landmark plaza of the Arche de la Défense. Both scenes not only show the joy and freedom that the girls experience outside the banlieue but also reveal the risk such escapades create as when Marieme is suspected of shoplifting in a clothing store simply because of her blackness or when she abruptly stops dancing to respond to a tense interaction between her younger sister, Bébé, and

Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Black and Brown Girlhood  81

Figure 7.1  Concrete buildings in a Parisian banlieue (Source: Cage à Poules by jakezc, SDSU, Adobe Stock Educational License via SDSU, https://stock. adobe.com/images/cage-a-poules/377296?prev_url=detail)

a white girl. In another powerful scene to which I will return later, the four girls pool their money to spend the night together in a hotel room in a nondescript place somewhere between Paris and its suburbs. It is there, away from the oppression of the banlieue and the exclusion of the city, that they are in their happiest and most carefree state. Yet, this necessitates that they pay a fee to access spaces of consumption, revealing the role of class in limiting young people’s mobility outside of the banlieue. Even though they inevitably reproduce stereotypes, both films seek to challenge our perception of the banlieue and reveal some of the social mechanisms that create it as an enclosed space of racial containment, highlighting sharp racial divisions within French society. In Sciamma and Benyamina’s renditions, the banlieue is primarily inhabited by Black and Maghrebi households from former French colonies who have been concentrated there by housing and other social policies that continue to limit their mobility. For young people of color, a failing education system, a lack of economic opportunities, and heavy surveillance and policing are common forms of state-sanctioned structural racism, which both films address specifically. Both Dounia and Marieme drop out of school early in the first few minutes of each film, revealing the inadequacy of the education system in the banlieue and its inability to engage Black and Brown girls in meaningful ways. For Marieme, leaving school is prompted by the fact that a counselor or teacher (we never actually see this authority figure) refuses her access to the lycée, instead recommending her

82  Pascale Joassart-Marcelli for vocational training. In a long sequence, focused entirely on Marieme’s face and embodied emotions, we hear a female voice telling Marieme why she is unfit for traditional high school. When Marieme tries to argue, the counselor asks: “what is your excuse?”—a question that Marieme refuses to answer perhaps because the many reasons why she finds herself in this situation are much more than an “excuse.” Similarly, Dounia walks out of her classroom after a mock interview exercise designed to prepare her and her female classmates for receptionist jobs, which she rejects as a poverty trap. In one of the most dramatic and masterfully acted scenes in Divines, Dounia takes out her frustration on her teacher who “just wants to help them.” After making fun of the exercise in front of a laughing class by mimicking a smiling and subservient receptionist, Dounia brings her teacher to tears by asking: Help us do what? Become society’s flunkeys? . . . What did you achieve in your fucking life? Look at your face. Look at your clothes. How much do you earn? . . . You shop at Leader Price because you can’t afford Carrefour . . . She’s got nothing! I don’t want to be like you. I don’t want to beg. I have some pride! After this cruel interaction, Dounia never returns to school. Dropping out is a form of disengagement that exposes the limits of an education system that touts upward mobility, personal responsibility, and color-blindness without addressing any of the structural constraints underlying educational disparities. The lack of economic opportunities, particularly for young people, is also clearly depicted in both films. The banlieue lacks avenues to earn income beyond the type of low-wage service work the protagonists’ mothers do or petty crime activities pursued mainly by boys. Meanwhile, better-paying jobs in the city are seemingly out-of-reach, made inaccessible by physical and social barriers. The only lucrative options seem to be stereotypical activities such as drug trafficking or prostitution in service of affluent Parisians. At the beginning of Divines, Dounia and her best friend Maimouna run a very successful stolen candy resale business during school recess, having mastered the art of shoplifting at the local supermarket by getting into the store after hours through a nebulous network of ducts and corridors. The Euro bills that Dounia extracts from her schoolmates are not enough for her; she wants to get rich and live a glamorous life. So she starts doing small jobs for Rebecca, a neighborhood drug dealer whose assertiveness compensates for her presumed gender disadvantage, and eventually turns to central Paris for more lucrative but also dangerous gigs. Similarly, Marieme will look toward Paris as a place where she might earn enough to lead a better life. Yet, neither Dounia nor Marieme will achieve this dream, underscoring the unromantic, gritty, and somewhat fatalistic nature of both films. Police surveillance targeting young people is another social feature of the banlieue—a space which Nicolas Sarkozi infamously described in 2005 as full of “racailles” (scums) and needing to be “cleaned with a Kärcher” (a well-known brand of high-pressure washers), establishing his zero-tolerance approach to the

Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Black and Brown Girlhood  83 “problème des banlieues” and setting himself on the path to becoming French president two years later. Policing is a prominent aspect of Divines, where Dounia’s interaction with the police echoes similar scenes in “banlieue films” such as La Haine12 and common media representations of the ongoing tension between young people and the police in such contexts. Most of these representations center on “bavures”—police’s quick and excessive use of force which leads to young people, typically men, being unjustly arrested, injured, or even killed. Such “bavures” have led to highly mediatized protests, leading to further militarization, while simultaneously justifying a withdrawal from providing basic community safety. This is illustrated in the final scene of Divines when first responders watch a building going up in flames and refuse to rescue Maimouna who is trapped inside, despite Dounia and other community residents’ begging. This callous refusal to serve appears to be a response to previous incidents in which police and emergency responders were attacked by protesting residents commonly depicted in the media as burning cars and throwing Molotov cocktails at the police. Dounia herself had set Rebecca’s runner’s car on fire after she realized the reason he failed to pick her and Maimouna up at a set time and location was that he was having sex with her intoxicated mother in his car. Tragically, by “provoking” the police, Dounia might have contributed to the unwillingness of fire fighters to enter the banlieue and save her best friend’s life. This heartbreaking scene illustrates how intense police surveillance does not make the community safer, but instead serves to reproduce spatial divisions between the banlieue and the rest of the city, affecting not just petty criminals but also all residents. Both films go beyond the racist state structures that constrain the mobility of the main characters and their ability to escape the banlieue to show how the lives of girls are also monitored and controlled by gender norms imposed by their fathers, brothers, and other men in the neighborhood—often in response to their own oppression and exclusion.13 Girlhood in particular highlights the suffering caused by the imposition of gender norms that limit the opportunities of girls. The film opens with an unexpected American football evening game. It is only when they remove their helmets and hug each other after the game that we realize that the players are women. When the lights go off abruptly, they walk off the field and head back toward their housing blocks. Their loud and cheerful talk becomes noticeably quieter until it eventually turns to silence when they walk in front of a group of young men seemingly owning that spot. This silencing illustrates the control that men have over girls’ bodies and daily geographies and the different relationships they have with space.14 Throughout the film, we see how Djibril, Marieme’s brother, polices her mobility by tracking her location by phone, checking her status on social media, and having his friends report on her whereabouts. Djibril, in a context of intense scrutiny and distrust of Black and Brown girls’ sexuality, feels responsible to protect the moral purity of his sisters and turns to physical and emotional violence to do so, indirectly becoming an agent of the state in enforcing patriarchy and heteronormativity and treating the banlieue girls differently. Sciamma and Benyamina offer a feminist perspective on the banlieue by revealing how its spatial dynamics of segregation and entrapment are not just the result of

84  Pascale Joassart-Marcelli social policies that discriminate against immigrants and people of color and punish those who seemingly refuse to assimilate. They are also embedded within gender norms that are reproduced daily. Together these policies and practices make the banlieue an enclosed space, characterized by limited social and physical mobility. Navigating the Everyday Marieme and Dounia are neither adults, nor children; they are girls on the verge of womanhood. They have had to face adult-like responsibilities earlier than most and are indeed often treated like adults, yet they are ill-equipped to claim their independence. As they make the difficult and often rushed transition into adulthood, they must learn to navigate the structural constraints described in the previous section, including an education system that fails them, a lack of employment opportunities, intense surveillance, and oppressive gender norms enforced by the men in their lives.15 Both films focus on how girls bend these gender norms to increase their mobility and escape the banlieue. While traditional banlieue films and popular media accounts either ignore girls or represent them as victims of misogyny and religious extremism, forced to veil and submit to men, Divines and Girlhood portray girls as clever, assertive, and independent. Their agency is shown through their appearances and behavior, which reveal a rejection of social expectations and a willingness to be themselves. Both Dounia and Marieme rely on clothing to bend gender rules and assert their strength and independence, alternating between the feminine and masculine depending on the circumstances. In the banlieue, they wear masculine clothes like baggy pants and hoodies and keep their hair tightly pulled in a ponytail or braids. This signals their desire to be treated like men and affords them the ability to move through the banlieue relatively safely and freely, without attracting the attention of men. In Girlhood, Sciamma shows how hiding their breasts through masculine disguise is a way for girls to stay safe and avoid men’s control. In an early scene, Marieme teases her younger sister Bébé about her developing breasts and playfully tries to lift her shirt to get a better look. The sisters’ joking ends abruptly when their brother Djibril gets home. Marieme quietly asks her sister if he has noticed her breasts already and, when Bébé says no, tells her to keep hiding them in hopes of sparing her sister from Djibril’s oppressive control of her body and behavior and his misogynistic attempt to “protect her reputation.” In another scene toward the end of the film, we learn that Marieme has been binding her breasts. At that point, she has moved out of her neighborhood to work for Abou, a drug dealer, in another banlieue. Looking like a boy is a way to stay under the radar and protect herself from unwanted advances from Abou and the men she works with. At times, however, both Dounia and Marieme adopt more feminine appearances. This is always temporary, purposeful, and happening in their friends’ company outside the banlieue. After Dounia starts working for Rebecca and gains her trust, she learns that one of her former associates, Reda, has stolen a significant

Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Black and Brown Girlhood  85 amount of money from her. They devise a plan in which Dounia would go to a nightclub in Paris to seduce Reda and recover the money from his apartment. With help from Rebecca and Maimouna, she is transformed into a mainstream beauty wearing long straightened hair and a skintight white dress, veering for a moment into a cliché story of feminine metamorphosis before turning to violence. Similarly, Marieme dons a short red dress and a blonde wig to drop off drugs to Abou’s clients at various Parisian parties. In such superficial and commercial settings, unlike in the banlieue, mainstream femininity is an asset that allows them to fit in, at least temporarily. As soon as Marieme finishes her job, however, she changes into her typical masculine clothes before heading back to the banlieue. It is only when she and her friends spend the night together in a suburban hotel room, in the comfort of their blooming friendship away from the stress of the banlieue and the city, that Marieme appears to be comfortable and free in feminine clothes—stolen dresses that still have anti-theft tags hanging. Sciamma and Benyamina also play with gender norms beyond appearances as their protagonists adopt masculine behavior to escape the banlieue. Both Dounia and Marieme follow a similar trajectory of leaving school and getting involved in increasingly more dangerous criminal activities—a path typically reserved for young men, at least in the cinematographic world. Both experience some resistance from their friends who worry that they will get in trouble. At the same time, it is these friendships that give them the resilience and courage to make the leap into these dangerous activities that would presumably allow them to escape their mother’s embarrassing predicament. Making “money, money, money!”, as Dounia describes it, should enable them to get the clothes, the smart phones, and the disposable income needed to access spaces from which they are currently excluded. But to make money, they need to take on male roles.

Figure 7.2  Dounia seems to be obsessed with making money through any means (Source: Screenshot from Benyamina 2016, © Easy Tiger/France 2 Cinéma)

86  Pascale Joassart-Marcelli The fights into which Marieme and her friends get involved provide another illustration of the emboldening effect of friendship in encouraging behavior typically associated with boys. During their first shopping trip to Paris as a gang, Marieme and her three new friends get into an altercation with another small group of girls. They exchange verbal insults and seem to be ready to fight physically, until a subway train physically splits them apart and the girls walk away giggling. A few days later, back in the banlieue, the gang leader, Lady, fights a girl from another group in a pre-arranged confrontation. Surrounded by a crowd, she is humiliated as her opponent pulls off her shirt, leaving her on the ground vulnerable and exposed. Marieme, who until then had appeared gentle and peaceful, promises to avenge Lady and sets up another fight against the same opponent. She claims her victory by cutting off and proudly brandishing the beaten girl’s red bra. This event, captured on cell phones and shared on social media, earns Marieme the only praise she ever receives from her brother, who invites her to play a video game of soccer with him and lets her choose her team instead of shoving her off the sofa as he typically does. This reinforces the idea that behaving like boys may be an effective strategy for girls to gain respect. Dounia and Maimouna’s admiration for Rebecca, the drug dealer for whom they eventually work, is based on her financial success and toughness as a woman. This admiration is established in the film’s first scene when Dounia, who is waiting for Maimouna to get out of the mosque, enviously watches Rebecca through a wired fence as she drives her fancy red convertible car around the neighborhood to supply drugs and pick up money from one of her male runners. Later in the film, the two friends build up the nerve to go to Rebecca’s apartment and ask if they could work for her. An almost naked and very muscular young white man opens the door, before Rebecca sends him inside with a slap on the rear end, reversing traditional gender roles once again and raising the two girls’ admiration for Rebecca as a tough and independent woman. As Rebecca is about to turn them down, Dounia slides her foot in the door and argues that they would make more loyal drug runners than her current male minions who have been slacking off. Rebecca is impressed by the two friends’ guts and tells Dounia: “you’ve got clitoris, I like that”—one of the most iconic phrases of the film that is now repeated by many French girls and provocatively flips around the common phrase “you have got balls.” Not only do Dounia and Marieme behave like boys are assumed to (especially on banlieue films) by engaging into petty crime and violence, their relationships with men are also influenced by a rejection of traditional gender norms. For instance, in both Divines and Girlhood, women often look at men’s bodies in ways typically associated with the male gaze, whether it is Dounia and Maimouna admiring Rebecca’s sex partner’s semi-naked muscular body, Dounia secretly watching a dancer with whom she eventually develops a relationship, or Marieme directing her boyfriend Ismaël through their first sexual intercourse. In fact, each film’s main character rejects the heteronormative assumption that they would marry and be saved by men. After her brother Djibril finds out that Marieme had sex with Ismaël, he grabs her by the neck in a distressing scene, calls her a slut, and shames her for hurting their mother and family, prompting her to take a drug dealing job that

Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Black and Brown Girlhood  87

Figure 7.3 Dounia watches Rebecca drive through the neighborhood in her convertible car with envy (Source: Screenshot from Benyamina 2016, © Easy Tiger/France 2 Cinéma)

enables her to leave her violent home and move into a different neighborhood. Later, when Marieme reconnects with Ismaël, he asks her to move in with him and offers to marry her to save her reputation. It is obvious by the slight smile on her face that this warms Marieme’s heart, but quickly she replies: “I’ll be your little wife at home? And then you’ll make me a kid. That’s what my life is? . . . I can’t.” She refuses to be saved by a man. Dounia also rejects the idea of marriage as a way out. Early in the film, Maimouna asks her if she will ever get married, to which she replies: “are you sick or what?”. Her attitude seems to soften as she develops a relationship with Djigui, a dancer she had secretly observed with Maimouna from their dark hidden perch high up among the ropes, lights, and pulleys above the stage. She even considers leaving town with him and promises to meet him at the train station. However, as she searches for him across the train platforms, she gets a call about Maimouna who is held hostage by Rebecca as ransom for the money that Dounia recovered from Reda and kept for herself, her friend, and her family. When faced with a choice between escaping with Djigui and rescuing her best friend, Dounia does not hesitate, revealing the importance of her friendship. Earlier, Maimouna had told her that she would “always be there to catch [her]” after Dounia confided in her about a recurring dream of falling. Now it was Dounia’s turn to be there for her friend. In short, solidarity and friendship allow the girls to navigate the harsh realities of life in the banlieue. Specifically, it gives them a safety net and enables them to experiment with gender roles, often by adopting masculine appearances and behavior, especially in settings where they feel threatened and controlled by oppressive gender norms.

88  Pascale Joassart-Marcelli Charting Fugitive Spaces Neither film is a romantic fairy tale; they both end sadly and convey the idea that the banlieue sticks to its inhabitants, making any escape from its oppressive circumstances difficult if not impossible to attain. Yet, in both movies, the characters are able to escape these enclosed spaces, at least imaginatively or temporarily, to places where they find joy and freedom. These fugitive moments are among the most powerful scenes of these films, emotionally and cinematographically. In Divines, Dounia and Maimouna are transported to Phuket in Thailand—a place where Rebecca bragged having vacationed—as they wait in an empty parking lot for their first customers, convinced that they are about to get rich. We see them open the doors and step in an imaginary convertible car as Dounia closes her eyes and begins describing their surroundings: “blue sky, turquoise water, sun, Ferrari, my Ferrari.” Dounia starts driving the made-up car with her friend by her side. The camera follows them as they put on imaginary sunglasses and clink pretend glasses of champagne, gliding in this fictional car through the concrete background of their neighborhood. After a few turns, they pick up a make-believe boyfriend and keep coasting with wind in their hair to the sound of the radio and honking cars. The luxury car, turquoise waters, champagne glasses, and sexy boyfriend never materialize, but the sky turns blue as the camera shifts away from the gray buildings and cracked pavement to a wider angle and brighter horizon, giving the impressions that the girls are floating out of the banlieue. The two friends smile and giggle as they imagine themselves in a different place. This scene contrasts sharply with the rest of the film that emphasizes the harsh reality of the banlieue and does not rely on cinematographic tricks to portray surreal experiences. Having stolen lunch money from other girls, Marieme and her friends book a room for the night in a large suburban hotel surrounded by office towers and freeways. They bring alcohol, candies, and drugs to ensure a night of fun. Marieme first appears to be a little hesitant as she watches her new friends eat snacks, drink, smoke, put on makeup, take selfies in stolen clothes, and throw pillows at each other. When she escapes to the bathroom to respond to her brother’s insistent calls about her whereabouts, she finds Lady relaxing in a bubble bath—what we can only assume to be a rare luxury. Lady tells her to shut off her phone and do what she wants, making her repeat after her: “I do what I want.” She then invites Marieme to sit down and hands her a necklace like hers with the name Vic, which she tells her is short for “Victory.” At this moment, Marieme becomes Vic—a more assertive, confident, and feminine version of herself, which not only gives her strength to reject her circumstances but also brings her trouble given the difficulty of escaping the banlieue. When Lady and Vic come back, in the room, the girls start dancing and singing, producing one of the most iconic and debated scenes of the film.16 As Rihanna’s “Diamonds in the sky” begins to play, the camera moves to Lady’s face who is lipsyncing. The room looks like a nightclub and the film begins to feel like a music video. The song continues to play in its entirety and the camera slowly switches to other girls, ending with Vic who joins the group last. Eventually, the camera zooms out showing the group of friends holding each other as they sing and dance before

Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Black and Brown Girlhood  89 falling together on the bed. Here too cinematography is important in distinguishing this scene from others in the film through blue filters and artful lighting that emphasize the girls’ beauty and their embodied performance of girlhood. This scene is all about joy, freedom, and pleasure. Yet “Diamonds in the sky” is a song associated with Rihanna’s experience of domestic violence and her “unapologetic” (which is the title of the album featuring this song) refusal to distance herself from her abusive partner at the time. Perhaps, it was the director’s intention in choosing this pop song to draw attention to the thin line between joy and pain and the difficulty to escape painful circumstances.17 Weeks later, the gang of four spends another night in the same hotel. This time, despite the supply of candies, alcohol, and drugs, the gathering is a lot less joyful. Instead of partying freely, they lament the departure of Vic, who announces her decision to leave her home and go work for Abou. Her friends understand what she tearfully explains as the impossible choice of working as a cleaning lady like her mother and having to forever deal with her reputation as a “whore” for having had sex with Ismaël. The girls hug her and try to comfort her, but the sadness remains. Their disapproval of Vic’s decision to work for Abou suggests that they would not be willing to take the same risks and would likely remain trapped in the banlieue, working underpaid jobs and being controlled by men. These scenes from both films show Black and Brown girls beyond the suffering and oppression of the banlieue where their mobilities are constricted and their own sense of space is denied. It reveals their dreams and visions of better lives, which they can temporarily enact. This echoes McKittrick’s notion of Black geographies, which are difficult to map and evince traditional cartography. Referring to the plantation, she argues: a black sense of place is not a steady, focused, and homogeneous way of seeing and being in place, but rather a set of changing and differential perspectives that are illustrative of, and therefore remark upon, legacies of normalized racial violence that calcify, but do not guarantee, the denigration of black geographies and their inhabitants.18 Similarly, the banlieue has been mapped into categories that emphasize oppression, yet other cartographies are possible and may be revealed through embodied practices, such as Marieme and Dounia’s fugitive moments, that help create a Black/ Brown sense of place, where girls can just be themselves—their whole selves— without the disciplining of others. These fugitive moments do not free the girls from containment but create new spaces within enclosed spaces. Conclusion Divines and Girlhood have been praised by critics for creating protagonists who have been left out of mainstream cinema. As such, it may be argued that they represent a large and growing segment of the French population.19 Through excellent casting and directing, we are presented with complex and beautiful characters that

90  Pascale Joassart-Marcelli defy stereotypes. While skin color is of inescapable significance in both films, they succeed in going beyond race and showing us girls navigating the transition from girlhood to adulthood. These two films also take us to new places. Divines and Girlhood introduce us to parts of the banlieue we have not seen on film: the places that Black and Brown girls attempt to make their own by refusing to be constrained by their circumstances and controlled by men, bending gender norms, building powerful friendships with other girls, and dreaming of a better life. They show us the football fields, parking lots, stairwells, hotel rooms, and mundane spaces that the main characters inhabit and transform through relationships and everyday activities. These are countercartographies that challenge stereotypes and map a different story than the one which has been told so far. One could debate whether these counter-cartographies illustrate or enable forms of resistance. Being a middle-aged white academic who grew up far from the French banlieue, I am not in a good position to judge the liberatory power that these films might have on Brown and Black French girls who may recognize themselves on the screen. Similarly, it is difficult to assess whether the fugitive geographies created by Marieme, Dounia, and their friends amount to resistance, resilience, refusal, defiance, withdrawal, or another type of response. Although critical researchers have been quick to equate non-normative behavior with resistance, such attributions may signal a superficial, almost romantic and voyeuristic, perspective that essentializes and exoticizes the practices of others.20 As the two films analyzed here suggest, escaping the structural constraints of the banlieue is difficult, if not impossible. Yet, people navigate these constraints differently. The notion of fugitive geographies emphasizes how people under oppressive and exploitative circumstances create ephemeral places that engender joy, pleasure, healing, and self-love. These counter-cartographies do not necessarily provide remedies, enhance oppositional consciousness, nor lead to emancipatory change, as implied in the concept of resistance. Instead, they enable Black and Brown girls to be “ordinary”—dress up, sing, laugh, dance, fall in love, and dream like most teenagers—and not be defined entirely by their circumstances.21 I interpret this quest for ordinariness as a form of refusal that showcases agency within the enclosed space of the banlieue. Notes 1 van de Wetering, “Stigmatization”; Wacquant, “Social Outcasts” 2 It is worth contrasting this assertion with Beazley and Warisno’s note that street kids in Indonesia are often thought of as perpetrators of crime and violence when that was almost always far from the truth (Chapter 5). Warisno goes on to note that he was accused of theft by the film’s main actress when he had nothing to do with it and, in fact, lived in a different city at the time of the crime (see his Monologue toward the end of Chapter 5). 3 Contrast this with Lo Presti’s filmic story about Roma Girlhood in Italy (Chapter 4). 4 Vincendeau, “The Parisian Banlieue”; Vogt, “Divine Girlhood” 5 Sciamma, Girlhood 6 Benyamina, Divines 7 Again, it is worth comparing this to Lo Presti’s (Chapter 4) arguments about ‘becoming adult’ for young Roma Girls in Italy. 8 Sojoyner, “Another Life Is Possible”; Reynolds, Ain’t Nobody Checkin’ for Us

Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Black and Brown Girlhood  91 9 It is disconcerting to consider how little the plight of young people has remained the same when comparing this story to the historical story of Smith’s documentary in Murnaghan and McCreary’s Chapter 9. 10 Castro, “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse”; Roberts, “Cinematic Cartography” 11 Butler, “Black Girl Cartography” 12 Kassovitz, La Haine 13 Mouflard, “Il ya des règles” 14 This relates strongly to Tyner’s assertion of state-control over young girls’ bodies and daily Geographies (Chapter 6). 15 Compare with Lo Presti (Chapter 4). 16 Pember, “Visions of Ecstasy” 17 This resonates with Aitken’s description of the ways Tomm Moore does not sidestep the harsh realities of medieval life for children in his animated classic (Chapter 10). 18 McKittrick, “On Plantations,” 950 19 This is true also of the Italian/Roma characters in Lo Presti’s story (Chapter 5) 20 Katz, Growing up Global 21 Taylor, Black Is Beautiful

Bibliography Benyamina, Houda. Divines. Paris, France: Easy Tiger/France 2 Cinéma Production, 2016. Butler, Tamara T. “Black Girl Cartography: Black Girlhood and Place-Making in Education Research.” Review of Research in Education 42, no. 1 (2018): 28–45. Castro, Teresa. “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture.”  The Cartographic Journal 46, no. 1 (2009): 9–15. Kassovitz, Mathieu. La Haine. Paris, France: Productions Lazennec, 1995. Katz, Cindy. Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. McKittrick, Katherine. “On Plantations, Prisons and a Black Sense of Place.” Social and Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (2011): 947–963. Mouflard, Claire. “ ‘Il y a des règles:’ Gender, Surveillance, and Circulation in Céline Sciamma’s Bande de Filles.” Women in French Studies 24, no. 1 (2016): 113–126. Pember, Alice. “ ‘Visions of Ecstasy’: Resilience and Melancholy in the Musical Moments of Bande de Filles (Céline Sciamma, 2014).” French Screen Studies 20, nos. 3–4 (2020): 298–316. Reynolds, Aja. “Ain’t Nobody Checkin’ for Us”: Race, Fugitivity and the Urban Geographies of Black Girlhood. PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2019. Roberts, Les. “Cinematic Cartography: Projecting Place through Film.” In Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, and Performance, edited by Les Roberts, 68–84. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Sciamma, Céline. Girlhood. Paris, France: Hold Up Films, 2014. Sojoyner, Damien M. “Another Life Is Possible: Black Fugitivity and Enclosed Places.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4 (2017): 514–536. Taylor, Paul C. Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. van de Wetering, Simone A.L. “Stigmatization and the Social Construction of a Normal Identity in the Parisian Banlieues.” Geoforum 116 (2020): 303–312. Vincendeau, Ginette. “The Parisian Banlieue on Screen: So Close, Yet So Far.” In Paris in the Cinema: Beyond the Flâneur, edited by Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vindendeau, 87–99. London: BFI Palgrave, 2018. Vogt, Naomi. “Divine Girlhood: Filming Young Women in France’s Banlieues.” Cineaste (2017): 38–42. Wacquant, Loic J. “Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17, no. 3 (1993): 366–383.

8

Toward a Deterritorialized Nomadism The Transversal Role of Children in Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) and Life and Nothing More . . . (1992) Colin Gardner and James Craine

Although the internationally acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made his reputation on the film festival circuit with critically acclaimed films such as CloseUp (1990) and A Taste of Cherry (1997), he began his career in the pre-revolutionary era making children’s education films for the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kānun-e parvaresh-e fekti-e kudakān va nowjavānān), founded by the Shahbanu [Farah Pahlavi] in 1969.1 Although Kiarostami’s films during this period—most notably The Bread and Alley (1970), Two Solutions for One Problem (1975), and Homework (1989)—were sympathetic to the plight of schoolchildren under the repressive regimes of both the Shah and the Ayatollah, the instructional shorts tended to avoid state censorship by accepting the status quo and finding behavioral solutions within the pre-existing educational and family systems. It was only in his semi-documentary features such as Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) and Life and Nothing More. . . —the first two films in the so-called ‘Koker trilogy’ (labeled as such because of their common location)—that Kiarostami utilized the role of children as a dynamic spatial and temporal vector that transformed established social and ideological hierarchies through a radically restorative psycho-geography.2 Thus, in Where Is the Friend’s House? a young-grade schooler (Ahmad), who lives in the remote Northern Iranian village of Koker in Gilan Province, accidentally takes home his friend Mohammad Reza’s notebook, thereby preventing the latter from completing his homework, which, after a number of similar lapses and reprimands from the teacher, will almost certainly lead to his expulsion.3 A greatly disturbed Ahmad disobeys his mother’s orders to stay home and do his own homework and instead sets off in search of his friend’s house in the neighboring village of Poshteh, triggering a number of distractions, false leads, and new encounters in the process. Unable to find the house after two excursions he generously completes Mohammad Reza’s homework and the next day surreptitiously slips it across the desk to his relieved friend. Mohammad Reza is eventually praised by the authoritarian teacher for finally following the rules. Life and Nothing More . . . expands on the story by tracing the journey of the first film’s director and his son Puya (fictionalized versions of Kiarostami and his DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-8

Toward a Deterritorialized Nomadism  93 own son) as they seek to find the two child actors three days after the June 21st, 1990, Manjil–Rudbar earthquake which destroyed the villages of Koker and Poshteh where Where Is the Friend’s House? was shot. Although “Ahmad” and “Mohammad Reza” are never found (Kiarostami is less interested in outcomes and narrative goals than in affectively celebrating the creative process), the film takes advantage of the search to establish a non-linear, zig-zagging trajectory that unites the community into a creative transversality, symbolized by their shared passion for football (the earthquake occurred on the day of the Brazil-Scotland World Cup ‘Group C’ match in Turin, Italy) which Kiarostami uses to express the villagers’ ability to carry on with life in the face of death and destruction. As a TV relay technician tells the director, “I’m in mourning too. I lost my little sister and three nieces and nephews. But what can we do? The World Cup comes once every four years, and life goes on.” The director laughs: “And an earthquake is once every 40 years.” The technician says: “It’s all in the Lord’s hands.” Kiarostami later recalled: At a screening of this film, they asked me how I knew I was going to make a film on the subject just three days after the earthquake had taken place. They didn’t realize that I had one year in which to find my insight, before coming back and reconstructing everything.4 Exploiting this emotional distance from the tragedy, Kiarostami realized that though we went to the location to see death, what we found was life. Death had no real value there. We could see the survivors, not the people lost in the rubble. The reflection of life was much stronger than the reflection of death. This is the view I came to by distanciation, by leaving one year’s distance between the day of the earthquake and the shooting. This is what I think stops audiences and film-makers from becoming too emotionally engaged. It is this affirmation of life that the children in both films express through the agency of transversality on their deterritorializing journeys of personal transformation, which also serve to re-map the literal and emotional landscape for the audience as a whole: a form of cinematic nomadism. So what is transversality and why is it relevant to the two films under discussion? As Ronald Bogue describes the phenomenon in Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics: The transverse way is the path in between, the diagonal across the grids of horizontal and vertical coordinates, the zigzag of a line of continuous variation. Its time is that of the entre-temps, the meantime or meanwhile, and its space is the middle, in medias res, always underway among things. The transverse way connects by affirming differences, constructing transversals that set the incommunicable in communication. Its transversals are agents of

94  Colin Gardner and James Craine transversality, forces with the social and political function of bringing forth group subjects and inventing a people to come.5 In Kiarostami’s films, it is the children who act as the catalyst for such a transversality, breaking down the rigid coordinates and patriarchal hierarchies of education, culture, and geography to create a process of poetic and ethical becoming that, as we shall see, lays the foundation for a transformative aesthetics based on Nietzsche’s ‘creative lie.’6 The children’s struggle against prevailing patriarchal forces is all the more demanding in Where Is the Friend’s House? because of the film’s rigid symmetrical structure that centers on a particularly brutal conversation. As Majid Eslami points out, the film is divided into seven sequences, with 1 and 7 taking place in the classroom, 2 and 6 at Ahmad’s home, 3 and 5 showcasing his journeys in Poshteh, with the pivotal scene 4 taking place in a local tea house or shaikhane in Koker (where Ahmad is largely absent). The outer scenes are all marked by endless repetition of unremitting orders and rigid demands.7 The teacher (Khodabakhsh Defai) berates Mohammad Reza (Ahmad Ahmadpur) for failing to do his homework in his notebook and insists that rules should only have to be stated and understood once, yet he repeats himself endlessly. Similarly, Ahmad’s mother (Iran Otari) constantly berates her son (Babak Ahmadpur) not to go to Poshteh and to do his own homework while also ordering him to help feed, clothe, and rock the baby. We also notice that Ahmad has to remove his shoes every time he enters the house. Perhaps the key expression of post-revolutionary rigidity is the pivotal scene in the tea house where Ahmad’s grandfather (Rafia Difai) sends Ahmad off to fetch his cigarettes and then tells his friend, Ali Djamali, a long (also highly repetitive) story about how those who act upon hearing something once are invariably competent and efficient and, in the work force, much better paid compared to those who need constant reminders. However, there is also a much darker side to his diatribe that makes Ahmad’s resistance all the more essential. We want the kid to be brought up properly. When I was a kid my dad would give me a penny every week and a beating every other week. He might sometimes forget my pocket money, but he’d never forget to give me a beating so that I’d be brought up properly. You saw how my grandson stood here, and I had to repeat myself three times. He wouldn’t listen. Then, of course, he unnecessarily repeats himself to Ali: “We want him brought up properly. If he grows up lazy, he’s of no use to society.”8 Ahmad’s transverse reactions to these oppressive strictures are represented pictorially both within the mise-en-scène and through his meeting with an extremely understanding carpenter (Mohamed Hocine Rouhi)—the only person he meets in Poshteh who goes out of his way to help him. The pictorial representation is, as one might expect, the zig-zag path up a hillside that Ahmad takes on his journey from Koker to Poshteh. It is shown four times during the course of the film, with instrumental folk music on the soundtrack for the uphill, outward-bound trek, as if

Toward a Deterritorialized Nomadism  95 to link the vertical thrust of the journey to the creative cultural and psychological transformation of both Ahmad and the neighboring villages. It’s important to note that Kiarostami artificially constructed the path especially for all three films in the “Koker Trilogy” and also added a solitary tree at the top of the hill, a “symbol of friendship in Persian literature, according to Kiarostami’s own explanation.”9 The transverse impact of the path and the tree could thus be seen as an expansion of Ahmad’s friendship and concern for Mohammad Reza to the community as a whole. The spatialities of Ahmad’s journeys in these two Kiarostami Koker films suggest how sensory experiences such as visual image (the tree), sound (the instrumental folk music), and movement (the journeys) interact in the affective mapping of the brain. They also suggest that, in domains where direct intellectual reconfiguration is insufficient, an ensemble of techniques or tactics applied to regions below direct intellectual control can sometimes reorganize predispositions to perceptions, feelings, and judgments. Kiarostami uses the film-as-document recording of voices and the presence of characters within these spatialities to infiltrate into patterns of thinking and identity but, for these two parts of the Koker Trilogy, they invite attention to the interplay of image, movement, sound, and rhythm in the films we consume. So Kiarostami communicates affective energies to the viewer, some of which pass below intellectual attention while still influencing emotions, judgments, and actions. We can therefore argue that Kiarostami moves beyond purely intellectualist models of thinking and culture and views Ahmad’s movements through space as augmenting a perspective that appreciates the dense interweaving of image, movement, sound, and rhythm through the transversal manipulation of space, time, and sound. Kiarostami’s sensorial dimension of Ahmad’s body comprises far more than the passive correlate of linkages between images and, indeed, serves to accord the body’s creative capacities—what we can theorize as the potential to broker qualitative difference. If we start from an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation, Ahmad’s slightest, most literal displacement creates a qualitative difference, because as directly as it conducts itself it affects a feeling, and feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably. When the body’s sensorial process opens it to its own indeterminacy, it is directly responsible for the body’s constitutive excess over itself. In this respect, Ahmad’s motion functions as the concrete trigger of affection as an active modality of bodily action. This is Kiarostami/Ahmad’s “affectivity”: the capacity of the body to experience itself as ‘more than itself’ and thus to deploy its sensorial power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new, particularly through the use of a transversal non-linear zig-zagging trajectory. Active affection or affectivity is precisely what differentiates Ahmad’s body from others in the two films: Ahmad has a capacity to experience his own intensity, and his own margin of indeterminacy. This transversality affectivity comprises a power of the body that cannot be assimilated to the normalized habit-driven, associational logic governing the perceptions of the viewer.

96  Colin Gardner and James Craine Gilles Deleuze provides a central paradigm for Kiarostami’s visual construction in that the image finds perfect instantiation in the cinema through the use of an interval (a ‘cut’ between shots, or the ‘movement-image’ in Cinema 1 and the ‘time-image’ in Cinema 2) that introduces a gap between the action and the reaction.10 Kiarostami’s use of transversality is perfectly homologous with that of Ahmad as a center of indetermination: the process of transversality, via Ahmad, isolates certain aspects of images to generate perception. Here, affection, the capacity of Ahmad (the proxy for Kiarostami) to experience himself as more than himself, is a specific permutation of the movement-image. Via transversality, affection as a phenomenological modality of bodily life gives way to affection as a concrete type of image that is defined exclusively by the protracted interruption of the sensorimotor circuit, the interruption, that is, of the form of the movement-image. This, as Deleuze postulated, carries out the progressive disembodying of the center of indetermination. Kiarostami’s transversality does not subordinate time to movement in space—it presents time directly and can thus be understood to divorce perception entirely from human embodiment. The notion of the interval comes from Henri Bergson, who uses it to describe the separation of a sensation from a motor response and thus the degree of indetermination of a perceptual center.11 Deleuze appropriates Bergson’s concept and correlates the interval with the movement-image, and, specifically, with the affection-image, in which affection occupies the gap separating sensation and motor action. The interval as transversal offers an alternative understanding of the correlation of Bergson’s center of indetermination with cinema. It was Bergson’s belief that there is no perception without affection, and Kiarostami’s ‘paths’ suggest that affection does not simply fill the sensorimotor interval of the movement-image but in fact constitutes its own interval. Pierre Lévy moves visual theory beyond Deleuze’s formal understanding of cinematic framing and into a contemporary neuroscience, thus enabling the transversality of Ahmad’s journeys to bring affectivity to the forefront of the two films—there is now much more than a passive correlate of linkages between images—the body now has a creative capacity.12 We make the connection between movement and sensation to the point that Ahmad’s slightest, most literal displacement convokes a qualitative difference—motion thus triggers affection as an active modality of bodily action. Within Kiarostami’s frame, affectivity comprises a power of the body, via Ahmad, that cannot be assimilated to the habit-driven, associational logic governing normalized perception. Ahmad’s problematic knot of tensions throughout the two films, his spatial constraints, the ‘paths’ that animate him, and the questions that move him forward are an essential part of his, and Kiarostami’s, determination. The actualization, then, of the visual dimensions of the two films creates new sets of meaning through this form of transverse affectivity. For Lévy, Actualization thus appears as the solution to a problem, a solution not previously contained in its formulation. It is the creation, the invention of a form on the basis of a dynamic configuration of forces and finalities.

Toward a Deterritorialized Nomadism  97 Actualization involves more than simply assigning reality to a possible or selecting from a predetermined range of choices. It implies the production of new qualities, a transformation of ideas, a true becoming that . . . carries with it a change that the viewer also sets in motion by a dynamic arrangement of tropisms and constraints—actualizes in a(n) inventive way. The real resembles the possible.13 Lévy sees us as becoming the center of embodied activity. A strict adherence to a central cinematic framing device is no longer needed to experience our own intensity, to create our own margin of indeterminacy—within Levy’s response of the actual’s response to the film image, affectivity comprises a power of the body that no longer is governed by concepts of habit-driven, associational logic governing perception. We can now experience Ahmad’s movement as no longer simply a way of being but as something fluid and dynamic. Let us apply this transversality dialectic to Kiarostami in this manner: by confronting and then engaging Ahmad’s movement through space and time we encounter the autonomous self in itself as a radical and unsettling challenge to our embodied understanding, our very capacity to make meaning out of the information of each scene. Because of the context of our encounter—our knowledge that we are in contact with Ahmad (and, again, the proxy for Kiarostami)—there is no pay-off in our affirming his autonomy (its transcendent detachment from any body to which it might belong); rather, this is a ‘becoming’, and actualization, that confronts us as ‘originally’ autonomous, as originally without any connection with the body and the logic of embodiment. As a result, our attention can and must focus on the relation of this autonomous visualization with our embodiment, such that what happens in the latter—that is, in and as the process whereby we transform visual information into meaning. This connection to a body (Ahmad) thus defines the films in a purely unique specificity. Without any information being exchanged, we undergo self-transformation that itself comprises the content of the film as information, which is to say, as information that can be necessarily meaningful for the viewer. The meanings contained within the spaces of the films are made real through the affective process in order to be freed to signify to and in conjunction with another body—the body of the viewer.14 Because movement is part of the everyday experience of life, Ahmad’s movement through space and time increases our sense of objective reality.15 The unreality of the narrative and the carefully constructed space contained in each scene allow for the laws of nature to be suspended: space is distorted, our cognitive mapping process breaks down, and our attempt to reconstruct space creates a discomfiting reality. A  key scene in Where Is the Friend’s House? takes place at night and Kiarostami, using a semi-documentary style, transforms the dark into a shadowy, disconcerting landscape. The darkness engulfs the world, obscuring the landscape in an array of shadows that disrupt the clarity of the screen and swallow up Ahmad zig-zagging through these dream-like spaces. Ahmad’s coherent space is now rendered confused and chaotic. Ahmad walks through the night, the seeming confidence of his forward motion contrasted with the undoing of this confident

98  Colin Gardner and James Craine progress by Kiarostami’s use of shadows and light. This displacement produced by the almost cubist fragmenting of the frame into several planes creates a space so artificially and explicitly constructed so as make the scene blatantly obvious in its attempt to intrude upon our standards of reality.16 In other words, in the construction of Ahmad as a dynamic, actualized self, the mind attempts to engage the worlds behind appearances. These worlds are in motion through cinematic timespace and are highly transformative, without (at least in the case of Where Is the Friend’s House?) attributable frames of reference, without material bodies or finite borders (just representations of bodies and borders), in constant flux, linking experiential and phenomenological past to future and affective memory to prediction. The viewer reconstructs their self while moving through Kiarostami’s internal, affective space. Again, there is no perception without affection. In these two films, there is a connection between movement and sensation to the point that the slightest, most literal displacement invokes a qualitative difference: motion triggers affection as an active modality of bodily action—this information, the transversality of Kiarostami’s cinematic space, can indeed be perceived as an affective process of becoming: the passage from the frame to the actual. It’s hardly surprising then that the exact same zig-zag path reappears in Life and Nothing More . . ., only this time it is a young man and not a child who ascends the path as he makes the journey to Poshteh, as if the natural disaster has spurred the local population to more improvisational solutions. More importantly, Kiarostami repeats the image at the very end of the film when the director (played by Kiarostami’s friend Farhad Kheradmand), having dropped off his son Puya (Buba Bayour) at a local village to watch the Brazil-Germany World Cup match on TV drives toward Koker to catch up with the two missing boys who have been spotted on the road carrying an oil heater. On the way he passes a potential hitchhiker but doesn’t offer him a lift. Then his car stalls on a steep incline with yet another zig-zag curve at the top. Suddenly we see two boys on the horizon—is it them? Fortunately, the man comes into view and helps to give the car a push-start before continuing up the rise. The director drives off to the right as if returning to pick up Puya but then reappears just in time to give the man a lift at the top of the hill. Kiarostami’s message here seems clear—the transverse connotations of the zig-zag from the earlier film have now taken on universal proportions of camaraderie, cooperation, and mutual help in promoting life at all costs. Catching up with the two boys is no longer important (we will meet them alive and well in the third part of the ‘trilogy’: Through the Olive Trees): they are now extras in a much larger scenario. The sequence with the carpenter takes place at night during Ahmad’s second visit to Poshteh and it is the most dream-like sequence in the film, exacerbated by the shimmering chiaroscuro of the houses’ lighted windows and doors as the carpenter shows Ahmad his talents as a skilled woodworker (a fading art as all the latest windows are made from metal). As Godfrey Cheshire points out, “Kiarostami’s portrayal of the kindly gent is wry and realistic, yet it must be recognized that as soon as darkness begins to fall, the story effectively switches from day-consciousness to night-consciousness, the realm of fables, dreams, and allegories.”17

Toward a Deterritorialized Nomadism  99 Perhaps the most important symbol of this encounter is a flower that the old man places in Mohammad Reza’s notebook, which turns out to be the closing image of the film as the teacher grades the homework assignment in close-up. According to Alberto Elena, the flower is “a symbol of innocence and altruism in the Persian poetic tradition,” showing that Ahmad has not only been enriched by the carpenter’s teachings but also that traditional wisdom has to be renewed and revitalized by every new generation in order to transcend the paralysis of the current theocracy.18 Of course it’s clear that Kiarostami also sees this as the role of contemporary cinema and as one might expect the carpenter’s alliance with the transverse role of children doesn’t stop here because he reappears in Life and Nothing More in the form of the actor who plays him: Mohamed Hocine Rouhi. As the film director and his son Puya drive in search of the two boys from the first film, encountering endless traffic jams, road blocks, closed highways, detours, and devastated villages, we quickly notice that it is Puya rather than his father who comes into close personal contact with the victims of the earthquake. “To me,” notes Kiarostami, the real guide on that trip was the kid, not the father, although the father has the steering wheel. In Eastern philosophy, we have this belief that you don’t ever set foot in unknown territory without having a guide. The kid here was acting more rationally, and the father was not rational. The kid has accepted the instability and the illogic of the earthquake, and he is just living on.19 Faced with death and heartbreak, Puya’s focus is exclusively on life. And nothing more! Not surprisingly, Puya learns this approach from Mr. Rouhi, who they pick up from the side of the road as he makes his way to his temporary lodgings. It’s Puya who asks him a key, creative question: “In Where Is the Friend’s House?, why were you older and humpbacked?” Mr. Rouhi: “Those people . . . put that hump on me. And they told me, ‘You have to look older.’ I said, ‘Fine, whatever you say.’ But I didn’t like it. It didn’t sit right with me. I don’t know what kind of art it is that makes people look older and uglier than they are. Art is making people look a little younger. Making the young look older isn’t art.” He then extends this argument for art as an affirmative creative lie to an advocacy of life itself: Mr. Rouhi: “No one appreciates youth until they grow old or life until they stare death in the face. If the dead could come back and live again they’d surely live better lives.” Note how it’s Puya who triggers the transverse conversation and car ride that follows, where art is about returning us to youth and vitality (and Brechtian

100  Colin Gardner and James Craine distanciation: a script girl has to enter the shot to help a bewildered Mr. Rouhi find a flagon of water on his balcony), not to agism and fake realism. This is not far from Nietzsche’s concept of an ‘untimely’ genealogy geared toward an affirmative, ever-changing ‘living thing’ rather than a predetermined teleological historicism. As Nietzsche describes the tragic hero (or in our case, the transversely driven child), “He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity.”20 Notes 1 In this book, Kiarostami Joins Smith and Obomsawin (Chapter 9) as directors of educational documentaries, so it is worth comparing his treatment of children in film with what comes in the next chapter (Murnaghan and McCreary). 2 The final film in the Koker Trilogy, Through the Olive Trees (1994), which features an off-screen relationship between two of the actors in Life and Nothing More . . ., does not focus on the role of children so is outside the scope of this chapter. 3 There is an important connection here to what Seitz (Chapter 12) discusses about Jake helping Nog with an essay in a classroom context not too dissimilar to this. 4 Hamid (1997), ‘Near and Far,’ Sight and Sound, Vol. 7, No. 2 (February), pp. 22–24. 5 Bogue (2007), Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. Aldershot, UK & Burlington VT: Ashgate, p. 5. 6 The idea of transversality plays out in other chapters, and perhaps most directly with Aitken’s (Chapter 10) discussion of how Brendan’s fight with the Worm/Snake Monster Crom takes place in Zig-Zags and with a lot of repetition (see also Chapter 9 for repetition contexts). 7 Repetitions and rigid demands as part of the relations between children and adults show up also in chapters 2, 9, 10 and 11, although Bosco’s Chapter (2) highlights the more positive side of repetition and circles. 8 A clear connection here to marginalized young women elaborated by Joassart-Marcelli (Chapter 7). 9 In the Chapter by Aitken (Chapter 10) the symbol of the flower shows up at the end of the Zig-Zag and represents Brendan’s enduring friendship with the forest sprite, Aisling. 10 Deleuze 1986), Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Deleuze (1989), Cinema 2 The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 11 Bergson (1991), Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul & W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books; Bergson (1998), Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover. 12 Lévy (1997), Collective Intelligence: Toward an Anthropology of Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno. New York: Plenum Trade; Lévy (1998), Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, trans. Robert Bononno. New York: Plenum Trade. 13 Lévy (1998), Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, trans. Robert Bononno. New York: Plenum Trade, p. 25. 14 Compare this to the way girl’s embodiment in Joassart-Marcelli’s Chapter (7), and particularly the dancing scene in the Hotel Room. 15 Metz (1974) Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 16 It is worth noting that in Chapter 10 (Aitken), filmmaker Tomm Moore uses 3D animation in a movie that is otherwise drawn and rendered in 2D to effect transformation and change in Brendan’s otherworldly (and Cubist) battle with Crom.

Toward a Deterritorialized Nomadism  101 17 Cheshire (2019), ‘Journeys of the Heart: Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy,’ Criterion Collection DVD Booklet, pp. 8–26, p. 13. 18 Elena (2005), The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, trans. Belinda Coombes. London: SAQI and Iran Heritage Foundation, p. 71. 19 Elena (2005), The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, trans. Belinda Coombes. London: SAQI and Iran Heritage Foundation. 20 Nietzsche (1967), The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, p. 37.

Bibliography Bergson, Henri (1991), Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul & W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books. Bergson, Henri (1998), Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover. Bogue, Ronald (2007), Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate. Cheshire, Godfrey (2019), ‘Journeys of the Heart: Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy,’ Criterion Collection DVD Booklet, pp. 8–26. Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2 The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elena, Alberto (2005), The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, trans. Belinda Coombes. London: SAQI and Iran Heritage Foundation. Hamid, Nassia (1997), ‘Near and Far,’ Sight and Sound, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 22–24. Lévy, Pierre (1997), Collective Intelligence: Toward an Anthropology of Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno. New York: Plenum Trade. Lévy, Pierre (1998), Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, trans. Robert Bononno. New York: Plenum Trade. Metz, Christian (1974) Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967), The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.

9

Indigenous Children in Canadian Cinema Ethnographic Explorations and National Narratives in the Early Films of Harlan Ingersoll Smith and Alanis Obomsawin Ann Marie Murnaghan and Tyler McCreary

Introduction Canadian documentary film has long included Indigenous children in its oeuvre; however their representations have shifted depending on the auteurs and their purpose. In this chapter, we explore how Carrier1 and Cree children have been represented in Canadian cinema through the lenses of two important documentarians, Harlan Ingersoll Smith and Alanis Obomsawin. Comparing these two directors separated by a half century, gender, training, and a gulf of cultural experience, we argue that these filmmakers and their respective initial films illustrate the challenge of a simple understanding of children in documentary films, pushing us to examine how contemporary films for children can incorporate their teachings. The chapter begins with some context of Canadian colonialism, and its relation to film and children’s education. After discussing the positionality of both filmmakers, we conduct close readings of the films The Carrier Indians of British Columbia,2 by Smith, and Christmas at Moose Factory,3 by Obomsawin, in order to show how Obomsawin’s path-breaking, culturally informed tale transcends the simple documentary mode. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how considering children as both a cinematic subject and audience in different ways impacted the ways that these filmmakers told their stories. Canadian Cinema in the Context of Colonialism In the early 20th century, Canadian ethnographers sought to collect information on Indigenous traditions as government policy sought to systematically eradicate these same traditions. In the period, ethnographers regularly approached work with Indigenous communities through the lens of salvage ethnography.4 Assuming that Indigenous peoples constituted a “vanishing race,” ethnographers sought to create a record of cultures that they expected to soon disappear. This documentary project built upon the racist assumption that Indigenous peoples represented an earlier stage of human development that would be effaced a by more advanced white settler society.5 As Peter Kulchyski argues, salvage ethnography paired with DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-9

Indigenous Children in Canadian Cinema  103 the colonial project of assimilating Indigenous peoples, allowing for the preservation of Indigenous traditions in documentary records while these traditions were eradicated from Indigenous populations.6 Alongside work in salvage ethnography, the Canadian government in the period supported policies aimed at the destruction of Indigenous peoples as a distinct cultural and political group. The Indian residential school system in particular sought to transform Indigenous lifeways, taking children from the care of their families and the rhythms of life on the land and placing them under the care of church-run schools that aimed to instil settler Canadian values.7 In the post-war period, the Canadian government began to eliminate explicitly not only racially discriminatory policies, but also all recognition of the distinct status of Indigenous peoples. This policy was explicitly articulated in the 1969 White Paper, in which the Canadian government proposed the complete elimination of the distinct status of “Indian” peoples.8 Indigenous peoples contested these policy initiatives. Challenging policies that aimed to erase their position as the original nations of the continent, Indigenous peoples began a cultural and political resurgence. They demanded recognition of their distinct political status as Indigenous peoples with inherent rights to self-determination.9 They asserted the right to both control the education of their children and maintain connections to their traditional territories. A florescence of Indigenous cultural production, from a resurgence of traditional carving to the emergence of Indigenous filmmaking, led to a profusion of counter narratives espousing discourses of Indigenous sovereignty.10 Early 20th-century ethnographic and educational films on Indigenous peoples were typically presented as a record of vanishing Indigenous cultures or “races.”11 In these films, the camera lens functions as the floating eye of an invisible observer that simply and objectively captures events. This effects what Mary Louise Pratt calls the scientific anti-conquest, establishing a purportedly non-interventionist colonial presence that is capable of apprehending and possessing Indigenous peoples through an authoritative scientific gaze.12 As Alison Griffiths argues, the early ethnographic films were the companion pieces to the Westerns of the nickelodeons, which celebrated the heroic adventures of white men amidst the Indians on the frontiers.13 Early educational films drew upon both these genres, positioning ethnographic research within expository narratives about the nature of Indigenous cultures. Being consistent across all these genres in the period was the presumed superiority of white culture over that of Indigenous peoples. Beginning in the 1970s, Indigenous filmmakers began to counter the dominant depictions of Indigenous peoples, developing their own sovereign cinematic voice.14 Indigenous filmmakers like Willie Dunn, Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell, Duke Redbird, and Ernest Benedict sought to portray Indigenous communities from the lens of Indigenous nationhood, working to counter, and occasionally satirize, the existing stereotypical depictions. The emergence of Indigenous films in Canada was bolstered by the creation of the Indian Film Crew, and the 1991 introduction of Studio One, a studio inside the National Film Board which sought to bring forward the stories of First Peoples.15 Contemporary Indigenous films show cultural traditions as vital as opposed to vanishing.16 They challenge the valorization of

104  Ann Marie Murnaghan and Tyler McCreary settlement and conquest normative within the frames of both Western and ethnographic film. Integrating children’s cultural production in adult artistic worlds has a strong lineage and entwines with the history of educational film. This extends from Alfred Stieglitz’s renowned 1912 showing of children’s drawings in his gallery in New York,17 to Walter Benjamin’s famous collection of his son’s language in his diaries,18 through Susumu Hani’s Japanese documentary short Children Who Draw19 and Americans Faith Elliot and John Hubley’s recording of their children’s play in the animated short Moonbird.20 Much of this integration has focused on children’s art being seen as primitive, untrained, and their approach to the world filled with whimsy and fantasy. However, the contemporary use of children’s drawings in academic research has begun to revalue children’s knowledge, for instance using children’s drawings to illustrate difficult knowledges, violence, and trauma,21 or integrating experiences through the field of art therapy and psychology.22 Recent work has suggested the validity of children as artists in their own right.23 The ethical questions about publicity and privacy, authorship and agency, and who truly benefits from children’s participation in the “adult world” that this integration and research raise are voluminous, and compounded when racial, classed, and colonial dominations are further entangled in the narrative.24 For the most part, work that moves beyond just “giving voice” to children, that respects their choices and desires for authorship, and that gives credit where credit is due in the truest form of community solidarity seems to be where the value in collaboration lies.25 Early Ethnographic Educational Cinema for Children: Harlan Smith Born in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1872, Harlan Ingersoll Smith developed an active interest in the anthropology and archaeology of Indigenous peoples as a youth, collecting Ojibwa artefacts in the area.26 To expand his knowledge, he briefly enrolled in University of Michigan in 1892. Although he left after only two years, Smith gained useful experience working with the anthropological collections in the university museum. He also worked with foundational anthropologists, F.W. Putnam and Franz Boas, at the Harvard Peabody Museum and the Chicago World’s Fair, respectively.27 Based on these experiences, he succeeded in securing a position at the American Museum of Natural History from 1895 to 1911. He subsequently took a position with the Canadian government, working first as head of the Archaeology division of the Geological Survey of Canada, and subsequently at the Victoria Memorial Museum, which was operated to showcase the collections of the Geological Survey. In 1927, this was transformed into the National Museum of Canada. At the national museum, Smith would become a pioneer in the field of children’s museum education.28 In this work, Smith was strongly influenced by the Children’s Museum in Brooklyn, New York. Opened in 1899, the Children’s Museum revolutionized museum education, emphasizing youth engagement and facilitating encounters with museum materials.29 As Smith described the educational work of

Indigenous Children in Canadian Cinema  105 a great museum, it provides opportunities for “classes of bright high-school or college students on a visit to the museum halls, [to supplement] their educational work by viewing the actual things of which they study.”30 Smith viewed the immersive experiential element of museum education as particularly transformative, appealing to the inherently inquisitive nature of youth, writing “the little child is a true scientist.”31 Through honing these inquisitive skills, Smith imagined the museum as a site of national uplift. “Thousands of slum children in the greater cities are cheered, educated and uplifted,” he wrote, “by being taken to the museums by their teachers.”32 Smith was also a foundational, if often forgotten, figure in the fields of children’s educational cinema and ethnographic documentaries.33 At the museum in Ottawa, Smith initiated a museum lecture series, beginning in 1912, pausing during World War I, and then resuming in 1920. In association with the lecture series, he began screening children’s educational cinema in 1921, eventually contributing his own films. Between 1927 and 1935, Smith released roughly 29 films, primarily focused on the ethnography of Indigenous peoples in Western Canada.34 Over the years, thousands of school-age children filled the museum auditorium to watch motion pictures and listen to experts discussing a wide range of topics from anthropology to zoology. As indicated by the focus of Smith’s cinematic oeuvre, knowledge of Indigenous peoples was particularly central to museum programming. In its 1930 annual report, the National Museum of Canada framed its mission as follows: “A main objective of the work of the National Museum of Canada is . . . the dissemination of information pertaining to the natural history of Canada and the life and customs of the aborigines.”35 The Carrier Indians of British Columbia, one of the three films that Smith released in 1927, is indicative of his broader oeuvre and approach to children’s educational cinema. It situates Indigenous families within the context of landbased traditions while storying the disappearance of these traditions with Indigenous children growing into a modernizing world. Through an ethnographic lens, the film captures how people traditionally gathered and prepared foods, framing everyday life within the community. The film’s intertitles introduce shots of young women preparing and eating creamed soapberries: “Fish and meat have a special tang when followed by whipped soapberries—the children’s ice cream.” In subsequent shots the viewer sees children playing as women fashion birch bark baskets; the intertitles explain: “Even beef and mutton grow tender in birch bark kettles, when the Indian boils the water with red hot stones.” However, the subsequent series of shots shift the narrative to one of disappearing traditions. Juxtaposing traditional and contemporary modes of transportation, shots counterpose foot travel by people and dogs burdened by packs with movement by horse-drawn carriage and car. “The days of the back pack are passing,” the intertitles suggest. “The horse and automobile now hold the field.” The film continues to document how, in the language of the intertitles, “children are growing up in a new world,” as Carrier people are imagined to abandon traditional ceremonies and livelihoods based on hunting and conduct themselves in accordance with the emergent norms of Christianity and capitalism.

106  Ann Marie Murnaghan and Tyler McCreary Despite the fact that Smith was working in an ethnographic frame that explicitly sought to scientifically document the loss of tradition, we can see a sense of playfulness in the portraits of the people that Smith captured, as well as a feeling of looseness in how he compiled these images into educational films. The Carrier Indians of British Columbia was shot over 5 field seasons, highlighting that he arrived and came back to the region over several years, becoming familiar with people and families. His notes document familiarity with named people, however these individuals became anonymized in his films. In several of the shots, including Figure 9.1, we can see children laughing, and people smiling for the camera. Many of Smith’s subjects appear to be complimented, teased, or encouraged to be a bit silly for the camera, unconventional in an era long before the home camera. In many of the portraits, particularly those with children who Smith tended to favour for his educational programme, a laugh or a smile ends the shot. It is curious how within the educational mode Smith took a lot of creative licence in his films, blurring the target of his ethnographic gaze, often using images from different locations and Indigenous nations interchangeably despite his meticulous notes on the specific origins of his various shots.36 Restoring the Voice of Indigenous Children: Alanis Obomsawin Alanis Obomsawin is a member of the Abenaki Nation and the “Mother” of First Nations Canadian documentary cinema. Born outside of Lebanon, New Hampshire in the United States in 1932, her film career has spanned more than fifty years, with fifty-eight film projects telling powerful stories ranging from Indigenous everyday life to complex political challenges between the state and Indigenous peoples at Restigouche and Oka.37 As a youth she learned traditional cultural practices from her aunt Alanis and Western Abenaki stories and songs from her mother’s cousin, Theophile Panadis. Prior to writing and directing her own short and feature films, she worked as a model, singer, and storyteller, touring and showcasing Abenaki stories for both white and Indigenous audiences with the boy scouts, in public venues, and in institutions like schools and prisons in the 1960s. After seeing a short television feature on her fundraiser for a swimming pool for her home reserve of Odanak, outside Montreal, Quebec, National Film Board of Canada producers hired her as a consultant in 1967 to help them to make a film about Indigenous peoples for the series Challenge for Change. She discusses her job interview in Robertson’s 2012 documentary, Making Movie History: Alanis Obomsawin, as consisting of telling the stories that she had been performing across the country.38 At the National Film Board, she continued her educational work, devising educational kits for school teachers on Indigenous issues, particularly using the words of Native peoples themselves. In the winter of 1967–1968, Obomsawin visited and lived with children at Bishop Horden Hall, originally an Indian residential school founded by the Anglican missionaries in Moose Factory, a small community on an island in the Moose River on the James Bay tidal flats. By this time, the Cree students had been integrated into the local public school, continuing to use Bishop Horden Hall as a residence away from their families.39

Indigenous Children in Canadian Cinema  107

Figure 9.1  The information sheet for Christmas at Moose Factory (1971) (Source: Used with permission of the National Film Board of Canada, reference number 593164)

After telling the children her traditional stories, and playing with them, she began to ask them about their own stories, and recorded the sounds of their play and environment. While collecting their stories, orally and through drawings and paintings, she focused on their remembrances of life and their feelings around the time of Christmas, when the boarding children returned to their families.

108  Ann Marie Murnaghan and Tyler McCreary In a letter dated April 24, 1970, to the National Film Board of Canada preserved in the catalogue for her international exhibit, The Children Have to Hear Another Story, Obomsawin argued that the voices of Native people had been absent from the narrative on Indigenous issues in Canada. In the past there has been no effort made to tell children in school—what the history of the Indian people of this country really is—I’ll not mention the past anymore than in these few lines—We Indian people want very much to tell it ourselves—We don’t want anyone to speak on our behalf anymore—40 The project proposed in Obomsawin’s letter would involve traveling to a reserve and asking “an old person” to tell their stories in their own language to children and record it.41 She also thought that children’s art could act as a visual record of the place of the reserve with its people, activities, and everyday life instead of the Othered, peripheral image of reserves in Canadian news media. Obomsawin writes that she hoped that this would show “children of all nations” and Indigenous children specifically that their Indigenous stories, places, and languages were valued in Canada.42 By 1971, Obomsawin had finished her first film, Christmas at Moose Factory, 13-minutes long and only the fifth film to be directed by an Indigenous director, and the first by an Indigenous woman, in Canada (Figure  9.2). The film begins similar to how her research began, with sound. Ojibwe cultural critic Jesse Wente argues Obomsawin’s is a “cinema of listening.”43 In interviews, she often recollects how experiences listening to stories by oil-light as a child inform her approach to storytelling.44 In Christmas at Moose Factory, numerous children’s imaginations and artistry are centred, alongside a soundtrack of northern life replete with barking dogs, howling, cold winds, skidoos, church and traditional songs in Swampy Cree and English, children’s laughter while tobogganing, and finally a party with fiddling, clapping, dancing, and laughter.45 The style of the film is intentionally plain; Obomsawin wants to focus the viewer on listening to the children’s words and exploring their images.46 Throughout her career she pushed to keep the integrity of the first recording, not removing superfluous sounds since they impact the speaker’s telling of the story or singing of the song.47 The soundtracks are multilayered: the stories of preparing bannock and muskrat in the kitchen are accompanied by clattering dishes and clinking spoons. Obomsawin has discussed how beautiful she finds the accent of the Swampy Cree first language speakers, and how hearing the youth tell their stories was a special pleasure.48 She narrates the introduction of the film, placing Moose Factory geographically and demographically, slowly zooming out of a children’s drawing of a dog tied to a laundry line of frozen pants in a wintry landscape with coniferous trees, a house with smoke coming out of the chimney, a sun on the horizon, and the sound of a single dog barking. Various pencil-drawn houses, and children within, are coloured with wax crayon, pastel, and occasionally paint and marker. The festivities of parties and the playing of jigs are as visceral as the squeals of laughter and shouting of the tobogganing hill.

Indigenous Children in Canadian Cinema  109 Christmas at Moose Factory layers the panning and zooming of the still images with the joy of the soundtrack, reflecting the oral tradition of storytelling, where listeners connected imagined images to the spoken narrative. While many of the drawings follow the convention of children’s presentation of life: a simple twodimensional representation of objects (houses) and events (Christmas), reminiscent of the picture book, there are also breaks in this vantage point. We see into houses through their roofs, and we take in the landscape from the air. Obomsawin enlivens these images further, with camera turns, and slides, which are occasionally disorienting, and quickly cut. The pace of the film matches the pace of the activities shown, going to sleep at Christmas is slow and plodding, and the tobogganing hill is quick and lively. The film ends with some of the artists’ portraits taken while drawing, connecting the viewer to the faces behind the voices and images. The first half of the film centres the children’s oral stories of real and imagined events around Christmas—the preparation of food, daily activities, the making of lists for Santa—accompanied by many images of houses and family. The stories are spliced and overlapping; quick cuts show children’s commonly shared imagery of the gold star in the sky lighting the way to Jesus, and the “Indian angel” going to church on Christmas. Following this point, the film transitions. The second half of the film shifts to present the soundtrack of an adult-ordered world accompanied with the children’s images. Catholic Mass is recited in Swampy Cree, and songs are sung with organ accompaniment. The drawings show many faces singing, holding hymnals, and different vantage points of the church, with stained glass windows. An original song by Arthur Cheechoo, a relative of the children, is used to further introduce their land, how to get from home to home, and numerous smiling, self-portraits, some attributed to the various children, in their own handwriting. The film concludes with a party, music, singing, dancing, and laughing bringing everyone together, where Obomsawin uses tiny changes in the tune or laughter in the background to introduce more drawn portraits. Zooms in and out echo the documentary genre, where both the performers and audience are integrated into the scene and bring the characters to life. The evocative diversity of the faces highlights the unique sensitivity this group of children had to life around them, acutely detailed and deeply communicated through their art.49 From the Objectification of Settler Science to the Reclamation of Indigenous Subjectivity Education films often take children as their audience, Smith and Obomsawin were both outliers to conventional didactic educational films in this realm: Smith as an early believer in children’s creative ability to interrogate and question and Obomsawin stressing the importance of letting children tell their own stories, using multiple media, and in their own time. As a point of similarity, both Smith and Obomsawin were immersive filmmakers living in the communities that they filmed, getting to know their subjects. While Obomsawin preserves children’s subjectivities, including 24 of their portraits and all of their 54 names in the credits, Smith’s children receive no such treatment. “Little nephews” and “the children”

110  Ann Marie Murnaghan and Tyler McCreary are the labels that accompany the faces of the youth in the films, and even in his ethnographic field notes names are only provided for adults and never attached to children. In the Canadian settler colonial context, the films’ purposes are also different. Smith sought to use Indigenous culture to integrate immigrants to Canada into a national narrative that celebrated a shared history, with Indigenous art and culture representing a common Canadian past. Together the mostly white immigrant children of the nation’s capital, Ottawa, could share in a sense of knowledge of the nation’s prehistory by knowing this objective story and viewing these films together. Obomsawin’s primary audience, on the other hand, is Indigenous children: she desires that they might hear and see “our [Indigenous] people’s” voices, traditions, and cultures in order to recognize their value and contribute to a stronger subjective sense of connection with each other. More recently she has been buoyed by First Nations youth activism, realizing her more than 50-year-old goal.50 Moreover, as discussed above, Obomsawin believes in the importance of “other nations in this country” learning about Indigenous stories, and that “in this country Indian people still live today.”51 Smith and Obomsawin come from different positions. While primarily trained through his research experience rather than formally university educated, Smith adopted and reproduced the colonial discourses of early anthropology and archaeology. He projected a claim to universal knowledge and the purportedly objective authority of white scientists over Indigenous life. In contrast, Obomsawin directed her films on the basis of her distinct and embodied experience as an Indigenous woman. From this embodied position, she explicitly sought to create narratives that countered the authority of anthropologists and presented an internal view from the perspective of Indigenous families, and particularly children. I grew up in Odanak. . . . There was . . . a lot of loving care for all the children. I remember my Aunt Jessie saying ‘Lock the door; the anthropologist is coming.’ As I grew older, I would tell myself that this discipline must have been created just for the White man to find out everything about us.52 Against the white anthropologists who sought to knowingly secure Indigenous culture in the past, she aimed to capture contemporary Indigenous voices. Promotional materials for her films included Obomsawin together with the children she collaborated with.53 Central to Obomsawin’s project was recognition of the capacity of children to create knowledge and be authorities over interpreting the meaning of their own lives. Smith’s films presented children passively playing, as adults in their communities processed soapberries and made birch bark baskets. Indigenous children were only narrated as active in eschewing the cultural traditions of their forebearers, described in Smith’s intertitles “growing up in a new world” as “a generation that heeds [elders] not.” In contrast, Obomsawin gently frames her film with introductory narration, stating “these children speak with their drawings about life around them and how they feel when Christmastime comes.”

Indigenous Children in Canadian Cinema 111 As discussed above, while children’s drawings have been used extensively in research and art to help children to communicate their own experiences and hopes for the future, this technique has been challenged for recentring adult voices in their interpretation. Obomsawin’s use of children’s drawings in her films, animated only with camera movements, zooms, and cuts, aims to tell their stories. The sheer volume of nearly 100 drawings in the film help to represent the views of the 54 children credited, with siblings’ and cousins’ shared experiences covering several viewpoints of the same event or story. In her role as a storyteller and singer through her twenties, she had resolved to teach Indigenous histories through Indigenous voices. Her film breaks the tradition of interpreting children’s art through adult voices and perspectives. Children’s voices and stories, sometimes simple and linear, sometimes digressive, and sometimes repetitive and iterative, are preserved in the pacing of the film. Indeed, the repetition and digression natural to dialogue and conversation would become a unique and powerful element of her cinematic form.54 Conclusion Comparing the early cinematic work of Smith and Obomsawin provides a powerful counterpoint between different approaches to children in film. While Smith made Indigenous children the object of his ethnographic gaze, Obomsawin stressed the importance of the knowledge produced by Indigenous children as a contrapuntal voice to dominant white narratives. The emergence of Obomsawin marked an inflection point in the history of Canadian and Indigenous cinema, fostering a contemporary florescence of Indigenous filmmaking that not only diversifies national narratives but also challenges the foundations of Canadian national mythopoetics in the appropriation of Indigenous territory, culture, and history. However, Obomsawin’s initial cinematic intervention also challenged the way in which we think about the relation between children and film. Obomsawin challenged the normative whiteness underpinning the ethnographic gaze, producing cinema that presented Indigenous children as themselves storytellers capable of speaking back to dominant representations of them through stories of their everyday life that unsettled colonial expectations. Notes 1 Anthropologists historically used the term Carrier to describe the Indigenous communities of both the Wet’suwet’en and Dakelh peoples. In his ethnographic film on the Carrier, Harlan I. Smith (one of the filmmakers discussed in this chapter) included footage of both groups. In this chapter, we retain the term Carrier, reflecting Smith’s usage of the then prevalent anthropological conceptualization. 2 The Carrier Indians of British Columbia, directed by Harlan I. Smith. National Museum of Canada, 1927. 3 Christmas at Moose Factory, directed by Alanis Obomsawin. National Film Board of Canada, 1971. www.nfb.ca/film/christmas_at_moose_factory/ 4 Compare this to the idea of salvage filmmaking described by Gaini (Chapter 3). 5 Fabian, J. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

112  Ann Marie Murnaghan and Tyler McCreary 6 Kulchyski, P. “Anthropology in the Service of the State: Diamond Jenness and Canadian Indian Policy.” Journal of Canadian Studies 28, no. 2 (1993): 21–50. 7 Miller, J. R. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. 8 Weaver, S. M. Making Canadian Indian Policy: The Hidden Agenda, 1968–70. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. 9 Cassidy, F. and R. Bish. Indian Government: Its Meaning in Practice. Fernie, BC: Oolichan Books, 1989. 10 A comparison with Lo Presti’s notion of accented cinema (Chapter  4) is worthwhile here. 11 Rony, F. T. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. 12 Pratt, M. L. Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. 13 Griffiths, A. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 14 Dowell, K. L. Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. 15 deRosa, M. Studio One: Of Storytellers and Stories. In North of Everything: EnglishCanadian Cinema since 1980, edited by J. White and W. Beard, 330–333. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 1980. 16 Hill, R. W. and H. Peleg, eds. Alanis Obomsawin: Lifework. Munich: Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, 2022. 17 Gaskill, N. Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 18 Benjamin, W. Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs. Translated by E. Leslie and edited by U. Marx, G. Schwartz, M. Schwartz and E. Wizisla. London: Verso, 2007. 19 Children Who Draw, directed by S. Hani. Iwanami Films, 1956. 20 Moonbird, directed by J. Hubley. Storyboard, 1959. 21 Theron, L., C. Mitchell, A. Smith and J. Stuart, eds. Picturing Research: Drawing as Visual Methodology. Rotterdam: SensePublishers, 2011. 22 Di Leo, J. H. Interpreting Children’s Drawings. New York: Routledge, 2013. 23 Winner, E., and J. E. Drake, The Child as Visual Artist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 24 Perhaps to the same degree that Lo Presti’s Roma (Chapter 4) are raced, classed and colonized. 25 In Chapter 18, Cindi Katz considers ethical questions around the videos of children in Rural Sudan she helped make over forty years ago she makes a case for why she did not offer them to the U.S. Library of congress for use by other researchers and interested parties at the time. Katz considers some of the benefits and pitfalls of so doing. 26 Leechman, D. Harlan Ingersoll Smith, 1872–1940. Canadian Field-Naturalist 56 (1942): 114. 27 Roby, N. L. From Amateur to Professional: Placing Harlan I. Smith in the History of North American Anthropology, MA Thesis, Carleton University, Ottawa, 2004. 28 McCreary, T. and A. M. F. Murnaghan. The Educational Work of a National Museum: Creating Knowledgeable Young Citizens in Ottawa, Canada.” Children’s Geographies 17, no. 6 (2019): 635–648. 29 Schauffler, R. The Children’s Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn, New York. American Midland Naturalist 9, no. 5/6 (1924): 195–244. 30 Smith, H.I. The Educational Work of a Great Museum. Science 36, no. 933 (1912): 664. 31 Smith, H. I. The Development of Museums and their Relation to Education. The Scientific Monthly 5, no. 2 (1917): 99. 32 Smith, “The Educational Work,” 664.

Indigenous Children in Canadian Cinema  113 33 Murnaghan, A.M. and T. McCreary. Projections of Race, Nature, and Ethnographic Childhood in Early Educational Cinema at the National Museum of Canada. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 98, no. 1 (2016): 37–53. 34 Zimmerly, D. W. Museocinematography: Ethnographic Film Programs of the National Museum of Man, 1913–1973. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1974. 35 National Museum of Canada. Annual Report for 1930. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1931, 2. 36 It is curious to Juxtapose this method of representation in terms of ‘authenticity’ with what we find in Chapters 5 and 6, which are not explicitly ethnographic. 37 Hill and Peleg, Alanis Obomsawin. 38 Making Movie History: Alanis Obomsawin, directed by J. Robertson. National Film Board of Canada, 2012. 39 Griffith, J. “Off to School: Filmic False Equivalence and Indian Residential School Scholarship.” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 30, no. 1 (2018): 69–83. 40 Obomsawin, A. in Hill and Peleg, eds. Alanis Obomsawin, 4. 41 Hill and Peleg, Alanis Obomsawin, 5. 42 Hill and Peleg, Alanis Obomsawin, 5. 43 Wente, J. “Christmas at Moose Factory.” In Alanis Obomsawin: Lifework, edited by R. W. Hill and H. Peleg, 21. Munich: Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, 2022. 44 Obomsawin, A. What Drives Me: The 85-Year-Old Indigenous Filmmaker—Who Just Released her 50th movie—On her Life, her Work, and the Power of Words. Macleans Magazine, October 6, 2017. www.macleans.ca/opinion/alanis-obomsawin-what-drives-me/ 45 The repetition here and elsewhere compares favorably to the theoretical base discussed by Gardner and Craine (Chapter 8), and also Aitken (Chapter 10). 46 White, J. Alanis Obomsawin, Documentary Form and the Canadian Nation(s). Cineaction 49 (1999): 26–36. 47 Robertson, Making Movie. 48 Hill and Peleg, Alanis Obomsawin, 254. 49 Compare with Katz (Chapter 17). 50 Walker, C.Alanis Obomsawin’s Tradition of Giving Back at Christmas. CBC News, December  24, 2013. www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/alanis-obomsawin-s-tradition-of-givingback-at-christmas-1.2474674 51 Hill and Peleg, Alanis Obomsawin, 5. 52 Obomsawin, “What Drives Me.” 53 Lewis, R. Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 54 White, “Alanis Obomsawin.”

Bibliography Benjamin, W. Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs. Translated by E. Leslie and edited by U. Marx, G. Schwartz, M. Schwartz, and E. Wizisla. London: Verso, 2007. Cassidy, F. and R. Bish. Indian Government: Its Meaning in Practice. Fernie, BC: Oolichan Books, 1989. deRosa, M. “Studio One: Of Storytellers and Stories.” In North of Everything: EnglishCanadian Cinema since 1980, edited by J. White and W. Beard, 330–333. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 1980. Di Leo, J. H. Interpreting Children’s Drawings. New York: Routledge, 2013. Dowell, K. L. Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

114  Ann Marie Murnaghan and Tyler McCreary Fabian, J. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Gaskill, N. Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Griffith, J. “Off to School: Filmic False Equivalence and Indian Residential School Scholarship.” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 30, no. 1 (2018): 69–83. Griffiths, A. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Hani, S. Children Who Draw (film). Iwanami Films, 1956. Hill, R. W. and H. Peleg, eds. Alanis Obomsawin: Lifework (a volume to accompany an exhibition The Children Have to Hear Another Story, January 23-April 18, 2022 Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin). Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, 2022. Hubley, J. Moonbird (film). Storyboard, 1959. Kulchyski, P. “Anthropology in the Service of the State: Diamond Jenness and Canadian Indian Policy.” Journal of Canadian Studies 28, no. 2 (1993): 21–50. Leechman, D. “Harlan Ingersoll Smith, 1872–1940.” Canadian Field-Naturalist 56 (1942): 114. Lewis, R. Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. McCreary, T. and A. M. F. Murnaghan. “The Educational Work of a National Museum: Creating Knowledgeable Young Citizens in Ottawa, Canada.” Children’s Geographies 17, no. 6 (2019): 635–648. Miller, J. R. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Murnaghan, A. M. and T. McCreary. “Projections of Race, Nature, and Ethnographic Childhood in Early Educational Cinema at the National Museum of Canada.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 98, no. 1 (2016): 37–53. National Museum of Canada. Annual Report for 1930. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1931. Obomsawin, A. Christmas at Moose Factory (film). National Film Board of Canada, 1971. www.nfb.ca/film/christmas_at_moose_factory/ Obomsawin, A. “What Drives Me: The 85-Year-Old Indigenous Filmmaker—Who Just Released her 50th Movie—On Her Life, her Work, and the Power of Words.” Macleans Magazine, October 6, 2017. www.macleans.ca/opinion/alanis-obomsawin-what-drives-me/ Pratt, M. L. Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Robertson, J. Making Movie History: Alanis Obomsawin (film). Ottawa, Canada: National Film Board of Canada, 2012. Roby, N. L. From Amateur to Professional: Placing Harlan I. Smith in the History of North American Anthropology, MA Thesis, Carleton University, Ottawa, 2004. Rony, F. T. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Schauffler, R. “The Children’s Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn, New York.” American Midland Naturalist 9, no. 5/6 (1924): 195–244. Smith, H. I. “The Educational Work of a Great Museum.” Science 36, no. 933 (1912): 659–664. Smith, H. I. “The Development of Museums and their Relation to Education.” The Scientific Monthly 5, no. 2 (1917): 97–119. Smith, H. I. The Carrier Indians of British Columbia (film). Ottawa, Canada: National Museum of Canada, 1927. Theron, L., C. Mitchell, A. Smith and J. Stuart, eds. Picturing Research: Drawing as Visual Methodology. Rotterdam: SensePublishers, 2011.

Indigenous Children in Canadian Cinema  115 Walker, C. “Alanis Obomsawin’s Tradition of Giving Back at Christmas.” CBC News, December 24, 2013. www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/alanis-obomsawin-s-tradition-of-givingback-at-christmas-1.2474674 Weaver, S. M. Making Canadian Indian Policy: The Hidden Agenda, 1968–70. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Wente, J. “Christmas at Moose Factory.” In Alanis Obomsawin: Lifework, edited by R. W. Hill and H. Peleg, 21. Munich: Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, 2022. White, J. “Alanis Obomsawin, Documentary Form and the Canadian Nation(s).” Cineaction 49 (1999): 26–36. Winner, E. and J. E. Drake. The Child as Visual Artist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Zimmerly, D. W. Museocinematography: Ethnographic Film Programs of the National Museum of Man, 1913–1973 (National Museum of Man Mercury Series 11). Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1974.

10 Hope through Creation Celtic Kids and Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells1 Stuart C. Aitken

For me the question is . . . whether the very characterization of the world as disenchanted ignores and then discourages affective attachment to that world. The question is important because the mood of enchantment may be valuable for ethical life. Jane Bennett2

The Secret of Kells, Tomm Moore’s Academy-nominated film, was created by a multinational team of artists using mostly hand-drawn, 2D animation, to tell an Irish story that weaves children, community, nature and contestation into and through interlaced Celtic swirls, whorls, runes, spirals, eddies and churns.3 The story focuses on twelve-year-old Brendan, a novice monk and nephew of Cellach, the Abbot of Kells. Kells is a monastery about 100km to the north of Dublin. Set sometime in the 8th century, the story of The Secret of Kells is ostensibly one of a small Irish community faced with imminent invasion by Vikings. The story takes a wonderous, enchanted turn when a vivacious monk, Brother Aidan, arrives from the Scottish island of Iona. Escaping Viking raids on Iona, Aidan is in possession of a mysterious and incomplete book that needs artwork through what the monks call illumination. Brendan can help Aidan in this process by gathering plants and berries for the book’s colorful graphics. To do so, Brendan sneaks out of the relative safety of the monastery to find the necessary materials in the nearby forest. Here he meets Aisling (Gaelic for ‘dream’), a silver-haired sprite who orders him out of her forest, and, with that, the enchantment ratchets up a notch or two. Brendan and Aisling unite like an older brother and his “pesky little sister” with the help of Brother Aidan’s cat Pangur Bàn.4 At this point in the film, and as part of the wonder, the mechanistic verticality of Kells is lost in the forest’s subtle plethora of Celtic knots, swirls and spirals: The woods where Brendan meets Aisling feel like an ancient forest, but the trees form complex spirals and knotted designs. The tendrils of mist, Aisling’s hair, the branches of the oaks and Pangur Bàn’s tail all echo the graceful curves found in the illuminations in the Book (of Kells). Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart5 The film’s story begins with Brendan’s connection to the mysterious Aisling and her forest, and then moves to his battle with his fears in the form of the worm/snake DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-10

Hope through Creation  117 demon Crom Cruach. This latter part of the film is about Brendan’s hero journey as he faces his fears but here, as is true for the whole of the film, it is also about enchantment. Moore and his team base this enchantment in Celtic myths and lore through the art of animation, language and music. Without sacrificing the brutal realities of life in 8th-century Ireland, they create a story that is wondrous and ageless. In what follows, I  begin with the Book of Kells and Moore’s team’s success at animating its visual depths. I  then take a deeper dive into how The Secret of Kells creates a landscape encapsulating the wonder, enchantment and brutality of 6th-century Ireland. I end with a consideration of enchantment and wonder as a conceptual basis for creating a world anew through and with children. Imagining the Book of Kells The Book of Kells is an 8th-century manuscript that began its life on the Scottish island of Iona and was moved to the monastery of Kells, which is located some distance from the Irish coast and, as a consequence, was somewhat safer from Norse raiders. The Book of Kells is by far the most famous existing piece of European medieval artwork and there is some evidence to suggest that it was started at the time of Colmcille.6 The adventures of Saint Colmcille are an origin story that Moore’s team embraces through Brother Aidan’s character who is depicted in The Secret of Kells as jovial and somewhat comic. The Book of Kells comprises the four Christian gospels written in Latin, hand-printed on vellum (pig skin) and copiously decorated with Celtic designs, interspersed with Christian and Pagan symbolism. What is left of the Book of Kells resides at Trinity College, Dublin, where it was moved in the 18th century. Scholarship and archeological evidence suggest that the book was mostly written in the monastic scriptorium of Iona by monks under the age of 18 years. These young artists left notes to each other on the margins of the pages that clearly point to their adolescence. In Matthew’s gospel, for example, the figure of a man incorporates the letter E in Ego, and his legs are crossed in front of his erect penis.9 Elsewhere are found cryptic notes in Latin or Gaelic about how cold the scriptorium is, or how boring and painstaking is the work of illuminating. Enigmatic writings of this kind are incorporated into Moore’s film. The name of Brother Aidan’s cat, Pangur Bàn, for example, comes from a poem by an anonymous 8th-century Irish monk working on Latin hymns in the scriptorium of an abbey in Reichenau, Germany. His poem, written in the corner of the page of hymns he was illuminating, describes the nights he spent watching his cat, Pangur Bàn, hunt mice. The monk compares the cat’s hunting to his scholarly pursuits and on the last line of the poem proclaims for mu mud céin am messe (“my work is to turn difficulty into clearness/ink into light”), heralding Moore’s commitment to turning his filmic artists’ drawings into light, and thereby keeping to the “. . . theme of ‘Hope Through Creation’ at the heart of the film.”10 Cats are found in the Book of Kells as part of the imagery. On the masterful and lauded Chi’rho page, for example, two cats at the bottom left appear to have caught

118  Stuart C. Aitken

Figure 10.1 Mechanistic Verticality: The Tower and Walls at Kells’ Abbey. (1A) What is left of the actual tower at Kells; (1B) Brendan climbing a vertical scaffold with the tower behind; (1C) Brendan in the tower (Source: Figure 10.1A: Stuart C. Aitken; Figures 10.1B and 10.1C: published with permission from The Cartoon Saloon Ltd.)

Hope through Creation  119

Figure 10.1  Continued

two rodents that look as if they are absconding with the communion Eucharist.11 The tendency of symbolic animals (peacocks, cats, lions and snakes) toward fantastical designs has led at times to suggestions that the young artists were indulging in whimsy. Scholars today look at the context of these young scribes depicting cats, in particular, as practical monastic companions helping to preserve the supply of food, both physically and spiritually.12 For Moore, Pangur Bàn—appropriately meaning ‘a fuller white’—is an important character uniting Brendan and Aisling. It is also the central metaphor for The Secret of Kells: “turning ink into light”.13 To the degree that the young monks’ work was to bring clarity to the Christian gospels it was to present a pagan Celtic world with a new way of life. While the Book of Kells was one of the first manuscripts created that still survives, for the several centuries that monks worked in scriptoriums they also transcribed many Celtic legends like Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of Invasions/The Taking of Ireland), Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) and Oidheadh chloinne Lir (The Children of Lear).14 These texts, often written in Gaelic, described a preChristian Irish world of magic and wizards, of debauchery and warring clans. The resolution of the stories, and the uniting of Ireland, for the young scribes, came with St. Patrick, St. Columba, St. Brendan and the other Irish monks who seemingly brought not only adventure but also peace and prosperity with their Christianity. Moore’s story does not broach Christianity per se, although his monks are clearly devout men. The communion of monks in The Secret of Kells is depicted with some

120  Stuart C. Aitken

Figure 10.1  Continued

Hope through Creation  121

Figure 10.2  Site of Columba’s Abbey, Island of Iona7 (Source: Stuart C. Aitken)

Figure 10.3 Horizontal Softening: The Celtic Swirls and Spirals. (3A) Animation from the forest in The Secret of Kells; (3B) Old-growth forest near Newgrange (very little exists in present-day Ireland); (3C) Newgrange stone spirals, Bru na Boine8 (Source: Figure 10.3A: published with permission from The Cartoon Saloon Ltd.; Figures 10.3B and 10.3C: Stuart C. Aitken)

122  Stuart C. Aitken

Figure 10.3  Continued

considerable accuracy, but at no time during the film are we told that the Book of Kells is a rendering of the Christian gospels. Rather, the film embraces the fantasy and enchantment of an older Celtic world as if there was no real tension between the pre- and post-Christian ideals, much like is suggested by the illuminations in the Book of Kells. Moore’s team use their inks to illuminate a wonderous childhood world in which enchantment and spirituality do not clash, nor do they necessarily diminish as Brendan grows older. In an interview with John Bucher, Moore notes further that part of his hope was to use drawings to enlighten and move Irish

Hope through Creation  123

Figure 10.4  Facsimile of the Book of Kells (Source: Stuart C. Aitken)

Figure 10.5  Cat illumination line drawing based on the Book of Kells (Source: Copyright Thoth Adan/Shutterstock.com)

124  Stuart C. Aitken myths into the realm of childhood fantasies and, by so doing, push back against what he saw as a commodification of those stories to attract tourist dollars.15 In what follows, I engage Moore’s work through the lens of enchantment, which is about taking pause to put aside preconceptions and create the world anew. To do so, after discussing Moore’s work I  pull from Jane Bennett’s Enchantment of Modern Life and Noora Pyyry’s use of Bennett’s work to create an ethics of encounter that is about children, childlike wonder, enchantment and the turning of the world toward the good and the light.16 Turning Ink into Light Opening with the community of Kells, Moore’s team portray an array of multiethnic visitors to the abbey as it prepares its walls to keep out Norse invaders. That so many ethnicities are portrayed in these opening scenes is not a Disneyesque attempt to represent diversity because 5th- and 6th-century Ireland was, as Barry Lopez puts it, “the center of high culture in Europe” and would have hosted an array of foreign visitors. Writing about the legendary journeys of St. Brendan (the navigator), Lopez notes that the Irish “tribal monasteries were refugia for intellectual thought and spiritual practice.”17 The Book of Kells is suffused with ink and artistic influences from all over the world. Moore’s monks have traveled from Asia and Africa. Brother Tang, for example, was named after an Asian market in Paris called Frère Tang. Brother

Figure 10.6  Moore’s Vision of the Kells’ Monks (Source: Published with permission from The Cartoon Saloon Ltd.)

Hope through Creation  125 Leonardo is Italian and Brother Sergei is Russian, the latter named as a tribute to filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.18 Moore’s characters are exotic and colorful, animated in a cubic-come-minimalist style that evokes Picasso, Matisse and the contemporary animations of Genny Tartakovsky (creator of the hit animation series Samurai Sam and Primal).19 As Charles Solomon points out, “the simplified design of the individual characters combines to form more complex patterns when they are grouped together.”20 Near the beginning of The Secret of Kells, the monks gather around Brendan and their images combine to form patterns that are not only multi-ethnic but also graphically pleasing. The verticality of the monks’ community is pleasing in ways that the verticality of the abbey’s circular lookout is not; the tower predominates the film’s visual landscape as it does in the small community of Kells to this day. Verticality is represented also in the community of characters, which is dominated by the Abbot, who is adorned in regal purple robes. Brendan’s character resides diminutively and plays disruptively in this space and it is this comic representation that contrasts so well with the power of the vertical tower. Brendan and Aisling are the smallest people depicted and, as with the monks, Moore’s team create a dutiful rendering of these characters from the Book of Kells.

Figure 10.7  (A and B) Moore’s team using the Book of Kells in their character creation (Source: Published with permission from The Cartoon Saloon Ltd.)

126  Stuart C. Aitken

Figure 10.7  Continued

Hope through Creation  127 The initial narrative of the monastery focuses solely on the abbot’s intention to build defensive walls (again, hugely vertical) against the violence and brutality of the Norse raiders. The arrival of Brother Aidan provokes a hinge around which this narrative turns. Aidan brings with him the partially developed vellum pages of the Book of Kells. If the Abbot of Kells is a vertical edifice of authority and practicality, Aidan is a playful devotee of the creative arts. Aidan’s spirited demeanor is unsullied by what we are led to believe was a narrow escape from a Viking raid on Iona. His quest to continue work on the book takes him into Kells’ scriptorium where he is joined by a curious Brendan who is drawn to the hope of Aidan’s creative spirit that, in every way, is the antithesis of his uncle’s practicality and despair. Moore wanted Aidan to be a Merlin figure and to connect him with the Celtic Church, with a front tonsure and white robes.21 His flowing hair and robes also connect Aidan in important graphical ways to the other playful protagonist in the film, Aisling. Aidan commissions Brendan to go into the woods to find berries for a particularly vibrant color of green. The Book of Kells used gall wasp berries from oak trees to create this color.22 Abbot Cellach forbids Brendan from venturing into the forest, which is initially depicted as a fearful place, a wilderness (from the Welsh/Old English ‘wilddeoren’, literally wild beast). Brendan extricates himself from Kells with the help of Pangur Bàn in a beautifully crafted scene of crawling and climbing that subverts the mechanical verticality of Kells’ tower. Immediately upon his entrance into the forest he encounters wild beasts in the form of wolves, which culminate with the appearance of the lead white wolf, which morphs into Aisling: For the forest, we wanted to show the opposite of the mechanical, geometric Kells vision. We wanted organic, majestic, magical and dreamlike . . . The forest is enchanting to Brendan, appearing playful and dreamlike in places. But it is also a mysterious and terrifying place; full of the unknown.” Tom Moore and Ross Stewart23 In a discussion of the enchantment of crossings and shape-shifting, Jane Bennett notes that “human children, more than adults, are in touch with the ‘inhuman contrivance with the animal’.” It is a state of Kafkaesque becoming and unbecoming. Bennett avers that the magic resides in the mobility, the capacity to create a new aggregation with travel, transformation, flying and flitting: Metamorphing creatures enact the very possibility of change; their presence carries with it the trace of dangerous but also exiting and exhilarating migrations.24 Moore’s team enact fear by surrounding Brendan with a wolf pack, and a lead white wolf, which flows and transforms into a less dangerous Aisling. The film crew also wanted the forest to feel Irish and, to do so, they researched medieval native Irish fauna and flora. Part of the outcome is the portrayal of dark, dense

128  Stuart C. Aitken

Figure 10.8  Shape-shifting Aisling as wolf (8A) and girl (8B) (Source: Figures published with permission from The Cartoon Saloon Ltd.)

Hope through Creation  129

Figure 10.8  Continued

woodland replete with organic Celtic designs and shapes, which mirror nature in important ways.25 When Brendan meets Aisling, the forest changes from dark and foreboding to spirited and full of life. The forest maintains its majesty and magic, but becomes more of a playground for Brendan and Aisling, at least for a while. The children’s

130  Stuart C. Aitken

Figure 10.9  Celtic spirals: Neolithic art at (9A) Newgrange and Moore’s Forest (9B) (Source: Figure 10.9A: Stuart C. Aitken; Figure 10.9B: published with permission from The Cartoon Saloon Ltd.)

playfulness foments with their climbing an ancient oak in the center of the forest to collect the gall wasp berries. Sensuality is essential to enchantment, notes Bennett, who goes on to claim that this is about recognizable ensembles of tastes, sounds, forms, colors, textures and so forth. Enchantment, in this way, functions through a system of relations or repetitions but there are also motions and becomings, so Bennett is talking about spirals

Hope through Creation  131 more than cycles. Celtic spirals repeat in this part of the movie with swerves and twists that make new formations possible but not necessarily with an end in mind: “Spiral repetition,” Bennett argues, “allows me to introduce a non-teleological and perhaps neo-pagan form of enchantment. In this image, fortuity, contingency—like will, design, and intent—can repeat and enchant.”26 Moore and his team use the forest and the community of Kells as counterpoised with and against each other through graphic repetitions; but the wall and tower of Kells are built with purpose and intention—the teleology of the Abbot, if you will, which ultimately falters—while the forest repeats in a different way and transforms itself ad infinitum. The enchantment of the forest is not always affable, and yet Brendan is drawn further and fuller, and with intent, into the cave of Crom Cruach. Crom Cruach and the Hero’s Journey27

Brendan’s hero’s journey began when he dared to enter the forest, and after collecting the berries it continues with his discovery of a Neolithic stone circle. Many circles of this kind exist in the Celtic realm. The current archeological wisdom is that they gained architectural significance in Orkney around 5,500 BCE and then were copied and reworked as the idea headed south to gain pre-eminence in the massive blocks of Stonehenge several hundred years later. Most agree that the significance and use of the circles differed depending upon the local contexts of their creation and development; some surrounded burial cairns, others were for astronomical and seasonal divinations and some may have simply been used as gathering places or erected merely because they were fashionable. For Tomm Moore, the forest’s stone circle is a doorway to the underworld, inspired by those found at Newgrange, to the north of Kells on the River Boyne. For Brendan, the stone circle advances his hero’s journey because he gets to face Crom Cruach: Crom symbolizes Brendan’s fears . . . the classic innermost “cave” of every hero’s journey. We wanted Crom to be beautiful yet terrifying. My first concept was actually inspired by an old Irish 2 pence coin we had before the Euro which had a strange knotworked creature that folded in on itself. Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart28 Crom Cruach was an Irish pagan god, the worship of whom demanded human sacrifice. Moore creates a snake- or worm-like figure made up of the Celtic designs and shapes that are also found in the rest of the movie, but, unlike the forest and more like the tower at Kells, Crom’s design is angular and hard with continuous variation. Crom was rendered in 3D to facilitate its fast and terrifying movements, and as such it is a different technological and artistic form from the movie’s predominant animations: We had developed a general shape-language for the film—with spiky triangular patterns symbolizing danger and evil, and curved organic shapes symbolizing safety. In scary or dangerous scenes we also used more

132  Stuart C. Aitken

Figure 10.10 Moore’s team used Newgrange burial mound (10A) as a model for Crom’s cave (10B), including accurate depictions of the winter solstice sunrise that leads Brendan aboveground after his hero’s trial (10C; this animation is the inside of Newgrange burial mound, the outside of which can be seen on Figure 10.3C) (Source: Figure 10.10A: Stuart C. Aitken; Figures 10.10B and 10.10C: published with permission from The Cartoon Saloon Ltd.)

perspective and less saturated colors; hoping to make the audience understand subconsciously that the flat color scenes meant Brendan was safe and in his element and that full perspective and desaturated blues and grays meant trouble! Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart29

Hope through Creation  133

Figure 10.10  Continued

The myth is that St. Patrick banished Crom underground along with all the other snakes in Ireland. In The Secret of Kells, Brendan’s task is to obtain Crom Cruach’s crystal eye. The reality is that the crystal will help the monks magnify details while producing the Book of Kells; the fantastical story is that Brendan faces and defeats his fears. In this task, as with all mythic hero journeys, he is alone because the otherwise fearless Aisling cannot enter the cave. Moore’s team create a dream-like and somewhat nightmarish sequence for Brendan’s battle with Crom. In the cave sequence Brendan falls through a huge field of animated icons based on ancient rock carvings. Crom Cruach is angular as it zig-zags relentlessly back and forth across the screen in pursuit of Brendan.30 The reality, we assume, is that Brendan enters the megalithic passage of a Neolithic cairn, faces his fears and obtains the crystal. In the dream sequence, the interlaced angles and colors of Crom relate to the mechanistic verticality of Kells’ defenses. Crom Cruach ends up eating his tail, as often seen in snake depiction in the Book of Kells. It is important to note further that Crom’s cave is based on megalithic structures like Newgrange, which contain Neolithic art symbolizing death and rebirth. The funeral cairn of Newgrange is aligned with the rising sun of the winter solstice so that the light penetrates to the inside of the cairn at sunrise: When Brendan tumbles out of Crom’s cave it’s as though he has been reborn—he faces his fears and has all he needs to become a great illustrator. All that remains of Aisling is snowdrops growing where everything before was Barren. Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart31 To exit the cave, Brendan follows the dawning winter solstice light as it spills through a narrow slit above the outside entrance mantel, which is in the movie

134  Stuart C. Aitken

Figure 10.11  Moore’s Crom Cruach (Source: Published with permission from The Cartoon Saloon Ltd.)

an exact copy of the opening at Newgrange. Just outside the cave, shape-shifting Aisling has transformed once more: this time she is a gathering of small snowdrops surrounding and giving light to the once barren cave mound entrance. The Viking Attack and Brendan’s Journey Inevitably the Vikings attack, and the mechanistic verticality of Kells is no barrier to their brutality. Brendan and Brother Aidan escape into the forest with the Book of Kells, although the Vikings gain its ornate gold cover. Community members are slaughtered or enslaved. Abbot Cellach is wounded and recovers as a prisoner in his own tower with the belief that Brendan and Aidan are dead or enslaved. After escaping, Brendan and Aidan travel through the seasons of Ireland; they both age and eventually the latter dies. In their travels they offer hope through sharing the book that is their creation and a spiritual solace. The scenes of the journey are offered in montage without spoken word and by so doing elaborate the wider landscape of Ireland, its seasons and Brendan’s becoming as a spiritual leader. In time, Brandan returns to the ruins of Kells and finds his uncle imprisoned in the Lookout Tower. Brendan offers the Abbot ‘hope through creation’ that is the light of the Book of Kells and, as the old man takes it, his cell is transformed by golden light comprising angular and curved spirals. Moore’s The Secret of Kells ends with the revelation of the Chi’rho page from The Book of Kells

Hope through Creation  135

Figure 10.12  Brendan and Aidan part (Source: Published with permission from The Cartoon Saloon Ltd.)

Moore decided to let the Chi’rho page create a visual climax for the movie. He admits that bringing the pages of the actual Book of Kells to life was a daunting challenge best left to the finale. Elsewhere, as noted in the preceding pages, Moore and his team do a wonderful job of bringing the Book of Kells to life through the movies’ characters and landscapes. Enchantment, Wonder and Hope through Creation As noted, the enchantment of the Kells’ forest resides in its endlessly interlaced Celtic spirals, knots and whorls. To the degree that Noora Pyyry and Raine Aiava speak to another, seemingly paradoxical, aspect of enchantment that prescribes, in their words, “the simultaneous loss of meaning and sudden gaining of significance,” the community of Kells and its defenses are juxtaposed with the forest.33 What I mean by this is that Kells and its vertical defenses lose their meaning under the Viking onslaught and, simultaneously, the forest into which Brendan and Aidan escape gains significance; indeed it gained an enchanted significance the first time Brendan entered and met Aisling. Let me take this idea of significance a bit further. The machinations of Kells’ defenses are understood as a barrier to keep the Norse invaders out, which they fail to do almost immediately. Alternatively, the forest is not about machinations and understandings: Moore and his team use infinitely repeating curves and spirals to suggest an ancient forest that need not be understood as a divine creation or part of a larger design but rather as a series of accidents that foment wondrous and unsettling new forms: recall Bennett’s admonition for a “non-teleological and perhaps neo-pagan image of enchantment.” On the flip side of this enchantment, Kells and its Abbot are immersed in the creation of something different, aligned to but also out of touch with the realities of the world. Kells and its gates and walls are mechanistic, vertical and, in the final instance, no deterrent

136  Stuart C. Aitken

Figure 10.13 (A) Sixth-century stone dwelling in County Kerry looks out toward the Skellig Michael Islands and (B) Moore’s depiction of Brendan’s stone dwelling takes shape through a montage of the seasons32 (Source: Figure 10.13B: published with permission from The Cartoon Saloon Ltd.)

Hope through Creation  137

Figure 10.13 Continued

Figure 10.14 (A) The Abbot’s bedroom transformed to light and Celtic spirals by Brendan’s return with the Book of Kells and (B) the Book of Kells’ famous Chi’rho page from the final scene in The Secret of Kells (in the movie, the design is slowly revealed through animation) (Source: Published with permission from The Cartoon Saloon Ltd.)

138  Stuart C. Aitken

Figure 10.14 Continued

to the Norse invaders. Both Kells and the forest are about wonder and creation, but Moore and his team are careful to distinguish between the two with endless repetitions of different kinds: hard and angular for Kells and the worm Crom, soft and sensuous for the forest. And it is important to note that the two fields coexist and intertwine. The monk’s scriptorium is replete with endless curves and spirals of light, while Crom’s cave is interlaced with infinite angles and darkened polygons. Wonder and fascination coalesce with realism and fear. Bennett notes that enchantment, like other cultural forms, is commodifiable. She spends some considerable time pushing against this with Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism.34 Animations, including Disney films, explore an ethics of things coming alive, transforming and shape-shifting, where inert materials exert themselves “revealing,” as Bennett puts it, “a secret capacity for self-propulsion.”35 Animations can disturb as well as delight, and these graphics conjoined with sound

Hope through Creation  139 and narrative can become cultural commodities with marketable propensities. The enchanting animation and the fantastical ways it could morph were Walt Disney’s gift to the world’s children, and to capitalism. Bennett asks whether enchanting potentials can survive commercialization.36 In a sense, she is asking whether they are ethically useful? Bennett notes further that a moral code is insufficient to ethics: “in addition to rules of behavior, one needs an aesthetic dimension hospitable to them.” I aver that, to counter the excesses of capitalism and its propensity to commodify everything, Noora Pyyry’s ethics of encounter are needed wherein there is a demeanor of generosity to others. Pyyry argues that generosity elaborates a world that is right sized and full of light. Generosity is about spending time—with others, on a project, telling a story—without worrying about remuneration. Like a child engrossed in a book or play, it has the potential for creating a world of enchantment. Bennett is convinced that animations are inventive enough to propel liberatory potentials that can offset the darker side of commodity fetishism. The questions, for her, revolve around the potential to reform commodity culture to render it more just and ethically sustainability.37 Moore’s project does so by pushing against the kitsch commodification of Irish culture in pursuit solely of something with which children can engage. More specifically, his project is to turn ink into light, by elaborating an ancient Christian text, and to describe a hero’s journey through neo-pagan graphics. Ultimately, Moore’s project is to create hope. Hope, for Jane Bennett, is to dispel codes of ethics that are “drawn too tightly” and “will not work without a sense of obligation or subscription.” Ethics of encounter, rather, require events that are “movements in space . . . a series of choreographed gestures, a distinctive assemblage of affective propulsions.”38 Moore’s work creates precisely these kinds of events, which he contrives and fosters through compelling and deliberate visual and sound strategies. It is with this that young viewers engage and by so doing they not only learn about ancient Ireland, absorb stories about heroes just like them and are enchanted by nature relations and connections between myths, monuments and the doings of men.39 Moore and his team painstakingly create a Celtic myth through space, scale, motion, geometries and gestures and, by so doing, they enchant. Young viewers are enchanted because the team creates with passion a world that is magical, mythical and wrought by the real fears and fancies of men, women and children. The Secret of Kells joins Tomm Moore’s other work as a transformative endeavor that liberates the potential for enchantments that create reconnections with nature, family and community through repetitions, sounds and motions. Notes 1 Tomm, Moore. The Secret of Kells (Kilkenny, Ireland: Cartoon Studio 2010). The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated feature). 2 Jane, Bennett. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossing, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 3). 3 This chapter and the next are the only two that deal with animated movies written for child audiences. both merge Celtic and Nordic cultural themes, with the movie described in this chapter focusing on recapturing Irish culture from commodification and those in the next using commodifying aspects of those same cultures.

140  Stuart C. Aitken 4 Tomm, Moore and Ross Stewart. Designing the Secret of Kells (Kilkenny: Ireland: The Cartoon Saloon 2014, p. 10). Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart wrote a book about the making of The Secret of Kells that includes storylines and sketches form the film as well as the voices of several of the artists who were involved in the project. 5 Ibid, p. 10. 6 Richard, Sharpe (Translator). Adomnán of Iona: The Life of St. Columba (London and New York: Penguin Classics, 1995). Adomnán was an early abbot of Iona who documented the life and the miracles of the abbey’s founding monk, Saint Colmcille (St. Columba). The writings and illuminations of these early monks provide one of the few windows we have into early medieval life. Moore and his team researched this work copiously for the creation of The Secret of Kells. 7 A beach to the north of this photograph, known as Traigh Ban Nam Manach (White Strand of the Monks) and one to the east known as Martyr’s Bay are locations where monks and locals were slaughtered during Norse raids. 8 Newgrange, Bru na Boine, is one of the largest burial cairns in Ireland. It is located northeast of Kells, near the River Boyne. Moore and his team use imagery of Newgrange for the layer of the great worm, Crom Cruach. Very little of the ancient forests of Ireland remain, although to get to the entrance to the Newgrange interpretative center requires a walk through some very old forest stands. 9 Bernard, Meehan. The Book of Kells (Under license from the Board of Trinity College, Dublin. New York: Thomas & Hudson Inc. 2019, p. 72). 10 Op cit, Moore and Stewart, p. 9. 11 Op cit, Meehan, p. 122. 12 Ibid, Meehan, p. 138 & p. 156. 13 Op cit, Moore and Stewart, p. 10. 14 The Tuatha Dé Danann (The folk of the goddess Danu) were pre-Christian invaders who came to Ireland in Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of Invasions/The Taking of Ireland). They were thought to be kings, queens, scientists, healers and druids with mystical powers. When they were ultimately defeated in battle, legend has it that they were led underground at Grangemouth to the land of youth (Tír na nÓg). 15 Moore, Tomm. (#1) Interview with Academy-Award Nominated Filmmaker Tomm Moore of “Wolfwalkers” Pipeline Artists. Interviewed by John Bucher. www.youtube. com/watch?v=ngvihmR-oQM&t=314s 16 Op cit, Jane Bennett 2001; Pyyry, Noora. Learning with the City Via Enchantment: Photo-Walks as Creative Encounters. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(1) (2016), pp. 102–115; Pyyry, Noora and Aiava, Raine. Enchantment as fundamental encounter: wonder and the radical reordering of subject/world. Cultural Geographies, 27(4) (2020), pp. 581–595. 17 Barry, Lopez, Arctic Dreams (New York, Random House: Vintage Books 1986, p. 316). 18 Op cit, Moore and Stewart, p. 62–64. 19 Compare to Gardner and Craine (Chapter 8). 20 Op cit, Moore and Stewart, p. 67. Charles Solomon is one of the artists who helped create The Secret of Kells, 21 Of Aidan, Moore muses, “somehow along the way, he picked up shades of Willy Nelson and George Carlin!” (Moore and Stewart, op cit, p. 35). 22 Op cit, Meehan, p. 224). 23 Ross Stewart, quoted in Moore and Stewart, pp. 85 and 89. 24 Bennett, op cit, p. 58 and p. 111. 25 Complex more-than-human connections are developed also in Cortés-Morales’ work (Chapter 11). Clearly, animation lends itself to these kinds of elaborations. In addition, and this is worth noting, Jarman and Kraftl (Chapter 16) focus on the more than human with child directed YouTube experiences. 26 ibid, p. 58 and p. 61.

Hope through Creation  141 27 The heroes’ journey is elaborated more fully in jake Rowlett’s discussion of the Star Wars Franchise (Chapter 13) and it is worth noting that George Lucas was inspired by Irish monks like Brendan for his Jedi Knights. 28 Op cit, Moore and Stewart, p. 141. 29 Ibid, p. 147. 30 Elsewhere in this book, Gardner and Craine elaborate the importance of repetitious ZigZags in the koker trilogy of Iranian Filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, and Deleuzian repetitive transversals that diagonally bisect horizontal and vertical coordinates. Transversals are somatic, and it is this dream-like form that Moore represents with Brendan and Crom. 31 Op cit. Moore and Stewart, p. 171. 32 Note the connection to the beehive stone dwellings that show up in Star Wars episode 7 described by Jake Rowlett (Chapter 13). this is the place that the Star Wars movie was filmed 33 Pyyry, Noora and Aiava, Raine. Enchantment as fundamental encounter: Wonder and the radical reordering of subject/world. Cultural Geographies, 27(4) (2020), pp. 581–595. 34 Bennett (op cit) includes a re-reading of his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus. It is beyond the scope of what I am trying to do here to engage this fascinating elaboration of materialism and cultural commodification, but she does note the benefits of the latter as it relates to contemporary animation. 35 Op cit, Bennett, p. 111. 36 Compare with Cortés-Morales (Chapter 11), who writes about enchantment of a different kind in movies that were much more commercially (and set out precisely to be so) successful than this one. 37 For a wonderful elaboration of the ways that ethics can be, and need to be, sustainable, see Rosi, Braidotti’s. “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” published in Deleuze and Philosophy (ed. Constantin Boundas, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2006, pp. 133–159); The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press. 2013). 38 Op cit, Bennett, p. 3. 39 Compare this to Murnaghan and McCreary’s (Chapter 9) focus on movies that documented the everyday lives of young first nations Canadians.

Bibliography Bennet, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossing, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Braidotti, Rosi. “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” published in Deleuze and Philosophy (ed. Constantin Boundas, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2006, pp. 133–159). ———. The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1986). Meehan, Bernard. The Book of Kells (Under license from the Board of Trinity College; Dublin and New York: Thomas & Hudson Inc., 2019). Moore, Tomm. (#1) Interview with Academy-Award Nominated Filmmaker Tomm Moore of “Wolfwalkers” Pipeline Artists. Interviewed by John Bucher. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ngvihmR-oQM&t=314s (last accessed May 10, 2023). Moore, Tomm and Ross Stewart. Designing the Secret of Kells (Kilkenny: Cartoon Saloon, 2014). Pyyry, Noora. “Learning with the City Via Enchantment: Photo-Walks as Creative Encounters,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(1) (2016), pp. 102–115. Pyyry, Noora and Raine Aiava. “Enchantment as Fundamental Encounter: Wonder and the Radical Reordering of Subject/World,” Cultural Geographies, 27(4) (2020), pp. 581–595.

11 The (Common) Worlds of Dragons Nature, Humans, and the Anthropocene in Children’s Films Susana Cortés-Morales Introduction The Anthropocene, and especially its most visible consequences such as the mass extinction of animal species and climate change, has made its way into the cultural industry aimed at children and families in diverse forms: from books and documentaries explicitly calling children to change their ways of living and their impact over the world through more sustainable practices, to films integrating these themes into their narratives in more or less realistic and/or fantastic ways.1 This chapter focuses on the latter, examining one kind of mythical being that has become popular in the last decade: dragons. These creatures have populated traditional mythology and storytelling for centuries, and the children’s cultural industry more recently, becoming a protagonist in children’s films, such as Raya and the Last Dragon (2021), Dragon Rider (2020) and the How to Train Your Dragon saga (2010, 2014, 2019).2 In all these films dragons become entangled with children or teenagers who need to somehow trigger a major shift in how human communities relate to each other, to their environments, and to dragons.3 The later trilogy is the focus of this chapter, suggesting that in these films dragons embody nature as an Other, creating worlds in which humans and dragons reshape their relationships seeking for balance. I explore these narratives and discuss them from a common world’s perspective, focusing on which stories are being told to children and families about the Anthropocene, particularly in terms of more-than-human relationships, the position of humanity in nature, the role of humans in the ruin of worlds, and the possibility of living together among these ruins. I posit the question not only in terms of the messages contained in the films, but also about which conversations these stories afford and whether they can be understood as a form of speculative fiction: can we see these stories as commonworlding attempts, in the words of Donna Haraway, helping children to become with the worlds in which they live? Or are they promoting views that intensify the divide between humans and the more-than-human beings with whom we share the world? Of course, it is likely that both these contexts are enacted. The chapter starts by briefly contextualizing the discussion in relation to some ideas about childhood-nature relationships, environmental education, and ecological imagination that will be relevant for reflecting about the films’ affordances. DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-11

The (Common) Worlds of Dragons  143 Then it moves towards a pondering of dragons, children, and nature in fantasy films and literature, as well as fantasy and the Anthropocene, which serves as the basis for presenting and discussing the narrative of the How to Train Your Dragon film trilogy from a common world’s perspective. From Environmental Education towards Ecological and Speculative Imagination Climate change and life in the Anthropocene discussions within both media and academia posit children variously as: present or future victims of their predecessors’ actions and lifestyles; environmental activists; or subjects of concern due to their assumed lack of contact with nature and the negative consequences of this disconnection both for their individual development and for the future of humankind.4 While these views have been questioned for their romantic, universalizing, anthropocentric, and adult-centric approaches to nature and childhood,5 they have resulted in various forms of environmental education initiatives that have become mainstream as part of school curricula around the world, characterized by encouraging stewardship roles on the side of humans and particularly children, where children’s views on nature are generally absent.6 As a response, various scholars have argued for the need to develop new approaches towards environmental education that question the understanding of our human position and agency in the world as separated from nature and the human exceptionalism that situates us in the centre of the stage—both as destroyers and as saviours of worlds. Instead, environmental education needs to acknowledge the various interdependencies that relate us to other species and the environments we are part of. Developing an ecological imagination is key in this regard,7,8,9 helping us to understand our ecological interdependencies and to “re-imagine the world in richer terms that will allow us to find ourselves in dialogue with and limited by other species’ needs, other kinds of minds.”10 The need for ecological imagination finds a response in Haraway’s idea of speculative fiction which, as argued by Hendrickx,11 enlarges our imagination and makes us more aware of the world. In this sense, it is possible to argue that “all fantasy is political.”12 But is speculative fiction something that can be found as an intrinsic characteristic of some forms of fiction literature, cinema, and arts? Or is it the result of how we think with fiction and the result of conversations it triggers?13 In this context, I posit three questions that I intend to explore in relation to the How to Train Your Dragon film trilogy: first, which kinds of environmental narratives focused on children are making their way into mainstream cultural industries aimed at children who inhabit different areas of the world and face diverse forms of environmental conflicts? I ponder this question particularly in relation to How to Train Your Dragon and situating my reflection from Chile. Second, how are children pictured and positioned within these narratives? And finally, in which ways do these creations work as speculative fiction, or not, contributing towards developing or hindering our ecological imagination?

144  Susana Cortés-Morales The Worlds of Dragons in Fantasy Film and Literature Dragons have populated mythological worlds in different cultural, historical, and geographical contexts, taking on different shapes, powers, and meanings, and engaging in different kinds of interactions with humans. Among the most popular images of dragons are the Asian—a benign being representing nature and good fortune—and the European dragon—originated in Nordic mythologies— representing a malefic force involved in fights with human heroes or warriors. The presence of dragons in fantasy literature and film usually follows one of these mythical portraits. In any case, their presence resonates with Ursula Le Guin’s notion of “green country”,14 defined as “a space in which animals, nature, and the unknown Other enjoy a power equal to or greater than that of humans.”15 In this context, dragons represent the whole of non-human animals, against which humans define themselves.16 Their role is not to prove to be “a better master of the world” than humans are, but to counterbalance their power and actions.17 In doing so, these narratives question the very idea of humankind as the world’s most powerful agent, responding to Oziewicz’s question about “how fantasy for the Anthropocene can disrupt the fantasy of the Anthropocene—a mistaken belief that we are masters of the planet,”18 arguing that more equitable futures for all forms of life need to be imagined in stories first. This idea resonates with Plumwood’s ecological imagination19 and Taylor’s emphasis on the role of minor players in imagining alternative future worlds.20 Going back to Le Guin’s notion of “green country”, it is possible to argue that in children’s fantasy worlds not only are animals and nature equal or more powerful than humans, but also children are perhaps more powerful in relation to adults. Many of the fantasy stories with environmental emphasis have children or young people as human protagonists. Burton takes on Haraway’s idea of staying with the trouble and that “it matters which stories tell stories,”21 and argues that stories told by children and for children are different to those told by and for adults.22 Children and young people “can offer insight and improvement to the staid narrative norms of adulthood through their own approaches to the trouble.”23 However, fantasy literature and film usually consist of stories told by adults for children and adults. In the case of films, there is not only one adult telling a story, but also cultural industry and its corporations.24 Therefore, it is important when approaching children’s fantasy films with child characters to bear in mind that they are not the ones making up the story. In this sense, it becomes a complex entanglement of agency and agents, as fictional children are given agentic aspects only found in a fantasy world,25 by adults standing in a different—real—world. Here, fantasy can also play a role as speculative fiction regarding children’s position within their human communities. How to Train Your Dragon: From Pests to Pets? How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2, and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World compose a 3D computer-animated action-fantasy film trilogy, based on Cressida Cowell’s series of children books with the same name.

The (Common) Worlds of Dragons  145 The films are set in Berk, a coastal village inhabited by a Viking-like community. Hiccup is the human protagonist of the story, a teenager transitioning towards adulthood, son of the village chief. He is the narrator of the story, and introduces us to Berk at the beginning of the first film as a good place to live, where “pests are the only problem . . . Most places have mosquitoes. We have . . . dragons”. While he says this with some humour, Hiccup lost his mother to a dragon when he was a baby. Despite this, and contrary to his father and community, this boy does not resent dragons, he does not want to kill them, and he thinks that dragons attack humans because they have been threatened by humans. The first film focuses on the relationship between humans and dragons, with humans’ approach being synthesized by the statement: “either we finish them or they’ll finish us”. Transitioning from teenager to adulthood necessarily implies killing your first dragon as a rite of passage, for both girls and boys who aim to become warriors. Hiccup, as the son of the chief, is troubled by this: he wants his father’s approval but his body and will are considered too weak to fight dragons.26 In the midst of a dragon raid in the village, Hiccup (who is told to stay inside and not to get involved in the fighting) shoots a dragon and the dragon flies away, with no one as a witness. The next day, Hiccup finds the dragon in the forest, with its tail hurt and unable to fly. This is not an ordinary dragon, but a Night Fury, thought extinct and the most dangerous of all. After deliberating whether to take this opportunity to kill a dragon and get his father’s approval, or help the dragon survive, Hiccup decides not to kill Night Fury, and instead brings raw fish to feed him. In between dragon-killing training sessions, Hiccup sneaks away to look after Toothless (as he names the dragon). Hiccup establishes a way to communicate with him, through imitating movements, gestures, sounds, and even eating raw fish like him, a process that culminates with the dragon imitating Hiccup’s drawing on the sand. The boy, who is also a blacksmith apprentice, designs and fabricates a tail prosthesis for Toothless. After a few tweaks and adjustments, the dragon is able to fly again with Hiccup as his rider, as the boy needs to activate and “drive” the dragon’s tail while in the air. Through this relationship, Hiccup concludes that dragons are not intrinsically violent and dangerous creatures. Their attacks are clearly a response against the threat of human violence. Applying his newly gained knowledge in the dragon-fighting training sessions, Hiccup goes from being the worst warrior to the most effective dragon tamer, as he secretly brings food and tickles dragons instead of fighting them. There is an important movement here, in which Hiccup’s relationship with Toothless questions the very image of dragons in European mythology, as their aggressiveness towards humans is explained by human threatening behaviour against dragons. The maleficent strength portrayed in dragons is quickly dissolved when Toothless starts playing with Hiccup to eventually become his pet-dragon—although many of the playing scenes still prove Toothless is much stronger than Hiccup. The rest of the first film is focused on Hiccup’s campaign to change his community’s view of dragons. His teenage friends make this move smoothly, while the elders and especially the chief are more difficult to convince, but eventually understand that they can have a different relationship with dragons.

146  Susana Cortés-Morales The second film of the trilogy starts with Hiccup introducing the audience to Berk: Dragons used to be a bit of a problem here, but that was 5 years ago, now they have all moved in. And really, why wouldn’t they? We have custom stables, all you can eat feeding stations, a full service dragon wash, even top of the line fire prevention. As the changes that have occurred in the village show, dragons have not only been adopted as pets, but also like working animals, with both status at the same time. This new entanglement has resulted in new kinds of agencies too: “Because we are Vikings on the backs of dragons, the world just got a whole lot bigger”, declares Hiccup. Thanks to this, Hiccup is creating a map of the wider territory they can now inhabit. As the world widens, however, they also encounter a wider human world that they need to convince about dragons not being a threat. This becomes the new challenge of the story, as they find Drago, a dragon hunter who is building a dragon army. On the way, Hiccup meets his lost mother, who turns out to also have a special relationship with dragons. His mother has been living with dragons since she was taken by one when Hiccup was a baby. Together, Hiccup, his parents, and their human-dragon community fight Drago and succeed. However, this success implies that Toothless becomes the alpha dragon—as he fights Drago’s alpha dragon in order to save Hiccup—and Hiccup’s father dies and Hiccup becomes the new chief. At the funeral, his mother says to him: “You have the heart of a chief, and the soul of a dragon. Only you can bring our worlds together”. This moment represents the establishment of a new era, with the mission to make the whole world shift their relationship to dragons. It has become clear now that dragons are not a threat by themselves, but can be if entangled into human threatening endeavours. So far, How to Train Your Dragon has presented us with an environmental context in which two species collide and fight each other, defining each other in the way, and a teenage boy whose vision transforms this relationship. He renounces the heroic path of dragon-killer and instead develops an affective relationship with them. In the context of climate-conscious narratives inspired by anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and queer ecologies, Barai argues, the solution is not destruction but “loving engagement with an enemy Other”.27 In doing so, these fantasies create a “counter-fantasy”, which consists in “imagining the desire to care for whole worlds and universes”, which in turn constitutes a counter-force in relation to the individualistic and oppressive aspects of capitalist ways of living.28 The stories told in the first two films move in this direction, working towards re-addressing dragon-human positions. This constitutes an ecological issue, in the sense that “the position or location of humans, animals, plants, and trees with respect to one another matters vitally.”29 When re-addressing the Other based on responsibility for that other in an interdependent manner, “new terms of the conversation”30 need to be established, based on the understanding of new mutual positions and impacts. In How to Train Your Dragon we observe how new codes of communication are

The (Common) Worlds of Dragons  147 established between the two species, and how new forms of agency emerge from the new intra-actions they get entangled in.31 As discussed before, dragons appear in fantasy stories counterbalancing human power. In How to Train your Dragon it is interesting to observe this feature of dragons, as they intra-act predominantly with teenagers rather than adults. The story seeks to showcase children and young people as powerful too. Here, the figure of dragons challenges not only human power, but also adult power when dragons and children become entangled and act together, “as one”, in Hiccup’s words. Dragons-children emerge then as relational agents. Hiccup appears initially as a fragile powerless young person, and Night Fury as a naturally powerful but currently disabled dragon who cannot fly and feed himself. Entangled with each other and technology they become strong, skilful, and powerful and the trigger for major socio-ecological change. Through this intra-action, both are able to fly, Night Fury is able to feed, and both become at some point of the trilogy leaders of their own communities, clearly separated as different species, but acting together at key times. This is perhaps one of the most relevant ideas in this film in terms of imagining more-than-human futures. However, the potential of this idea weakens as the relationship between humans and dragons becomes very much like that of humanspets in affective terms, and as that of humans-working animals in practical terms. This feral ecology turns problematic in the third (and so far the last) film: The Hidden World.32 In the introduction to Berk, this time we see an about-to-collapse village overcrowded with humans and dragons, with limited space and food, and dragons’ abilities such as spitting fire continuously putting at risk the infrastructures of the village. At the same time, the villagers have become excessively dependent upon the dragons’ affordances. But the real threat is the human Others who want to hunt the dragons and destroy Berk if necessary. Hiccup realizes that Berk needs to find a bigger and safer location. Hiccup focuses on finding the Hidden World his father used to tell him about, a world guarded by dragons. But as he searches for it, he realizes that, in the current world, dragons will never be safe while living with humans. In a puzzling turn of events, the worlds of dragons and humans become drastically separated. Having found a way to make a new prosthesis that allows Toothless to fly on his own, Hiccup makes the decision to let dragons go and move into the hidden world. When saying goodbye, Hiccup says to Toothless: I was so busy fighting for a world that I wanted, I didn’t think about what you needed! You’ve looked after us for long enough. Time to look after yourselves . . . I want you to be free. Our world doesn’t deserve you . . . yet. The film ends with Hiccup telling us that: Legend says that when the ground shakes, or when lava pukes from the Earth, it’s the dragons letting us know they’re still here, waiting for us to figure out how to get along. Yes, the world believes dragons are gone, if they ever existed at all. But we Berkians, we know otherwise, and we’ll guard the secret, until the time comes when dragons can return in peace.

148  Susana Cortés-Morales Otherness and difference translate here in terms of how diverse human groups relate to each other and to the world they inhabit. Hiccup and Toothless manage to shift their communities’ relationship, but they accept that this is not possible in a wider context. This seems to acknowledge the idea that [s]ome ecologies are more fragile than others; some people and nations pollute more than others; some economies wreak more environmental havoc than others; and there are weird and inventive forms of life—both human and nonhuman—that we might learn from.33

Trentrenvilú and Kaikaivilú Situating myself as an audience member in the territory known as Chile in South America, there is an ancient story that I  deem relevant to briefly refer here: the Mapuche legend of Trentrenvilú and Kaikaivilú, two sibling dragon-like giant serpents who guard land and sea, correspondingly. They are said to have fought each other for years because Kaikai created a giant wave that flooded the land making humans and land animals drown and turn into sea animals. Trentren helped the survivors, taking them to the mountains and making the mountains higher so the water could not reach them. The story explains the particular geography of this territory as a result of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The story has been mainly orally transmitted and there are variations,34 but these are the basic elements contained in all of them. Its relation to real natural disasters is expressed by the idea that each Mapuche community has its “trentren”, a hill or mountain where they would climb every time a lake, river, or the sea comes out of its normal course or height. The story can be told as history rather than as a myth or legend, at least among the elderly. While the story can be understood as part of the creation of the world history rather than as an isolated legend,35 Chile’s National Curriculum includes it as one among many resources for teaching Ancestral Indigenous groups: Language and Culture in year 3 of primary school. There are many animated videos illustrating the story, for example the two animated videos contained as pedagogical resources on the National Curriculum website36: the live-action short video made by Mapuche communities37 and the Kiñe Rupa series of videos inspired by Mapuche tales.38 In the latter, the story is told by a grandmother to her grandson, as retelling something that happened to their ancestors. Here, the story takes a turn also found in other written or audiovisual versions, in which the dragon-serpents’ fight is explained by the fact that, when Kaikai awoke from a long sleep, it realized that humans had not looked after the sea but exploited and polluted it. Furious Kaikai hit the waters and sent a giant wave that flooded the land and so on. As in other dragon stories, Trentren and Kaikai appear as beings whose power outperforms that of humans— particularly their polluting and destructive power. In the animated video, after listening to his grandmother, the boy reflects: “my grandma says that if we keep planting pines and eucalyptus everything will dry up. Perhaps Kaikai will return”.

The (Common) Worlds of Dragons  149 In the present, in addition to its relation to natural disasters, the story seems to have taken a turn that reflects the wider context of environmental conflicts that affect Mapuche people in Chile, where their lands have been actually flooded for the construction of dams, or appropriated by forestry companies that exploit and dry the land planting foreign trees in single-crops. In this context, Mapuche cosmology and philosophy have been understood by scholars and activists as a contribution to imagining and learning from more sustainable relations between human communities and the ecosystems they inhabit.39 For example, Elisa Loncón explains how in Mapuche cosmology the land is populated not only by animals, plants, diverse forms of water, mountains, and so on, but also by spiritual owners and protectors of the land that have material and spiritual existence: The gen mapu kipulme live in particular places in nature, such as hills, waterfalls, woods, rocks, riffs, picks, rivers, caves, manantials, stars, sun, moon and other ecological and energetic places. They are spiritual owners who protect the territories and ecological biodiversity areas. For this very reason, mapuche communities defend and protect places and territories so that they are not destroyed by economic activities (mining, forestry, hydroelectric, single-crop agriculture) because these are important places for biodiversity but also places with the presence of important spiritual energetic diversity. Therefore, this ecological, spiritual and energetic richness . . . does not belong to humans. It does not have an anthropocentric origin. It is part of Mother Earth.40 This kind of discourse within which Trentrenvilú and Kaikaivilú are immersed in the present resonates with various peoples and territories in a country where natural resources have historically constituted its main source of income, and where the consequences of the exploitation of the land and resources through capitalist logics are negatively impacting human, animal, and material lives in diverse ways, from forced migration due to draught to lethal illnesses caused by pollution. Among the most dramatic cases, and one that has affected children in particular, is the acute sulphur dioxide pollution of Puchuncavi, a district in central Chile, by the CODELCO copper refinery Ventanas. The refinery, still working in 2023, has transformed the surrounding territory into a sacrificial zone. On repeated occasions, when the pollution gets to extremely high levels in the air, dozens or even hundreds of children have been intoxicated. Schools have to close and people need to lock themselves in their houses. This context is where children living in Chile watch these films and from where I reflect upon it. Conclusions Going back to the first question I posed, in terms of which kinds of environmental narratives are present in How to Train Your Dragon, while the story is set in a fictional place with a mixture of Nordic geocultural characteristics and Scottish accent, the environmental issues affecting its characters refer to universal aspects

150  Susana Cortés-Morales of fiction in which antagonistic forces struggle, with different world visions coinhabiting time and space. In this case, divergent world visions refer precisely to how humans view and relate to dragons, therefore raising an explicitly interspecies problem. The narrative presents a spatial issue too, with Berk located in a territory that does not have the conditions for supporting the co-inhabitation of the multiple species entangled in its feral ecologies. Migration appears here as a solution, in the midst of which it turns out that migrating together, humans and dragons, will not solve the main problem, which is the safety of the whole community in relation to foreign threats. While the issue of divergent views inside the community are solved through Hiccup and Toothless joint agency, the issue is not solved when seen on a wider scale, in relation to communities that remain Other. The third film, bringing us back to the real world in which dragons do not exist, leaves open the possibility of a different world, and seems to pass on the responsibility for creating it to the audience, which takes us to the second question: how are children pictured and positioned within these narratives? In How to Train Your Dragon as well as other children’s films about dragons, young people appear as the bearers of socio-ecological change. For example, when all adult dragons fall under the spell of the alpha dragon controlled by a dragon hunter, Hiccup realizes that baby dragons are not vulnerable: “They’re babies, they don’t listen to anyone”, explains Hiccup. “Yeah, just like us!”, replies one of his friends. This feature of baby dragons and children is what positions them in the film as key players in changing the world as we know it. Free from the spell thrown by older powerful leaders, they are able to do things differently. And perhaps this is what makes the end of the trilogy significant: while in films 1 and 2 a different world seems possible, in film 3 we are thrown back at our real world in which we humans do not deserve sharing the world with dragons. The responsibility moves away from Hiccup and his friends towards the audience. While this can be seen as a way of acknowledging minor players’ agencies, it is also problematic to suggest that change constitutes an individual responsibility. In the case of Hiccup this is an ambiguous matter: on one side, he acts as an individual and fragile young person who becomes entangled with a vulnerable dragon and together they become one powerful agent of change. On the other, he becomes a political authority when his father dies. In his figure both individual and political agency-responsibility converge. The third question refers to the ways in which these films act as speculative fiction, or not, contributing towards developing or hindering our ecological imagination. This question is about which conversations about our positionality within the world we inhabit are triggered by the films. Each film, book, story, drawing, and so on is a constellation of affordances for these conversations. It matters what discussions and conversations children’s films are affording or encouraging. But these conversations are the result of the intra-action between these stories and the people who watch/listen to them, and the common worlds they are part of. In Chile, where mainstream stories intra-act with local indigenous stories, and with particular environmental conditions and conflicts such as drought and sacrifice zones, what are

The (Common) Worlds of Dragons  151 the affordances of these foreign films in addressing the issues that affect children and young people in their everyday lives? While the How to Train Your Dragon movies can be seen as forms of speculative fiction that help us imagine other possible futures, even within Hiccup’s community the trouble of human-nature relationship perpetuates a logic of human domination over nature or dragons in this case. While the film can be seen as speculative fiction in terms of positioning children and young people as bearers of positive interspecies change as individual, collective, or political agents, the narrative seems to remain within an anthropocentric logic in which humans are the centre of ecological and interspecies drama, both as villains—destroyers of the world—or as heroes—saviours of the world. In this sense, while Hiccup finds himself constrained by situations beyond his control, his is the impulse to get his community and dragons entangled in the first place, and his is the decision to migrate and ultimately to let go of Toothless. However, we can further this exercise of speculative ecological imagination as audiences. What if we speculate other possible fictions for the futures of Berk? Were dragons only good and harmless on the condition that they were trained and tamed by humans? What if, instead of How to Train Your Dragon, the film was called how to live with dragons? Which possible relations and feral ecologies would have emerged in this scenario? Interrogating the film’s story, we do not really know what life was like for dragons before Toothless and Hiccup became entangled, and why did they leave the Hidden World to torment humans. This and other questions can further the ecological imagination afforded by the films, situating these imaginations when possible in the territories we inhabit. Notes 1 Compare to previous chapter by Aitken, which discusses fantastical connections between the main protagonist in The Secret of Kells and a magical natural environment. 2 The How to Train Your Dragon trilogy was produced by DreamWorks Animation: DeBlois, D. (Director). (2014).; How to Train Your Dragon 2 [Motion Picture].; DeBlois, D. (Director). (2019). How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World [Motion Picture].; DeBlois, D., & Sanders, C. (Directors). (2010). How to Train Your Dragon [Motion Picture]. Raya and the Last Dragon was produced by Walt Disney Animation: Hall, D., Estrada, C. L., Briggs, P. & Ripa, J. (Directors). (2021). Raya and the Last Dragon [Motion Picture]. Dragon Rider was produced for Netflix: Eshed, T. (Director). (2020). Dragon Rider [Motion Picture]. 3 Although dragons do not show up in the film discussed in the previous chapter, they are indirectly referenced in the art of The Book of Kells, which is ostensibly a Christian text. moreover, Brendan’s fear is manifest in the great worm Crum, which may be thought of as a dragon of sorts. 4 Louv, R. (2005). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Workman Publishing Company. 5 Malone (2016). Theorizing a child—dog encounter in the slums of La Paz using posthumanistic approaches in order to disrupt universalisms in current ‘child in nature’ debates. Children’s Geographies, 14(4), 390–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2015 .1077369; Nxumalo, F. (2017). Geotheorizing mountain—child relations within anthropogenic inheritances*. Children’s Geographies, 15(5), 558–569; Taylor (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Routledge: London; Wells (2002). Reconfiguring the

152  Susana Cortés-Morales

6

7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16

17 18

19 20 21

radical other: Urban children’s consumption practices and the nature/culture divide. Journal of Consumer Culture, 2(3), 291–315. https://doi.org/10.1177/146954050200200301 Adams and Savahl (2017). Nature as children’s space: A systematic review. Journal of Environmental Education, 48(5), 291–321. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2017.13 66160; Clarke, D. A. G. & McPhie, J. (2014). Becoming animate in education: Immanent materiality and outdoor learning for sustainability. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 14(3), 198–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2014.9198 66; McPhie and Clarke (2015). A walk in the park: Considering practice for outdoor environmental education through an immanent take on the material turn. Journal of Environmental Education, 46(4), 230–250; Ruck and Mannion (2020). Fieldnotes and situational analysis in environmental education research: experiments in new materialism. Environmental Education Research, 26(9–10). https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2 019.1594172 Taylor (2020). Downstream river dialogues: An educational journey toward a planetaryscaled ecological imagination. ECNU Review of Education, 3(1), 107–137. https://doi. org/10.1177/2096531120905194 Plumwood (2007a). A  review of Deborah Bird Rose’s ‘Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for decolonisation’. Australian Humanities Review, 42. http:// australianhumanitiesreview.org/2007/08/01/a-review-of-deborah-bird-roses-reportsfrom-a-wild-country-ethics-for-decolonisation/ Plumwood (2009). Nature in the active voice. Australian Humanities Review. http:// australianhumanitiesreview.org/2009/05/01/nature-in-the-active-voice/ (Google Scholar). Plumwood (2009). Nature in the active voice, no page numbers. Hendrickx (2022). On monsters and other matters of housekeeping: Reading Jeff VanderMeer with Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin. In Oziewicz et al. (eds.), Fantasy and myth in the Anthropocene: imagining futures and dreaming hope in literature and media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Bould and Vint (2011). The Routledge concise history of science fiction. Abingdon, New York: Routledge, p. 102. The power of speculative fiction as its controversial application is also an import focus in Chapter 12 by Seitz. Le Guin (2007). The critics, the monsters, and the fantasists. The Wordsworth Circle, 38(1–2). Burton (2022). Playing with the trouble: Children and the Anthropocene in Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch series. In Oziewicz et al. (eds.), Fantasy and myth in the Anthropocene: imagining futures and dreaming hope in literature and media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Doherty (2022). Reading children’s literature in the Anthropocene: The representation of nature in Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea fiction. In Oziewicz et al. (eds.), Fantasy and myth in the Anthropocene: imagining futures and dreaming hope in literature and media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Larsson (2021). Bringing dragons back into the world. In A. Hoglund & C. Trenter (eds.), The enduring fantastic: Essays on imagination and Western culture. McFarland: North Carolina, 130. Oziewicz (2022). Fantasy for the Anthropocene: on the ecocidal unconscious, planetarianism and imagination of biocentric futures. In Oziewicz et al. (eds.), Fantasy and myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining futures and dreaming hope in literature and media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic, 58. Plumwood (2009). Nature in the active voice, no page numbers. Taylor (2020). Countering the conceits of the Anthropos: scaling down and researching with minor players. Discourse, 41(3), 340–358. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2019. 1583822 Burton (2022). Playing with the trouble: Children and the Anthropocene in Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch series. Haraway (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

The (Common) Worlds of Dragons  153 22 Compare to Murnaghan and McCreary (Chapter 9), who compare two documentaries about children, the first told by adults and the second more sensitive to child tellings and to Katz (Chapter 17) who focuses exclusively on child tellings. 23 Burton (2022). Playing with the trouble: children and the Anthropocene in Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch series, p. 37. 24 Compare this to the previous discussion (Chapter  10) on Tomm Moore’s vision that pushes against the commodification of Irish culture. 25 Murray and Overall (2017). Moving around children’s fiction: Agentic and impossible mobilities. Mobilities, 12(4), 572–584. 26 Compare to discussions of embodiment in Chapters 4 and 7. 27 Barai (2022). 17 “The Earth is my home too, can’t I help protect it?”: Planetary thinking, queer identities, and environmentalism in The Legend of Korra, She-Ra, and Steven Universe. In Oziewicz et  al. (eds.), Fantasy and myth in the Anthropocene: imagining futures and dreaming hope in literature and media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic, p. 116. 28 Barai (2022). 17 “The Earth is my home too, can’t I help protect it?”: Planetary Thinking, Queer Identities, and Environmentalism in The Legend of Korra, She-Ra, and Steven Universe, p. 118. 29 Hendrickx (2022). On monsters and other matters of housekeeping: Reading Jeff VanderMeer with Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 227. 30 Hendrickx (2022). On monsters and other matters of housekeeping: reading Jeff VanderMeer with Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 227. 31 Rautio (2013). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14733285.2013.812278 32 Tsing et al. (2021). Feral Atlas: The more-than-human Anthropocene. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 33 Hendrickx (2022). On monsters and other matters of housekeeping: Reading Jeff VanderMeer with Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 227. 34 Trivero (2018). Trentrenfilú: el mito cosmogónico fundamental de la cultura mapuche. Chile: Tácitas (Tacit Editions). 35 Trivero (2018). Trentrenfilú: el mito cosmogónico fundamental de la cultura mapuche. Chile: Tácitas (Tacit Editions). 36 www.youtube.com/watch?v=abkkzTe70NU and www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyIlf9Aq614 37 www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3Tj6SiS7I0 38 www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbZnHr6q3b4&list=TLPQMTkwNDIwMjNSkzrrmK8B Yg&index=2 39 Related ideas of sustainability come across in Chapters 10 and 16. 40 Loncón (2023). Azmapu: aportes de la filosofía Mapuche para el cuidado del lof y la madre Tierra. Santiago: Editorial Planeta, 80. Own translation.

Bibliography Adams, S., & Savahl, S. (2017). Nature as children’s space: A systematic review. Journal of Environmental Education, 48(5), 291–321. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2017.13 66160 Barai, M. (2022). 17 “The Earth is my home too, can’t I help protect it?”: Planetary thinking, queer identities, and environmentalism in the Legend of Korra, She-Ra, and Steven Universe. In Oziewicz et  al. (eds.), Fantasy and myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining futures and dreaming hope in literature and media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Bould, M. & Vint, S. (2011). The Routledge concise history of science fiction. Abingdon, New York: Routledge.

154  Susana Cortés-Morales Burton, L. (2022). Playing with the trouble: Children and the Anthropocene in Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch series. In Oziewicz et al. (eds.), Fantasy and myth in the Anthropocene: imagining futures and dreaming hope in literature and media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Clarke, D. A. G. & McPhie, J. (2014). Becoming animate in education: Immanent materiality and outdoor learning for sustainability. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 14(3), 198–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2014.919866 Common Worlds Research Collective. (2020). Learning to become with the world: Education for future survival. https://www.commonworlds.net/ Doherty, P. (2022). Reading children’s literature in the Anthropocene: The representation of nature in Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea fiction. In Oziewicz et al. (eds.), Fantasy and myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining futures and dreaming hope in literature and media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hendrickx, K. (2022). On monsters and other matters of housekeeping: Reading Jeff VanderMeer with Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin. In Oziewicz et al. (eds.), Fantasy and myth in the Anthropocene: imagining futures and dreaming hope in literature and media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Larsson, M. (2021). Bringing dragons back into the world. In A. Hoglund & C. Trenter (eds.), The enduring fantastic: Essays on imagination and Western culture. North Carolina: McFarland. Le Guin, U. (2007). The critics, the monsters, and the fantasists. The Wordsworth Circle, 38(1–2). Loncón, E. (2023). Azmapu: Aportes de la filosofía Mapuche para el cuidado del lof y la madre Tierra. Santiago: Editorial Planeta. Louv, R. (2005). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Dublin: Workman Publishing Company. Malone, K. (2016). Theorizing a child—Dog encounter in the slums of La Paz using posthumanistic approaches in order to disrupt universalisms in current ‘child in nature’ debates. Children’s Geographies, 14(4), 390–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2015. 1077369 McPhie, J. & Clarke, D. A. G. (2015). A walk in the park: Considering practice for outdoor environmental education through an immanent take on the material turn. Journal of Environmental Education, 46(4), 230–250. Murray, L. & Overall, S. (2017). Moving around children’s fiction: Agentic and impossible mobilities. Mobilities, 12(4), 572–584. Nxumalo, F. (2017). Geotheorizing mountain—Child relations within anthropogenic inheritances*. Children’s Geographies, 15(5), 558–569. Oziewicz, M. (2022). Fantasy for the Anthropocene: On the ecocidal unconscious, planetarianism and imagination of biocentric futures. In Oziewicz et al. (eds.), Fantasy and myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining futures and dreaming hope in literature and media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Plumwood V. (2007a). A  review of Deborah Bird Rose’s ‘reports from a wild country: Ethics for decolonisation’. Australian Humanities Review, 42. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2007/08/01/a-review-of-deborah-bird-roses-reports-from-a-wild-countryethics-for-decolonisation/ Plumwood, V. (2009). Nature in the active voice. Australian Humanities Review. http:// australianhumanitiesreview.org/2009/05/01/nature-in-the-active-voice/ Rautio, P. (2013). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733 285.2013.812278

The (Common) Worlds of Dragons  155 Ruck, A. & Mannion, G. (2020). Fieldnotes and situational analysis in environmental education research: Experiments in new materialism. Environmental Education Research, 26(9–10). https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1594172 Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. London: Routledge. Taylor, A. (2020). Countering the conceits of the Anthropos: Scaling down and researching with minor players. Discourse, 41(3), 340–358. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2019. 1583822 Taylor, A. (2020). Downstream river dialogues: An educational journey toward a planetaryscaled ecological imagination. ECNU Review of Education, 3(1), 107–137. https://doi. org/10.1177/2096531120905194 Taylor, A. & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2018). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. In The Common Worlds of Children and Animals: Relational Ethics for Entangled Lives (Vol. 3, Issue October  2018). https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315670010 Trivero, A. (2018). Trentrenfilú: el mito cosmogónico fundamental de la cultura mapuche. Chile: Tácitas (Tacit Editions). Tsing, A. (2015). The Mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tsing, A., Gan, E., Swanson, H. & Bubandt, N. (2017). Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tsing, A., Deger, J., Keleman, A. & Zhou, F. (2021). Feral Atlas: The more-than-human Anthropocene. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wells, K. (2002). Reconfiguring the radical other: Urban children’s consumption practices and the nature/culture divide. Journal of Consumer Culture, 2(3), 291–315. https://doi. org/10.1177/146954050200200301

12 “A Futuristic Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?” Race, Class, and Boyhood in Star Trek’s 24th Century David K. Seitz Social Reproduction from Deep Space Nine Human geography and speculative fiction (sf), never fully distinguishable endeavors, converge in their preoccupations with the question of social reproduction: the daily and generational work of sustaining life and maintaining life’s material conditions of possibility.1 An inherently ambivalent category, social reproduction in practice often serves to reproduce the same old unequal social relations. But social reproduction also holds out the possibility of repetition with a difference.2 It comprises the material grounds from which liberatory politics might emerge and offers departure points for the possibility of something new.3 Both geography and sf, from the novels of Octavia Butler to the ethnographies of Cindi Katz, creatively investigate the agency of children and young people in the spaces of social reproduction.4 Both fields emphasize that young people are not merely the passive recipients of efforts to reproduce existing social relations—that they relentlessly question the maps of the social world that they are presented with by parents, teachers, and peers. This chapter turns to the U.S. popular sf television franchise Star Trek, arguing that it positioned children and young people as critical interlocutors for the contradictions of U.S. social life in the 1990s. While scholars (including geographers) have long turned to Star Trek as a pedagogical and critical resource for examining race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, class, geopolitics, and more, they have rarely considered where these processes meet up with matters of age.5 Given the centrality of reproduction to sf as a genre and to sf scholarship, and the popularity of much sf with children and young people themselves, this elision is somewhat curious.6 Offering one small contribution to efforts to close this gap, this chapter turns to two of the child characters on Deep Space Nine (1993–1999), the fourth and most critically acclaimed Star Trek television program to date. Although Deep Space Nine remains unique among Star Trek programs and films in many respects, perhaps its most fundamental and, indeed, most controversial break from the franchise is geographical: the program is set on a station at a fixed point in outer space, a port city at the crossroads of multiple galactic powers, rather than on a roving starship. By making easy escape from political consequences of alien encounters gone awry impossible, the program’s setting became a site of DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-12

“A Futuristic Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?”  157 possibility, not for exploring “exotic” worlds “out there,” but for critical reflection on the contradictions of and U.S. urban life. Atop DS9’s lengthy list of progressive bona fides are its unprecedented casting of a Black actor (the fantastic Avery Brooks) as a commanding officer, its sympathetic depiction of organized labor in an anti-union age, its extended allegory for the struggles of the Palestinian people, and a history-making same-sex kiss.7 DS9 also took young people seriously in novel ways. Although not the first Trek to make a young person a regular character, it went beyond previous installments by imagining the quotidian relationships between children, as well as between children and adults, as affectively complex and politically significant.8 This chapter offers glimpses into the geographies of social reproduction in everyday life on DS9, with a focus on the friendship between Benjamin Sisko’s son Jake (Cirroc Lofton) and a young extraterrestrial, a Ferengi named Nog (the late Aron Eisenberg). Making Friends Both Jake and Nog are sons of single fathers, men who have moved to the station for reasons of work and duty.9 Jake’s father, Starfleet Commander Sisko, is a widower, a military officer for the United Federation of Planets (a liberal stand-in for the United States, United Nations, or West) who is dispatched to the station on a long-term diplomatic mission. Jake’s mother, Jennifer (Felecia M. Bell), was killed in a military conflict with the Borg, among Trek’s most fearsome antagonists, three years earlier. Nog’s father, Rom (Max Grodénchik), moves to the station to work for Nog’s uncle, an exploitative entrepreneur named Quark (Armin Shimerman) whose eponymous restaurant, bar, and casino is the station’s primary commercial hub, in keeping with the characterization of Ferengi as the most capitalist society in Trek. Although Nog’s mother is still living, she has taken the family’s assets and left Nog’s father for a wealthier man and is never depicted as a part of Nog’s life. Between Jake, the Starfleet brat, and Nog, who is subject to his father’s grim prospects in the unforgiving Ferengi economy, both boys have already moved multiple times in their young lives. The two are also among a very small handful of young people living on the station, which is undergoing dramatic cultural, political, and economic transformation after a successful armed anticolonial uprising on the nearby planet of Bajor. When Jake introduces himself to Nog on the station’s Promenade, the young Ferengi’s initial reaction is one of incredulity. But when Jake points out that there are “not exactly a lot of friends to choose from around here,” Nog sees his point and loosens up. When a station primary and secondary school is established shortly thereafter, the two also become classmates as well as friends. Yet if Jake and Nog seem to face similar emotional and social predicaments, and to navigate similar crises of household social reproduction, other dimensions of their social locations make their friendship a surprising achievement. To begin with, the antagonism between their respective societies is considerable. The Ferengi, whose civil religion explicitly valorizes the accumulation of capital, transgress a cardinal rule of Star Trek’s post-scarcity (and secular) utopian Federation, which

158  David K. Seitz has famously moved past the capitalist mode of production. Yet although Ferengi capitalism is indeed worth criticizing, DS9 suggests that it is the poorest and most exploited Ferengi (particularly women) who often endure the worst excesses of this system. As the son of a failed entrepreneur in a brutal class society, Nog does not enjoy the privileges of social citizenship in the post-scarcity Federation that Jake takes for granted. While Nog is expected to work for his uncle for the rest of his life if he can’t hack it as a businessman, Jake is free to pursue whatever work he enjoys and finds meaningful with far fewer worries as to his basic needs. Intertwined with the class gulf between Jake and Nog are complex questions of race and ethnicity. DS9 is widely and rightly hailed for its tender and nuanced images of Black single fatherhood in a society that has long scrutinized and pathologized Black families, and the relationship between Ben and Jake Sisko (and the actors who portray them) is indeed a very special one.10 Brooks is particularly laudable and insightful in his refusal to toe Star Trek’s line about the 24th century as a truly “post-racial” utopia, and his performance and the program’s narrative often address race directly, rather than through allegory alone.11 But even as Lofton’s performance as Jake is mediated by contemporaneous images of Black youth, within DS9’s narrative, Jake is endowed with full personhood in ways that remain allegorically elusive for Nog. As itinerant merchants, the Ferengi are widely viewed by many extraterrestrial societies—and even the “enlightened” and cosmopolitan Federation—as devious, avaricious criminals and outsiders. The very word “Ferengi” comes from Arabic and Farsi words for “foreigner.”12 Although the Ferengi originally envisaged by writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a major new Federation foe, their diminutive stature and effete mannerisms led to ridicule, and they rapidly became secondary, comic adversaries instead. Alongside mockery, the Ferengi have incurred ire from some who read the extraterrestrials’ and appearance association with the abstract, financial dimensions of capital as drawing on a deep reservoir of anti-Semitic or anti-Asian caricatures and stereotypes.13 Yet most Ferengi in 1990s Trek are portrayed by actors of Ashkenazi Jewish origin who do so with a clear and critical awareness of how images of Jewishness are being put to work. So although the friendship between Jake and Nog is a space of encounter between Blackness and Jewishness, between class privilege and dispossession, and between lofty, comfortable Federation ideals and hard-luck, cynical Ferengi hustle, the encounter also remains a space of possibility, the outcomes of which cannot fully be known in advance.14 Amidst all the similarities and differences between Nog and Jake, and alongside the convenience of geographical proximity and the absence of many other options, is an element that catalyzes their unlikely friendship: fun that elicits the opposition of both of their parents. Within minute of saying “hello” for the first time, Jake and Nog are up to no good, using a box of strange (though ultimately harmless) insects to pull pranks on passersby on the station’s Promenade. When these antics attract the attention of station security personnel, both Rom and Benjamin Sisko have all the evidence they need to prohibit their sons from hanging out ever again. Although he is considerably more pluralistic and politically capacious than many

“A Futuristic Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?”  159 of his Starfleet colleagues, Commander Sisko’s initial view of Ferengi does not depart too significantly from the one held by many Federation citizens. Rom, for his part, has serious misgivings about Federation values, and is initially reluctant even to send Nog to the Federation-administered station school. But for Jake and Nog, who are eager to elaborate independent senses of self, such opposition merely fuels the fire. In a retrospective podcast on DS9, actors Lofton and Eisenberg, both of whom became fathers as adults, joke that it was this paternal prohibition that sealed the fate of their characters’ unshakeable bond.15 Nog and Jake are inseparable—they come and go, make new friends, get into fights with other kids, and, as they get older, check out women together. They even try double-dating, although doing so requires working through very divergent Federation and Ferengi attitudes about gender and sexuality.16 Huck and Tom in the 24th Century? Eisenberg also compared Jake and Nog to Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, the famed duo central to several of the novels of the 19th-century U.S. literary luminary Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.17 This is an intriguing comparison, as Clemens’ novels commented critically on anti-Black racism and capitalism in what were, at the time of their publication, quite transgressive ways, all through the eyes of child protagonists.18 The Huck and Tom comparison has also been extended by other Star Trek creators, notably novelist J. M. Dillard.19 What is most interesting about the comparison for our purposes here is a deceptively simple question: If Jake and Nog are “a futuristic version of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer,” then who’s who?20 Both Eisenberg and Dillard compare Jake to the naïve, innocent Huckleberry Finn, with Nog reprising the role of the cynical, entrepreneurial Tom Sawyer, who is far savvier in the ways of the world. Nog’s link to Tom Sawyer becomes especially clear in “Progress,” a pivotal episode from DS9’s first season that makes Jake and Nog the heroes of its secondary or “B” plot.21 The episode follows the two boys as they take to market, attempting to unload a vast surplus of “yamok sauce” (an unpalatable extraterrestrial condiment favored by the station’s deposed colonial rulers) from the inventory of Quark’s bar. They manage to trade the sauce for a vast quantity of “self-sealing stem bolts,” a curiously named industrial part that seems incompatible with Federation technology, and in turn exchange the bolts for a plot of land on the nearby plant of Bajor. Although Nog is frustrated that the exchange still has not yielded that sought-after Ferengi commodity and medium exchange, “gold-pressed latinum,” Jake reassures him that “land is good”; one cannot help but hear in their exchanges echoes of the historic struggles of both Jewish and Black people against exclusion from land ownership. In both “Progress” and season five’s “In the Cards,” Nog instructs Jake in the ways of what the Ferengi call the “Great River” or the “Great Material Continuum,” a vast network of exchange that has a providential quality, at least for true believers. Ironically, Nog instructing Jake in capitalist ideology gave Lofton an opportunity to reprise his earlier role in Econ and Me, a 1989 public television

160  David K. Seitz program funded by banks and oil and chemical companies that imparted the core principles of neoclassical economics to primary schoolers.22 Nog the salesman’s wheeling and dealing—his knack for extracting unexpected surplus value from a seemingly worthless commodity—vividly recalls the scheming of Tom Sawyer, who infamously enlists his friends in the tedious whitewashing of a picket fence (while profiting off their labor) by convincing them it is fun and charging them for the privilege.23 Yet where Tom Sawyer’s scheme succeeds, the transactions of the “Noh-Jay” Consortium, as the boys call their fledgling small business, never pan out. When their youthful identities are discovered, the land is returned to the Bajoran government, and Quark is saddled with the stem bolts. Yet we might also learn from reversing the Huck/Tom comparison. Consider “The Nagus,” in which Commander Sisko continues to dispute Nog’s presence in his son’s life. After Jake lies to a teacher to cover for Nog’s failure to complete a school essay assignment, Benjamin Sisko worries the Ferengi is a “bad influence.”24 The commander is frustrated with how much time his son spends with the young Ferengi outside of school. But he softens when he realizes that the boys’ primary extracurricular activity is no longer antagonizing passersby on the Promenade; in truth, Nog didn’t turn in his essay because he is still learning, under Jake’s confidential tutelage, to read.25 That Jake is taking care to protect Nog’s privacy makes the elder Sisko all the prouder. This plotline places Jake, not Nog, in the role of the worldly Tom, who likewise teaches Huck to read.26 Education scholar Aparna Tarc observes that literacy in a real sense forcibly “humanizes” its pupils, bringing them into a particular common language and form of life.27 In DS9, literacy marks the beginning of Nog’s inauguration into a Federation social order that culminates in his becoming the first Ferengi to join Starfleet, which serves as both the Federation’s military and a significant part of its professional-managerial class. At first, Jake is happy to help Nog get an audience with his father about applying to Starfleet Academy.28 But when Nog later returns to the station as a cadet—and he and Jake become roommates—the Ferengi officer’s rigid adherence to military standards for hygiene and exercise throws their newfound domestic arrangement into crisis.29 As an emerging writer who is exploring interests in both journalism and fiction, Jake can be as untidy and capricious as Nog can be organized and fastidious, and it is all too easy at first for Nog to reduce these differences to Jake’s comfortable Starfleet upbringing. While Nog and Jake come to a compromise about their domestic routine, it is not the last time their orientations to daily life come into conflict. As a kind of Starfleet “model minority,” Nog often feels he has more to prove than other cadets. Jake, by contrast, is the son of a Starfleet officer, and although he adores his father he remains eager to demystify the pomp and circumstance of it all. As a journalist, Jake is more skeptical of the official lines offered to the public by all political powers, even those given by his father. In “Valiant,” Nog and Jake are rescued behind enemy lines by a ship staffed entirely by rogue Starfleet cadets who are in way over their heads.30 When Jake questions the cadets’ reckless strategies, Nog vociferously defends them, even mythologizing the cadets after an avoidable and destructive defeat. Yet when Nog later returns to the station from battle a deeply traumatized

“A Futuristic Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?”  161 man, it is Jake who pushes him out of the emotional stasis that has come over him, who accommodates and forgives his acting out, and who is there for him when he returns to duty.31 If Jake and Nog each bear resemblances to both Huck and Tom, it is also worth asking after their resemblances to other characters in the Twain stories. Perhaps most notable here is the figure of Jim, a Black adult man whom Huck eventually helps to escape from slavery, though not without hesitation. As the late literary giant Toni Morrison points out, if the act of freeing Jim secures Huck’s identity as a “good” white American, Clemens goes no further than this, avoiding an ending that would have required exploring the relationship between Jim and Huck as free equals.32 By making Jake the “privileged” subject in the friendship—the fully enfranchised child who stands in for humanity—DS9 in some ways imagines an “innocent” childhood that Black feminist legal scholar Dorothy E. Roberts argues is rarely afforded to Black children in the United States.33 Given the program’s debut on the heels of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and the frequent demonization of poor Black and Brown youth across the political spectrum at the time, this is an impressive contribution. We might also ask what, finally, emerges from the space of encounter between Black and Jewish identities in Nog and Jake’s friendship. As DS9 aired in the 1990s, conflicts in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York (1991), and Oakland, California (1994), and surrounding the Million Man March of Black American men (1995) fueled a media fascination with the caricature of the Black anti-Semite.34 Writing at the intersection of Black and Jewish identities, Black feminist scholar Chanda Prescod-Weinstein reminds us that while both antipathies and solidarities do exist between some in these groups (to the extent that they comprise discrete groups), the assimilation of most Ashkenazi Jews into whiteness in the United States affords considerably more material and symbolic power than most Black Americans can claim.35 Here, too, then, DS9 flips the script, making Jake a comparatively empowered figure and Nog a comparatively disempowered one, but still allowing for the possibility of friendship and solidarity between them. Some might read this reversal as too simple, falsely equating positions that remain structurally unequal. Yet by preserving a noticeable power asymmetry between the two characters—and leaving room for the agency of both—DS9 arguably avoids the liberal politics of false equivalences while reminding us that, as Katz points out, the systems of social reproduction that fetishize some childhoods while turning others into “waste” remain open to contestation.36 As the events of DS9 end and many of the show’s major characters disembark, Nog and Jake are among the handful of characters to remain onboard the station. The audience has watched the characters grow up together, little by little, across the program’s seven seasons, through glimpses of their everyday social reproduction—moments of education in and beyond school classrooms, times of leisure, and squabbles over cohabitation. The soldier and the writer are very different young men—but perhaps no more different than when their friendship began. If Star Trek and much speculative fiction open up a space of encounter across difference, then Deep Space Nine, by virtue of its setting in a single place, sustains such encounters rather than allowing them to dissipate in more ephemeral

162  David K. Seitz “alien-of-the-week” fashion. It is from within the space of the everyday social reproduction of life that the possibility of mutual identification without the consolations of identity emerges. Reflecting on their childhoods, Jake remarks that “aside from playing dom-jot and watching the Bajoran transports dock, it seems like we spent most of our time doing nothing.” “Maybe so,” Nog replies, “but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather do nothing with than you.”37 Notes 1 Katz (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. University of Minnesota Press. 2 Compare to the way Gardner and Craine (Chapter  8) and Aitken (Chapter  10) use repetition. 3 Speculative fiction and reproduction show up in powerful ways in Chapters 2, 10 and 11 but also in the ‘Non-Fiction’ documentaries discussed in Chapter 9 4 Butler (1993). Parable of the sower. Four Walls Eight Windows. 5 E.g.: Alexander (2016). Far beyond the stars: The framing of blackness in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 44(3), 150–158. https://doi. org/10.1080/01956051.2016.1142418; Bernardi (1998). Star Trek and history: Race-ing toward a white future. Rutgers University Press; carrington, a. m. (2016). Speculative blackness: The future of race in science fiction. University of Minnesota Press. https:// doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816678952.001.0001; Dittmer and Bos (2019). Popular culture, geopolitics, and identity. 2nd ed. Rowman and Littlefield; Rhodes II, M. A., Davidson, F. M., & Gunderman, H. C. (Eds.). (2017). The geographies of Star Trek. Special issue of The Geographical Bulletin, 58; Seitz (2023). A different Trek: Radical geographies of Deep Space Nine. University of Nebraska Press. 6 Important exceptions include: Greven (2009). Gender and sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of desire in the television series and films. McFarland; Roberts (1999). Sexual generations: Star Trek: The next generation and gender. University of Illinois Press. 7 It is worth noting a tenuous but real connection between the multi-racial contexts of DS9 (Chapter 12) and the monastery at Kells (Chapter 10), which is also an outpost of sorts. 8 The affectively complex relations between adults and children are poignant in Gardner and Craine also (Chapter 8). 9 Piller, M. (Writer), & Carson, D. (Director). (1993, January  3). Emissary (Season 1, Episodes 1 & 2) [TV series episodes]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. 10 Altman and Gross (2016). The fifty-year mission: The next twenty-five years: From the next generation to J. J. Abrams: The complete, uncensored, and unauthorized oral history of Star Trek. Macmillan. See also Alexander 2016. 11 carrington 2016. 12 Memory Alpha (2023). Ferengi. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ferengi. 13 For a review of debates on the Ferengi as racial caricature, see Seitz 2023, ch. 4. 14 Similarly, what kinds of outcomes are partially hidden in the movies discussed by Joassart-Marcelli (Chapter 7) and Bosco (Chapter 2)? 15 Eisenberg, A., Husk, R. T., & Lofton, C. (Hosts). (2019, July 24). Star Trek actors review DS9 episode 11, ‘The Nagus’ (No. 26) [Audio podcast episode]. In The seventh rule. https:// podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/star-trek-actors-review-deep-space-nine-ds9–1–10-the/ id1453564609?i=1000564621009. 16 Moore and Badiyi (1995, January 31). Life support (Season 3, Episode 13) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount.

“A Futuristic Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?”  163 17 Erdmann and Block (2000). The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine companion, p. 52. Simon and Schuster. 18 Michaelsen (1997). Tom Sawyer’s capitalisms and the destructuring of Huck Finn. Prospects, 22, 133–151. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300000077; Morrison (1992). Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination. Harvard University Press; Smith (1992). Huck, Jim, and American racial discourse. In Leonard, J. S., Tenney, T. & Davis, T. (Eds.), Satire or evasion: Black perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, pp. 103–117. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381716-010. 19 Dillard (1993). Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Emissary. Pocket Books. 20 Altman and Gross 2016, p. 52. 21 Fields, P. A. (Writer), & Landau, L. (Director). (1993, May  9). Progress (Season 1, Episode 15) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount; Hassler, D. M., & Wilcox, C. (Eds.) 1997. Political science fiction. University of South Carolina Press. 22 See e.g. Delgado-Betancourth (2014). Rethinking economics education: Challenges and opportunities. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 23, 48–56. https://doi. org/10.14288/workplace.v0i23.184759. 23 Seybold (2014). Tom Sawyer impersonates “The original confidence man”. Mark Twain Journal, 52(2), 136–142. 24 Behr and Livingston (1993, March 21). The Nagus (Season 1, Episode 11) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. 25 This is a wonderful counterpoint to a very similar connection between the two boys in the film discussed by Gardner and Craine (Chapter 8). 26 Murphy, K. (1984). Illiterate’s progress: The descent into literacy in Huckleberry Finn. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 26(4), 363–387. 27 Tarc (2015). Literacy of the Other: Renarrating humanity. State University of New York Press. 28 Behr et al. (1995, February 6). Heart of stone (Season 3, Episode 14) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. 29 Behr et  al. (1996, November  25). The ascent (Season 5, Episode 9) [TV series episode]. In I. S. Behr & R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. 30 Moore et al. (1998, May 6). Valiant (Season 6, Episode 22) [TV series episode]. In I. S. Behr & R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. 31 Moore et al. (1998, December 30). It’s only a paper moon (Season 7, Episode 10) [TV series episode]. In I. S. Behr & R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. 32 Morrison, 1992. 33 Roberts (1997). Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. Vintage. 34 Parker (2018, April  27). The miseducation of Castlemont High. In Random acts of history (No. 644) [Audio podcast episode]. In This American life. WBEZ. www. thisamericanlife.org/644/random-acts-of-history/act-one-11; Snitow, A., & Kaufman, D. (Directors). (1997). Blacks and Jews. California Newsreel. 35 Prescod-Weinstein (2017). Black and Palestinian lives matter: Black and Jewish America in the twenty-first century. In Jewish Voice for Peace (Eds.), On anti-Semitism: Solidarity and the struggle for justice, pp. 25–29. Haymarket. 36 Katz (2018). The angel of geography: Superman, tiger mother, aspiration management, and the child as waste. Progress in Human Geography, 42(5), 724–740. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132517708844. 37 Behr et al. (1995, November 15). Little green men (Season 4, Episode 8) [TV series episode]. In I. G. Behr & R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount.

164  David K. Seitz Bibliography Alexander, L. D. (2016). Far beyond the stars: The framing of blackness in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 44(3), 150–158. https://doi.org/10. 1080/01956051.2016.1142418 Altman, M. A., & Gross, E. (2016). The fifty-year mission: The next twenty-five years: From the Next Generation to J. J. Abrams: The complete, uncensored, and unauthorized oral history of Star Trek. Macmillan. Behr, I. S. (Writer), & Livingston, D. (Director). (1993, March 21). The Nagus (Season 1, Episode 11) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. Behr, I. S., & Wolfe, R. H. (Writers), & Conway, J. L. (Director). (1995, November 15). Little green men (Season 4, Episode 8) [TV series episode]. In I. G. Behr & R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. Behr, I. S., & Wolfe, R. H. (Writers), & Kroeker, A. (Director). (1996, November 25). The ascent (Season 5, Episode 9) [TV series episode]. In I. S. Behr & R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. Behr, I. S., Wolfe, R. H. (Writers), & Singer, I. (Director). (1995, February 6). Heart of stone (Season 3, Episode 14) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman, M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. Bernardi, D. L. (1998). Star Trek and history: Race-ing toward a white future. Rutgers University Press. Butler, O. (1993). Parable of the sower. Four Walls Eight Windows. carrington, a. m. (2016). Speculative blackness: The future of race in science fiction. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816678952.001.0001 Delgado-Betancourth, S. X. (2014). Rethinking economics education: Challenges and opportunities. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 23, 48–56. https://doi.org/10.14288/ workplace.v0i23.184759 Dillard, J. M. (1993). Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Emissary. Pocket Books. Dittmer, J., & Bos, D. (2019). Popular culture, geopolitics, and identity, 2nd ed. Rowman and Littlefield. Eisenberg, A., Husk, R. T., & Lofton, C. (Hosts). (2019, July 24). Star Trek actors review DS9 episode 11, ‘The Nagus’ (No. 26) [Audio podcast episode]. In The seventh rule. https:// podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/star-trek-actors-review-deep-space-nine-ds9–1–10-the/ id1453564609?i=1000564621009 Erdmann, T. J., & Block, P. M. (2000). The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine companion, p. 52. Simon and Schuster. Fields, P. A. (Writer), & Landau, L. (Director). (1993, May 9). Progress (Season 1, Episode 15) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. Hassler, D. M., & Wilcox, C. (Eds.) 1997. Political science fiction. University of South Carolina Press. Greven, D. (2009). Gender and sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of desire in the television series and films. McFarland. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. University of Minnesota Press. Katz, C. (2018). The angel of geography: Superman, tiger mother, aspiration management, and the child as waste. Progress in Human Geography, 42(5), 724–740. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132517708844. Memory Alpha. (2023). Ferengi. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ferengi Michaelsen, S. (1997). Tom Sawyer’s capitalisms and the destructuring of Huck Finn. Prospects, 22, 133–151. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300000077

“A Futuristic Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?”  165 Moore, R. D. (Writer), & Badiyi, R. (Director.) (1995, January 31). Life support (Season 3, Episode 13) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. Moore, R. D. (Writer), & Vejar, M. (Director). (1998, May 6). Valiant (Season 6, Episode 22) [TV series episode]. In I. S. Behr & R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. Moore, R. D. (Writer), & Williams, A. (Director). (1998, December 30). It’s only a paper moon (Season 7, Episode 10) [TV series episode]. In I. S. Behr & R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination. Harvard University Press. Murphy, K. (1984). Illiterate’s progress: The descent into literacy in Huckleberry Finn. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 26(4), 363–387. Parker, B. A. (Producer). (2018, April 27). The miseducation of Castlemont High. In Random acts of history (No. 644) [Audio podcast episode]. In This American life. WBEZ. www.thisamericanlife.org/644/random-acts-of-history/act-one-11 Piller, M. (Writer), & Carson, D. (Director). (1993, January 3). Emissary (Season 1, Episodes 1 & 2) [TV series episodes]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Paramount. Prescod-Weinstein, C. (2017). Black and Palestinian lives matter: Black and Jewish America in the twenty-first century. In Jewish Voice for Peace (Eds.), On anti-Semitism: Solidarity and the struggle for justice, pp. 25–29. Haymarket. Rhodes II, M. A., Davidson, F. M., & Gunderman, H. C. (Eds.). (2017). The geographies of Star Trek. Special issue of The Geographical Bulletin, 58. Roberts, D. E. (1997). Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. Vintage. Roberts, R. (1999). Sexual generations: Star Trek: The Next Generation and gender. University of Illinois Press. Seitz, D. K. (2023). A different Trek: Radical geographies of Deep Space Nine. University of Nebraska Press. Seybold, M. (2014). Tom Sawyer impersonates ‘The original confidence man”. Mark Twain Journal, 52(2), 136–142. Smith, D. L. (1992). Huck, Jim, and American racial discourse. In Leonard, J. S., Tenney, T. & Davis, T. (Eds.), Satire or evasion: Black perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, pp. 103–117. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381716-010. Snitow, A., & Kaufman, D. (Directors). (1997). Blacks and Jews. California Newsreel. Tarc, A. M. (2015). Literacy of the other: Renarrating humanity. State University of New York Press.

13 “Why Are You Here, Rey from Nowhere?” The Hero’s Journey, Island Storytelling, and the Gendered Roles of Heroes in the Star Wars Saga Jacob Rowlett In the final moments of Star Wars: The Force Awakens,1 we see a young woman in her late teens approach the end of a long and winding stone pathway at the top of a craggy island retreat. There, she finds a stoic older man standing in a long white cloak. His long hair and beard marked with the graying of age since he has fled to find seclusion at this forgotten outpost. The young woman reaches out to hand the man an object of his youth: a weapon and tool long thought lost. As we see the older man contemplate the object and this new interference of his solitude, the epic John Williams score begins to swell and the screen cuts to black. When we return to this exact moment in the subsequent film, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker (the older man) takes the lightsaber from Rey (the young woman) and carelessly throws it over his shoulder. This moment signifies a foundational break in the mold of what audiences could expect from a Star Wars protagonist and the conclusions these protagonists achieve. A few scenes later, in a dark cave housing ancient texts, Luke asks: “Why are you here, Rey from Nowhere?” Rey rushes to respond:  “The Resistance sent me. We need your help; the First Order has become unstoppable . . .” Pushing past her response, Luke interrogates: “Why are *you* here?” She pauses. She opens up, honestly: “Something inside of me has always been there. And now it’s awake. And I’m afraid. I do not know what it is, or what to do with it. And I need help.” Geographers say there are two kinds of islands. This is valuable information for the imagination because it confirms what the imagination already knew. Nor is it the only case where science makes mythology more concrete, and mythology makes science more vivid. Continental islands are accidental, derived islands. They are separated from a continent, born of disarticulation, erosion, fracture; they survive the absorption of what once contained them. Oceanic islands are originary, essential islands. Some are formed from coral reefs and display a genuine organism. Others emerge from underwater DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-13

“Why Are You Here, Rey from Nowhere?”  167 eruptions, bringing to the light of day a movement from the lowest depths. Some rise slowly; some disappear and then return, leaving us no time to annex them . . . Dreaming of islands—whether with joy or in fear, it doesn’t matter—is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone—or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew. Some islands drifted away from the continent, but the island is also that toward which one drifts; other islands originated in the ocean, but the island is also the origin, radical and absolute. Certainly, separating and creating are not mutually exclusive: one has to hold one’s own when one is separated, and had better be separate to create anew. —Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts2 Introduction In this chapter, I  will connect the relationships and lives of Rey and Luke Skywalkerto the narrative structures of their youths and the storytelling journeys that guided them before, during, and after their meeting on this island. I will do this by confronting the mythic influences that have guided Star Wars filmmakers from George Lucas down to Rian Johnson as well as by examining the evolution of “Hero’s Journey” structures themselves. I  will ground this on-screen/off-screen conversation to the island planet that Rey and Luke meet on: known as Ahch-To on-screen, doubled by Skellig Michael for filming off the coast of southwestern Ireland. This island planet serves as a nexus point in the Star Wars films, representing the moment when a corporate multimedia franchise looked inward and analyzed itself on screen. A baton/lightsaber was passed, a franchise evolved, and characters confronted their own journeys and the dangerous power of myth. All on screen. All on an island. The Mythic Origins of the Star Wars Saga The first Star Wars film came out in 1977 and was the third feature film written and directed by George Lucas.3 Lucas’s style formed as a composite of every cinematic influence he’d ever had; every western he’d ever seen, every Saturday matinee serial, every Akira Kurosawa movie he’d watched in film school.4 Thousands of nods and flourishes were pulled into the script of that first Star Wars film (along with a healthy dose of young Lucas’s counter culture political leanings). Later on, Fredric Jameson would describe Lucas’s films as “nostalgia pictures” which give new viewers popular imagery to latch onto while satisfying older crowds with remixes of the imagery of their youth.5 The connective tissue that held all of this aesthetic together, especially in the first film, was Lucas’s structure adapted from Joseph Campbell’s work on “The Hero with A Thousand Faces”; or, the Hero’s Journey and the monomyth.6 The hero’s journey is a story structure developed by Campbell based on his extensive research on the recurring themes and motifs across the myths, religions, and folklore of cultures around the world through time. In the simplest terms, it

168  Jacob Rowlett

Figure 13.1 This space along the 600-stair pathway leading up Skellig Michael is the approximate spot where the scene from Star Wars: The Force Awakens was shot. The stairs in the photo lead visitors to the beehive hut village of the monks (Source: Jacob Rowlett)

“Why Are You Here, Rey from Nowhere?”  169 begins with a hero in a place of normalcy or the outer world, there is then a “call to adventure” where the hero is introduced to outside forces (usually from a supernatural mentor) which then thrusts the hero into a quest in which they will have to achieve knowledge and balance of the internal or mystic world in order to achieve their goals. Once the hero faces their own failings and overcomes their obstacles, they can then return with control over the inner and outer worlds of their reality as well as the tools necessary to share what they have learned with others. Campbell himself describes it as follows: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.7 While Campbell developed the Hero with 1000 Faces as a work of comparative mythology and narratology born out of his influences from Rank-Raglan and Jung,8 it was very quickly adapted not as a template of understanding past myths but as a template for devising new ones. Star Wars has gone on to become one of the premiere examples of adapting Campbell’s work into film.9 Lucas’s hero is Luke Skywalker, a 19-year-old farmer on a distant desert planet with little hope that his life will ever take him elsewhere. Little does Luke know that circumstances will thrust him onto a quest with an old hermit named Ben Kenobi who was once a Jedi Knight and mystical warrior. Luke learns his own father was once one of these knights and is invited to be trained in the Jedi ways by Kenobi. In doing so, he is given his father’s lightsaber, a weapon of the old guard. Luke, despite a desperate desire to leave his home world, is somewhat reluctant to join the old wizard on this quest until the forces of the evil fascist Galactic Empire ends in the destruction of Luke’s home and remaining family. Luke then joins Ben Kenobi along with rogue star pilot Han Solo and Han’s alien copilot Chewbacca. Alongside his new crew, Luke embarks on a quest to learn the ways of the mystical Force as well as save a young Princess from the clutches of the Empire and its evil taskmaster Darth Vader. Luke succeeds, Ben dies, and a massive planet-killing space station is destroyed. Luke and Han return as heroes. While the first film encapsulates the entire Hero’s Journey in one film, Lucas also played with scale by making the same template work for all three films of this “original trilogy” that were produced between 1977 and 1983. In this sense, that first film (later retitled “Star Wars: Episode IV-A New Hope”)10 is just the first phase of Luke leaving home: in the second film he further confronts his inner self and perception of the world as he trains in the Force and learns the truth of his father’s identity as Darth Vader. In the third and final film of the trilogy, Luke returns to his home planet as a more mature and powerful knight before taking on the final confrontation with his father and the evil Emperor. It is in this final confrontation that Luke learns he is fully equipped with the knowledge of his own self and reality. In this final film the audience also learns that the only female protagonist in the series, Leia, is Luke’s biological sister.11 The trilogy ends on the note that

170  Jacob Rowlett Luke is the last of the Jedi Knights but through his knowledge and the guidance he has received, he will be able to pass on what he has learned to a new generation. Following the immense and enduring popularity of the series, Lucas would return to the well in 1999 with the release of “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” which was the first of his “prequel trilogy”12 in which the focus was shifted from Luke Skywalker to his father, Anakin Skywalker, the man who would eventually fall to the Dark Side of the Force and become the villainous Darth Vader. Following the completion of these films, Lucas had reframed the entire 6-film saga as the story of Anakin Skywalker: his childhood, his fall to the dark, and his eventual return to the light thanks to the love of his son. It was a larger remix of the hero’s journey for Lucas. These prequel films, however, were not entirely well received by fans or critics at the time. A Franchise Awakens In 2012, Disney purchased the Lucasfilm production company and the rights to Star Wars from Lucas for over $4  billion. Disney then immediately announced plans for the production of a sequel trilogy of films that would bring back cast members from those original ’77–’83 films, including an aged Jedi Master Luke Skywalker. The newest protagonist of these films would be a teenage girl named Rey. She was a scavenger on a desert planet and due to the appearance of a strange robot and the twisted schemes of a fascist organization, she is thrust off planet and out into her quest to become a powerful space wizard. Does all this sound familiar? Well that is very much by design. Whether Disney was scared of the response to the prequel films or was just very nervous about their new brand investment, they decided to play it very safe with 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. JJ Abrams, the director of the film, was an avid fanboy and lover of that original 1977 film. So much so, he deliberately retreads most of the plot and character beats of that first movie as a way of gently setting Disney up with a firm and familiar foundation.13 It is a strange remix of Jameson’s “nostalgia picture” theory: instead of the Star Wars films serving as an amalgamation of familiar archetypes and aesthetics, this production serves as a presentation of exclusively Star Wars archetypes and aesthetics. Distilled into a bit of a postmodern late-capitalist shot glass of nostalgia. Grapes into wine, wine into brandy. The driving MacGuffin14 of the film is a map to Luke Skywalker who went missing years ago. The film itself is looking for its map, its hook, into Star Wars. George Lucas, having had no creative input whatsoever, commented that he was disappointed they didn’t do anything different or unexpected.15 But Rey is not an exact clone of Luke Skywalker from that first film and in many ways serves as an inverse to his story. Rey is not desperate to leave her home planet like Luke was; in fact, she is incredibly hesitant about leaving as she holds out hope that her estranged parents will soon come back for her and she doesn’t want to be gone when they arrive. She is also constantly underestimated by the men of the film. Sure, Luke was portrayed as cocky and headstrong but no characters really responded with outright shock or dismay when he displayed adequacy at tasks like flying and fighting. While the film may challenge gendered stereotypes around female heroes, it does not necessarily subvert them.

“Why Are You Here, Rey from Nowhere?”  171 Rey has to assert herself for respect, in one scene she yells at the young man Finn to stop grabbing her hand as they attempt to flee a barrage of laser fire. An aged Han Solo is blown away when Rey is able to successfully repair his starship but holds back just short of giving her praise. Rey is eventually kidnapped by the evil First Order and angers a series of men when she is able to use her newfound powers to escape. In the final conflict of the film, Finn is pitted against the nefarious Kylo Ren (the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia) and when he fails to successfully do battle with a lightsaber, we see the saber fly into the hands of Rey and she is able to get the job done. Seeing Rey achieve the lightsaber and embrace the conflict is framed by Abrams as simultaneously shocking and empowering for our young protagonist. By doing this, Abrams establishes a form of audience gaze that assumes female empowerment on-screen will result in audience surprise off-screen. Feminist scholars have explored the power of masculine representation in film and the ways in which films can uphold and reify masculine gazes in perspectives.16 By centering a form of “male hysteria” in which each man in the film has to come to terms with Rey’s abilities, Abrams is attempting to redefine the female action hero protagonist in part by process of male action star deconstruction.17 By having male characters refer to her as “the girl,” her youth and gender are constantly placed as her leading characteristics in the scale and scope of the storytelling. Despite the patriarchal doubt around her power, however, she proves capable at every turn. Critics of these films as well as the current state of Disney-affiliated media have argued that these kinds of depictions only scratch the surface levels of feminist storytelling. Coming from a massive media franchise that still considers young men its primary demographic, these depictions and centering of female heroes have been called examples of “commodity feminism” in which women are present but not in a way that risks any kind of changes or losses in the toy market.18 The film ends with Rey approaching an older Luke, clothed in white robes, on the planet Ahch-To on the island that once served as the location of the first Jedi Temple. Here she offers his lightsaber to him with an outstretched arm and the film concludes. In the subsequent film, 2017’s The Last Jedi, when we return to this moment, Luke takes the lightsaber and casually throws it over his shoulder. Different Journeys for Different Heroes Two characters, two protagonists, at an impasse; one having completed the Hero’s Journey he began in his teenage years, the other, a teenager at the forefront of her own. Following the popularity of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey not only as a work on myth studies but also as a resource for writing, critics began to see some cracks when applying the template to women characters. Campbell himself didn’t really believe women worked in the template as they were already the goal at the finish line for the men to achieve; she is to be understood by the hero when he is ready. Woman represents all that can be known, and the hero is the man who must learn to know. Since Campbell’s template became such a popular tool for Hollywood screenwriters, there have been multiple attempts to reconcile it with the experiences of women. One of the more popular writings on the Heroine’s Journey was developed by psychotherapist Maureen Murdock as a way to help her female

172  Jacob Rowlett patients understand their personal journeys.19 Similarly to Campbell, the template was designed for understanding, not as a prescription for storytelling. In an oversimplification of the process, Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey sees a heroine begin by rejecting the feminine in favor of the masculine as a survival technique in a patriarchal society. After facing several trials and overcoming them, the heroine is confident and empowered by the masculine sensibilities she has adopted to survive. Ultimately, however, these traits fail her against some unforeseen crisis and it is only through the reconciliation of the masculine and the feminine that the heroine is able to feel truly empowered and understanding of her role in the world. Many praised Murdock’s template for providing a deeper well of emotional possibilities to the Hero’s Journey. Others criticized it as being less-adaptable to the needs of creative writing as it was only ever intended as a therapy tool. Another issue is the fact that, in patriarchal societies, women begin with a lesser status to men so, by the end of the journey, they are often able to achieve an equal status as men but seldom are they superior. Author Victoria Lynn Schmidt would later go on to write her version of the Heroine’s Journey template which was a tool for writing and featured many of the same elements of Murdock’s version but with a heavier emphasis on the heroine honoring herself and accepting outside support.20 As recently as 2021, folklorist Maria Tatar released “The Heroine with 1001 Faces” which analyzes women in myth and folklore to uncover the ways in which wit and cleverness gave women leverage in a violent and patriarchal world.21 Do any of these updated models work for Rey? Which template best suits her and her story? Is it Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey? Perhaps, as Rey is forced to embrace masculine traits in order to survive. Or maybe Schmidt’s format? Rey does have to learn to support herself before accepting support from others. Or as Tatar outlines, Rey also has to find clever solutions to survive in the man’s world. But also, maybe Rey could just be a surrogate character for a male hero? She does hit most of Campbell’s beats and is certainly no stranger to violence and warfare. The answer, ultimately, is that it’s a little of everything. Rey’s journey is less of a Hero or Heroine’s Journey: it’s a Star Wars Journey. It’s the distillation of the nostalgia of that first film that works in conversation with everything that came before it. Abrams wants her to be familiar yet different but ultimately what the audience expects these characters to be. Which is why the following film is such a shock to the system: Luke willingly throws away the lightsaber when he meets Rey, and he throws away the legacy she is handing him. She finds him a tired and jaded warrior who must scrap his past wholesale in order to choose which elements to pick back up. She finds him in an uncomfortable position of unlearning and learning just as she herself is experiencing. It is their conversations on that island that fully define what her journey might and could be as well as reshape what we already know of Luke. The Island Intersection Skellig Michael is an island off the coast of southwestern Ireland that has been a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996.22 In an interview with The

“Why Are You Here, Rey from Nowhere?”  173 Force Awakens’s production designer Rick Carter, Carter stated that for Ahch-To the team was looking for a shooting location that felt “completely from another time and place.”23 Skellig Michael served this function as it is home to the oldest and most well-preserved examples of early Christian architecture: the stone beehive huts that rest at the peak of the island’s crag. Those beehive huts were first crafted in the 6th century AD when Catholic monks left the Irish mainland in order to establish a monastery on the island in order to strengthen their solitary bonds with God. They were joined on the island by tens-of-thousands of migratory birds who call the Skellig islands their home, including the puffins that have become synonymous with the wildlife of western Ireland. Choosing to use Skellig Michael as the island location of the first Jedi Temple brought the weight of the island’s natural and cultural history to the screen. While The Force Awakens would only use the island’s pre-existing structures for the film’s final few shots, the subsequent film would have to branch out to multiple locations across coastal Ireland. One of the scenes that was deemed impossible to shoot on Skellig Michael was one in which Luke milks a large amphibious creature on a rocky shore as a means of displaying his new daily island life. The scene was instead moved to Dunmore Head on the western coast of the mainland of County Kerry where the alien could be helicoptered into position on a space that had been previously 3D scanned to match the size of the practical effect.24

Figure 13.2 The beehive huts of the Catholic monks who first began their pilgrimages to Skellig Michael in the 6th century AD. As many as twelve monks lived on the island at the time and would periodically cycle out with others from the mainland. While the island has been beaten and ravaged by storms and harsh ocean conditions, these beehive huts look much the same as they did 1500 years ago (Source: Jacob Rowlett)

174  Jacob Rowlett

Figure 13.2 Continued

In Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker has abandoned the Force and fled from all of his friends and family, ashamed of a mistake that ultimately led to Kylo Ren becoming a big bad guy. On the island, he finds solitude. He unplugs from the powers of the force and lives a life far more similar to that of the 6th-century monks who lived at Skellig Michael: he fishes and lives off the nature of the island by day and resides in a beehive-shaped hut at night. Monastic

“Why Are You Here, Rey from Nowhere?”  175 hermitage that sought island refuges in Europe derived from the early monks who sought solitude in the deserts of the Middle East; Luke himself has now made the transition from desert to island. But he rejects the religiosity of the monks in favor of dwelling on the misdeeds and failure of the Jedi order and the role of the Force in the universe. This is the state in which young Rey finds him. In many ways, Luke’s position in this film as the spiritual mentor is a direct response to the ways in which Campbell’s journey often doesn’t leave much room for a hero once the arc is complete. It’s as if Luke was subjected to the Hero’s Journey, not a participant in it. Luke finished the journey and brought what he had learned back to his world and it ended in failure and shame. Does the hero’s journey fail to extend beyond the spirit of youth and young adulthood? Is a hero forever trapped in the cycle? What happens when the hero goes from the center of the cycle to a player in someone else’s? Luke certainly sees little potential in Rey and is very reluctant to train her in the ways of the Jedi. Instead, he takes the opportunity to try and dissuade her from ever using her abilities and to accept his hypothesis that it is time for the Jedi to end. There is a scene in which Rey is meditating under Luke’s tutelage where we see just how vital the geography of the island is to the film’s narrative center: Luke: Breathe. Reach out with your feelings. What do you see? Rey: The island. Life. Death and decay, that feeds new life. Warmth. Cold. Peace. Violence. Luke: And between it all? Rey: Balance and energy. A force. Luke: And inside you? Rey: Inside me, that same force. Luke: And this is the lesson. That Force does not belong to the Jedi. To say that if the Jedi die, the light dies, is vanity. Can you feel that? Rey: There’s something else . . . beneath the island. A place. A dark place. Luke: Balance. Powerful light, powerful darkness. Luke uses the geography of the island as a way to illustrate every lesson Rey needs to learn. They cut to each individual example as she’s naming what she is feeling. The island is a place of mentorship and understanding where multiple journeys and ideas and lessons collide and negotiate and reconcile. Luke frames the island as a space of fractal multiplicities, cycles that constantly repeat and reinforce the balance of the narrative.25 From the perspective of the Hero’s Journey, we are seeing the fractal geographies of a space of training; one that the hero with a thousand faces has seen thousands of times. Rey comes to the island looking for a hero of the cause and what she finds is a broken old hermit who forces her to take the scraps of his lessons and build a hero out of herself, a much different hero than Luke. Luke had come to the island to live out the rest of his life in solitude before dying alone, instead he has a protege thrust into his life who, against his best wishes, learns something from him. He rejected his Hero’s Journey but ultimately wasn’t allowed to abandon it.

176  Jacob Rowlett Immediately after this exchange, Rey is pulled to that dark place and embraces it without hesitation. It leads to her cracking the ground beneath her and Luke has to yell and pull her out of the trance. It offered her something she wanted and she went straight to it. Luke’s lessons on the island continue as Rey begins to learn more about what prompted him to abandon the Jedi Order and his anti-Imperial causes. She learns about Luke’s difficult relationship with Kylo Ren/Ben Solo, a young man who she herself has gained complicated romantic and confrontational feelings toward. Rey and Kylo Ren are connected by a will of the Force that allows them to communicate across intergalactic distances as if they were together in the same room. In a scene later in the film, Rey is describing to Kylo her return journey to that dark center of the island. Here, harkening back to a spiritual cave journey Luke experienced in his training days, Rey enters a dark well with gnarled vines escaping out onto the surface. Once below, she becomes one of many thousands of versions of herself that stretches off into the unviewable distance. Each one is an immediate reflection of herself; when Rey snaps her fingers, the version before her snaps after and so on down the line. Rey is able to become conscious of the version of herself at the end of the line, one who stands a few steps away from a mirror. Rey sees two dark visions within the mirror, perhaps the shapes of her parents whose identities remain shrouded in mystery. As Rey approaches the mirror, the shapes collide in the center into one: a single reflection. Rey reaches for the mirror and sees only herself looking back at her. This scene draws to mind the work of Diane Elam who wrote about the mise-en-abyme as a literary device that “opens a spiral of infinite regression in representation” in which “there is no set sender or receiver of representation” that leads to an object that “cannot be grasped by the subject; it slips away into infinity.”26 By looking into the void and seeking its conclusion, Rey dislocates and regresses herself as the center of the story in search of a version of herself amongst infinite possible versions that has found the answers she wants to hear. What she concludes from the infinite is the singular: the sole conclusion of her choices. She is unable to achieve the answers she wants but pushes herself forward in order to be more comfortable with the questions themselves in the scale and scope of her role within the Hero’s Journey. In the behind-the-scenes commentary for the film, director Rian Johnson elaborates on what inspired his choices for this scene. He says this moment is about Rey “finding herself and [finding] there’s all these versions of her going down the line, this infinite number, and ‘which one am I?’ and ‘where is this going to end?’, ‘how am I going to find them?’ ” Johnson concludes that those questions are the culmination of anxieties around adolescence. He says: Lucas kind of drew from the Hero’s Journey and that whole myth that Joseph Campbell wrote about, making the first Star Wars. The Hero’s Journey is not about becoming a hero, it’s not about becoming Superman. If you really look at it, I think it’s about the transition from childhood to adulthood. It’s about adolescence. It’s about finding your place in the world. Finding who you are.

“Why Are You Here, Rey from Nowhere?”  177 You have these powers in you and who’s going to help find the right way to use them and that’s really Rey’s journey in this and it’s something we can all relate to.27 In this quote, Johnson makes it clear that designing the journey of a Star Wars protagonist is an effort done in tandem with the storytelling legacies that have come before. He thinks about Rey not only in the tradition of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey but through the lens of Lucas’s interpretation of the monomyth as well. Rey, as a hero on a “Star Wars Journey,” allows Johnson to subvert audience expectations and make a space for her in the galaxy that defies the procedures Star Wars characters have followed in the past. Ultimately, Rey leaves in order to face down Kylo Ren herself against Luke’s wishes. After she leaves, Luke is determined to destroy all the ancient knowledge of the Jedi once and for all but is prevented by the spirit of his own former master, Yoda. In this scene, Yoda admonishes Luke for only ever passing on his strengths to his students, not his failures. “The greatest teacher, failure is,” Yoda shares in his reversed style of sentence structure. “We are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.” Yoda, as a supernatural mentor, continues to inspire and progress Luke’s journey. He understands the man with a perspective reserved only for those that knew him in his youth. This discussion inspires Luke and, in his final effort of astral projection, he appears across the galaxy to face down Kylo Ren once and for all. Physically, he is present on Ahch-to, floating in the air in a meditation stance. After his deed is complete, he dies and vanishes into the arms of the spiritual Force. Embracing the power after such a long hiatus struck Luke down in the same way an addict is often unable to fully cope with a relapse. As the Force washes over him, he envisions the Twin Suns of his home planet where the journey began all those years ago when he was just a lonely teenager, looking for a cause. The island itself is a space where the Hero’s Journey comes to die and be reborn, reforged, reinterpreted, and reinforced. Wave crashing on wave, one after the other, shaping the rock and stripping it before building it back up. Conclusion I’d like to return to the Deleuze quote from the beginning of the discussion and tie it in with what I’m trying to say: Luke and Rey and their journeys that collide in this island space are also of island. Star Wars storytelling as Island. The continental island, defined by what it was before but forever fractured. The nostalgia picture and its preeminent hero. The oceanic island, defined by the formation and distillation of a singular concept, singular material, into something new. Finding meaning out of the lowest depths. Luke and Rey weave in and out of these island metaphors and themselves reshape what a “Journey” can be. Thinking of the “Hero’s Journey” itself as a diagram, a circle of storytelling, evokes an image of looking down upon

178  Jacob Rowlett an island. We see the top of the structure where the hero begins and ultimately works their way back toward. When Luke sees the Twin Suns of his home planet, a vision within his mind and beyond the astro-geography of Ahch-To, he sees himself returning to the top of the arch one last time. Rey, with her journey spun off from this island, is now restructuring the island and reconfiguring its narrative pathways and stone steps. She returns to the island once more in the following film, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.28 She is disillusioned about her past and identity and receives words of wisdom from Luke, himself now a Force Ghost, who reassures her that her identity is always what she makes of it. She ends the film donning the surname Skywalker as she looks on at the Twin Suns of Tatooine for herself. Perhaps if the series ever circles back to the end of her story, she will envision the sharp and jagged crag of Skellig Michael’s profile as she completes her last journey. Campbell, Murdock, and all the other influencers of the monomyth in the 20th century have guided and shaped what we think about it today. But it is Star Wars, the jagged crag rising over the shoreline, that has consistently reinforced and renegotiated what the Journey can mean about possibilities and promise of young heroes and heroines. Notes 1 Abrams, J. J. (Director). Star wars: The force awakens, 2015. The first “Star Wars” film without the involvement of creator George Lucas. 2 Deleuze (2004). Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Semiotext(e). 3 “Star Wars” was Lucas’s third film following “THX 1138” in 1971 and “American Graffiti” in 1973. 4 While Lucas would eventually drop out of film school, he took great influence both narratively and stylistically from films such as “The Hidden Fortress” (1958) and “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) among others. Frequent Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune was Lucas’s first choice for the role of hermit Ben Kenobi. 5 Jameson (1991). The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press. “Star Wars, far from being a pointless satire of such now dead forms, satisfies a deep (might I even say repressed?) longing to experience them again: it is a complex object in which on some first level children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artifacts through once again.” 6 “The Hero’s Journey” and the “Monomyth” are both forms of the theories presented in Campbell’s “The Hero with A Thousand Faces”. 7 Campbell (2008). The Hero with A Thousand Faces. New World Library, p. 30. 8 Campbell’s work on myth and archetypes were heavily inspired by previous works including the “mythotype” which was developed separately by Otto Rank and Lord Raglan in the early 20th century as well as by the psychological analysis of myth as developed by Carl Jung. 9 The first “Star Wars” film has often been used within high school and upper-education classrooms as a means by which to provide a case study of the “Hero’s Journey” in action. 10 The film first received its newly adjusted title as it was re-released in theaters in order to build anticipation for its sequel, “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1980. 11 Lucas initially planned to make a sequel trilogy in which he would present Luke searching the galaxy for his sister but ultimately decided to include the storyline in this final film.

“Why Are You Here, Rey from Nowhere?”  179 12 “The Phantom Menace” was released in 1999 and would be followed by “The Attack of the Clones” in 2002 and “The Revenge of the Sith” in 2003. 13 In an interview with website IGN in 2016, Abrams stated “[‘The Force Awakens’] was a bridge and a kind of reminder; the audience needed to be reminded what ‘Star Wars’ is, but it needed to be established with something familiar, with a sense of where we are going to new lands, which is very much what 8 and 9 do .  .  . So we very consciously—and I  know it is derided for this—we very consciously tried to borrow familiar beats so the rest of the movie could hang on something that we knew was ‘Star Wars.’ ” www.ign.com/articles/2016/04/16/ why-mark-hamill-didnt-want-to-return-as-luke 14 A term concerning a narrative object or devise which drives a plot forward, for example The Maltese Falcon. 15 In Disney CEO Bob Iger’s autobiography, “The Ride of a Lifetime,” he quoted Lucas as saying “There’s nothing new” upon seeing “The Force Awakens” for the first time. Iger states that Lucas “didn’t hide his disappointment.” www.indiewire.com/features/ general/george-lucas-disappointed-force-awakens-bob-iger-1202176208/ 16 See: Bruno, G. Street walking on a ruined map: Cultural theory and the city films of Elvira Notari. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Friedberg, A. Window shopping: Cinema and the postmodern. Berkely: University of California Press, 1993; Mulvey, L. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16, no. 3 (1975), 6–18. 17 See Aitken and Lukinbeal’s definition of “male hysteria” as a means of uncoding men as men in their chapter “Sex, Violence and the Weather: Male hysteria, scale and the fractal geographies of patriarchy” in the book by Nast, H. and Pile, S., eds. Places through the body. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 1998. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203976531 18 For more on “commodity feminism” in recent Disney films, see: Koushik, K. and Reed, A. “Star wars: The last Jedi, beauty and the beast, and Disney’s commodification of feminism: A political economic analysis.” Social Sciences 7(2018): 237. 19 Murdock (2020). The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. Shambhala. 20 The “Feminine Journey” was included within Schmidt’s book “45 Master Characters”. 21 Tatar (2021). The Heroine with 1001 Faces. Liveright. 22 This information was found on the official UNESCO: World Heritage Convention website: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/757/ 23 This interview can be seen in a YouTube clip posted by the official “Discover Ireland” account titled “Star Wars: The Force Awakens-Behind the Scenes in Ireland” found here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9f2y4jUYq8 24 This information comes from the special “The Director and the Jedi” which was included on home video releases of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It is also available in the “Extras” section of the film’s tile on Disney+. 25 This use of “fractal geographies” pulls from the previously mentioned chapter “Sex, Violence and the Weather: Male hysteria, scale and the fractal geographies of patriarchy” by Aitken and Lukinbeal in the book by Nast, H. and Pile, S., eds. Places through the body. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 1998. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203976531 26 These quotes from Elam, D. Feminism and deconstructionism: Ms. En Abyme. New York: Routledge, 27–28, 1994. Aitken and Lukinbeal would draw on this definition as literary device in relation to fractal geographies and patriarchal hysterics in their chapter “Sex, Violence and the Weather: Male hysteria, scale and the fractal geographies of patriarchy” in the book by Nast, H. and Pile, S., eds. Places through the body. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 1998. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203976531 27 The audio commentary by director Rian Johnson can be accessed either through the “Special Features” of the home video physical release of the film or as a feature in the “Extras” section when viewing the film on streaming platform Disney+. 28 This final film of the trilogy was directed once more by JJ Abrams following a complicated and rushed production.

180  Jacob Rowlett Bibliography Abrams, J. (Director). (2015). Star Wars: The Force Awakens [Motion Picture]. Lucasfilm Ltd.; Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Abrams, J. (Director). (2019). Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker [Motion Picture]. Lucasfilm Ltd.; Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Campbell, J. (2008). The Hero with A Thousand Faces. New World Library. Deleuze, G. (2004). Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Semiotext(e). Jameson, F. (1991). The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press. Johnson, R. (Director). (2017). Star Wars: The Last Jedi [Motion Picture]. Lucasfilm Ltd.; Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Lucas, G. (Director). (1977). Star Wars: A  New Hope [Motion Picture]. Lucasfilm Ltd.; Distributed by 20th Century Fox. Murdock, M. (2020). The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. Shambhala. Schmidt, V. L. (2012). 45 Master Characters. Writer’s Digest Books. Tatar, M. (2021). The Heroine with 1001 Faces. Liveright. UNESCO. (2010, August  23). Sceilg Mhichil. UNESCO: World Heritage Convention: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/757/

14 Finland Extended Encounters with Top Gun Films and the Emerging Post-Social Landscapes of Youth Raine Aiava and Noora Pyyry Introduction: The Post-Social Landscapes of Youth Well, at that time [1986, when Top Gun was released] there were clear good vs. evil divides. You know, the Soviet Union vs. the U.S. Raine (Researcher): Does this still seem to be the case? Otto: Yes, because Soviet attacked Ukraine [sic]. Also, Russia has been pursuing war in Afghanistan. Otto:

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the pharmacies in Finland quickly ran out of iodine, people located their neighborhood air-raid shelters, hoarded food to their pantries, and started to prepare for the worst. Courses for gun training suddenly began selling out. Finnish history with Russia was referred to in everyday chat, on coffee breaks, and walks with friends. The collective trauma of war was suddenly palpable. And so was the feeling of being united; it is surprising how quickly family differences get suppressed when your neighbor is a bully with whom you share a 1,340 km border. History quickly surfaced as deeply affectual responses, from verbalized personal readiness to defend one’s home to a state strategy stressing the security of the country—causing Finland to submit, with unforeseen public support, its NATO application (together with Sweden), an option that had been there for a long time but never used. In this atmosphere, this shared state of emergency, the new Top Gun movie, Maverick, came into cinemas on May 27. In this chapter, we engage with the complexly interwoven realms of young people’s everyday lives and media.1 Through discussions surrounding the two Top Gun movies that we watched with a group of five teens in Helsinki, Finland, we want to probe the post-social landscapes of youth that emerge with contemporary film.2 By this, we refer to the new geographies of young people beyond nationalities, localities, and scales that are formed through extended techno-timespaces.3 With our discussion, we want to pay attention to the new absent localities in the globalized media landscapes, which nevertheless contrast with the powerful localized readings that arise from the way media content is experienced. Where and how is “Finland” emerging in relation to these extensions, especially when youth are dealing with film landscapes of war? DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-14

182  Raine Aiava and Noora Pyyry Our aim is to conceptualize this landscape of “representation” in a nonrepresentational frame, focusing on the ongoingness of the world—the moving, affective, and relational nature of young people’s post-social landscapes. With nonrepresentational theorization, we move away from traditional notions of landscape as scenery colonized by human spatial ordering and willful intention—that is, landscape as a way of seeing—to embrace John Wylie’s reconceptualization of landscape4 as “the materialities and sensibilities with which we see”.5 In this way, landscape encompasses not only the embodied and spatial experience, but also the ideas, histories, and affective atmospheres with which we are always already in relation. The return to materiality at the heart of embodiment allows us to reconceptualize landscapes as relational encounters and entanglements of spatiality: human and non-human elements that co-constitute each other. This understanding of landscape moves away from being-with, with its static images of collected subjects engaging a world “out there,” toward becoming-with.6 Thus, we follow John-David Dewsbury’s conception of a becoming subject as shaped by the landscape in such a way that the subject cannot be claimed to preexist the actions that articulate it.7 In a very real sense, we coincide with landscape. In relation to film, landscape emphasizes movement and performance, circulations of affect, powerful representations as well as that which resists representation. It is to focus on the process of placemaking where various agencies come together to affect each other in navigating their co-emergence. This includes a call to attune to the relationality of the non-human constituents of social life—the “more-than-social”, as Peter Kraftl terms it.8 According to Kraftl, we must recognize that contemporary forms of sociality are constituted by technologies and knowledges such that it is impossible to discern where the “social” starts or ends.9 What he has in mind here is an attunement to the kind of atmospheres produced through constellations of human and non-human agents.10 The term “more-than-social”, as used by Kraftl, is additive, expanding the sense of constituents in relations beyond human beings, and in this way shares a conceptual vector with the concept post-social, which calls for a loosening up of the notion of sociality, from its fixation on human groups alone, to include objects, media, and other individuating processes that involve our connectedness to the material world.11 While these two concepts have important distinctions—Karin Knorr Cetina, for instance, emphasizes a flattening of social forms in the globalized media landscape that has become constitutive of social relations,12 which we will take up later in our discussion of the Top Gun film landscapes—we nevertheless recognize the imperative in their call to attend to the “increasing orientation towards objects as sources of the self, of relational intimacy, of shared subjectivity, and of social integration”13 in young people’s geographies. We therefore ask: How do young people reflect on the films in relation to their everyday dwelling? In particular, how does the war in Ukraine affect young people’s experience of the Top Gun movies and vice versa? What becomings are encouraged or made available through film and other media? What kind of placemaking happens when engaging with the films and how do these new geographies emerge?

Finland Extended  183 The Movies Top Gun is an aerial action film that premiered in 1986 to mixed critical reviews but resounding commercial success. Starring Tom Cruise in one of his most iconic roles, the film centers on an elite Navy flight school and its class of “top gunners”— the best of the best naval fighter pilots. Released near the end of the Cold War, the film follows the main character, Maverick, as he competes to redeem his father’s name in the Navy by recklessly flaunting boundaries, and passionately pursuing excellence. Through the accidental death of his co-pilot, Goose, Maverick grows to value his team members as more than mere competitors and ultimately rises to defeat several enemy MiGs in an outnumbered gun fight to save his fellow Naval airmen. While the enemy of these American pilots remains unspecified, the film operates on existing tensions of the Cold War—a fact that played no small role in the film being the highest grossing of the year. Indeed, critical reception at the time accused the film of jingoism, and portraying modern warfare as clean, removed, and winnable.14 Beyond its setting as a war film, Top Gun is also known as a drama and romance movie, something which is due more to the affectual power of its soundtrack than to the romance internal to the movie, which has also been critically lambasted, but was instrumental to its success. Top Gun: Maverick is the 2022 sequel to the 1986 blockbuster. In it, Tom Cruise reprises his role as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a Captain who has failed—or more specifically, refused—to climb the Naval ranks, to remain an active pilot. In this film, Maverick is asked to return to the Top Gun flight school to train a group of

Figure 14.1  Top Gun: Maverick theater display (Source: Copyright chingyunsong\shutterstock.com)

184  Raine Aiava and Noora Pyyry younger graduates for a dangerous mission. Maverick struggles coming to terms with training the son of his deceased former co-pilot, Rooster, who is ill-prepared for this mission due to his inability to take the risks necessary to fly the mission successfully. In this film, as in its predecessor, the enemy remains faceless and unspecified, though the stakes of the mission are portrayed in terms of nuclear escalation. Ultimately, Maverick is chosen to lead the mission as he is the only one on the team who successfully endured the physical and cognitive demands of the course. While romance again plays a large role in this sequel, it seems to function as an existential challenge to Maverick’s failure to meaningfully dwell on the ground. The film would open to critical acclaim and resounding commercial success, and go down as Cruise’s most profitable film to date.15 In Finland, the movie would shatter opening weekend box-office records for the country, hailing a longawaited return to movie theaters for the COVID-weary Finnish public.16 Young People as Co-Researchers: Mapping the Movies This research brings nonrepresentational geographical theorization (NRT) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) together to mobilize creative and playful interventions toward an awakening of critical awareness of one’s circumstances in relation to film landscapes. Understanding representations to be epistemological vehicles that inevitably mis-represent their object of study by failing to attend to the embodied, nonintentional, nondiscursive, and elusory nature of the everyday world, nonrepresentational theories focus on life and thought as practiced, in process, and open ended.17 By attending to the undisclosed and sometimes undisclosable nature of everyday practices NRT challenges traditional notions of what it means to know. Likewise, in PAR projects, knowledge is understood as situated and always partial.18 Thus, this awakening of critical awareness is also understood to be always in process, with total self-awareness perpetually out of reach.19 Rather than approaching research as traditional empirical knowledge production, PAR methods emphasize a process of co-researching and deepening understanding that may also strengthen participants’ sense of agency in life, even where prevailing societal restrictions cannot be brought completely into view.20 In this we attend to the ethical imperative of PAR, which has its history in anthropology and development cooperation, as well as in feminist, anti-racist, activist, and social justice movements. However, with a nonrepresentational approach to PAR, we emphasize the avoidance of codifying or re-presenting young people’s lives in relation to global media and international film, but rather aim to think with young people about their experiences of and through such post-social material. New knowledge is created in collaboration with participants during creative experiments such as the mapping exercise used in this research. The power of words is not ignored, but they are taken as world-building “doings”: they are performative.21 Attention is on the generative potential of experimentation in making space for alternative knowledges.22 Mental mapping exercises are often used for assessing young people’s geographical knowledge or for gaining information about their lives in informal ways.23 The

Finland Extended  185 focus is a bit different here, and improvisatory mapping functions as a flexible and creative process of thinking-with affective atmospheres.24 The mapping is not an analysis of the film, nor is it itself a product to be analyzed and assessed as any specific kind of representation. Indeed, it is not to be approached as an artifact of knowledge production. Rather it is a creative engagement which may unfold thinking with the films, and with everything that emerges and comes together in the process. As an artistic participatory technique, mental mapping provides the means for registering and intervening on the affectual magnitudes of the landscape by allowing the researchers to pay attention not only to what young people say or do, but “also the understandings of the world that both inform and are informed by these practices”.25 By giving space to alternative modes of expression over privileging pure linguistic engagement, embodied emotional reactions can be experienced and felt in ways that preclude narration, representation, or explanations. By attuning to moments of connection with participants, we used this method in hopes of bringing out the intra-active and dynamic relationship between experience, materiality, and articulation through linking practice and understanding.26 In this study, participatory research with the young people was organized as three separate mental mapping sessions. The first one happened after watching the 1986 movie at Noora’s home and included all participants and both researchers. The second one included only the three girls of the group (pseudonyms: “Tuuli”, “Minttu”, and “Ilta”) after watching Top Gun: Maverick at the cinema with Noora. The third was organized by Raine with the two boys (“Otto” and “Kalle”) watching the same film, on a separate occasion. In addition to these collaborative sessions, participants were invited to revisit these discussions by commenting on the manuscript in process. The separation of the group along gender lines after the first session was both pragmatically influenced (scheduling conflicts) and carefully considered: while the first, mixed gendered session, certainly went smoothly, with all parties engaged and contributing to the discussion and drawing, the atmosphere nevertheless reflected the fact that the participants were 14–15 years old and unfamiliar with each other. A  shyness about one’s drawing skills, for instance, or a hesitancy about their capacity to communicate fluently in English, would have the groups occasionally dividing amongst themselves to discuss with the researchers separately before returning to the more general discussion. Having the final discussion sessions as separate events seemed to relax the atmosphere and this ease seemed to facilitate the thinking process.27 Mapping Session One: 1986 Top Gun The young people are sitting around a table, pens in hand, laughing at an attempted drawing of Joseph Stalin by Otto. This moves them to act. If Stalin is there, who is his counterpoint? Clearly, we need Truman, a brawny action hero with six-pack abs and massive biceps. Two mortal enemies. Good vs. evil. All of this unfolds as we debate the unspecified powers at conflict in the first film. The reading is unanimous. It must be Russia, though the participants are hard pressed to justify that claim. Well, it was made in the 1980’s, after all, during the Cold War. And at that time,

186  Raine Aiava and Noora Pyyry there were clear good vs. evil divides, Otto tells us, as he passes the drawing of the bald eagle that he was working on over to Kalle who, following his lead, finishes up the sketch with a tongue-in-cheek “MURICA!!!”. The Team America: World Police reference draws laughs. In the first session, hands reached more easily for pens than mouths did for words. Indeed, the material task seemed to engender verbal engagement, as occupied hands seemed, in that moment, not only to call for articulation, but availed an atmosphere where speaking carried less weight, supported as it was by a network of material and bodily engagements. As drawings of superheroes flying over skyscrapers joined portrayals of fighter jets firing missiles, discussions flowed easily, with participants wondering whether the film really made sense in these times, and in this part of the world. When probed, Kalle struggled to clarify: there was really no war in the movie, even though it was about war. There was no death, it was very clean. Except Goose, Ilta pitches in, whose death served the plot. In this way, though the film touched on a significant part of their contemporary landscape— the ongoing invasion of Ukraine is commonly discussed in their classrooms and amongst their friends—it failed to connect with their experiences of it. This is not to say that the film did not connect with them. Indeed, the consensus was rather that it was a good film. There was an affectual power to the film, something compelling. Several of them were quick to locate this in the neatness of the dichotomy between good and evil. That though the film was cliché in its portrayal of an individual hero who would ultimately save the day through tenacity, passion, and individual instinct (as opposed to the by-the-book pilots who would prove unable to rise to the occasion, see Figure 14.2), it was ultimately compelling in its message of heroic sacrifice for the greater good. Even if, as the participants were all aware, greater good was rather ambiguous or merely implied. We have noted here the laughter and humor that engendered an atmosphere of sharing, collaboration, and openness. But there were other kinds of laughter too, other layers to these atmospheres, nervous laughter or self-conscious giggles, and laughter that breaks the circuit of speech, that forestalls exchanges, creates, and partitions space.28 Eruptions that escape the chest, that affect without conveying. There were pressures and resistances as well: sighs and pauses, glances of askance, or noncommittal shrugs to questions of war and politics. Attending to the affectual atmosphere of the situation also means attending to the absences. How do we account for that which escapes representation, escapes accountability, yet affects the research we do? Indeed, the inability to “represent” or relate their experiences through language is not only indicative of their inability to communicate them, but also expresses the limits of relationality itself: perhaps not a failure to relate, but the impossibility of relating to. So how to stay with that which does not rise to the surface of intended decisiveness, or capacity to act, but nevertheless underpins action? To stay with these troubles, we rely, in part, on the research method. Invited to sketch or write or map out their thoughts on the film, the mental mapping becomes a foil for affectual encounters with each other as well as the material on hand, including but not limited to the film itself. Timidness and self-aware discomfort were there, but so too was silliness, as well as seriousness. Individual responses

Finland Extended  187

Figure 14.2  Affectual map drawn together over the course of three sessions (Source: Aiava/Pyyry)

changed as the atmosphere became saturated with laughter or the appreciation of someone’s insight, observation, or drawing skills. These did not always manifest in speech-acts, nor are they easy here to re-present. Rather, they were felt in minor gestures or even absences. But what we want to emphasize here is the opening created by this affectual atmosphere, for us to think together, to co-participate, collaborate, and question our experiences with the films. And insofar as participatory action research often involves critical reflection on the prevailing circumstances, in this instance, conversations quickly turned to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the tensions and concerns that accompany sharing a long border with the aggressive, authoritarian state. The Top Gun movies participated in this process, as part of the technoscientific landscape with which we were seeing, provoking resistance to too clean portrayals of war and heroism, or, in other instances, reaffirming newly raised allegiances and patriotic emotions. Session Two: Girls’ Night Out with Top Gun: Maverick After watching Top Gun: Maverick, we had dinner before renewing our mental mapping discussions at a café in downtown Helsinki. Our discussion started

188  Raine Aiava and Noora Pyyry with the characters of the film. We talked about competition as an inherent part of these types of movies. About how this seems to be a justification in itself—that their being “In it to win it” (see Figure 14.2) was portrayed as a positive trait. We talked about women’s roles in the movie, how they were somehow empty or onedimensional, always beautiful, and again were mainly there to support the men— even with female “Phoenix” as one of the top gunners. Still, despite its somewhat traditional gender norms, the girls liked the film very much. They did laugh a little about the superhero type being depicted by a 60-year-old Tom Cruise, and doodled slogans such as “Heroes don’t give up” to the map, echoed by giggles. Given that the young people chose these films, in these tense, historically weighted times, we wondered whether it would be possible to feel the impacts of the war in how they attended to these movies. Are they locked out of the discussion? If not, by what means are they included? What role does media play in their processing of these events? Indeed, children and young people are often purposely “kept” from having to think of or process such potentially traumatic and existentially threatening situations. After a difficult pandemic, for instance, parents may want to protect young people even more, wanting to give them a sense of safety and of routine. But it was clear that these tactics are not bulletproof for young people living in a neighborhood where buildings have holes in the walls from Russian bombing in the Second World War, in a country that is now building a fence on its Eastern border. Even in absence, affect leaks through, punctures, and permeates, at the very limits of relationality. This being-held-toward that which resists being drawn into and subsumed by relation—for instance, war and its infinite invisible corollaries—anticipates, and pre-empts response, even if that response only sounds the unaccountable.29 For instance, although the girls did not feel that the war directly affected their everyday lives, Minttu and Ilta pointed out that social media is full of funny representations of Putin and some characters from pop culture who can fight him. For example, Tuuli showed a TikTok video in which Queen Elizabeth fights Putin and another one where “Emily Gilmore” from the Gilmore Girls puts him in his place. They also noted that either Putin or the very popular Finnish President, Sauli Niinistö, is on the cover of newspapers every day when the girls stop at a grocery store, creating a certain masculinist atmosphere where the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, as a young woman, is not considered serious enough to be responsible for the country’s future. Discussing the masculine newspaper covers led us to probe the gender issues related to war and leadership. While the male presidents were discussed in relation to military and security, Prime Minister Marin was in headlines for her social media dance videos. Even though the girls were bringing critical feminist views to the discussion, it was challenging to talk about the ways in which these technoscientific extensions of sensing inevitably carry with them a (calculated) loss of other ways of seeing and being in the world. There is a real effect in even choosing the movie to watch: it sets the table for some discussions, but not so much others. The girls remarked that the atmosphere of war seems to somehow define topics that are worth public discussion. Suddenly environmental, gender, or sexuality issues feel secondary, not that important anymore. Not as important. It is difficult to recognize that this

Finland Extended  189 flattening of topics is a form of oppression that operates on many segments of life. Simply put: “global warming ended on February 24th”. In this way, globalizing media “can be understood not merely as objects entangled with(in) children’s agency, but as interactive and forceful elements of a globalizing social themselves through the generation and production of potential and emergent intellectual and affective social networks”.30 An important part of the globalizing social within this film was the supposed violation of a “multilateral NATO treaty” on nuclear enrichment, which was the single, unassuming justification for the military engagement. Importantly, no such treaty exists in NATO. But the citation of a NATO enemy provoked powerful affectual responses, not least of which were concerns about recent shifts in what Finland “is”. Minttu mentioned that she had originally been against Finland joining the NATO, because she had been worried about Russia’s response. She explained that she discussed the matter with her parents and now feels that joining NATO is the safer choice from “two evils”. The other participants agreed with this Finnish consensus. They also noted that Finland is already part of the “West” by being part of the EU. Still, this process from neutrality to NATO does affect the way we think about Finland and produces new geographies of war and defense—and fear. An assemblage of previously (seemingly) unrelated forces take part in this placemaking, linking Finland more closely to the US, and other NATO allies. Session Three: Boys’ Night Out with Top Gun: Maverick The boys in this project were particularly affected by the question of who precisely was the enemy in Maverick. In this film, like the first, Kalle supposed it must be Russia—with Otto leaning toward a Middle Eastern country. In either case, there was a consensus that the enemy remained purposely unspecified, yet somehow given through the articulation of the quality of heroism on display. If the enemy could not be recognized by their deeds, they could be inferred by the virtues of those who oppose them. These qualities were mapped out: heroic and sacrificial, reckless yet committed, principled and devoted to others—dynamics already present in the first film. Good vs. Evil. USA vs. Soviet.31 Western vs. Non-Western. The question of Finland seemed almost to insist: where on this axis does Finland fall? Both Otto and Kalle felt strongly that Finland aligned with the West, expressing confidence in Finland’s decision to join NATO. Kalle had been previously hesitant about Finland being part of a military alliance. Still, the agreement with the decision was emphatic and unapologetic. It was a matter of safety and articulated in terms of the war. Finland needed to shore up its defenses against Russia. In Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and endurance in late liberalism, Elizabeth Povinelli outlines the late-liberal temporalizing logic of selfsacrifice as an investment in an anterior future that swallows up the possibility of a more complex mode of dwelling in the fractured present: By establishing a specific relationship between violence and redemption, such that killing and dying would be understood and experienced as a mode of birth, as a way of bringing new futures to bear, then killing can be represented in the future perfect, as always

190  Raine Aiava and Noora Pyyry to-be justified in terms of the as-yet-unattained future.32 Thus, the present perfect of suffering and death is inverted as something to strive for, celebrate, and memorialize, as a sacrifice of love in the struggle between good and evil.33 Redemption is a matter of future narratives.34 These perspectives are stressed in the Top Gun films, where heroic sacrifice is the necessary and applaudable cost of good triumphing over evil. But more than this, it is also correlated with the means to a meaningful being: a being-for a future that justifies current suffering. The aims of the enemy, the why of the fight, are as unimportant as the aims of the United States military. All that matters is, as written on the mental map: “Hero ready for sacrifice”. For friends, for family, for honor, and for future anterior. The aspect of the enemy in the film cannot be approached in terms of representation, insofar as it is present as an absence—an absence of enemy faces, of enemy motives, a mere citation of world powers in struggle. Instead, it should be approached as a circulation of affects throughout the film. The Top Gun landscape includes not merely the heroic sacrifice, but the absence of justification for the necessity of that sacrifice. Indeed, Maverick’s character is entirely unfit to dwell in the complexities of a durative present. Relationships, friendships, and meaning outside warfare, are impossible for him to maintain. Redemption lies in blind dedication to the craft, absent justification. It was Kalle who would perceptively highlight this: Goose had to die in the first one, and Iceman needed to in this one. Their sacrifice somehow supported Maverick. And, while we are not interested in providing an analysis of the film per se, the affectual promise of a world of good vs. evil is powerful and is part of the landscape of post-social war that Finnish youth encounter through such media. These extended techno-timespaces facilitate a globalized and flattened logic that threatens to erase embodied and experiential difference through an enactment of totalizing dichotomies of representations of us vs. them.35 While the film seemed inclined to produce the flattened temporal ontologies Povinelli marks as critical to late-liberal logics, and the participants were themselves aware of the affectual power of these routes of critical reflex—the call to heroic self-sacrifice, to accept the need for such sacrifice as a given in the dichotomies of good and evil—while these power dynamics were hard at work, there remained, nevertheless, in the embodied relational co-production of sense put into play in these discussions, a deep feeling that something was missing. Otto asked whether these films would not be better if they showed the other side—the everyday life of a Russian pilot. His question suggested a resistance to dichotomies, and a desire for nuanced understanding of the complicated and messy realities of war. Conversations turned to videogames, and other narratives, and their power to potentially challenge our view of those we consider different from us. But they also returned to the Russian invasion again and again. Military service was brought up, and a sense of pride and duty seemed to punctuate the answers as the boys stated matter-of-factly that they would indeed be completing their mandatory duty in the Finnish military, instead of public civil service. To do otherwise was unthinkable. Or, as Otto put it: “For a man, choosing to do civil service is like cutting off your balls, socially.” Thus, despite the intention of dwelling with difference and

Finland Extended  191 connecting meaningfully with the unknowability of the other, war—real war— looms. The question is how do these teens process that war? What becomings are cultivated through these globalized film landscapes? Conclusion In this chapter, we mobilized a notion of sociality opened to objects, media, and other individuating processes that involve our connectedness to the material world in order to consider films as centering and integrating encounters that cultivate collective conventions, moral order, and a sense of social continuance. We examined these post-social landscapes in collaboration with five teens from Helsinki by thinking-with the Top Gun films via mental mapping and discussions that surfaced in connection. Attuning to the affective atmospheres opened our analysis to that which evaded representations, intentionality, or even relationality—as, for instance, with war, something which outright resists being taken into relation or being related to. Dwelling with the absences, pauses, and frustrations in the discussions led us to meditate on the powerful, temporalizing logic of sacrifice that these films mobilized on a global scale, at the cost of embodied, localized readings— though, importantly, we also see how these never fully displace the situated, ongoing experiences that they work to affect. Ultimately, with this text, we hope to generate discussion on the limits of representational studies in young people’s geographies by looking to the generative potential of collaborative experimentation in making space for alternative knowledges. Notes 1 Compare this chapter to the way Cortés-Morales (Chapter 11) engages with children’s lives and media. 2 Compare to the ideas of post-social landscapes in Bosco (Chapter  2) and JoassartMarcelli (Chapter 7). 3 On post-social, see Cetina, K.K. “Sociality with objects: Social relations in postsocial knowledge societies.” Theory, Culture and Society 14, no. 4 (1997): 1–43. Cetina argues for expanding the conceptualization of sociality to include the material world, atmospheres, and attunements to more-than-human agents that delimit and constitute relations. 4 On Wylie’s reconceptualization of landscape, see Wylie, J. “A  single day’s walking: Narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 30 (2005): 234–247; Wylie, J. “Depths and folds: On landscape and the gazing subject.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24 (2006): 519–535; Wylie, J.W. “Landscape, absence and the geographies of love,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, no. 3 (2009): 275–289. 5 Wylie, “Depths and Folds”, 531. 6 Compare to the idea of ‘becoming with’ in Gardner and Craine (Chapter  8), Aitken (Chapter 10) and Cortés-Morales (Chapter 11). 7 Dewsbury, J.D. “Non-representational landscapes and the performative affective forces of habit: from ‘Live’ to ‘Blank’.” Cultural Geographies 22, no. 1 (2015): 29–47. 8 Kraftl, P. “Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children’s emotional geographies.” Emotion, Space and Society 9 (2013): 13–23.

192  Raine Aiava and Noora Pyyry 9 Note Jarman and Kraftl in this volume (Chapter 16), where this theme is even more fully developed. 10 Kraftl, “Beyond ‘voice’,” 18. 11 Cetina, “Sociality with objects,” 22. 12 Cetina, “Sociality with objects,” 14. 13 Cetina, “Sociality with objects,” 12. 14 Zenou, T. “ ‘Top Gun,’ brought to you by the U.S. military.” The Washington Post, May 27, 2022. www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/27/top-gun-maverick-us-military. 15 Rubin, R. and Moreau, J. “ ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ filmmakers on box office glory, Oscar ambitions and sequel speculation.” Variety, August 23, 2022. https://variety.com/2022/ film/features/top-gun-maverick-box-office-oscars-sequel-1235347975/ 16 Lehtonen, V.P. “Suomen jääkiekko­menestyksestä huolimatta myös elokuvat kiinnostavat”—Tom Cruisen Top Gun vetää väkeä teattereihin Suomessa ja maailmalla.” Helsingin Sanomat, May 5, 2022. www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/art-2000008845966.html 17 On NRT, e.g., Anderson, B. and Harrison, P., eds., Taking-place: Non-representational theories and geography. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. 18 Kindon, S., Pain, R. and Kesby, M., eds., Participatory action research approaches and methods: Connecting people, participation and place. London: Routledge, 2007; Skelton, T. “Research with children and young people: Exploring the tensions between ethics, competence and participation.” Children’s Geographies, no. 6 (2008): 21–36. 19 Rose, G. Visual methodologies. An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. 2nd ed. London: Sage 2007, 137. 20 Cahill, C. “Doing research with young people: Participatory research and the rituals of collective work.” Children’s Geographies 5, no. 3 (2007): 297–312. 21 See Pyyry, N. “ ‘Sensing with’ photography and ‘thinking with’ photographs in research into teenage girls’ hanging out.” Children’s Geographies 13, no. 2 (2015): 149–163. 22 Seen also in Jarman and Kraftl (Chapter 16). 23 Béneker, T. et al. “Picturing the city: Young people’s representations of urban environment.” Children’s Geographies 8, no. 2 (2010): 123–140. 24 Kitchin, R. and Dodge, M. “Rethinking maps.” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3 (2007): 331–344.; Pyyry, ‘Sensing with’, 149–163. 25 Greenhough, B. “Vitalist geographies: Life and the more-than-human.” In Taking-place: Non-representational theories and geography, edited by Anderson, B. and Harrison, P. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, 47. 26 This form of intra-action is a powerful part of Cortés-Morales’ work also (Chapter 11). 27 See Sellar, S. “ ‘It’s all about relationships’: Hesitation, friendship and pedagogical assemblage.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 33, no 1 (2012): 61–74. 28 Harrison, P. “flētum: A prayer for X.” Area 43, no. 2 (2011): 158–161. 29 Harrison, P. “ ‘How shall I say it . . . ?’ Relating the nonrelational.” Environment and Planning A 39 (2007): 590–608. 30 Curti, G.H., Aitken, S.C. and Bosco, F.J. “A doubly articulated cartography of children and media as affective networks-at-play.” Children’s Geographies 14, no. 2 (2016): 175–189. 31 It is worth noting that “Soviet” and “Russia” were used interchangeably by the boys. It is unclear if this is reflective of history reaching forward to bridge current events— revealing that Russia really was Soviet all along—or whether it is a matter of language. With English as their second language, it is possible that the distinctions between the proper nouns may simply not register in the same way as they might for a native speaker. 32 Povinelli, E.A. Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 168. 33 Tyner (Chapter 6) provides a powerful example of everyday geographies of death that relates to this. 34 Povinelli, Economies of abandonment, 184. 35 Again this is seen powerfully in Tyner’s work (Chapter 6).

Finland Extended  193 Bibliography Anderson, B. and Harrison, P., eds. Taking-place: Non-representational theories and geography. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Béneker, T. et al. “Picturing the city: Young people’s representations of urban environment.” Children’s Geographies 8, no. 2 (2010): 123–140. Cahill, C. “Doing research with young people: Participatory research and the rituals of collective work.” Children’s Geographies 5, no. 3 (2007): 297–312. Cetina, K.K. “Sociality with objects: Social relations in postsocial knowledge societies.” Theory, Culture and Society 14, no. 4 (1997): 1–43. Curti, G.H., Aitken, S.C. and Bosco, F.J. “A doubly articulated cartography of children and media as affective networks-at-play.” Children’s Geographies 14, no. 2 (2016): 175–189. Dewsbury, J.D. “Non-representational landscapes and the performative affective forces of habit: from ‘Live’ to ‘Blank’.” Cultural Geographies 22, no. 1 (2015): 29–47. Greenhough, B. “Vitalist geographies: Life and the more-than-human.” In Taking-place: Non-representational theories and geography, edited by Anderson, B. and Harrison, P. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Harrison, P. “flētum: A prayer for X.” Area 43, no. 2 (2011): 158–161. Harrison, P. “ ‘How shall I say it . . . ?’ Relating the nonrelational.” Environment and Planning A 39 (2007): 590–608. Kindon, S., Pain, R. and Kesby, M., eds. Participatory action research approaches and methods: Connecting people, participation and place. London: Routledge, 2007. Kitchin, R. and Dodge, M. “Rethinking maps.” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3 (2007): 331–344. Kraftl, P. “Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children’s emotional geographies.” Emotion, Space and Society 9 (2013): 13–23. Lehtonen, V.P. “Suomen jääkiekko­menestyksestä huolimatta myös elokuvat kiinnostavat”—Tom Cruisen Top Gun vetää väkeä teattereihin Suomessa ja maailmalla. Helsingin Sanomat, May 5, 2022. www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/art-2000008845966.html Povinelli, E.A. Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pyyry, N. “ ‘Sensing with’ photography and ‘thinking with’ photographs in research into teenage girls’ hanging out.” Children’s Geographies 13, no. 2 (2015): 149–163. Rose, G. Visual methodologies. An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2007. Rubin, R. and Moreau, J. “ ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ filmmakers on box office glory, Oscar ambitions and sequel speculation.” Variety, August 23, 2022. https://variety.com/2022/film/ features/top-gun-maverick-box-office-oscars-sequel-1235347975/ Sellar, S. “ ‘It’s all about relationships’: Hesitation, friendship and pedagogical assemblage.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 33, no. 1 (2012): 61–74. Skelton, T. “Research with children and young people: Exploring the tensions between ethics, competence and participation.” Children’s Geographies, no. 6 (2008): 21–36. Wylie, J. “A  single day’s walking: narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 30 (2005): 234–247. Wylie, J. “Depths and folds: On landscape and the gazing subject.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006): 519–535. Wylie, J.W. “Landscape, absence and the geographies of love.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, no. 3 (2009): 275–289. Zenou, T. “ ‘Top Gun,’ brought to you by the U.S. military.” The Washington Post, May 27, 2022. www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/27/top-gun-maverick-us-military.

15 Cinema Out of Sight The Role of Film Halls for Street Youth in Harare, Zimbabwe Lorraine van Blerk, Wayne Shand and Janine Hunter Introduction I work in a market area, at different places on the streets. There are many people [street children] in my area, even up to 50 . . . The girls use the money they find to hoard sacks and re-sell them at the bus rank where they stay . . . Some of the boys spend their day near the bins, picking items they find and selling to people. The young boys are the ones allowed inside the market, where they take away rubbish and get two or three Rand. There are some boys who are cruel and bully youngsters. Sometimes we do get some items, but our “bases” are not safe or free, as other people can easily come and steal our belongings. Sometimes we are harassed by the “political party boys”, because at night we do not have anywhere where we can hang out freely. At night we stay at the film halls, but sometimes the political party boys come and chase us out. The problems I encounter there are that sometimes if I get money and I sleep with the money, it will be stolen. (Taurai, 19, describing street life in a Harare neighbourhood, sharing his experiences with other street youth from Growing up on the Streets)

As part of the urban informal landscape, film halls represent important communal spaces for children and youth who live on the streets of Harare, Zimbabwe (see Figure 15.1). Offering a space away from the public gaze where young people can meet friends, sleep, and watch films for entertainment, film halls are both an escape and a source of escapism.1 As indicated above by Taurai, a street youth trained in ethnographic research, film halls are a place of relative safety compared to the streets, but with inherent risks for the young people that use them. This chapter provides insights into the social and practical functions of film halls for young people living on the streets of Harare, considering these as both spaces of communal occupation, recreation, protection, and also danger.2 It draws from data collected as part of the Growing up on the Streets longitudinal research project that took place in three African cities, including Harare, over three years. As a participatory and co-produced research project, Growing up on the Streets provides unique insights into the daily lives and coping strategies of young people living in situations of extreme poverty. Focusing on how young people meet their basic needs, including for food, safety, health, sleep, and livelihoods, as well as how they DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-15

Cinema Out of Sight  195

Figure 15.1  Inside a film hall (Source: Photograph by Shaibu Chitsiku)

manage their social relationships with other youth and adults, the research shows how children and youth on the streets navigate the city and its hazards to manage risks and build their capabilities to survive. The Zimbabwean Context for Street Children and Youth Zimbabwe has experienced a continuing decline in its economic condition and political environment over the last twenty years.3 With nearly half of its population categorised as living in extreme poverty,4 income and access to services are severely limited.5 The informal economy dominates in urban centres as the primary source of employment and across all aspects of life, with most people striving to ‘get by’ in the face of shortages, political violence, and insecurity.6 Young people living and working on the streets is a feature of extreme poverty and inequality in cities across the global South. Youth come to, and stay in, cities to improve their economic prospects, and undertake a variety of work including street vending, petty tasks such as load carrying, washing car windscreens, and sex work.7 Surviving on a subsistence basis, street youth adopt a range of income strategies that draw from the informal economy of the city and include theft and begging to generate meagre earnings to meet their basic daily needs.

196  Lorraine van Blerk, Wayne Shand and Janine Hunter Young people living on the streets often experience rejection and violence from adults and the authorities in the city and rely on their social networks and places of safety to cope with the risks and the boredom of everyday life. Many young people are estranged from their families or have fractured relationships that increase the importance of their friends as a primary source of protection and support as they cope with the stresses of everyday life. Young people become experts in navigating the city, finding places that enable them to meet their needs for food, for care, and for shelter. In Harare, Growing up on the Streets data highlights a film hall in one market suburb of the city that is important for young people as a venue to meet with friends, to sleep, and to escape from their usual environment. As shown in the quotes from young people highlighted in this chapter, the film hall forms a key part of their social geography of the city.8 Films and the Film Hall In common with much of urban Africa, the formal and commercial market for cinema theatres have been replaced by the informal video parlour or film halls. Lowincome populations may have an appetite to consume film, but lack the financial means, other than using the film halls or film shacks in market areas of the city. Urban poverty and deep economic inequality, alongside growth of the digital and online market for film, information, and entertainment has fundamentally changed demand and the way that people consume and experience film. For people living in poverty, informal film halls cater for those who lack a permanent home or the income to pay for electricity, TVs, or DVD players to screen films bought from street vendors or data-bundles to stream content on mobile devices. In Zimbabwe, the theatrical exhibition of cinema is restricted to a few locations in more well-off suburban areas, with popular demand for film met by a large market for pirate DVDs and, for those that can afford it, subscription channels broadcast from South Africa. The formal cinematic experiences have been largely substituted by informal points of access for those with the lowest incomes, bifurcating availability along income lines.9 Growing up on the Streets data in Harare, drawn from focus groups on different capability themes which took place between 2012 and 2015, highlights a film hall in one market suburb of the city to be used extensively by street young people and other low-income residents for a mix of reasons which include, but are not limited to, watching films and the escapism that offers. The young people report that the film hall is used by “different people: luggage carriers, street kids, those that stay at home; they will [all] be mixed up.” They commented that this can result in opportunistic access to resources for some by stealing from the diverse range of occupants: “even farmers come to the films, there is an old man who cried in the morning after his cell phone and bag with raincoat was stolen. He asked me about it, but the thieves were still in there” (H-RA6 Play Focus Group 2014). Therefore, the film hall has a recreational function as a place to watch films, but more widely it has a social role as a point of congregation, escape, and shelter. As indicated by the experience of the farmer, it is also a place of opportunity as regular frequenters

Cinema Out of Sight  197 exercise their informal knowledges and look for opportunities for theft, with those, like the farmer, unfamiliar with the space, may fall victim to crime. Use of the hall also has a temporal aspect, with different times of day offering safety or entertainment, operating from mid-afternoon to around 6 am, organisers will show approximately six films back-to-back during the night, costing US$1 for the night or 5 Rand for an afternoon. Typically, pirated versions of films are shown from Nigeria, Hong Kong, China, the USA, and Europe. Posters advertise the films to be shown in the evening and films are screened on televisions. Popular genres include martial arts, heist, and action movies. Entry to the film hall may cost a whole day’s earnings or mean foregoing purchase of food or drink. While relatively cheap compared to prices of the remaining formal cinema outlets in wealthier parts of Harare, in the context of very low and unstable earnings of young people the entry fee is significant and indicative of its relative importance as a place of refuge: “at night they show films for us (those that do not have a place to stay), but in the afternoon people that want to rest there at the films could go” (H-RA6 Play Focus Group 2014). During the night, young people are unable to occupy their time through work and are most vulnerable on the streets. The film hall offers temporary respite from the streets, providing relative safety from the risks of violence or arrest in public places, or cold and wet nights without shelter.10 As an extension of the informal and street environments of the city, occupying the film hall is known to come with risks but, with limited options for shelter, it is a key destination for the street children and youth. Located in a former community centre, the film hall is a single room that can accommodate up to 50 people when busy, with benches that provide seating or places to sleep. Street children and youth described the hall as noisy and dirty, with food and excrement on the floor, dust in the air, and bottles of urine waiting to be knocked over. The films offer entertainment and distraction but are largely a backdrop where viewers can drop in-and-out of the movie, sleep, or mix with friends, rather than having an immersive cinema-going experience. It is a place of relative safety, compared to the street, where there are few controls over behaviour. A young person explains: “it is safe because there is no one who asks you what you are doing”. Another young person comments: “at the films I will be smoking mbanje [marijuana], watching films and whiling away time” (H-RA6 Play Focus Group 2014). As explored below, individuals have a multi-layered perspective on the role of the film hall in their lives and on the people that they meet there. Using the Film Hall—a Place of Escapism and Safety (with Risks) Young people have a complex relationship with the adults who run the film hall, whom they describe as “giants”, who can be, at different times, a source of protection from the authorities or from thieves operating in the film hall. These adults can also be exploitative, stealing money from the young people when they are sleeping or as a source of violence or sexual assault. Aside from the temporal variations which affect the use of the hall by street children and youth, the film hall provides a refuge away from the public gaze,

198  Lorraine van Blerk, Wayne Shand and Janine Hunter where behaviours unacceptable in wider society may be the norm: “it is a place which is now known for smoking drugs and thieves are found there” (H-RA6 Safe Movement Focus Group, 2013). The space of the hall is one where particular social relations and practices are acceptable, with the physical shack acting as a barrier to conceal illegal activities from the police and other city authorities. By entering the film hall, such behaviours are normalised, and diverse marginalised groups are accepted there. However, this means that diverse groups, often located outside of mainstream society, congregate in the film hall creating a space that offers both safety and risk for street children and youth. Using the film hall is therefore a conditional and contingent decision for young people who have few alternatives when they need to be away from their usual areas of the city due to their own acts or to avoid negative actions by others. A young man, below, explains how the film hall is a place of both risk and safety. “In the films it is safe yes, there are lot of things that happen in there, but it is better to sleep in there than to sleep outside just because sometimes if police come, the film organiser may talk to the police and we will be protected. But outside the problem there is that even a person who is not police may step on your head as you sleep and he will want to steal from you.” (H-RA6 Safe Movement Focus Group, 2013) A main reason for going to the film hall is to sleep. Young people on the streets in Harare stay in ‘bases’, which are small areas of the city that they territorialise with their friends.11 These might include the alleys between buildings, verandas of shopping parades, or waste land. In establishing bases, their primary concern is to obtain some shelter from the weather and to avoid being observed by members of the public or police who might chase them away. It is illegal to construct an informal shelter in Harare city centre and police and soldiers will tear down any structures they find. Most young people use blankets or cardboard that they pack up every morning and hide in drains or alleyways away from the authorities. These measures are a very poor substitute for shelter when there is inclement weather. The film hall offers a temporary refuge, with individuals going to “the films to avoid being raided by police in their bases” (H-RA6 Earnings Focus Group, 2013), as well as to be inside and in an environment where they may be safer than on the street. Street children and youth have fragmented sleep, remaining partially aware of their surroundings and alert to potential risks or attacks during the night. The film hall is used because “it is comfortable and there is nothing that disturbs me there” (H-RA6 Shelter Focus Group, 2013). However, this is not a universal experience; for some young people the benefits of sleeping at ‘the films’ are marginal: “you sleep by chance or when drunk, but it is not like a person who has slept in a house. Plus, there are mosquitos, plus lice, and most diseases: you can get them in the films” (H-RA6 Shelter Focus Group, 2013). The benefits of staying in the film hall are relative to the other options available to young people at any given time.

Cinema Out of Sight  199 As well as sleep, the film hall has social and relational purpose; providing a space to be with friends and to watch films. Social relations and bonds of friendship among young people on the streets are vital to survival. A familiar place that accepts street children, regardless of age, behaviour, level of sobriety, with few rules and offering the opportunity to play, to be entertained, and to feel safe has an enormous value. It is a place where young people can “see funny films and laugh” (H-RA6 Play Focus Group 2014) and find some escape from the stress of life on the streets. One young person commented: “I get my mafia (my friends), and we go to buy blue diamond (strong beer) and we will be high [at the films]” (H-RA6 Play Focus Group 2014). While the viewing of the films themselves might be fragmented, with films and their narratives merging across periods of sleep and distraction, they offer engagement of the imagination vital to the play and wellbeing of young people, a unique space of shared social and cultural experience. The relative safety of the film hall space enables young people to be freer, to engage in leisure activity that involves escapism both in the watching of films and in the social and cultural engagement around the film themes with their peers. Risk and Opportunity at ‘the Films’ While offering spaces of temporary refuge from the streets, film halls are also places of risk for young people who might be robbed or abused while sleeping or sheltering there. A young woman described: “drunken people urinating anywhere, while others, while you sleep, will put urine on your head and you will wake up wet” (H-RA6 Health and Wellbeing Focus Group, 2013). Using the space is a compromise, with unpredictable outcomes, which some young people may reluctantly accept in the face of worse alternatives in their bases or in street environments. While young people have imaginative ways to hide money and possessions to manage the risk of theft, any valuables may attract the attention of those looking to commit robbery. Young people adopt tactics to hide any money they have about their bodies to prevent it being stolen while they are asleep: “at the films [ . . . ] you get in there drunk, with money, and in the morning, you will wake up with your pocket cut and your money stolen” (H-RA2 Play Focus Group 2014). Sleeping on or under benches gives young people little protection inside and adults and other youth are able to identify potential victims for robbery. Young people explain how thieves wait until people are asleep to take any money and other valuables the young person may have: “if you get in the films and flash a lot of money when buying food, you will be robbed in there of your clothes, shoes, and money” (H-RA4 Play Focus Group 2014). Young people who are drunk, asleep, or taking drugs are vulnerable to theft and abuse if they are identified as having money. The perpetrators of theft might include the adults that organise the film sessions or others coming into the film hall with the intention to steal from young people and other visitors. Opportunist petty crime among young people is a key part of a livelihood survival strategy, with young people afraid or conflicted to challenge criminal acts. Below, a young man explains how another’s theft is ignored to stay safe. Young people do not want to

200  Lorraine van Blerk, Wayne Shand and Janine Hunter draw attention to theft for fear that they will be implicated in the crime, or receive a beating if they are discovered to have alerted authorities to the real criminal. Thieves will look at those paying a lot of money and rob them later. I once saw someone being robbed and I did not say anything due to fear. The thief left and I also changed position because I was afraid to be accused of the crime. (H-RA4 Play Focus Group 2014) The heavy reliance on social networks means that young people may passively condone acts of thefts among friends, particularly as they are also likely to undertake these acts on occasions. With potentially large groups of young people congregating at the film hall, the risks of theft and violence are significant; however the need to retain membership of base groups outweighs the risks of being alone on the streets and young people will not ‘give each other up’ to the authorities. It is also important to highlight the temporality to using the film hall as a place to steal. For most young people their engagement in theft while using the film hall will be dependent on opportunity or financial situation. Therefore, different young people will use the hall for stealing or leisure or sleep depending on their various needs on any given day or night. Who uses the hall for these purposes then varies temporally, with most engaging in multiple use of the hall space on a regular basis. A related form of economic gain which film halls are used for is to gamble, which is also illegal on the streets of Harare and must be concealed from the public gaze. “When at films you will play with others that come there. Some who have grown up on the streets, but now they are staying at home with a wife, but they come to looking for money at the films” (H-RA6 Play Focus Group 2014). Gambling is commonplace as a form of entertainment and as an income strategy. At one level it can be an important activity within friendship groups, however gambling can also offer a means to exploit susceptible youth and other visitors. The film hall is also a prime location for sex work, particularly for girls but also younger boys. Girls face particular difficulties of living on the streets and are especially susceptible to sexual violence and exploitation. This results in many engaging in sex work to obtain money, to secure protection from a street boy or young man, or to get food. In Harare, around one-third of street youth are female and they are at a distinct disadvantage when competing for shelter, relying on relationships with boys to gain access into street bases. In the absence of other forms of income, sex work forms a key part of a survival strategy for girls on the street. In a discussion, a young woman described how girls at the film hall identify people with money and solicit sex: “there are some girls that stay there at the films and would approach men that come with money” (H-RA6 Play Focus Group 2014). A  young man commented: “in the films hall some people have blankets in there and the girls will be there also. You can give her US$3 and go with her to the blankets for sex” (H-RA4 Play Focus Group 2014). Girls without other sources of support may use the film hall to identify ‘boyfriends’ who would be willing to buy or share food in exchange for sex. Darkness and the

Cinema Out of Sight  201 use of drugs and alcohol during the night provide a cover for girls to engage in sex work activity. The crowded space of the film hall also provides an element of protection, where girls can solicit in groups or may know film hall regulars who could protect them if they experience unwanted acts of violence. Conclusion Film halls in Harare are a vital part of the social geography of the city for young people on the streets. The importance of the film hall space is less about the viewing of film for its own sake, as a shared immersive experience, but more about a venue for young people who have few options to find safety on the streets. As a place to meet friends, to sleep, and to stay out of sight, the ‘audience’ have a partial relationship with the film, consuming the narrative pieces or as an audiovisual backdrop to other activities carried out in the dark. While the film hall keeps alive the availability of collective viewing of cinema in a city where film theatres have been largely lost to low-income residents, they have extended their function and arguably their importance beyond a cultural venue to play a wider social and economic survival role in the lives of low-income and marginalised people of the city. The film hall offers a place of escape for young people from their usual bases, when they are at risk of physical attack or suffer from inclement weather. The absence of family and social support structures for street children and youth places a heavy reliance of maintaining friendship groups as a primary means of protection and to meet their basic needs. The film hall provides a place for congregation, of refuge and relative safety, in what can be a hostile urban environment for young people, and a place of escapism, to laugh with friends, to sleep, or to watch the films. As part of the informal city, the film hall offers a compromised form of safety for young people, who benefit from being away from the public gaze, creating a rare sense of communal identity, despite risks of theft and exploitation. The film hall is therefore a social and temporal multi-purpose place, which offers a space of support for street children and youth. This cuts across various aspects of their wellbeing from leisure and escapism from the harsh realities of daily life, to meeting basic needs of shelter and economic opportunity to support daily food and survival needs. Engagement with film is therefore merely tangential to the other functions the space of the film hall provides. Notes 1 There is an obvious connection to Chapter 5, Beazley and Warisno’s stories about street children in Indonesia who also needed bases and safe places to mediate the everyday violence of their lives (see also Chapter 6 by Tyner). The approach is markedly different here with a focus on ethnographies and film halls, but it resonates with Warisno in the sense that van Blerk and her colleagues participate with the street children as fellow researchers. 2 Compare with Katz’s film ethnographies described in Chapter 17. 3 World Bank (2022). The World Bank in Zimbabwe, 3 October 2022. www.worldbank. org/en/country/zimbabwe/overview

202  Lorraine van Blerk, Wayne Shand and Janine Hunter 4 World Bank (2021). Poverty & Equity Brief Zimbabwe. http://databank.worldbank. org/data/download/poverty/987B9C90-CB9F-4D93-AE8C-750588BF00QA/AM2021/ Global_POVEQ_ZWE.pdf 5 Compare with Katz’s context in Sudan (Chapter 17) 6 Magidi (2022). The role of the informal economy in promoting urban sustainability: Evidence from a small Zimbabwean Town. Development Southern Africa, 39(2), 209–223. DOI: 10.1080/0376835X.2021.1925088 7 Shand et al. (2016). Economic practices of African street youth: The democratic republic of Congo, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. In Labouring and Learning (pp. 1–21). Springer. 8 It is worth noting a connection to the chapters that are explicitly about the more-thanhuman (Chapters 10, 11 and 16) and the ways that Harare’s film halls are an integral part of the youths’ safety security and socializing. 9 There is perhaps a connection worth making to Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988) and that movie’s focus on human connections and a film hall, but we do not want to make too much of a very different story. 10 See also Beazley and Warisno (Chapter 5) on street children’s need for ‘bases’. 11 See also Beazley and Warisno (Chapter 5) on street children’s need for ‘bases’.

Bibliography Magidi, M. (2022). The role of the informal economy in promoting urban sustainability: Evidence from a small Zimbabwean Town. Development Southern Africa, 39(2), 209–223. DOI: 10.1080/0376835X.2021.1925088 Shand, W., van Blerk, L., & Hunter, J. (2016). Economic practices of African street youth: The democratic republic of Congo, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. In Labouring and Learning (pp. 1–21). Springer. World Bank. (2021). Poverty & Equity Brief Zimbabwe. http://databank.worldbank.org/ data/download/poverty/987B9C90-CB9F-4D93-AE8C-750588BF00QA/AM2021/ Global_POVEQ_ZWE.pdf World Bank. (2022). The World Bank in Zimbabwe, 3 October, 2022. www.worldbank.org/ en/country/zimbabwe/overview

16 ‘What Do You See Guys? Comment Down Below’ Children Becoming YouTubers in the Park Experimentation with Digital Content Creation Polly Jarman and Peter Kraftl Introduction Children and young people not only encounter media platforms such as television, film and cinema as the receivers, observers or audience, but also increasingly engage with online digital platforms, such YouTube, as creators and active participants in (social) media production.1 Children, from diverse global contexts, from very early ages engage with, watch and search YouTube. YouTube, while currently blocked in countries including China, Iran and North Korea, regulates access to the platform in countries where it is not restricted. Regulations include preventing children under 13 having their own accounts and requiring 13–17-year olds to gain parental permission before opening an account. However, despite these restrictions, children with parental permissions (and frequently those without) log in, watch, comment, host and upload content.2 The platform is often used within the home, on computers and televisions; on phones and tablets while on the move; and increasingly in schools for educational purposes and entertainment aimed at children and young people. The adaptability of viewing devices, which now include mobile phones, iPads, tablets, laptops, computers and through ‘entertainment centres’ on televisions, encourages the interaction with YouTube in a multitude of settings and contexts. Not only do children and young people have access to watching and interacting with digital content from these platforms, but they, increasingly (and increasingly globally), are creating content consumed by millions of other young people. Content ranges from fashion, beauty, mental health issues, gaming viewing, unboxing of products, music and entertainment, school- and education-related content, play and family activities, science, outdoor and nature-based content. Children and young people are becoming ‘YouTube stars’ and ‘Kidfluencers’, gaining millions of subscribers, likes and consequently earning substantial money through their channels.3 For example, the child YouTuber Ryan Kaji, born in 2011, hosts ‘Ryan’s World’, with 30 different YouTube channels dedicated to unboxing and reviewing toys, but also other challenges, experiments, skits and activities. This child YouTube ‘influencer’ has, at the time of writing this chapter, totalled 54,091,147,963 DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-16

204  Polly Jarman and Peter Kraftl views on YouTube,4 since joining in March 2015 and, according to The Guardian, earned $29.5 million in 2020,5 making him the highest-paid YouTuber of that year. Of course, this is at the extreme end of the scale for influencers, but alongside Ryan are millions of other young people interacting with the site in various ways, that include watching, liking, subscribing, commenting, creating, uploading, editing, reacting and curating channels. Research related to children and young people and social and digital media tends to focus on the social, emotional and cultural impacts of social media interactions, for example: on mental health; body image; sedentary lifestyles; relation to online bullying; its efficacy in terms of an educational resource; exposures to inappropriate, adult, sexual, violent or politically extreme content; impacts on values, beliefs and morals; and the thorny question of children’s rights and responsibilities when using or being targeted by digital media.6 Where research focuses on digital media platforms’ use as a learning tool, the focus tends to consider digital literacies and the skills of learning with technologies as a tool and skill to master.7 There is little research, therefore, attending to the material-discursive, embodied, affective and processual creating and doing of making digital content and particularly in everyday, outdoor contexts and with children from diverse and marginalised backgrounds. Despite this lack of research, there exist multiple, complex and everyday ways in which YouTube figures in children’s and young people’s lives. As digital technologies have become intimately entangled with human experiences in many contexts, different questions, inquiries and curiosities are needed that might address these encounters and interactions with digital media platforms. How might research attend to the ways in which children reference, relate, respond and enact YouTube in everyday and informal contexts? How are practices of becoming YouTubers performed and narrated by children and young people? What relations are being made between digital practices and embodied encounters of place by children and young people, in ways which encompass YouTuber vocabularies, narratives and performances? This chapter tells stories of the entangling of children’s bodies, GoPros, YouTube and the materialities of an urban woodland. Through sharing stories from a Leverhulme Trust8 funded doctoral research project walking and filming with children, GoPros and a local urban park within Birmingham, a post-industrial city in the UK, this chapter will open some new approaches to processes of children becoming Youtubers. Taking a feminist new materialist approach to research, our research collective (made up of two groups of nine children aged 8–11 years old, their forest school leaders, classroom teachers and some parent volunteers) inquired with the digital, the material, the embodied and the more-than-human.9 Through a non-outcomes-based research-creation process, which encouraged experimental inquiry with GoPros, including filming, creating ‘content’, co-produced video editing, the making of a website and additional creative workshops, the research argued for more nuanced, processual and entangled ways of learning with materialities, technologies and place. This chapter highlights how, through these processes, children become producers, creators, researchers and participants in film and video practices, shifting how we come to understand children in relation to digital medias.

What Do You See Guys?  205 Digital Media and Technologies in Research As outlined above, media and technologies literature within interdisciplinary childhood studies research has been broadly focused on the utilisation of technologies for human and childhood practices.10 Areas of research include digital methods within children’s geographies; application of digital technologies for formal and informal learning; the digital and ‘mobile’ parenting practices related to YouTube; digital and social media related to everyday lives; and digital technology in relation to children’s mobilities.11 Much of the research concerning educational and learning relations to digital technologies considers how to understand and situate the role of technology within learning environments; whether schools should be engaging with social media12; how to recognise and incorporate children’s at-home practices related to digital technologies within school teaching13; what we understand as digital literacies14; how digital literacy informs pedagogy and how the unequal access to digital technologies at home and outside of school should be addressed.15 Less commonly—as in this chapter—scholars have begun to explore how digital technologies might be folded into children and young people’s interactions with outdoor or ‘natural’ environments.16 Following a posthuman and new materialist approach, in this chapter and the research on which it is based, digital media and technologies are understood as always-already entangled with naturecultures, interwoven with human lives, bodies and socio-material practices, so that any ‘separation’ of human from technology becomes impossible. Rather, the acknowledgement of the ongoing entanglement of technologies with children and natures becomes central to this research, productively opening up multiple new possibilities for learning with technologies, digital platforms and embodied performances. Within children’s geographies and interdisciplinary approaches to childhood studies, there is limited research that attends to technologies and GoPros specifically related to walking, entanglements with nature and children’s co-produced filming. Research using mobile methods and digital technologies, such as the GoPro, enable multimodal and more-than-representational inquiry through the affordances of the GoPro to ‘go-along’, ‘animating and witnessing’17 and also extend sensory possibilities. Ideas of assemblages of technologies-nonhumans-child and place are useful to think with.18 Similarly, Susanne Clement’s19 work on the ‘GoProing-research-assemblage’ is instructive, where ‘GoProing’ is considered as a specific approach to ‘more than walking’ with the GoPro co-creating everyday research encounters. The technology plays an active part in the affective and emotional atmospheres of walking. Research that considers the intra-active relations between technologies, children and place has also been influential in framing this chapter.20 Particularly noteworthy here is Nicole Land et al.’s21 collaborative research with iPhones as active companions in digital lively place stories, as well as Sylvia Kind’s22 work with cameras in experimental intra-active moments where cameras act in collaboration with the haptic movements and senses of children. There is limited work on the embodied, affective and performed relation specifically between children and YouTube, which this chapter aims to address, whilst

206  Polly Jarman and Peter Kraftl raising a number of broader questions about children’s interactions with visuality, materiality and non-human ‘natures’. This research is therefore interested in the assemblages of children, technologies and materialities. Wargo considers the ‘withness’ of wearable technologies (such as GoPros) as ‘materially performative of the posthuman subject’, attending to the ‘relational practices and assemblages the child becomes enmeshed in.’23 It is this kind of relational assemblage that is of interest here, when considering children’s experimentation and learning with GoPros. Sylvia Kind’s work on creating and improvising with photographic cameras and children further pushes this assemblage approach to seeing photography ‘as a process of collaborating and moving with the world, an in-between space, rather than a view from either the outside or inside.’24 Parry and Taylor consider the ‘emergent approach to digital authoring’ which arises as ‘process rather than predetermined or curriculum-oriented learning objective.’25 It is this ‘withness’ of technologies, the more-than-human and the body that encourages us to think in terms of the process of ‘becoming YouTube’, creating and inquiring with GoPros, filming and walking. Research-Creation Processes The research took a non-outcomes-based research process. Following Erin,26 meaning it was not concerned with the outcome of the activities as evidence of, for example, curriculum learning, but rather attentive to the processes of learning as they were taking place. This encouraged an open-ended, experimental inquiry of walking, with GoPros and filming. The broad focus of this research was to open up possibilities for ways of thinking and doing outdoor learning and environmental education, attending to processes learning with place, materialities, digital technologies, bodies, affect and more-than-humans. Concerned with children’s learning through relations with ‘natures’, understanding ‘natures’ as vibrant, lively and affective.27 This broadly positions our research within more-than-representational approaches to interdisciplinary childhood studies that entangle the body, materialities, affect, emotion, the sensory, the more-than-human and the everyday, and offer possibilities for thinking beyond the individual, developmental child towards the relational and entangled. Specifically in this project, digital technologies and other technological materialities come to figure as part of our learning with approach. Considering ‘creation-as-research’, the concept asks researchers to think with participants in generating problems, events and practices that encourage thinkingmaking-doing processes.28 For researchers working with children as collaborators and co-researchers, therefore, research-creation encompasses the process of the research as the research. During the research project, research-creation process emerged in three ways: walking and walking-and-filming with GoPros as research-creation; a collaborative website editing and creative workshops as research-creation; and the children as research-creators. This chapter focuses on the walking-with GoPros and becoming YouTube as research-creation. Over six months, the collaborative group walked in Highbury Park, Birmingham. Highbury Park is a public park of 30 hectares, and it is a large, diverse site

What Do You See Guys?  207 with rich ecological and historical significance. It includes diverse mature trees, wet woodlands, wetlands, peatland, swamps, meadows, streams and rivers, decaying wood, landscaped gardens, ruins of former gardens, a pinetum and various other features. This project worked with two schools; 18 children were involved altogether, nine from each. The children were aged between 8–11, ten identified as male, eight as female. Over half of the children involved in this project were autistic and one has profound hearing loss. Of these participants, four were of British-Asian heritage, one was Black-British, one was Pakistani, one was Palestinian, one was Czech and the remaining ten were of white British heritage. Walking with these intersecting differences matters and makes our work political in queering the normative ‘child in nature’ constructs.29 Each 2-hour walking session over 6 months included the GoPro and each participant had 10–15 minutes independent time with the GoPro. The camera was waterproof which meant it could be ‘put to the test’ under various submerged encounters with rivers, ponds, muddy puddles and drains. Participants also understood how to extend and shorten the selfie-stick. As such, GoPros came to figure prominently as a digital technology and companion on our walks. These walks were unstructured, open ended and led by children’s inquiries. The walks took us to streams, woodlands, grass meadows, mud, tree canopies and marshy land. At the very beginning of our walking project, relations were already being made by some participants between the materiality of the GoPro, its straps, its waterproof casing and YouTubers and vloggers who incorporate GoPros in the footage that many of these children encounter digitally online. Participants clearly had experience and knowledge of this technology, either through having used a selfie-stick before or through their online, everyday interactions with YouTube. One participant shared with the group very early on about YouTube videos he watches with GoPros going underwater and finding metals and technologies like car parts and Go-Karts. In this sharing of everyday digital practices of participants watching YouTube and through embodied walking with streams and trees, thinking emerged about the possibilities of the GoPro to film and record the park in ways that children could not otherwise through their physical bodies. GoPro as Extension of the Body and as Sensory Companion30 Before turning to becoming YouTubers, we can briefly touch on two related embodied ways of becoming with the camera—firstly, how the GoPro and selfiestick become as extension of the body, and, secondly, relating to the camera as companion. Often during our walks, participants would extend their arms and the cameraselfie-stick up into a tree canopy, into a hedgerow, through the dense branches of a bush, underwater into rivers, ponds and into thick mud. The movements of the arm thrusting the camera into the hedge can be sensed in Figure 16.1. The image on the left, recorded on my body camera, of the participant-camera-selfie-stick sticking the camera into a hedgerow offers one perspective, and the footage recorded on

208  Polly Jarman and Peter Kraftl

Figure 16.1  “Extending the GoPro and selfie-stick into hedges” (Source: Screenshot from footage taken by P. Jarman, 2019)

GoPro selfie-stick camera on the right-hand image offers the other, as it is pushed into a yew tree hedge. In these moments, the GoPro camera and selfie-stick become an extension of the body itself. The assemblage of the GoPro camera (specifically with its visual and sonic recording affordances, its long battery power and its lightweight-ness, its solid, durable plastic waterproof casing), the selfie-stick (with its extending metal pole and attaching screw mount to fix the camera in place) and the child

What Do You See Guys?  209 (particularly the child’s arms or forehead depending on adaptation of wearing it), enables the child-camera to move into places that the child’s body alone might not reach. Such a move facilitates different kinds of material and sensory encounters, generating a touching with materialities, with frequent (failed) attempts at seeing in detail the lichens, leaves, stones, gravelly, soily grounds and underwaters. But these moves-with-cameras also open a feeling and sensing between the child, GoPro and the material environment, felt as vibrational through the child’s hand and body as it holds the selfie-stick. As well as the camera as a collaborating extension of the body, the camera also becomes a companion, afforded the possibility to be able to smell and taste. Leo31 and the camera would smell flowers and he would invite the camera to taste flowers and grass. He encourages the camera to kiss a tree trunk, voicing ‘mwah, mwah’ as the camera taps and hits into contact with the tree. In these moments, the camera becomes a sensory companion, a participant touching and communicating with the world, in relation with the child, sharing in sensory encounters which extend and invite further inquiry. GoPro and Performing YouTube Frequently during our walks, participants worked with the GoPro as YouTube(rs), creating ‘content’ and narrating for imaginary audiences. This despite knowing that we were not creating a YouTube channel as part of the project. These processes of becoming YouTubers form part of the participants’ research-creation process when walking and filming. These processes of becoming YouTube came to matter in relation to some of the emerging curiosities, inquiries and attentions that became significant within this research-creation project. For example, the incorporation and articulation with(in) our walks, of participants’ online knowledges from specific YouTube channels or videos, both opened children’s relations to the more-than-human materialities of the park but also related to other places and temporalities.32 There was a great deal of debate and discussion amongst participants as to whether what children were filming was ‘YouTube’ or not. Depending on the perceived imagined audience, their content creation style shifted, as did how they moved their bodies, worked with the camera, narrated and intra-acted with the camera.33 While some children considered themselves to be making a website or narrating for nature documentaries, others were ‘gamers’; these differing engagements with online platforms presented different ways of being, narrating and performing with the camera and ways of encountering the park. A key example of these differing engagements was of when, while performing narrations for his website audience, Avery became a presenter of nature documentaries, extending the camera high above the heads of the participants, using the phrase ‘and here we see . . .’ before introducing the camera and audience to various people in their ‘habitats’ (the ‘addicted youtubers’) and imagined animals (a ‘panda’). Aviary became a nature presenter, using some of the narrations and phrases of popular nature documentaries observing animals in ‘their habitats’. At other times, Aviary became interviewer, holding the camera in one hand while

210  Polly Jarman and Peter Kraftl extending out his other arm as clenched hand/microphone, asking others to respond to our walks: ‘any thoughts on how this experiment is going? Any thoughts at all?’ Avery and the other children then worked with the camera to film participantsas-pandas in their ‘natural habitats’ and articulate their learning from nature documentaries and television series. These differing interactive presenting styles, of nature documentary and interviewer contrast significantly to the ways in which children performed becoming YouTubers, whilst both mimicking and disrupting the formal ‘knowledges’ about and ‘connections’ with the environment that, it is assumed in many contexts, children ‘should’ acquire.34 Children most frequently became YouTubers. This becoming ‘YouTube’ occurs in a variety of ways, either through narrating and sharing information, asking viewers to participate in the inquiry by commenting, liking and subscribing, or by rotating and positioning the camera facing their bodies, extending the camera out on the selfie-stick rotated towards them, talking directly to imagined viewers as if they were viewing in real time. Dino performs his ‘YouTuber’ narration with an Americanised accent, saying ‘What’s up guys?! ‘Sup ‘YouTube fam?’ He continues: ‘’Sup, YouTube?’ while Leo runs in front of the camera and demands people subscribe to the channel. Dino then jumps into the river and shouts ‘Eyyyyy bro, yeah yeah, guys, what’s happenin’? . . . Just remember fam, the entirety of YouTube wants to see me jump off that mountain’. His performance brings atmosphere, vocabulary and exaggerated accents of his digital encounters with YouTube(rs) into the park. During one of her times with the GoPro, Cinnamon turns the camera to face her, extended as far as possible on the selfie-stick and proclaims: ‘so today, YouTubers, please subscribe, like and follow the best channel and ring the bell ding ding and smack that (GoPro) and flex on the haters’. She explains to the researcher walking with her after doing this that this is how YouTubers use the camera, turning it towards them and talking direct to the camera; again, articulating an embodied knowledge of becoming a YouTuber. Leo regularly spoke to his YouTube audience; in one film clip he recorded, he narrates the processes of leaves changing colours, selecting different leaves from the ground and bringing them close-up to the camera, filling the screen, often touching the camera lens, twirling the leaf in his fingers while talking through how they change from green to brown. He frequently worked with the camera to reach into areas of the undergrowth or canopy that he couldn’t reach without the selfie-stick, such as in Figure 16.2. These three screenshots are from footage filmed by Leo, in the accompanying audio he can be heard talking to his imagined viewers, saying: Okay guys, so I wanted to show you this, so I can’t get past there, but you guys can, so guys, tell me what you see in there. Hello? I’m guna put you inside there and then, what do you see? I would like to see. And then, what do you see? Alright guys, when Miss calls me, I’m guna have to go, I’m guna have to go but make sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the subscribe button’. He asks viewers to respond to his questions, ‘putting them inside’ places he would ‘like to see’. In other encounters, he states ‘I’m going to show you what I see guys, this is what I see’. Leo talks with the imagined viewers as if recording in live time,

What Do You See Guys?  211

Figure 16.2  “What do you see guys? Three screenshots of a film clip from Leo” (Source: Screenshots from footage taken by P. Jarman, 2019)

bringing YouTube audiences ‘into the park’, to both record, witness and comment, entangling the material and the digital. Children extend their learning with the park to learning with their imagined audiences, requesting their input, suggestions and responses to their embodied encounters. In this sense, learning becomes extended into imagined digital audiences, entangling the digital and physical.

212  Polly Jarman and Peter Kraftl For many participants becoming YouTubers mainly involved getting (imagined) subscribers, with children frequently stating: ‘we are trying to get to one million subscribers so hit the like button, subscribe now’ (Crazy). Getting subscribers includes both creating new content and content that will result in ‘likes’; this often involves their attempts to share encounters with place: for example Dolly walks down a narrow stream that cuts through the middle of the park as she asks viewers: ‘Guys, leave a comment down below. What is this river? Where does it lead to?’ Digital technologies and digital platforms such as YouTube are not used here for digital literacy or mastery as a tool, but instead, building on Nicole Land et al. as a companion for unfamiliar learning-with place. At points, the GoPro becomes a companion, dragged along, or communicated with in smelling and eating. At other points, it becomes a companion for communicating with digital (and thus global) audiences through becoming YouTube, bringing children’s practices of content creation into relation with their material environments, with the camera-child becoming YouTubers, creating the potential for the possibility for telling ‘digital lively place stories.’35 As such, the GoPro cameras and YouTube become significant collaborators in how children engage, experiment and communicate with the physical environment as well as how they engage with and incorporate a wider (digital, imagined) audience into their material worlds. The GoPro and the digital platforms such as YouTube entangle in exciting ways with the processes of how children, materials, technologies and natures relate. Concluding Thoughts: Becoming YouTube, Learning with GoPros and Research-Creation This chapter began by outlining the dominant ways in which YouTube and digital platforms are framed within academic research, from a socio-cultural position and in relation to digital literacy. Specifically, children’s learning with digital platforms, such as YouTube, and interaction with other digital technologies, such as phones, iPads, cameras and gaming softwares are often dismissed as being counterproductive and damaging to children’s health and wellbeing as well as to their ‘connection’ to nature.36 Technologies are rarely, if ever, figured within these discourses, considered as companions and collaborators. Children’s digital practices and knowledges from gaming and platforms like YouTube are rarely acknowledged for their productive entanglement with learning, materialities and nature(s). Through the stories told in this chapter we have argued our position that there exist multiple everyday, relational and processual ways in which children learn with technologies and engage with digital content creation. This chapter attends to the merging, overlapping, flows and spilling over of digital practices and knowledges into both informal learning and embodied encounters with/in research. Digital knowledges become part of children’s walks in unexpected ways. Paying attention to participants’ informal knowledges from digital platforms such as YouTube became a productive and exciting part of research-creation and inquiry. Recognising technology not as a distinct or separate aspect of formal education, nor

What Do You See Guys?  213 as a tool to be mastered or learnt but as entangled and ubiquitous within children’s everyday lives and learning environments, opens up playful experimentation with children’s embodied performances, languages and knowledges that include the digital and the filmic. This chapter extends Neumann and Herodotou’s acknowledgement of children’s engagement with YouTube, ‘researching, creating, curating, sharing (and) showcasing’ encounters by becoming YouTube.37 It asks us to take seriously inquiries that emerge through filming and walking. And further, to consider the liveliness of becoming YouTube in affective assemblages of performances, narratives, vocabularies, embodied movements and proposals or invitations such as ‘liking’ and ‘subscribing’ and ‘commenting down below’. Notes 1 Compare this chapter to Beazley and Warisno (Chapter 5) and Katz (Chapter 17), who also have young people as co-producers of film, but in very different ways. in addition, there is a connection to the incredible success of filmmaker Laura Halilovic who goes from a cheap video and a YouTube production to a full-length feature film (described by Laura Lo Presti in Chapter 4) in a couple of years. 2 Neumann and Herodotou (2020). Young children and YouTube: A global phenomenon. Childhood Education, 96 (4), 72–77. 3 Feller and Burroughs (2022). Branding kidfluencers: Regulating content and advertising on ‘YouTube’. Television & New Media, 23 (6), 575–592. 4 Ryan’s World (2023, March 02). About. www.youtube.com/@RyansWorld/about 5 Neate (2020, March 2). Ryan Kaji, 9, earns $29.5m as this year’s highest-paid YouTuber. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/18/ryan-kaji-9-earns30m-as-this-years-highest-paid-youtuber 6 Livingstone and Third (2017). Children and young people’s rights in the digital age: An emerging agenda. New Media & Society, 19 (5), 657–670; Holloway and Valentine (2002). Cyberkids: Youth Identities and Communities in an on-Line World. Oxon: Routledge. 7 Livingstone et al. (2021). The outcomes of gaining digital skills for young people’s lives and wellbeing: A systematic evidence review. New Media & Society, 1–27. 8 This chapter draws on Dr Polly Jarman’s Leverhulme Trust funded PhD research project (2018–2022), funded as part of the Forest Edge Doctoral Training Programme, Birmingham Institute of Forest Research, University of Birmingham. The project was supervised by Professor Peter Kraftl, Professor Sophie Hadfield-Hill and Dr Phil Jones and was co-produced with eighteen children from two primary schools, one of which was a special educational needs schools, along with their teachers and forest school leaders. 9 Aitken (Chapter  10) and Cortés-Morales (Chapter  11) also focus on the more-thanhuman as a conceptual basis, which based upon the posthumanist theories of Braidotti amongst others. 10 Gallagher (2020). Childhood and the geology of media. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41 (3), 372–390. 11 Kraftl (2020). After Childhood: Re-thinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children’s Lives. Oxon: Routledge; Land, N., Hamm, C., Yazbeck, S.L., Danis, I., Brown, M., and Nelson, N. (2020a). Facetiming common worlds: Exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones. Children’s Geographies, 18 (1), 30–43. 12 Greenhow and Lewin (2016). Social media and education: reconceptualizing the boundaries of formal and informal learning. Learning, Media and Technology, 41 (1), 6–30.

214  Polly Jarman and Peter Kraftl 13 Gillen and Kurcirkova (2018). Percolating spaces: Creative ways of using digital technologies to connect young children’s school and home lives. British Journal of Educational Technology, 49 (5), 834–846. 14 McDougall et al. (2018). The uses of (digital) literacy. Learning, Media and Technology, 43 (3), 263–279; Meyers et al. (2013). Digital literacy and informal learning environments: An introduction. Learning, Media and Technology, 38 (4), 355–367. 15 Sefton-Green et  al. (2009). Reviewing approaches and perspectives on “digital literacy”. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4 (2), 107–125. 16 Smith and Dunkley (2018). Technology-nonhuman-child assemblages: Reconceptualising rural childhood roaming. Children’s Geographies, 16 (3), 304–318. 17 Vannini and Stewar (2017). The GoPro gaze. Cultural Geographies, 24 (1), 149. 18 Smith and Dunkley (2018). Technology-nonhuman-child assemblages: Reconceptualising rural childhood roaming. Children’s Geographies, 16 (3), 304–318. 19 Clement (2019). GoProing: Becoming participant-researcher. In B. Hodgins (Ed.), Feminist research for 21st century childhoods: Common worlds methods (pp.  149–158). London: Bloomsbury Academic. 20 Understanding intra-active relations is a large part of Cortés-Morales (Chapter 11) and Aiava and Pyrry’s work (Chapter 14) 21 Land et al. (2020a). Facetiming common worlds: Exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones. Children’s Geographies, 18 (1), 30–43; Land et al. (2020b). Doing pedagogical intentions with facetiming common worlds (and Donna Haraway). Global Studies of Childhood, 10 (2), 131–144. 22 Kind (2013). Lively entanglements: the doings, movements and enactments of photography. Global Studies of Childhood, 3 (4), 427–441. 23 Wargo (2018). Writing with wearables? Young children’s intra-active authoring and the sounds of emplaced invention. Journal of Literacy Research, 50 (4), 506. 24 Kind (2013). Lively entanglements: The doings, movements and enactments of photography. Global Studies of Childhood, 3 (4), 429 (emphasis in original). 25 Parry and Taylor (2021). Emergent digital authoring: Playful tinkering with mode, media, and technology. Theory Into Practice, 60 (2), 157. 26 Manning (2016). Ten propositions for research-creation. In N. Colin and S. Sachsenmaier, (Eds.), Collaboration in performance practice: Premises, Workings and failures (pp.  133–141). Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan; Springgay, S., and Truman, S. E. (2019). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human worlds: WalkingLab. Oxon: Routledge.; Loveless (2015). Towards a manifesto on research-creation. Canadian Art Review, 40 (1), 52–54. 27 Blaise, M., and Ryan, S. (2019). Engaging with Critical Theories and the Early Childhood Curriculum. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315103310–6. 28 Aiava and Pyrry’s (Chapter 14) also follows the dictates of ‘creation-as-research’. 29 Springgay and Truman (2019). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human worlds: WalkingLab. Oxon: Routledge.; Taylor (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Oxon: Routledge. 30 Although derived from very different representations, it is worth comparing this to the more-than-human assemblages suggested by the magic in Tomm Moore’s Secret of Kells (Chapter 10) and the more-than-human youths/dragons in Chapter 11. 31 Throughout this chapter the children’s names are those chosen by the participants during the project, to anonymise their names. 32 See also: Land et  al. (2020a). Facetiming common worlds: Exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones. Children’s Geographies, 18 (1), 30–43. 33 Änggård (2015). Digital cameras: Agents in research with children. Children’s Geographies, 13 (1), 1–13. 34 Jarman (2022) Children’s encounters with urban woodlands, digital technologies and materialities. PhD Thesis. Birmingham: University of Birmingham; Helms et al. (2019). Away and (dis)connection: Reconsidering the use of digital technologies in light

What Do You See Guys?  215 of long-term outdoor activities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3 (230), 1–20; Kraftl et al. (2019). (Re) thinking (re) connection: Young people, “natures” and the water—Energy—FOOD nexus in São Paulo State, Brazil. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44 (2), 299–314. 35 Land et al. (2020b). Doing pedagogical intentions with facetiming common worlds (and Donna Haraway). Global Studies of Childhood, 10 (2), 131–144. 36 Helms et al. (2019). Away and (dis)connection: Reconsidering the use of digital technologies in light of long-term outdoor activities. Proceedings of the ACM on HumanComputer Interaction, 3 (230), 1–20. 37 Neumann and Herodotou (2020). Young children and YouTube: A global phenomenon. Childhood Education, 96 (4), 75.

Bibliography Änggård, E. (2015). Digital cameras: Agents in research with children. Children’s Geographies, 13 (1), 1–13. Clement, S. (2019). GoProing: Becoming participant-researcher. In B. Hodgins (Ed.), Feminist research for 21st century childhoods: Common worlds methods (pp. 149–158). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Feller, G., and Burroughs, B. (2022). Branding kidfluencers: Regulating content and advertising on ‘YouTube’. Television & New Media, 23 (6), 575–592. Gallagher, M. (2020). Childhood and the geology of media. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41 (3), 372–390. Gillen, J., and Kurcirkova, N. (2018). Percolating spaces: Creative ways of using digital technologies to connect young children’s school and home lives. British Journal of Educational Technology, 49 (5), 834–846. Greenhow, C., and Lewin, C. (2016). Social media and education: Reconceptualizing the boundaries of formal and informal learning. Learning, Media and Technology, 41 (1), 6–30. Helms, K., Ferreira, P., Brown, B., and Lampinen, A. (2019). Away and (dis)connection: Reconsidering the use of digital technologies in light of long-term outdoor activities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3 (230), 1–20. Holloway, S., and Valentine, G. (2002). Cyberkids: Youth identities and communities in an on-line world. Oxon: Routledge. Jarman, P. (2022). Children’s encounters with urban woodlands, digital technologies and materialities. PhD Thesis. Birmingham: University of Birmingham. Kind, S. (2013). Lively entanglements: The doings, movements and enactments of photography. Global Studies of Childhood, 3 (4), 427–441. Kraftl, P. (2020). After childhood: Re-thinking environment, materiality and media in children’s lives. Oxon: Routledge. Kraftl, P., Balestieri, J.A.P., Campos, A.E.M., Coles, B., Hadfield‐Hill, S., Horton, J., Soares, P.V., Vilanova, M.R.N., Walker, C., and Zara, C. (2019). (Re) thinking (re) connection: Young people, “natures” and the water—energy—food nexus in São Paulo State, Brazil. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44 (2), 299–314. Land, N., Hamm, C., Yazbeck, S.L., Danis, I., Brown, M., and Nelson, N. (2020a). Facetiming common worlds: Exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones. Children’s Geographies, 18 (1), 30–43. Land, N., Hamm, C., Yazbeck, S.L., Brown, M., Danis, I., and Nelson, N. (2020b). Doing pedagogical intentions with facetiming common worlds (and Donna Haraway). Global Studies of Childhood, 10 (2), 131–144. Livingstone, S., Mascheroni, G., and Stoilova, M. (2021). The outcomes of gaining digital skills for young people’s lives and wellbeing: A systematic evidence review. New Media & Society, 1–27.

216  Polly Jarman and Peter Kraftl Livingstone, S., and Third, A. (2017). Children and young people’s rights in the digital age: An emerging agenda. New Media & Society, 19 (5), 657–670. Loveless, N. (2015). Towards a manifesto on research-creation. Canadian Art Review, 40 (1), 52–54. Manning, E. (2016). Ten propositions for research-creation. In N. Colin and S. Sachsenmaier, (Eds.), Collaboration in performance practice: Premises, workings and failures (pp. 133–141). Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. McDougall, J., Readman, M., and Wilkinson, P. (2018). The uses of (digital) literacy. Learning, Media and Technology, 43 (3), 263–279. Meyers, E.I., Erickson, I., and Small, R.V. (2013). Digital literacy and informal learning environments: An introduction. Learning, Media and Technology, 38 (4), 355–367. Neate, R. (2020, March  02). Ryan Kaji, 9, earns $29.5m as this year’s highestpaid YouTuber. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/18/ ryan-kaji-9-earns-30m-as-this-years-highest-paid-youtuber Neumann, M., and Herodotou, C. (2020). Young children and YouTube: A global phenomenon. Childhood Education, 96 (4), 72–77. Parry, B.L., and Taylor, L. (2021). Emergent digital authoring: Playful tinkering with mode, media, and technology. Theory Into Practice, 60 (2), 148–159. Ryan’s World. (2023, March 02). About. www.youtube.com/@RyansWorld/about Sefton-Green, J., Nixon, H., and Erstad, O. (2009). Reviewing approaches and perspectives on “digital literacy”. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4 (2), 107–125. Smith, T.A., and Dunkley, R. (2018). Technology-nonhuman-child assemblages: Reconceptualising rural childhood roaming. Children’s Geographies, 16 (3), 304–318. Springgay, S., and Truman, S.E. (2019). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human worlds: WalkingLab. Oxon: Routledge. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Oxon: Routledge. Vannini, P., and Stewart, L.M. (2017). The GoPro gaze. Cultural Geographies, 24 (1), 149–155. Wargo, J.M. (2018). Writing with Wearables? Young children’s intra-active authoring and the sounds of emplaced invention. Journal of Literacy Research, 50 (4), 502–523.

17 History, Memory, Media Revisiting the Films from My Research on Children’s Work and Play in Sudan Cindi Katz Writing this piece has inspired many returns—a return to view and review my research films from Sudan—taken by my then partner Mark LaPore in collaboration with my study of children’s environmental learning, knowledge, and interactions during a period of political economic and environmental transformation; a return to the work of anthropologist E. Richard Sorenson whose commitment to film documentation as a potential resource for future research inspired me and eventually disturbed me; a return to the research itself to reflect on the work and play of the children with whom I worked and to see again the ecologies of their/ our everyday lives; and a return to reflect on the materiality of visual ‘data,’ both as media and as a mode of observation.1 In the course of these returns, I reflected on the work and play of children in a village I  called Howa in central-eastern Sudan through revisiting more than eight hours of research films I  made with my partner in 1981.2 Through  layers of material that reflect changing technologies—from the original super-8  sound films through VHS tapes, 3/4 Inch Videotapes, DigiBeta Cassettes, and ultimately to digitized formats—refracted through decades of research in children’s geographies, I returned to my fieldwork in a mediated fashion seeing with new old eyes what I saw, missed, and might think anew. The trunk-load of all those small yellow Kodak film boxes (and countless heavy batteries) may now fit on a thumb drive with memory to spare, but the images and actions recorded spare no memory as they spark remembrances, recall pleasures and pains, and expand my ideas spurring me to resee what I saw and rethink my decisions about the material itself.3 I was initially inspired by Sorenson’s ideas concerning film documentation as an archivable record that if shot in an open-ended way and complemented with explanatory notations would be available as ‘visual data’ for researchers interested in other topics than those explicitly documented in the films.4 Sorenson, inspired by Margaret Mead among others and interested in chronicling ‘non-recurring’ or ‘disappearing’ events, advocated a sort of ‘window on the world’ approach to documentation, which we followed in about eight hours of super-8 sound film covering the range of ten-year-old children’s work and play activities.5 The films documented sedentary practices such as seed preparation or modeling dramatic play activities with toys crafted from debris and readily available items as date pits and stones, as well as more active engagements within and outside the village DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-17

218  Cindi Katz including herding flocks of sheep and goats, agricultural field work, making charcoal, or gathering fuelwood. At the start of each roll of film, I indicated its number and a three-word description of the activity to be filmed along with the child’s first name. Most activities were observed and documented in more than a single three-and-a-half-minute reel, sometimes encompassing ten to fifteen minutes of activity. We also kept a notebook with a detailed description of the activities observed and recorded. Of course, we recognized that the act of framing is a social and cultural practice that tempers claims to the films being some sort of ‘objective’ record, but their open-endedness enabled the documentation of the full run of each particular activity. Sorenson advocated and was involved in the creation of film archives where research films would be available to scholars whose interests might be quite distinct from those associated with the original documentation.6 For example, our films of children’s work and play might be studied by scholars interested in gross motor skills, cooperative behavior, or the use of idiomatic language. Although depositing these films in the National Research Film Collection of the Smithsonian Institution was part of my research plan and NSF proposal, I refrained from doing so after the fact. It’s hard to piece together my thinking at the time, but what I recall (and continue to think) was that the specificity of the children’s activities, and our intimacy with them and their families, made it feel like a violation or betrayal of that intimacy to put the work in an archive for others to study what they will. It wasn’t so much being possessive of the work and the children with whom we worked as a sense that putting the work in an archive would objectify them.7 In reviewing these films now, I am struck by the focus and concentration of the children at work and play, by what I continue to think of as their workful play and playful work, by their awareness of the camera and their comfort bordering on obliviousness with it, and by the social and physical environment in which these activities—the children’s and ours—took place.8 The lens of the filmmaker is quiet and focused, as concentrated as the children’s activities; no rushing the frame, no quick changes in perspective or focal length, enabling what Daniel Eisenberg, in reference to his extraordinary films on labor, calls ‘durational observation,’ through which he “attempted to meet the experience of work and labor at the site of production with heightened senses and finely tuned attention; an intentional slowing down of perception and thought.”9 LaPore achieved precisely this in films ranging from three-and-a-half to fifteen minutes whether focused on delicate labors like drawing water filtered through the sandy shallow wells children dug in the riverbed or rowdy ones like shepherds’ games of capture and knock-down.10 As the viewer is drawn into the frame, LaPore’s delicate attention to the activity—whether quiet or raucous, collective, or solitary—intensifies the experience of watching and reflecting on what is taking place, an observational richness enabling the ‘slowing down of perception and thought.’ The steady and patient framing entices close observation of the children’s work and play activities, at once familiar and strange, slowing down one’s perception to notice their attire, facial expressions, modes of communication, body language, and energy, while at the same time bringing the landscape—whether the mud and dung structures within

History, Memory, Media  219 the village, its agricultural fields and canals, the sandy riverbed or seasonal river that bounds it, or the sparsely vegetated savanna all around—into focus as arenas of children’s everyday lives. The synchronous sound brings the aural environment close—I hear things I no doubt took for granted or barely heard at the time given my focus on the children’s interactions, or trying to juggle equipment, notetaking, and staying cool. Watching and listening now I hear birds; conversations in the background; children’s quiet humming while playing and their conversational and musical exchanges; unsolicited—and often unappreciated and unheeded— guidance or admonishments to the children; machines; music and the radio; wind; and animals braying, bleating, barking, cackling, clucking, and grunting. The soundscape contextualizes the children and their activities in a vibrant wider world. While I  did use the films to review and slow down my own perceptions and thoughts about what I was observing—often frantically—in the field, I did not use them to develop ‘hypotheses’ about children’s activities to guide return visits to the field as Sorenson did with his work among Fore children in Papua New Guinea. Our films documented my research but were not themselves envisioned as material for developing new questions to be addressed empirically at another time, although they could have been and might be understood as such now. When I returned to Howa for three brief study visits over fifteen years, my focus was on the social, economic, and political ecologic shifts taking place there more than on the children’s work or play, which I attended to tangentially as part of those broader shifts. I photographed but did not film at all on these visits. Indeed, one of the reviewers of the manuscript that became Growing Up Global11 faulted me for not documenting the nature of the children’s play in return visits. But the films are a resource that I could share with a colleague or student to anchor a study in that direction. The political situation in Sudan has been fraught since the end of the 1980s and a factor in my not returning to the village for even a short research visit since 1995. I thought with the uprisings that started in 2018, and in 2019, overthrew the long-standing dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, I might at last return to Sudan and the village and do a bit of follow-up research. The explosive violence that has rocked the country since spring 2023 has postponed that possibility yet again. If I get the opportunity to return, the films will help me to remember the range of children’s activities (not just the highlights) situated in their contexts—large and small, along with their props and participants. If I am not able to return, I might find a way to share the films with another ethnographer, ideally a young Sudanese researcher, who could document the work and play of children in Howa now, drawing on the films as a baseline for analyzing change. The collision of past-present-future prompted by writing this piece has multiple manifestations. Reviewing the films now, I am both transported to that time and place so critical to my life and work that it feels knitted into my bones and astonished that so much time has gone by. The children, so vividly present in the films, are now about 50 years old and while that present is now so far away, seeing and reseeing the work vividly cuts through the time and space, while a village WhatsApp group offers the possibility of entirely collapsing the distance. Despite the deterioration of the image thanks to multiple transfers across media, each meant to

220  Cindi Katz preserve them, the films enfold the decades of lives lived, mine and the others, as they preserve a time and place of shared experiences and all kinds of interactions. At the time of my field research, I made sure to have photographs printed on visits to Khartoum to give to people in the village and brought color photos on return visits to give to everyone who had participated in my research or just jumped in front of the camera. I always had the fantasy that we could return to the village with a set-up like health and social extensionists sometimes do with generator, projector, and screen to show the films of the children and others. I regret that I left that idea to fantasy and didn’t try to make it happen. Looking at the films now returns me to that fantasy and missed opportunity with poignancy, but with a new twist. Each transfer made the work more accessible—the medium remains the message—and it can be shared now in ways I could not have imagined when the films were shot. With them all digitized, and people in the village having mobile phones—not to mention that WhatsApp group—it is now possible to share a file or two or more, which would add another dimension to this reflection (and probably spark all kinds of memories among those who had participated in or remembered my research while surely entertaining their children and others living in Howa at present). Speaking of ‘entertainment,’ I  had forgotten that we’d produced a 45-minute videotape that I narrated drawing on passages from my dissertation. The tape is well done and quite informative, showcasing the kids in all kinds of activities. The running explanatory text and modest editing create a different format than the unadorned Sorenson inspired framings of the children’s work and play. Seeing it again now, I am somewhat torn that this version of the work, if not the entire collection of films, has not seen the light of day apart from a few screenings in classes and university presentations decades ago, so I entertain thoughts of posting it on YouTube or Vimeo, sending it to people in Howa as a digital file, and/or archiving it somewhere. Looking at the children playing their different modeling games I am struck by what a treasure they are of creative activities using nothing but found objects, raising questions for me of whether this sort of play is still going on, how its nature might have changed, and what found objects would provide its props at present. The films preserve something quite compelling and beautiful, but that’s not all. One of the remarkable things I found in my research, documented in the films as well, was that the children played with and at the political economic shifts underway in Howa. One version of their modeling farming games was called ‘Hawashaat’ (‘Tenancies’), the other was called ‘Bildat’ (‘Subsistence Fields’). They cultivated representative crops in each, but in the former they received ‘China money’ (shards of broken China) for their cotton and groundnuts, which was then used in riotous games of ‘store.’ Given this nuanced sensitivity to the political ecologies of the moment, what sorts of modeling games might contemporary researchers find? Apart from the narrated video, which doesn’t break any barriers in the ethnographic documentary genre, Mark made his own non-narrative film, Medina,12 while in the field, but also edited together two extended passages of the children’s work and play footage—a clutch of boys in the shade of a grass-roofed ‘veranda’ quietly engaged in the dramatic modeling games of ‘fields,’ and girls gathering firewood out in the margins of the fields bounding the village. Simply titled Work and

History, Memory, Media  221 Play, it is a mesmerizing and beautiful study of these activities. It was supposed to be purchased by New York’s Museum of Modern Art for their permanent film collection, but the fragility of Super-8 sound film made that prospect difficult and the expense of making decent usable copies seems to have made it impossible.13 The medium also impedes the message. Rethinking the work in each of these registers along with both its limited availability in each format and the possibility of somehow making it available now, I wonder if I am driven in this direction because it’s all become a bit abstract as the actual project recedes further in the past. Mark LaPore died in 2005 and I am long separated from the children, their families, and the village. Do these circumstances somehow enable their ‘objectification’ in a way that was uncomfortable in the years just following the work? Or am I now seeing the remarkableness of what we recorded in ways I didn’t see then (although I think I did)—or, as noted above, sense the ways life in Howa and the children’s work and play may be so different now that this record might have a different valence both in Howa and more broadly? It could also be that as I have aged my sense of history and memory in evaporating landscapes—intimate and global, near and far—make all sorts of evidence precious. Watching these films, which has brought me profound joy, has also nudged some seemingly settled pieces of thought out of place. I am eager to show the films again, excited at the possibility of sharing them with people in Howa and even archiving them, though I remain resistant to archiving them in the manner advocated by Sorenson, which seems too anonymously up for anyone’s grabs. Thinking about LaPore’s Work and Play, I recognize that presenting the work as ‘art’ did not raise the same questions for us as presenting it as ‘data,’ but perhaps it should have.14 The juxtaposition of the two is really more of a confluence, their boundary a bit blurred. As I was completing this chapter, I discovered a compelling article by Warwick Anderson in Visual Anthropology15 that reflected on the observational films of Warhol such as Sleep or Blow Job in relation to ethnographic research films such as those produced by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson or Sorenson and his collaborator Carleton Gajdusek. Their mutual interests in absorbing ‘everything that happened around’16 them so as to ‘catch people being themselves’17 suggest adjacent inquiries into the epistemological quandaries of observation. These shared aspirations are fascinating but recognizing the impossibility of completely satisfying the ‘desiring machine’18 of the camera is key as well. The comparisons Anderson draws between avantgarde experimental films and those of field researchers made perfect sense to me as I reflected on Mark LaPore’s work with the Sudan films and the ways the material in each genre irradiates and refracts the others. Still, I think about questions of responsibility as I reflect on the children’s work and play and what might be done with these materials now. Of course, all of the films were made with people’s permission and an understanding that they would be seen by others, but the contexts of that seeing were not clear, even to us, so the question for me is how to negotiate the responsibility of having these materials to the children filmed, to people in Howa, and to other scholars and filmmakers. I am asking myself what seeing these films would mean to whom, what never sharing

222  Cindi Katz them would mean, how they might float across time and space with what sorts of resonance. I wonder who would be looking, and what they would be seeing. It is tantalizing to imagine and to think about the unfoldings that might ensue and the sparks they might ignite. Notes 1 With this Chapter there is an important connection to work of visual documentary filmmakers, Harlan I. Smith and Alanis Obomsawin, described in Chapter 9. there is also an important connection to Chapter 5, where Beazley’s ethnographic participant becomes a film star in his Own Right and Joins Beazley as an author in Chapter 5. 2 See for examples of published work on this project, Katz, C. 1991. “Sow What You Know: The Struggle for Social Reproduction in Rural Sudan,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81, no. 3: 488–514; and Katz, C. 2004. Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 3 Compare this to the technology and video materials discussed in the previous chapter to get a sense of the gulf between ethnographic research in the 1980s and today, and the ease with which children connect to video technologies. It is worth noting that the playful performances in front of the camera are not diminished (Chapter 16). 4 See for example, Sorenson, E.R. 1967. “A  Research Film Program in the Study of Changing Man,” Current Anthropology 8, no. 3: 443–460; and Sorenson, E.R. 1976. The Edge of the Forest: Land, Childhood and Change in a New Guinea Protoagricultural Society. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 5 Murnaghan and McCreary (Chapter 9) also speak to the troubling ethics behind documenting so-called vanishing societies. 6 A key participant in the anthropological film archive at the National Institutes of Health during the 1960s, Sorenson founded the National Anthropological Film Center at the Smithsonian Institute in 1975, which lasted about a decade. 7 Note connections to the intimacy and emotional contexts of Angela Jolie’s ‘based on true events’ feature film discussed by Tyner (Chapter 6). 8 Jarman and Kraftl (Chapter 16) point out the playful work and working play of young people in front of (and behind) cameras. 9 Eisenberg, D. 2022. “Director’s statement,” The Unstable Object II. www.danieleisenberg.com/theunstableobjectii 10 Compare this point to the labor of the young women in Joassart-Marcelli’s discussion (Chapter 7). 11 Katz, Growing Up Global. 12 LaPore, Medina. 13 LaPore, Work and Play. 14 Think of the ethnography and the artist representations in the filmmaking discussed by Beazley and Warisno (Chapter 5) and Tyner (Chapter 6). 15 Anderson, W. 2019. “Filming Fore, Shooting Scientists: Medical Research, Experimental Filmmaking, and Documentary Cinema,” Visual Anthropology 32: 109–127. 16 Mekas, J. 1990. “Notes after Re-seeing the Movies of Andy Warhol,” In Andy Warhol, edited by John Coplans, pp. 139–145. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, quoted in Anderson “Filming Fore” 112. 17 Warhol 1968 as quoted in Mekas, J. 1990. “Notes after Re-seeing the Movies of Andy Warhol,” In Andy Warhol, edited by John Coplans, pp. 139–145. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, quoted in Anderson “Filming Fore” 112. 18 Anderson, 109, 115.

History, Memory, Media  223 Bibliography Anderson, W. 2019. “Filming Fore, Shooting Scientists: Medical Research, Experimental Filmmaking, and Documentary Cinema,” Visual Anthropology 32: 109–127. Eisenberg, D. 2022. “Director’s Statement,” The Unstable Object II. www.danieleisenberg. com/theunstableobjectii Katz, C. 1991. “Sow What You Know: The Struggle for Social Reproduction in Rural Sudan,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81, no. 3: 488–514. Katz, C. 2004. Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. LaPore, M. 1983a. Medina. Self Produced and Distributed. 20 min. LaPore, M. 1983b. Work and Play. Self Produced and Distributed. 10 min. Mekas, J. 1990. “Notes after Re-seeing the Movies of Andy Warhol,” In Andy Warhol, edited by John Coplans, pp.  139–145. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society. quoted in Anderson “Filming Fore” 112. Murnaghan, A. M. and McCreary, T. 2024. “Indigenous Children in Canadian Cinema: Ethnographic Explorations and National Narratives in the Early Films of Harlan Ingersoll Smith and Alanis Obomsawin,” this volume. London UK: Routledge. Sorenson, E. R. 1967. “A Research Film Program in the Study of Changing Man,” Current Anthropology 8, no. 5: 443–460. Sorenson, E. R. 1976. The Edge of the Forest: Land, Childhood and Change in a New Guinea Protoagricultural Society. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Warhol 1968 as quoted in Mekas, J. 1990. “Notes after Re-seeing the Movies of Andy Warhol,” In Andy Warhol, edited by John Coplans, pp. 139–145. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society. quoted in Anderson “Filming Fore” 112.

18 Musings and Reflections Children, Young People, Film Tracey Skelton

Some good while ago, as many wonderful stories begin, Stuart C. Aitken and Jake (Jacob) Rowlett invited me to be part of a major edited collection titled The Film Landscapes of Global Youth: Imagining Young Lives. My task was to read, explore, engage, and muse over the seventeen chapters and deliver my reflections (as Stuart suggested). The creation of the chapters was to bring together a collection of authors to deliver, illustrate, and present ‘children, youth, adults, film, cinema, movies’ through global lenses in different parts of the world. The principal approach was to afford the chapter authors, actors, directors, and characters1 the opportunity to explore and engage with different children, youth, places, regions, and films. Cinema affords a myriad of opportunities to stay local or go international, to give space and time to watch, absorb, and engage with what is being watched, who is watching, and how cinematic experiences have effects and affects. We know that in many countries, cultures, and contexts, cinema is more accessible, affordable, and available for some than others. For those who get to create, share, and deliver films, the opportunities to watch may engage with film in complex, enlightening, exhilarating, disappointing, diverse, mesmerising, shocking, surprising, upsetting experiences. As is the case with several films and characters, especially ones connected with mythology or fantasy, I have been tasked (as in Hercules!) to deliver reflective interrogations, reactions, reservations, responses, queries, and questions. My approach here is to read, absorb, and reflect upon this fascinating and comprehensive collection of chapters produced by a range of authors whose works connect with children, young people, and film in diverse ways. I have selected aspects of chapters that capture my recognition, curiosity, surprise, concern, enchantment, disturbance, and more. However, I have decided to be guided by an eclectic approach of reading, writing, reflecting, and selecting. It is not possible to cover everything—but I have managed to include all authors. Here I share personal reflections which I hope have synergies with the authors of the other chapters. Musing There is something a little strange to be musing over a set of seventeen chapters, that are in themselves, introducing us to different films (in their broadest sense)—some DOI: 10.4324/9781003347446-18

Musings and Reflections  225 we may have seen, many we might never see. That is the fascination of film—its making, its purpose, its audience, authors, and viewers, the stories we might tell others of what we learned as we watched. To be reminded of that particular film which you will never forget and wish to watch again. Hence, I find my responsibility here somewhat demanding but also intriguing. What will be familiar? What will I learn anew? What will I enjoy? There is a lot to cover in these chapters—they have been skilfully wrought, crafted, and detailed. I have enjoyed and learned a great deal from all of them. Each chapter stands as the interlocutor between the film and its ‘audience’. My task to weave aspects of these rich chapters together is both exciting and intimidating. However, my remit from Stuart and Jake was open and inclusive, encouraging, and supportive. So, I  have decided to take this rare opportunity to muse and to be confident in my musing!2 To muse is to allow oneself to be absorbed in thought, to think about something carefully and thoroughly, to allow abstraction to enter, and to contemplate and ponder about things. However, there needs to be a focus, a response to the work I have been openhandedly presented with, a recognition and identification of the value of this book. This book of film, screen, and cinema is a fine collection—I hope we will all muse, reflect, and recognise the value of these opportunities to write and share. The title of this collection, The Film Landscapes of Global Youth: Imagining Young Lives, is ambitious and has a bold reach. The chapters take us to many parts of the world that are real or fiction. I state this as an easy description but in fact the chapters are complex and layered—they are real, part of reality, but also fiction— combined in all sorts of ways. For example, Laura Lo Presti (Chapter 4) presents a story of a young woman (Laura Halilovic) who is determined to become a filmmaker. Halilovic is Roma, born in Italy, but her passport is Bosnian. Halilovic, the filmmaker, is successful, she wants to meet Woody Allen (who is real), and she makes a film about her life with a central character, Gioia Tracovic, who is Halilovic’s alter-ego. This is an example of the ways in which film and the facets of film interact and entwine between reality and fiction—there are several stories in play here. Reading some of the chapters demands careful reading, creating complex layering between the maker of the films, the chapter author, and the stories of the characters told. Remembering The Jungle Book Thinking about The Film Landscapes of Global Youth: Imagining Young Lives, I was reminded of my first film experience which I still vividly remember, even though it was decades ago. I was 5 years old, it was November, and my dad took me to the afternoon cinema show in Nottingham (UK). It was already dark, and very cold. For me The Jungle Book ‘event’ was magical, scary, funny, and song filled. I  remember sitting next to my dad and watching the huge screen, mesmerised and fascinated. For the record (pun intended) I can still sing most of The Jungle Book songs. Even as a five-year old I was learning about the magic of cinema. The power of film is fascinating, the visual stays with us a long time, some films are unforgettable, others confusing, frustrating, disappointing, or enlightening, happy,

226  Tracey Skelton beautiful. The Jungle Book was my first film encounter, and I still revere the animation, the singing, the frightening parts, and the laughter. I was very happy about my first film; I knew it was a rare event. We didn’t have much money. My father worked in the Boots factory and my mum did weekly night-time cleaning. We rented a council house. For my parents to buy the Long Play (LP) of The Jungle Book and pay for the cinema tickets were special, but hardwon. I remember, when dad and I got home, the coal fire was ebbing, and it was time to go to bed. None of the anxieties that hover around poverty were felt that night—because The Jungle Book had really happened and the LP would be played again. I felt so lucky and happy. This is what film can do—take us somewhere else and allow us to imagine more. Key Themes Emerging There are many themes presented in the chapters. It is a rich assemblage which is dedicated to children and young people in multifaceted ways. Each chapter contributes its own reel/real experience/s. Through my readings, notes, and jottings, many foci emerged, too many to report in detail. This list was generated from my musings and engagements with the chapters. Care; friendship; race-gender-class identities; ethics; mobilities/journeying; risk-safety; fear; escapism; realities; mythology; enchantment; brutality; history; nature-children/youth; better futures; poverty; hope; indigeneity . . . It demonstrates the diversity and scale of work that the volume provides and engages with children, young people, and geographies. What is remarkable is not just the range of themes and places but the diverse ways in which children, young people, and film interact, generate, create, design, and produce. This edited book of film, characters, authors, directors, and more is generous, eclectic, and valuable. In the next sections of this musing, I present my reactions and reflections related to the chapters/characters/authors/filmmakers. I weave, interlace, and entangle, in order to present a version or versions of what connects children, young people, and film. Intervention: Musing and Querying I started reading the chapters randomly as I received them in my inbox. The chapters were captivating and enjoyable. However, I began to feel somewhat uncomfortable about the dominant presence of adults and the apparent absence of children and young people in the chapters. I had to ask myself, am I part and parcel of an adultist context? There is something problematic here. I want to express this as a form of critical politics around filmmaking in its wide-ranging reach. Most filmmaking is dominated and directed by adults. It struck me that here I was reflecting upon chapters

Musings and Reflections  227 that analysed global young lives connected with film landscapes knowing that in many contexts children and youths are absent, invisible, and little noticed in much of the infrastructure of film production. It is adults that dominate and determine the style of filmmaking, the story line, the choice of actors, the central characters, and so on. We can talk about assemblages of directors, authors, films, settings, and soundtracks, but they are almost all determined by adults—often leaving children and young people out of the process. I realised that adults write the books, which become films, in which children and young people reside. Film is the key actor and the global is set as the screen—these are adult creations. We need to ask: Where do children and young people fit in the process of filmmaking? What role do children and young people play in/on the big screen? What discussions are they party to? How often do they get the chance to offer suggestions? Do they get to make their own decisions? Are they included, listened to, and heard? Who makes films about children and young people and why? What are those makers’ ethics, motivations, and responsibilities when working with child and youth actors? In what ways are young people stereotyped, acting in contexts that they find uncomfortable? What support and care are provided for younger actors and children? Harriot Beazley and Wiryo Warisno (known as Heru) have discussed and reflected on Heru’s experience as a former street child who became a lead child actor in a very successful Indonesian film set in Yogyakarta (Chapter 5). The film told stories of three street children, struggling to survive, with little hope of change. For Heru, in reality, the film experience was mixed—he was famous as the character but the backstory showed that he was treated badly. He didn’t have a contract, his payment was about US$60, and he was illiterate so crew members gave him ‘acting’ instructions. Heru and others involved in the film provide an example of the wrong kind of filmmaking and ethics—the children were poorly supported, unclear about the legal processes and certainly not able to engage effectively and fairly with adults. There is degree of brutality here. The film was a success but the child actors were rendered vulnerable. Happily, there are alternative approaches where children and young people can be involved in all levels of filmmaking and viewing. For example, Roger Hart’s Ladder of Participation where the top rung is young people and adults sharing decision-making. Young people have the ideas, develop a project, and invite adults to join them to make decisions. If children and young people can do decisionmaking then many of them will have the capacity, determination, desire, and wish, to be filmmakers. Given support and recognition as participants, more and more young people and children become better involved in opportunities to make films, documentaries, biopics, and so on. The digital generation is increasingly global. UNESCO have been proactive about film, children, and young people. For example, on 1st April, $58 973,00 USD funds were allocated to Argentina (2011 to 2012). The 8th edition of the Festival Iberoamerica de Cortos Imágenes Jóvenes en la Diversidad Cultural was a short film festival. This was a showcasing of audiovisual productions created by children and young people, aged 5 to 15, and from

228  Tracey Skelton diverse cultural and social backgrounds. 125 short films were produced by Latin American children and young people from 24 countries. There is no doubt that young people are willing to contribute considerably to filmmaking, YouTube performances, and using GoPro cameras in order to see the world differently which might include a view inside a tree! (Chapter 16, Jarman and Kraftl). If given a camera, then some young people will use film to demonstrate their social, cultural, political, and possibly ecological lives, and it can function as the equivalent of a voice, a chance to speak, and to be heard—but through the visual. Children, Young People, Film At this stage in my reflections of the chapters, there are so many possible pathways to follow and weave together, to put in touch with, to hold fast to children, young people, and film. This is where the mixing-up comes and I attempt to interweave and criss-cross the chapters in a kind of affinity of time, space, care, hope, humanity, and more. Of Books and Dragons—Translated to Screen

These two chapters, 103 and 11,4 are based on animated films and we are placed in mythical and fantastical places of real and unreal locations—a world of ancient Ireland and a magical world of dragons. Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells5 is beautifully illustrated and tells a story of Vikings, monks, and a shape-shifting female sprite who cares for the forest—engravings—swirls, whorls, runes, spirals—read aloud, these words are poetry. Throughout there are Celtic enchantments of myths, illuminated Christian gospels, and Pagan symbolism. Here mythology and spirituality are blended together—including irreverent notes and drawings that the young boy monks, all under 18, naughtily create. For these young scribes, their role in the book might have been a stimulant of design, artistry, and the opportunity for newness—a key desire for young people—whether in the 8th century or in the 21st century. There is a phrase used in The Secret of Kells, which I love, “turning ink into light”. As fan of coloured ink pens in my Oxford University years I found this to be a quite beautiful phrase. In childhood, children can see or forge synergies and create them to make sense, be accepting, desirous of colour, and, possibly, linking enchantment and spirituality. Susana Cortés-Morales tackles the popular creature—a dragon—through the various cultural industries linked to Disney, Netflix, and Dreamworks.6 This is an animated film which ‘believes’ in mythologies and the existence of dragons—a remarkably successful franchise and a likely ongoing fascination for children globally. Dragons carry different interpretations—they are powerful and could destroy humans but in How to Train Your Dragon (HTTYD) a somewhat uncomfortable togetherness is established. Cortés-Morales draws upon her knowledge of ancient stories of Mapuche legends, Trentrenvilú and Kaikaivilú, sibling dragon-like serpents. These are the lands

Musings and Reflections  229 of earthquakes and floods, to survive the siblings and people need to find higher ground, a mountain, when the earth changes. In order to engage children with Indigeneity and real history, school resources use the Mapuche tales to encourage children to protect their environments and to respect the land and sea. However, in HTTYD, the village ecology is overcrowded, too many dragons and people, and hunters seek out the dragon. New land and space must be found and the dragons move into a hidden world to be safe. A final message is that people have to take responsibility. Realities, Brutalities, Fear

It is important to tackle the very difficult aspects of brutality, reality, and fear which need to be articulated, in this case through film. James A. Tyner (Chapter 6) and Lorraine van Blerk, Wayne Shand, and Janine Hunter (Chapter 15) are extremely well-respected researchers in their own right and have tackled troubling realities that children and young people face. Tyner has conducted extremely demanding research around genocide, famine, and post-violence, particularly in Cambodia. In Chapter 6, he focuses on the film First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (Netflix 2017) and the daughter Loung Ung’s 2000 autobiography. He worked to place genocide studies in conversation with children and young people’s geographies. The film is analysed carefully through Tyner’s expertise and “depicts a young girl’s geography of everyday death”. Tyner reminds us that we have accurate data about the genocide between 1975 and 1979, the determination to build a new society which led to over two million people dying, most brutally. As I read this, I was shocked at how little I knew of the deeper, vicious determination of the Communist Party of Kampuchea—brutal reality. A factor of debate as to authenticity and the film is that the genocide is seen only through a child’s eyes, although we don’t really know how old she was, and how much she understood at the time. Sadly, it is quite common to deny that children can recall and remember significant incidents—especially traumatic ones—when the reality is that many children carry trauma with them throughout their adult life. I have learned so much from this chapter, and I will never forget it. Will I watch the Netflix film? I am not sure—what I do know is that I could not watch it alone. Lorraine van Blerk et al. (Chapter 15) focus on some of the brutal realities and fears that young people experience as street children in extreme poverty and examine the importance of informal film halls. These are shacks which people in poverty utilise as limited resources of space, film showings, and a precarious sense of safety. Usually, young people want to be visible and part of public space. However, the film halls afford space, friendship, care and concern, recreation and illicit activities that pass the time through the nights. Young people interpret the space as gathering, shelter, and escapism. The youths’ narratives give us insight to their struggling lives and the risks they face—theft and violence are common. However, they perform a kind of escapism where they feel accepted, freer, can laugh, have fun, and have time for imagination. The young people enliven it and hope it will

230  Tracey Skelton be safe, each evening, but they know they are vulnerable and at risk. Can the film halls ever be safe? Must fear be present each evening? What initiatives could support these children better? Care, Friendship, and Mobilities7 Inevitably, there is analytical depth related to these three filmic spaces of geographies that afford important social resources to the all of these particular cinema/ filmic characters. In the film Anita, a young adult with Down syndrome journeys away from her familiar neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, because an explosion destroys her home and kills her mother. Continuing her journey Anita is exposed to care, people help her. She is welcomed by the grandmother of the Chinese family and finds family life, culture, and friendship. Nori becomes a surrogate mother and Anita is ultimately reunited with her brother; there is a hopefulness to look forward together. In Deep Space Nine, characters Jake and Nog are friends and the sons of single fathers. Jake’s father is a Starfleet Commander and Nog’s father moved to the space station. Both boys have moved a lot and their racial and ethnic inequalities are problematic. Nog is Ferengi, but tries to distance himself from this identity. The boys share a sense of humour, Jake helps Nog with his homework, despite different identities, they are inseparable, and their friendship endures. Kiarostami’s film Where Is the Friends House? presents a similar story line to young Jake and Nog, two school boys and their friendship. In this film Ahmad takes his friend’s homework home by mistake. Knowing that Mohammad Reza will be in serious trouble at school Ahmad defies his mother and leaves to find his friend’s house. He tried several times to find the right house but fails, he has mobility but he cannot find the right route, despite his earnest zig-zagging to succeed. Ahmad finds a resolution; he does the homework and slips the papers to his friend who is saved from expulsion. Ahmad demonstrates active affection or affectivity— he understands his own intensity and the importance of care and friendship. These are the possibilities of transformative journeys that young people might be able to create, maintain, and share—these are snippets of films that show these essential elements of care, friendship, and mobilities interpreted by young people. Ethics, Research, Indigeneity, Ethnography

There are fascinating connections and synergies between Ann Marie Murnaghan and Tyler McCreary’s indigenous Canadian cinema and Cindi Katz’s revisiting of her research film in Sudan.8 The chapters are richly presented with strong politics around the four title themes. I am particularly taken by the film work of Alanis Obomsawin, which is described as “path breaking, culturally informed” and more-than documentary. Here film and storytelling combine and children are recognised as cinematic subject and audience and how they tell their stories. The terrible damage wrought

Musings and Reflections  231 on Indigenous children, and the determination to destroy Indigenous people culturally and politically, is a terrible stain on Canadian history. Obomsawin’s goal was to capture children’s stories and drawings because people, especially children, have to hear different stories and learn their own histories—to focus on words and images. She established intergenerational storytelling, older members sharing with children—always recording and capturing a visual record of place and people. I admire the ways in which she nurtured children to speak, draw, and communicate about their lives. Cindi Katz has worked in Sudan for decades and her film recording equipment presents an interesting insight of her collaboration with her then partner Mark LaPore, a filmmaker. Katz reels off the technologies: Super-8, VHS tapes, ¾-inch videotapes, DigiBeta cassettes, and digitised formats—capturing the work and play of children. Reading Katz’s chapter, I  share the dilemmas about recorded materials for research and what to do with them, the dilemmas of archiving materials that others might misinterpret, and the memories uncovered as nostalgia affects our emotions. Where are those children who are now adults? How do we get to go back to places we knew so well? What are our responsibilities to participants? How can I continue my work in Montserrat, while based in New Zealand? Ethnographic work can be bittersweet, especially across time and space, there will be places we have worked in that we may never see again. Girls, Boys, Films, Escapism, Fear

For this final section of my musings and questioning I focus on race and gender identities through film perspectives and representations where young people are placed central. First, we visit the girls of the Faroes, the Finnish boys and girls watching Top Gun: Maverick, and give the last words to the Black and Brown girls dwelling in the Banlieues of Paris. The Faroe Islands

Firouz Gaini (Chapter 3) introduces us to two Faroese feature films, Bye Bye Blue Bird (BBBB) and Dreams by the Sea (DBTS),9 and focuses us on two sets of two girlfriends; Rannvá and Barba, and Ester and Ragna. I have always been intrigued by islands and very much hope to see both of these films. The Faroes are literally that—they are far away between Scotland, Norway, and Ireland.10 I want to visit them and dance at a Faroese party! Rannvá and Barba (BBBB) dress strangely, possibly outlandishly, desiring to shock or surprise the local islanders. They present as anarchic, but also desire adventure, altercation, something akin to disruption. Barba left the islands as a child, Rannvá in her teens. The girls react differently to the islands, hoping it would be wilder and special. They are disappointed and sense abandonment, uncertain of what happens next. Like many dressed-up teenage girls, they want to be desirous and noticed, but they feel deflated.

232  Tracey Skelton Ester and Ragna (DBTS), who have grown up in an island village, long for an actual future. Ragna’s home life has been difficult, and she values the comfort in Ester’s family religious conformity. Ester is 16 and has always lived in the same village. Both girls recognise that there are possibilities elsewhere, but Ester is tired of a place that seems to replicate everything the same. On these Faroe Islands, both pairs of girls presented in the films face the ‘island’ question—should I/we leave or should I/we stay? Do they belong? They face a difficult, emotional, and complicated decision. Does their time in the islands help them find a sense of a future? They can turn their backs to the sea, but it is not forgettable, will it ever be escapable? Watching Top Gun: Maverick: Fear and Togetherness

Raine Aiava and Noora Pyyry (Chapter  14) report that when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, “pharmacies in Finland quickly ran out of iodine . . . and people hoarded food”. For young Finnish teenage boys and girls, a complex mix of emotions and affects must have been extremely unsettling. Despite the possible closeness of war, the five teens, three girls and two boys, wanted to watch Top Gun: Maverick. As I read this chapter, I was intrigued by the youngsters’ decision to choose a war-style film. Was the Ukraine-Russian situation too far away? Did they feel safe in Finland knowing a fence was being built? Perhaps we all need to think harder and clearer about war and how we dis/engage with it? Thinking about gender and war, both groups recognised that these were currently the most important concerns but how do they talk about war? Girls Being Black and Brown in French Parisian Banlieues

Pascale Joassart-Marcelli (Chapter 7) introduces two acclaimed films Girlhood11 and Divines12 that focus on young Black and Brown girlhoods in the Banlieues. These French geographies and the young women in the films residing in them are hyper-stereotyped—they are tagged with poverty, crime, unemployment, violence, anti-social behaviour, and rebelliousness. Ironically, most French people have never set foot in such spaces, but seem to know all about the people there. Writer director Céline Sciamma (Girlhood, October 2014) stated that she wasn’t making a film about black women but with black women. First-time French director Houda Benyamina created Divines (31 August 2016) and has been described as a French writer/director/actress/all-round amazing woman. These two French films burst with energy, confidence, assertiveness, and success—unusually the actors are Black/Brown young French women and they definitely take centre-stage. These films are enlivened, compelling, and engaging. The young women in films are significant counterpoints to the racialised and gendered representations Black and Brown young women are subjected to as actors or in reality. Films that focus on Black/Brown people are rare, and films with Black/ Brown young women were even rarer—Girlhood and Divines are changing that

Musings and Reflections  233 with determination to be noticed and acknowledged—either as actors or other Black/Brown girls in the Banlieue. However, I do wonder how and if the Black/ Brown girls residing in difficult periphery places can access these films—I hope they do and that they garner courage to be proud of who they are. In closing I thank Stuart and Jacob for their patience. I hope my musings, questions, insights, and engagements with all seventeen chapters contribute to all of the chapters in different and curious ways. Reading the chapters was intellectually stimulating, and I have learned so much from everyone. How wonderful it is to be part of this remarkable book. Notes 1 I include ‘characters’ here because they are often the centre of the chapters—they have their own filmic stories to tell. 2 In terms of the chapters, not all of them have the illustrations embedded within the text, what I see in several cases is a ‘Figure’ reference ‘to be inserted here’—but there is no visual. On the upside, I look forward to the film visuals in the final book. 3 Hope through Creation: Celtic Kids and Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells (Kilkenny, Irelands: Cartoon Studio 2010) 4 Raya and the Last Dragon (Disney, 2021), Dragon Rider (Netflix 2020) and How to Train Your Dragon (Dream Works, 2010, 2014, 2019) 5 The Book of Kells is a material artefact and housed in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland 6 Raya and the Last Dragon (Disney, 2021), Dragon Rider (Netflix, 2020) and the How to Train Your Dragon saga (DreamWorks, 2010, 2014, 2019) 7 Fernando J. Bosco (Chapter 2) Anita: Journeying through landscape of loss and hope in Buenos Aires; David K. Seitz (Chapter 11), A futuristic Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?: Race, Class and Boyhood in Star Treks’ 24th Century; Colin Gardner and James Craine (Chapter 8), Towards a deterritorialized nomadism: The transversal role of Children in Abbas Kiarostami’s, Where is the friend’s house? (1997). 8 Ann Marie Murnaghan and Tyler McCreary (Chapter 9) Indigenous children in Canadian cinema: Ethnographic explorations and national narratives in the early films of Harlan Ingersoll Smith and Alanis Obomsawin; Cindi Katz (Chapter 17) History, Memory, Media: Revisiting the films from my research on children’s work and play in Sudan. 9 Bye Bye Blue Bird by Katrin Ottarsdóttir (1999) and Dreams by the Sea by Sakaris Stórá (2017) 10 Jacob Rowlett’s chapter linked to the Star Wars Saga has an Irish connection. Luke Skywalker and Rey are heroes and make important journeys. The heroes first meet on an island called Ahch-To. In reality the island is Skellig Michael and is largely filmed off the Western coast of Ireland. 11 Sciamma, Girlhood 12 Benyamina, Divines

Bibliography

Abrams, J. (Director). (2015). Star Wars: The Force Awakens [Motion Picture]. Lucasfilm Ltd.; Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Abrams, J. (Director). (2019). Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker [Motion Picture]. Lucasfilm Ltd.; Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Adams, S. & Savahl, S. (2017). Nature as children’s space: A systematic review. Journal of Environmental Education, 48(5), 291–321. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2017.1366160 Aguilar, G. (2009). New Argentine cinema: The people’s presence. Revista Harvard Review of Latin America, 8(3). Aitken, S.C. (1994). Putting Children in Their Place. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Aitken, S.C. (2001). Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity. London: Routledge. Aitken, S.C. (2018). Children’s geographies: Tracing the evolution and involution of a concept. Geographical Review, 108(1), 3–23. Aitken, S.C. & Zonn, L.E. (1993). Weir(D) sex: Representation of gender-environment relations (In Peter Weir’s Pirnie at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli). Environment and Planning D, Society and Space, 11, 191–212. Aitken, S.C. & Zonn, L.E. (1994). Representing the place pastiche. In S.C. Aitken & L.E. Zonn (Eds.), Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, pp. 3–25. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Alexander, L.D. (2016). Far beyond the stars: The framing of blackness in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 44(3), 150–158. https://doi.org/10. 1080/01956051.2016.1142418 Altman, M.A. & Gross, E. (2016). The Fifty-year Mission: The Next Twenty-Five Years: From the Next Generation to J. J. Abrams: The Complete, Uncensored, and Unauthorized oral History of Star Trek. London, UK: Macmillan. Anderson, B. & Harrison, P. (Eds.) (2010). Taking-place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography. Farnham: Ashgate. Anderson, K. & Smith, S.J. (2001). Emotional geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26(1), 7–10; at 7. Anderson, W. (2019). Filming fore, shooting scientists: Medical research, experimental filmmaking, and documentary cinema. Visual Anthropology, 32, 109–127. Änggård, E. (2015). Digital cameras: Agents in research with children. Children’s Geographies, 13(1), 1–13. Archer, N. (2016). The Road Movie: in Search of Meaning. London: Wallflower. Baldacchino, G. (2007). A World of Islands: An Island Studies Reader. Prince Edward Island: Island Studies Press. Barai, M. (2022). 17 “The Earth is my home too, can’t I help protect it?”: Planetary thinking, queer identities, and environmentalism in the Legend of Korra, She-Ra, and Steven

Bibliography  235 Universe. In Oziewicz et  al. (Eds.), Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Beazley, H. 1999. ‘A Little But Enough’: Street Children’s Subcultures in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. https://doi. org/10.25911/5d78db149c5f7 Behr, I.S. (Writer) & Livingston, D. (Director). (1993, March 21). The Nagus (Season 1, Episode 11) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount. Behr, I.S., Wolfe, R.H. (Writers) & Conway, J.L. (Director). (1995, November 15). Little green men (Season 4, Episode 8) [TV series episode]. In I.G. Behr, R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount. Behr, I.S., Wolfe, R.H. (Writers) & Kroeker, A. (Director). (1996, November 25). The ascent (Season 5, Episode 9) [TV series episode]. In I.S. Behr & R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount. Behr, I.S., Wolfe, R.H. (Writers) & Singer, I. (Director). (1995, February 6). Heart of stone (Season 3, Episode 14) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount. Béneker, T. et al. (2010). Picturing the city: Young people’s representations of urban environment. Children’s Geographies, 8(2), 123–140. Benjamin, W. (2007). Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs. Translated by E. Leslie and edited by U. Marx, G. Schwartz, M. Schwartz & E. Wizisla. London: Verso. Benjamin, W. (2008). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducability and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bennet, J. (2001). The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossing, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Benyamina, H. (2016). Divines. Paris, France: Easy Tiger/France 2 Cinéma Production. Bergson, H. (1903/1999). An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T.E. Hulme. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company. Bergson, H. (1991). Matter and Memory. Translated by N.M. Paul & W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books. Bergson, H. (1998). Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover. Bergson, H. & Pogson, F.L. (1959). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. 7th impr ed. Crows Nest: George Allen and Unwin; Etc. Bernardi, D.L. (1998). Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bogue, R. (2007). Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Bosco, F.J. (2001). Place, space, networks, and the sustainability of collective action: The Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Global Networks, 1(4), 307–329. Bosco, F.J. (2006). The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and three decades of human rights’ activism: Embeddedness, emotions, and social movements.  Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(2), 342–365. Bould, M. & Vint, S. (2011). The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2006). The ethics of becoming imperceptible. In C. Boundas (Ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy, pp. 133–159. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, N. (2017). The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation, and Narrative. New York: Wallflower Press. Bruno, G. (1987). Ramble city: Postmodernism and “blade runner”. October, 41, 61. Bruno, G. (1991). Heresies: The body of Pasolini’s semiotics. Cinema Journal, 30, 29–43. Bruno, G. (1993). Street Walking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

236  Bibliography Bruno, G. (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York: Verso. Burkitt, I. (2004). The time and space of everyday life. Cultural Studies, 18(2–3), 211–227. Burton, L. (2022). Playing with the trouble: Children and the Anthropocene in Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch series. In Oziewicz et al. (Eds.), Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Butler, O. (1993). Parable of the Sower. New York, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows. Butler, T.T. (2018). Black girl cartography: Black girlhood and place-making in education research. Review of Research in Education, 42(1), 28–45. Cahill, C. (2007). Doing research with young people: Participatory research and the rituals of collective work. Children’s Geographies, 5(3), 297–312. Campbell, J. (2008). The Hero with A Thousand Faces. Novato, CA: New World Library. carrington, a.m. (2016). Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816678952.001.0001 Carubia, J. (2007). Sign processes of journeying and destination. Semiotics, 32–46. Cassidy, F. & Bish, R. (1989). Indian Government: Its Meaning in Practice. Fernie, BC: Oolichan Books. Castro, T. (2009). Cinema’s mapping impulse: Questioning visual culture. The Cartographic Journal, 46(1), 9–15. Cetina, K.K. (1997). Sociality with objects: Social relations in postsocial knowledge societies. Theory, Culture and Society, 4(4), 1–43. Chandler, D. (1991). The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chandler, D. (1999). Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. University of California Press. Cheshire, G. (2019). Journeys of the Heart: Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy. Criterion Collection DVD Booklet, pp. 8–26. Clarke, D.A.G. & McPhie, J. (2014). Becoming animate in education: Immanent materiality and outdoor learning for sustainability. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 14(3), 198–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2014.919866 Clarke, D.B. (Ed.) (1997). The Cinematic City. London: Routledge. Clement, S. (2019). GoProing: Becoming participant-researcher. In B. Hodgins (Ed.), Feminist Research for 21st Century Childhoods: Common Worlds Methods, pp. 149–158. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Common Worlds Research Collective. (2020). Learning to Become with the World: Education for Future Survival. https://www.commonworlds.net/ Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). (1988). Report of activities of the party center according to the general political tasks of 1976. In D. Chandler, B. Kiernan, and C. Boua (Eds.), Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977, pp. 182–212. New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies; at 200. Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). (1988). The party’s four-year plan to build socialism in all fields, 1977–1980. In D. Chandler, B. Kiernan & C. Boua (Eds.), Pol Pot Plans the Puture: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977, pp. 120–163. New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies. Conley, T. (2007). Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cons, G.J. (1959). The geographical film in education. The Geographical Magazine, pp. 456–466. Cresswell, T. & Dixon, D. (2002). Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Curti, G.H., Aitken, S.C. & Bosco, F.J. (2016). A doubly articulated cartography of children and media as affective networks-at-play. Children’s Geographies, 14(2), 175–189. Debell, C. &Tórgarð, M. (2021). Skál [Film]. Torshavn/Copenhagen: Made in Copenhagen ApS.

Bibliography  237 De Franceschi, L. (2018). La cittadinanza come luogo di lotta. Le seconde generazioni in Italia fra cinema e serialità. Ariccia: Aracne. Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema I: The Movement-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2 The Time-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2004). Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e). Delgado-Betancourth, S.X. (2014). Rethinking economics education: Challenges and opportunities. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 23, 48–56. https://doi.org/10.14288/ workplace.v0i23.184759. deRosa, M. (1980). Studio one: Of storytellers and stories. In J. White & W. Beard (Eds.), North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980, pp.  330–333. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. Dewsbury, J.D. (2015). Non-representational landscapes and the performative affective forces of habit: From ‘Live’ to ‘Blank’. Cultural Geographies, 22(1), 29–47. Di Leo, J.H. (2013). Interpreting Children’s Drawings. New York, NY: Routledge. Dillard, J.M. (1993). Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Emissary. Pocket Books. Dittmer, J. & Bos, D. (2019). Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD; London, England: Rowman and Littlefield. Document No. D00698, “Cooperation with the Ministry of Commerce,” archived at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. Document No. E3/4, “Revolutionary Flag Issue 7, July 1976,” archived by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) at www.eccc.gov.kh/en. Doherty, P. (2022). Reading children’s literature in the Anthropocene: The representation of nature in Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea fiction. In Oziewicz et al. (Eds.), Fantasy and MYTH in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Donovan, C. & Moss, P. (2017). Muddling intimacy methodologically. In P. Moss & C. Donovan (Eds.), Writing Intimacy into Feminist Geography, pp. 3–30. London: Routledge; at 17. Dowell, K.L. (2013). Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Dy, K. (2007). A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979). Phnom Penh, Cambodia: Documentation Center of Cambodia. Ea, M.T. (2005). The Chain of Terror: The Khmer Rouge Southwest Zone Security System. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: Documentation Center of Cambodia; and Tyner, The Politics of Lists. Ea, M.T. & Sim, S. (2001). Victims and Perpetrators? Testimony of Young Khmer Rouge Comrades. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: Documentation Center of Cambodia. Eisenberg, A., Husk, R.T. & Lofton, C. (Hosts). (2019, July 24). Star Trek actors review DS9 episode 11, ‘The Nagus’ (No. 26) [Audio podcast episode]. In The Seventh Rule. https:// podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/star-trek-actors-review-deep-space-nine-ds9–1–10-the/ id1453564609?i=1000564621009 Eisenberg, D. (2022). Director’s statement. The Unstable Object II. www.danieleisenberg. com/theunstableobjectii Eisenstein, S. (1943). The Film Sense. London: Faber and Faber. Eisenstein, S. (1949). Film Form. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Eisenstein, S. et al. (1986). Eisenstein on Disney. Kolkata: Seagull Books. Elena, A. (2005). The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami. Translated by Belinda Coombes. London: SAQI and Iran Heritage Foundation. Erdmann, T.J. & Block, P.M. (2000). The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, p. 52. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Eslami, M. (2000). The freshness of repetition: Where is the friend’s home? 13 years later. Film International (Iran), 26–27, 108–114. Etcheson, C. (1984). The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

238  Bibliography Fabian, J. (2014). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Feller, G. & Burroughs, B. (2022). Branding kidfluencers: Regulating content and advertising on ‘YouTube’. Television & New Media, 23(6), 575–592. Fields, P.A. (Writer) & Landau, L. (Director). (1993, May 9). Progress (Season 1, Episode 15) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount. Friedberg, A. (1993). Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University of California Press. Gaini, F. (2013). Lessons of Islands. Place and Identity in the Faroe Islands. Torshavn: Faroe University Press,. Gaini, F. (2022). Det stille oprør. Modstand, indflydelse og fremtid på Færøerne. Nordisk tidsskrift for ungdomsforskning, 3(1), 29–43. Gallagher, M. (2020). Childhood and the geology of media. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41(3), 372–390. Gaskill, N. (2018). Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gillen, J. & Kurcirkova, N. (2018). Percolating spaces: Creative ways of using digital technologies to connect young children’s school and home lives. British Journal of Educational Technology, 49(5), 834–846. Gillis, J.R. (2012). The Human Shore. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Grassilli, M. (2008). Migrant Cinema: Transnational and guerrilla practices of film production and representation. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34(8), 1237–1255. Greenhough, B. (2010). Vitalist geographies: Life and the more-than-human. In B. Anderson & P. Harrison (Eds.), Taking-place: Non-representational Theories and Geography. Farnham: Ashgate. Greenhow, C. & Lewin, C. (2016). Social media and education: Reconceptualizing the boundaries of formal and informal learning. Learning, Media and Technology, 41(1), 6–30. Greven, D. (2009). Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films. California: McFarland. Griffith, J. (2018). Off to school: Filmic false equivalence and Indian residential school scholarship. Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation, 30(1), 69–83. Griffith, R. (1953). America on the screen. The Geographical Magazine, 26, pp. 443–454. Griffiths, A. (2002). Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Halilovic, L. (Director). Io, la mia famiglia rom e Woody Allen, 2009. Zenit Arti Audiovisive, Italy, colour, 47’. Halilovic, L. (Director). Io Rom Romantica, 2014. Wildside and Rai Cinema, Italy, colour, 80’. Hamid, N. (1997). Near and far. Sight and Sound, 7(2), 22–24. Hani, S. (1956). Children Who Draw (film). Tokyo, Japan: Iwanami Films. Hanson, K. (2017). Embracing the past: ‘Been’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming children. Childhood, 24(3), 281–285. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Harris, B. (2021). Teaching Cambodian genocide through film. Education about Asia, 26(2), 12–17. Harrison, P. (2007). ‘How shall I say it . . . ?’ Relating the nonrelational. Environment and Planning A, 39, 590–608. Harrison, P. (2011). Flētum: A prayer for X. Area 43, 2, 158–161. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Bibliography  239 Hassler, D.M. & Wilcox, C. (Eds.) 1997. Political Science Fiction. Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. Helms, K., Ferreira, P., Brown, B. and Lampinen, A. (2019). Away and (dis)connection: Reconsidering the use of digital technologies in light of long-term outdoor activities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(230), 1–20. Hendrickx, K. (2022). On monsters and other matters of housekeeping: Reading Jeff Vander Meer with Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin. In Oziewicz et al. (Eds.), Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Henkin, S. (2017). Bearing witness to geographies of life and death: Intimate writing and violent geographies. In P. Moss & C. Donovan (Eds.), Writing Intimacy into Feminist Geography, pp. 173–179. London, UK: Routledge; at 177. Highmore, B. (2001). Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Hill, R.W. & Peleg, H. (Eds.) (2022). Alanis Obomsawin: Lifework (a volume to accompany an exhibition The Children Have to Hear Another Story, January 23-April 18, 2022 Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin). Munich, Gütersloh, Frankfurt and Cologne, Germany: Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe. Him, C. (2000). When Broken Glass Gloats: Growing up under the Khmer Rouge. Norton. Hinton, A. (2005). Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hoffman, E. (2004). After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York, NY: Public Affairs, at 43. Holloway, S. & Valentine, G. (2002). Cyberkids: Youth Identities and Communities in an on-Line World. Oxon: Routledge. Holloway, S.L. (2014). Changing children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 12(4), 377–392 Hubley, J. (1959). Moonbird (film). London: Storyboard. Ifianti, T. & Rahman, A.K. (2020). Analysis of characterization of the main characters of ‘First they killed my father’ movie by Angelina Jolie. Journey, 3(1), 19–25. Isin, E.F. (2008). Theorising acts of citizenship. In E.F. Isin & G.M. Nielsen (Eds.), Acts of Citizenship, pp. 15–43. London: Zed Books. ISTAT (Istituto nazionale di statistica). (2019). Identità e percorsi di integrazione delle seconde generazioni in Italia. Rome. www.integrazionemigranti.gov.it/AnteprimaPDF. aspx?id=1337 Jacobsen, S.R.H. (2020). Island. Translated by Caroline Waight. London: Pushkin Press. Jameson, F. (1991a). Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (1991b). The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (1992). The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jarman, P. (2022). Children’s Encounters with Urban Woodlands, Digital Technologies and Materialities. PhD Thesis. Birmingham: University of Birmingham. Johnson, R. (Director). (2017). Star Wars: The Last Jedi [Motion Picture]. Lucasfilm Ltd.; Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Jones, O. (2013). ‘I was born but .  .  .’: Children as other/nonrepresentational subjects in emotional and affective registers as depicted in film. Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 4–12. Jones, S. (2012). Memory on film: Testimony and constructions of authenticity in documentaries about the German Democratic Republic. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(2), 194–210; at 196. Kansteiner, W. (2018). History, memory, and film: A  love/hate triangle. Memory Studies, 11(2), 131–136. Kassovitz, M. (1995). La Haine. Paris, France: Productions Lazennec.

240  Bibliography Katz, C. (1991). Sow what you know: The struggle for social reproduction in Rural Sudan. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81(3), 488–514. Katz, C. (2004). Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Katz, C. (2018). The angel of geography: Superman, tiger mother, aspiration management, and the child as waste. Progress in Human Geography, 42(5), 724–740. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132517708844 Kiernan, B. (1996). The Pol Pot regime: Policies, Race and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. Kim, S.J. (2017). Cambodian American memoirs and the politics of narrative strategies. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 9(1–2), 27–49; at 31. Kind, S. (2013). Lively entanglements: The doings, movements and enactments of photography. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(4), 427–441. Kindon, S., Pain, R. & Kesby, M. (Eds.). (2007). Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place. London: Routledge. Kitchin, R. & Dodge, M. (2007). Rethinking maps. Progress in Human Geography, 31(3), 331–344. Knight, A. (1957). Geography and the documentary film: The United States. The Geographical Magazine, 30, pp. 290–30; at I. Kohn, E. (2017). ‘First they killed my father’ review: Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian drama is her best film. IndieWire, September 2. www.indiewire.com/2017/09/first-they-killed-myfather-review-angelina-jolie-netflix-telluride-1201872312 (Accessed October 25, 2022). Koval, F. (1954). The rise and fall of German film-making. The Geographical Magazine, 26, pp. 575–584. Koushik, K. & Reed, A. (2018). Star wars: The last jedi, beauty and the beast, and Disney’s commodification of feminism: A political economic analysis. Social Sciences 7(11), 237.  https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7110237 Kraftl, P. (2013). Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children’s emotional geographies. Emotion, Space and Society, 9(2013), 13–23. Kraftl, P. (2020). After Childhood: Re-thinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children’s Lives. Oxon: Routledge. Kraftl, P., Balestieri, J.A.P., Campos, A.E.M., Coles, B., Hadfield‐Hill, S., Horton, J., Soares, P.V., Vilanova, M.R.N., Walker, C. & Zara, C. (2019). (Re) thinking (re) connection: Young people, “natures” and the water—Energy—Food nexus in São Paulo State, Brazil. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44(2), 299–314. Kulchyski, P. (1993). Anthropology in the service of the state: Diamond Jenness and Canadian Indian policy. Journal of Canadian Studies, 28(2), 21–50. Lacan, J. (1978). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: W W Norton. Lacan, J. (1983). Feminine Sexuality. Edited by J. Mitchel & J. Rose, Translated by J. Rose. New York: W W Norton. Land, N., Hamm, C., Yazbeck, S.L., Brown, M., Danis, I. & Nelson, N. (2020b). Doing pedagogical intentions with facetiming common worlds (and Donna Haraway). Global Studies of Childhood, 10(2), 131–144. Land, N., Hamm, C., Yazbeck, S.L., Danis, I., Brown, M. & Nelson, N. (2020a). Facetiming common worlds: Exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones. Children’s Geographies, 18(1), 30–43. LaPore, M. (1983a). Medina. The Netherlands: Rotterdam. LaPore, M. (1983b). Work and Play. The Netherlands: Rotterdam. Larsson, M. (2021). Bringing dragons back into the world. In A. Hoglund & C. Trenter (Eds.), The Enduring Fantastic: Essays on Imagination and Western Culture. North Carolina: McFarland.

Bibliography  241 Lay, S. (2001). The Cambodian tragedy: Its writers and representations. Amerasia Journal, 27(2), 171–182; at 173. Le Guin, U. (2007). The critics, the monsters, and the fantasists. The Wordsworth Circle, 38(1–2). Leechman, D. (1942). Harlan Ingersoll Smith, 1872–1940. Canadian Field-Naturalist, 56, 114. Lees, D. (2016). Cinema and authenticity: Anxieties in the making of historical film. Journal of Media Practice, 17(2–3), 199–212. Lefebvre, H. (1991). Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I. Translated by J. Moore. New York: Verso; at 97. Lehtonen, V.P. (2022). “Suomen jääkiekko­menestyksestä huolimatta myös elokuvat kiinnostavat”—Tom Cruisen Top Gun vetää väkeä teattereihin Suomessa ja maailmalla. Helsingin Sanomat, May 5, 2022. www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/art-2000008845966.html Levine, A. & Natasha, Z. (Eds.). (2015). Landscapes of Memory and Impunity: The Aftermath of the AMIA Bombing in Jewish Argentina. Leiden: Brill. Lévy, P. (1997). Collective Intelligence: Toward an Anthropology of Cyberspace. Translated by R. Bononno. New York: Plenum Trade. Lévy, P. (1998). Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. Translated by R. Bononno. New York: Plenum Trade. Lewis, R. (2016). Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Livingstone, S., Mascheroni, G. & Stoilova, M. (2021). The outcomes of gaining digital skills for young people’s lives and wellbeing: A systematic evidence review. New Media & Society, 1–27. Livingstone, S. & Third, A. (2017). Children and young people’s rights in the digital age: An emerging agenda. New Media & Society, 19(5), 657–670. Lombardi-Diop, C. & Caterina, R. (2012). Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Loncón, E. (2023). Azmapu: aportes de la filosofía Mapuche para el cuidado del lof y la madre Tierra. Santiago: Editorial Planeta. Lopez, B. (1986). Arctic Dreams. New York: Random House; Vintage Books. Louv, R. (2005). Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Dublin: Workman Publishing Company. Loveless, N. (2015). Towards a manifesto on research-creation. Canadian Art Review, 40(1), 52–54. Lucas, G. (Director). (1977). Star Wars: A  New Hope [Motion Picture]. Lucasfilm Ltd.; Distributed by 20th Century Fox. Lukinbeal, C. & Sommerlad, E. (2022). Doing film geography. GeoJournal, 87(Suppl 1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708 Lukinbeal, C. & Zimmermann, S. (2006). Film geography: A new subfield (Filmgeographie: Ein Neues Teilgebiet). Erdkunde, 60(4), 315–325. www.jstor.org/stable/25647919. Malone, K. (2016). Theorizing a child—Dog encounter in the slums of La Paz using posthumanistic approaches in order to disrupt universalisms in current ‘child in nature’ debates. Children’s Geographies, 14(4), 390–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2015. 1077369 Mam, K. (2004). The endurance of the Cambodian family under the Khmer Rouge regime. In S.E. Cook (Ed.), Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives, pp. 127–171. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area Studies; at 134–135. Manning, E. (2016). Ten propositions for research-creation. In N. Colin & S. Sachsenmaier (Eds.), Collaboration in Performance Practice: Premises, Workings and Failures, pp. 133–141. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Manvell, R. (1953). The geography of film-making. The Geographical Magazine, 25, pp. 640–650.

242  Bibliography ——— (1956a). Geography and the documentary film. The Geographical Magazine, 29, pp. 417–422. ———. (1956b). Robert flaherty, geographer. The Geographical Magazine, 29, pp. 491–500. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: SAGE. May, S. (1986). Cambodian Witness: The Autobiography of Someth May. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McCreary, T. & Murnaghan, A.M.F. (2019). The educational work of a national museum: Creating knowledgeable young citizens in Ottawa, Canada. Children’s Geographies, 17(6), 635–648. McDougall, J., Readman, M. & Wilkinson, P. (2018). The uses of (digital) literacy. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(3), 263–279. McKittrick, K. (2011). On plantations, prisons and a black sense of place. Social and Cultural Geography, 12(8), 947–963. McPhie, J. & Clarke, D.A.G. (2015). A walk in the park: Considering practice for outdoor environmental education through an immanent take on the material turn. Journal of Environmental Education, 46(4), 230–250. Meehan, B. (2019). The Book of Kells (Under license from the Board of Trinity College, Dublin). New York: Thomas & Hudson Inc. Mekas, J. (1990). “Notes after Re-seeing the Movies of Andy Warhol,” In J. Coplans (Ed.), Andy Warhol, pp. 139–145. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society. quoted in Anderson “Filming Fore” 112. Memory Alpha. (2023). Ferengi. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ferengi Mennel, B. (2008). Cities and Cinema. New York: Routledge. Mertha, A. (2014). Brother in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Metz, C. (1974a). Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Translated by M. Taylor. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Metz, C. (1974b). Language And Cinema. The Hague: Mouton. Meyers, E.I., Erickson, I. & Small, R.V. (2013). Digital literacy and informal learning environments: an introduction. Learning, Media and Technology, 38(4), 355–367. Michaelsen, S. (1997). Tom Sawyer’s capitalisms and the destructuring of Huck Finn. Prospects, 22, 133–151. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300000077 Miller, J.R. (1996). Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Moore, R.D. (Writer) & Badiyi, R. (Director). (1995, January 31). Life support (Season 3, Episode 13) [TV series episode]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount. Moore, R.D. (Writer) & Vejar, M. (Director). (1998, May 6). Valiant (Season 6, Episode 22) [TV series episode]. In I.S. Behr &R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount. Moore, R.D. (Writer) & Williams, A. (Director). (1998, December  30). It’s only a paper moon (Season 7, Episode 10) [TV series episode]. In I.S. Behr & R. Berman (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount. Moore, T. (#1) Interview with academy-award nominated Filmmaker Tomm Moore of “wolfwalkers” pipeline artists. Interviewed by John Bucher. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ngvihmR-oQM&t=314s (Last Accessed May 10, 2023). Moore, T. & Ross, S. (2014). Designing the Secret of Kells. Kilkenny: Cartoon Saloon. Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moss, P. & Besio, K. (2019). Auto-methods in feminist geography. GeoHumanities, 5(2), 313–325; at 316. Moss, P. & Donovan, C. (Eds.) (2017). Writing Intimacy into Feminist Geography. New York: Routledge.

Bibliography  243 Mouflard, C. (2016). ‘Il y a des règles:’ Gender, Surveillance, and Circulation in Céline Sciamma’s Bande de Filles. Women in French Studies, 24(1), 113–126. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. Mulvey, L. (1990). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In P. Erens (Ed.), Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, pp. 28–40. Bloomington, TN: Indiana University Press. Murdock, M. (2020). The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. Boulder, CO: Shambhala. Murnaghan, A.M. & McCreary, T. (2016). Projections Of Race, Nature, And Ethnographic Childhood in Early Educational Cinema at The National Museum of Canada. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 98(1), 37–53. Murnaghan, A.M. & McCreary, T. (2024). Indigenous children in Canadian cinema: Ethnographic explorations and national narratives in the early films of Harlan Ingersoll Smith and Alanis Obomsawin, this volume. London, UK: Routledge. Murphy, K. (1984). Illiterate’s progress: The descent into literacy in Huckleberry Finn. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 26(4), 363–387. Murray, L. & Cortés-Morales, S. (2019). Children’s Mobilities: Interdependent, Imagined, Relational. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Murray, L. & Overall, S. (2017). Moving around children’s fiction: Agentic and impossible mobilities. Mobilities, 12(4), 572–584. Naficy, H. (2001). An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nair, M. (1988). Salaam Bombay. India/France/UK. National Museum of Canada. (1931). Annual Report for 1930. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada. Neate, R. (2020, March  02). Ryan Kaji, 9, earns $29.5m as this year’s highestpaid YouTuber. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/18/ ryan-kaji-9-earns-30m-as-this-years-highest-paid-youtuber Neumann, M. & Herodotou, C. (2020). Young children and YouTube: A  global phenomenon. Childhood Education, 96(4), 72–77. Ngor, H. (1987). A Cambodian Odyssey: Survival in the Killing Fields. New York: Macmillan. Nietzsche, F. (1967). The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Nugroho, G. (1998). Daun Di Atas Bantal. Indonesia: PT Christine Hakim Film. Nxumalo, F. (2017). Geotheorizing mountain—Child relations within anthropogenic inheritances*. Children’s Geographies, 15(5), 558–569. Obomsawin, A. (1971). Christmas at Moose Factory (film). National Film Board of Canada. www.nfb.ca/film/christmas_at_moose_factory/ Obomsawin, A. (2017). What drives me: The 85-year-old indigenous filmmaker—Who just released her 50th movie—ON her life, her work, and the power of words. Macleans Magazine, October 6, 2017. www.macleans.ca/opinion/alanis-obomsawin-what-drives-me/ Oldman, D. (1994). Adult-child relations as class relations. In J. Qvortrup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta & H. Wintersberger (Eds.), Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics, pp. 43–58. Aldershot: Averbury Press. Ottarsdóttir, K. (1999). Bye Bye Blue Bird [Film]. Torshavn & Copenhagen: Peter Bech Film. Oziewicz, M. (2022). Fantasy for the Anthropocene: On the ecocidal unconscious, planetarianism and imagination of biocentric futures. In Oziewicz et al. (Eds.), Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and dreaming Hope in Literature and Media. London, New York, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. Parker, B.A. (Producer). (2018, April 27). The miseducation of Castlemont High. In Random acts of history (No. 644) [Audio podcast episode]. In This American life. WBEZ. www.thisamericanlife.org/644/random-acts-of-history/act-one-11

244  Bibliography Parry, B.L. & Taylor, L. (2021). Emergent digital authoring: Playful tinkering with mode, media, and technology. Theory Into Practice, 60(2), 148–159. Pedersen, O.C. & Zittoun, T. (2021). “I  have been born, raised and lived my whole life here”—Perpetually on the move while remaining still. Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Science 56, 775–778. Pember, A. (2020). ‘Visions of ecstasy’: Resilience and melancholy in the musical moments of bande de filles (Céline Sciamma, 2014). French Screen Studies, 20(3–4), 298–316. Piller, M. (Writer) & Carson, D. (Director). (1993, January 3). Emissary (Season 1, Episodes 1 & 2) [TV series episodes]. In R. Berman & M. Piller (Executive Producers), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount. Pirker, E.U. & Rüdiger, M. (2010). Authentizitätsfiktionen in populären Geschichtskulturen: Annäherungen [Fictions of authenticity in popular history cultures: Approaches]. In E.U. Pirker, M. Rüdiger, C. Klein, T. Leiendecker, C. Oesterle, M. Sénécheau & M. UikeBormann (Eds.), Echte Geschichte: Authentizitätsfiktionen in populären Geschichtskulturen (pp. 11–30). Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag. Plumwood, V. (2007a). A  review of Deborah Bird Rose’s ‘reports from a wild country: Ethics for decolonisation’. Australian Humanities Review, 42. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2007/08/01/a-review-of-deborah-bird-roses-reports-from-a-wild-countryethics-for-decolonisation/ Plumwood, V. (2009). Nature in the Active Voice. Australian Humanities Review. http:// australianhumanitiesreview.org/2009/05/01/nature-in-the-active-voice/ Portes, A. & Kelly, H. (2003). Latin American class structures: Their composition and change during the Neoliberal Era. Latin American Research Review, 38(1), 41–82. Povinelli, E.A. (2011). Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Powell, Z. (2023). Indonesian Icons: Christine Hakim, the Grande Dame of Indonesian Cinema, Jakarta Post, February 24th. www.thejakartapost.com/culture/2023/02/24/indonesian-icons-christine-hakim-the-grande-dame-of-indonesian-cinema.html Pratt, M.L. (1992). Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Prescod-Weinstein, C. (2017). Black and Palestinian lives matter: Black and Jewish America in the twenty-first century. In Jewish Voice for Peace (Eds.), On anti-Semitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice, pp. 25–29. Chicago, IL: Haymarket. Pridgeon, S. (2020). Portrayals of Jews in contemporary Argentine cinema: Re-thinking argentinidad by Mirna Vohnsen. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 54(3), 881–882. Pugh, J. (2018). Relationality and island studies in the Anthropocene. Island Studies Journal 13(2), 93–110. Pyyry, N. (2015). ‘Sensing with’ photography and ‘thinking with’ photographs in research into teenage girls’ hanging out. Children’s Geographies, 13(2), 149–163. Pyyry, N. (2016). Learning with the City Via enchantment: Photo-Walks as creative encounters. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(1), 102–115. Pyyry, N. & Raine, A. (2020). Enchantment as fundamental encounter: Wonder and the radical reordering of subject/world. Cultural Geographies, 27(4), 581–595. Rautio, P. (2013). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733 285.2013.812278 Reynolds, A. (2019). “Ain’t Nobody Checkin’ for Us”: Race, Fugitivity and the Urban Geographies of Black Girlhood. PhD Dissertation. University of Illinois at Chicago. Reynolds, L.G.J. (2017). Subjectivity in Flux: Youth in Latin American and Latino Literature. Dissertation. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University. Rhodes II, M.A., Davidson, F.M. & Gunderman, H.C. (Eds.). (2017). The geographies of Star Trek. Special issue of The Geographical Bulletin, 58. Roberts, D.E. (1997). Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York, NY: Vintage.

Bibliography  245 Roberts, L. (2012). Cinematic cartography: Projecting place through film. In  L. Roberts (Ed.), Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, and Performance, pp.  68–84. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Roberts, R. (1999). Sexual Generations: Star Trek: The Next Generation and Gender. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Robertson, J. (2012). Making Movie History: Alanis Obomsawin (film). Montreal, Quebec: National Film Board of Canada. Roby, N.L. (2004). From Amateur to Professional: Placing Harlan I. Smith in the History of North American Anthropology. MA Thesis. Ottawa: Carleton University. Rony, F.T. (1996). The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rose, G. (2001). Visual Methodologies. London: Sage Publications. Rose, G. (2007). Visual Methodologies. An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. 2nd ed. London: Sage. Rosenstone, R.A. (2001). The historical film: Looking at the past in a postliterate age. In M. Landy (Ed.), The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, pp. 50–66. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rotten, T. (1999). www.rottentomatoes.com/m/daun-di-atas-bantal-leaf-on-a-pillow Rubin, R. & Moreau, J. (2022). ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ filmmakers on box office glory, Oscar ambitions and sequel speculation. Variety, August 23, 2022. https://variety.com/2022/ film/features/top-gun-maverick-box-office-oscars-sequel-1235347975/ Ruck, A. & Mannion, G. (2020). Fieldnotes and situational analysis in environmental education research: Experiments in new materialism. Environmental Education Research, 26(9–10). https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1594172 Russian, A. (2018). All about Angelina Jolie’s connection to Cambodia that led to her Golden Globe nominated film. People. https://people.com/movies/angelina-jolie-cambodiagolden-globe/ (Accessed October 1, 2022). Ryan’s World (2023, March 02). About. www.youtube.com/@RyansWorld/about Schauffler, R. (1924). The children’s museum of the Brooklyn institute of arts and Sciences, Brooklyn, New York. American Midland Naturalist, 9(5–6), 195–244. Schmidt, V.L. (2012). 45 Master Characters. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books. Sciamma, C. (2014). Girlhood. Paris, France: Hold Up Films. Sefton-Green, J., Nixon, H. & Erstad, O. (2009). Reviewing approaches and perspectives on “digital literacy”. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(2), 107–125. Seitz, D.K. (2023). A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Sellar, S. (2012). ‘It’s all about relationships’: Hesitation, friendship and pedagogical assemblage. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(1), 61–74. Seng, V. (2005). The Price We Paid: A Life Experience in the Khmer Rouge Regime. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse. Seybold, M. (2014). Tom Sawyer impersonates ‘The original confidence man”. Mark Twain Journal, 52(2), 136–142. Shaw, D. (Ed.) (2007). Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Short, P. (2005). Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. New York, NY: Macmillan. Silverman, K. (1988). The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Sims, D. (2022). First they killed my father is a surprising, devastating triumph. The Atlantic, September 15, 2017. www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/09/first-theykilled-my-father-is-a-surprising-devasting-triump/540018/ (Accessed October 25, 2022). Siv, S. (2008). Golden Bones: An Extraordinary Journey from Hell in Cambodia to a New Life in America. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Skelton, T. (2008). Research with children and young people: Exploring the tensions between ethics, competence and participation. Children’s Geographies, 6, 21–36.

246  Bibliography Smith, D.L. (1992). Huck, Jim, and American radical discourse. In J.S. Leonard, T. Tenney & Davis, T. (Eds), Satire or Evasion: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, pp. 103–117. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381716-010 Smith, H.I. (1912). The educational work of a great museum. Science, 36(933), 659–664. Smith, H.I. (1917). The development of museums and their relation to education. The Scientific Monthly, 5(2), 97–119. Smith, H.I. (1927). The Carrier Indians of British Columbia (film). National Museum of Canada. Smith, T.A. & Dunkley, R. (2018). Technology-nonhuman-child assemblages: Reconceptualising rural childhood roaming. Children’s Geographies, 16(3), 304–318. Snitow, A. & Kaufman, D. (Directors). (1997). Blacks and Jews. San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel. Sojoyner, D.M. (2017). Another life is possible: Black fugitivity and enclosed places. Cultural Anthropology, 32(4), 514–536. Sorenson, E.R. (1967). A research film program in the study of changing man. Current Anthropology, 8(5), 443–460. Sorenson, E.R. (1976). The Edge of the Forest: Land, Childhood and Change in a New Guinea Protoagricultural Society. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Springgay, S. & Truman, S.E. (2019). Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human Worlds: WalkingLab. Oxon: Routledge. Stórá, S. (2017). Dreymar við Havið [Film]. Faroe Islands & Denmark: Fish & Film. Stubbs, J. (2013). Historical Film: A Critical Introduction. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Swanson, K. (2010). Begging as a Path to Progress: Indigenous Women and Children and the Struggle for Ecuador’s Urban Spaces. Vol. 2. Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Tanvir, K. (2009). Interview: Christine Hakim. Widescreen, 1(1). https://widescreenjournal. files.wordpress.com/2021002F06/interview-christine-hakim.pdf Tarc, A.M. (2015). Literacy of the Other: Renarrating Humanity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Tatar, M. (2021). The Heroine with 1001 Faces. New York, NY: Liveright. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. Oxon: Routledge. Taylor, A. (2020a). Countering the conceits of the Anthropos: Scaling down and researching with minor players. Discourse, 41(3), 340–358. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2019. 1583822 Taylor, A. (2020b). Downstream river dialogues: An educational journey toward a planetaryscaled ecological imagination. ECNU Review of Education, 3(1), 107–137. https://doi. org/10.1177/2096531120905194 Taylor, A. & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2018). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. In The Common Worlds of Children and Animals: Relational Ethics for Entangled Lives. Vol. 3. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315670010 Taylor, P.C. (2016). Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Theron, L., Mitchell, C., Smith, A. & Stuart, J. (Eds.) (2011). Picturing Research: Drawing as Visual Methodology. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Trivero, A. (2018). Trentrenfilú: el mito cosmogónico fundamental de la cultura mapuche. Chile: Tácitas (Tacit Editions). Tsing, A. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tsing, A., Deger, J., Keleman, A. & Zhou, F. (2021). Feral Atlas: The More-than-human Anthropocene. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tsing, A., Gan, E., Swanson, H. & Bubandt, N. (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Tuon, B. (2013). Inaccuracy and testimonial literature: The case of Loung Ung’s First they killed my father: A daughter of Cambodia remembers. MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 38(3), 107–125; at 173.

Bibliography  247 Twining, C.H. (1989). The economy. In K. Jackson (Ed.), Cambodia, 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death, pp. 109–150. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; at 127–128. Tyner, J.A. (2017). From Rice Fields to Killing Fields: Nature, Life, and Labor under the Khmer Rouge. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Tyner, J.A. (2018). The Politics of Lists: Bureaucracy and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge, p. 86. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. Tyner, J.A. (2021). Red Harvests: Agrarian Capitalism and Genocide in Democratic Kampuchea. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. Tyner, J.A. & Henkin, S. (2015). Feminist geopolitics, everyday death, and the emotional geographies of Dang Thuy Tram. Gender, Place & Culture, 22(2), 288–303. Uhde, J. (1999). “Indonesian director Garin Nugroho.” Kinema Spring Issue. https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/kinema/article/view/897/884 UNESCO. (2010, August  23). Sceilg Mhichil. UNESCO: World Heritage Convention: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/757/ Ung, L. (2000). First they Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. Harper: University of California Press. United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. (1989). www.unicef.org.au/ united-nations-convention-on-the-rights-of-the-child Valentine, G. (2003). Boundary crossings: Transitions from childhood to adulthood. Children’s Geographies, 1(1), 37–52. Van de Wetering, S.A.L. (2020). Stigmatization and the social construction of a normal identity in the Parisian Banlieues. Geoforum, 116, 303–312. Vannini, P. & Stewart, L.M. (2017). The GoPro gaze. Cultural Geographies, 24(1), 149–155. Vickery, M. (1984). Cambodia 1975–1982. Chiang Mai, Tailand: Silkworm Books. Vincendeau, G. (2018). The Parisian Banlieue on screen: So close, yet so far. In A. Phillips & G. Vindendeau (Eds.), Paris in the Cinema: Beyond the Flâneur, pp. 87–99. London: BFI Palgrave. Vogt, N. (2017). Divine girlhood: Filming young women in France’s Banlieues. Cineaste, 38–42. Vohnsen, M. (2016). Anita. In B. Urraca & G. Kramer (Eds.), Directory of World Cinema: Argentina 2, pp. 147–148. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. Vohnsen, M. (2017). Revisiting the AMIA bombing in Marcos Carnevale’s Anita. In Evolving Images: Jewish Latin American Cinema, pp. 73–88. Texas: University of Texas Press. Wacquant, L.J. (1913). Urban outcasts: Stigma and division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 17(3), 366–383. Walker, C. Alanis Obomsawin’s tradition of giving back at Christmas. CBC News, December  24, 2013. www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/alanis-obomsawin-s-tradition-of-givingback-at-christmas-1.2474674 Wargo, J.M. (2018). Writing with wearables? Young children’s intra-active authoring and the sounds of emplaced invention. Journal of Literacy Research, 50(4), 502–523. Warhol 1968 as quoted in Mekas, J. 1990. “Notes after Re-seeing the Movies of Andy Warhol,” In J. Coplans (Ed.), Andy Warhol, pp. 139–145. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society. quoted in Anderson “Filming Fore” 112. Weaver, S.M. (1981). Making Canadian Indian Policy: The Hidden Agenda, 1968–70. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wells, K. (2002). Reconfiguring the radical other: Urban children’s consumption practices and the nature/culture divide. Journal of Consumer Culture, 2(3), 291–315. https://doi. org/10.1177/146954050200200301 Wente, J. (2022). Christmas at moose factory. In R.W. Hill & H. Peleg (Eds.), Alanis Obomsawin: Lifework, p. 21. Munich: Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe. White, J. (1999). Alanis Obomsawin, documentary form and the Canadian nation(s). Cineaction, 49, 26–36. Williams, T. (2018). Film review: First they killed my father: A daughter of Cambodia remembers. Genocide Studies and Prevention, 12(1), 113–114.

248  Bibliography Winner, E. & Drake, J.E. (2022). The Child as Visual Artist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Woodman, D. & A. Bennet. (2015). Youth Cultures, Transitions, and Generations. Bridging the Gap in Youth Research. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Woolford, A., June, W. & Um, S. (2021). We planted rice and killed people: Symbiogenetic destruction in the Cambodian genocide, Genocide Studies and Prevention, 15(1), 44–67. Wright, B. (1956). Geography and the documentary film: Britain, since 1945. The Geographical Magazine, 29, pp. 586–595. Wylie, J. (2005). A single day’s walking: narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS, 30, 234–247. Wylie, J. (2006). Depths and folds: On Landscape and the gazing subject. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 519–35. Wylie, J.W. (2009). Landscape, absence and the geographies of love. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34(3), 75–89. Yúdice, G. (1991). Testimonio and postmodernism. Latin American Perspectives, 18(3), 15–31; at 17. Zenou, T. (2022). ‘Top Gun,’ brought to you by the U.S. Military. The Washington Post, May 27, 2022. www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/27/top-gun-maverick-us-military Zhenhui, Y. (2019). Grasslands as transitional spaces of play: Mongol children’s reimagination of the World in cinematic representation. Children’s Geographies, 18(1), 69–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1598544 Zimmerly, D.W. (1974). Museocinematography: Ethnographic Film Programs of the National Museum of Man, 1913–1973 (National Museum of Man Mercury Series 11). Ottawa: National Museum of Canada. Žižek, S. (2000). The Fragile Absolute or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London and New York: Verso. ———. (2006). The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. (2008). On Violence. London: Profile Books. ———. (2010). Living in the End Times. London and New York: Verso. ———. (2012). Interrogating the Real. London and New York: Continuum.

Index

Abbot Cellach (character) 125, 127, 131, 134 Abrams, J. J. 170 – 172 accented cinema 35 – 38 accented space, shooting rites/rights of passage 36 – 46 actualization 96 – 97 Adiadanto, Didid 54 affection-image 96 affectivity 95 – 97 Ahmad (character) 92 – 99, 230 Aiava, Raine 135 Aitken, Stuart C. 4, 5, 7, 41, 224 Allen, Woody 34, 38, 40, 46, 225 AMIA bombing 4, 13 – 15, 17, 20 – 21 Anak Girli see street children Anderson, K. 71 animations 3, 116, 117, 138 – 139 Anita (Carnevale): Argentine collective memory and 15 – 16; care for 15 – 17, 19 – 21; contextualizing 13 – 15; features 13; mixing fiction and reality 17; people and places of 16 – 21; as urban road movie 15 – 16, 21 Anthropocene 7, 142, 143, 151; fantasy of 144 Appadurai, Arjun 47 authenticity 64 – 65, 69 – 72, 229 Bande de Filles see Girlhood banlieue 4, 78 – 90, 230 – 232; escaping the 83 – 85, 88 – 89; gender norms, oppressive 83 – 84; inadequate education system 81 – 82; lack of employment 82; oppression of 81, 83, 88 – 89; police surveillance on young people 82 – 83; racism 81, 83; social exclusion of 81, 83 Barai, M. 146 Barba see Rannvá and Barba (characters)

Beazley, Harriot 6, 90n2, 201n1, 213n1, 227 Benjamin, Walter 3, 6, 8n2 Bennett, Jane 124, 127, 130 – 131, 138 – 139 Bergson, Henri 3, 96 biodiversity 149 Black: fugitivity 79; geographies 89; and Brown girls in banlieue 78 – 90, 230 – 232 Black girl cartographies 79 Bogue, Ronald 93 Book of Kells 4, 117, 119, 122, 124, 125, 127, 133 – 135, 138 Braidotti, Rosi 1 Brendan (character) 116 – 117, 119, 122, 125, 127, 129, 131 – 135 Brother Aidan (character) 116, 117, 127, 134, 135 Bruno, Giuliana 3 brutality 66, 68, 117, 127, 134, 227, 229 Buenos Aires 4, 12 – 21 Burton, L. 144 Bye Bye Blue Bird (Ottarsdóttir) 24 – 29, 31, 231 – 232; departure-arrival on Faroe Islands 28 – 29, 31; Rannvá and Barba 24 – 29, 31, 231 Cambodia: genocide 63, 65 – 68, 71 – 72, 229 Campbell, Joseph 178; hero’s journey 167, 169, 171 – 172, 175 – 177 Canadian cinema, in colonialism 102 – 104 care 15 – 17, 19 – 21 Carnevale, Marcos 13, 15, 21 Carrier Indians of British Columbia, The (Smith) 102, 105 – 106 Celtic: myths 117, 139, 228; spirals 131, 135 center of indetermination 96

250

Index

Cheers 32 Cheshire, Godfrey 98 children: becoming YouTubers 209 – 212; cinematic portrayals 3 – 5; digital content creation 6, 209, 212; digital knowledges 212; digital media and technologies in research 205 – 206; drawings 104, 107 – 109, 111; ethnographic educational cinema 104 – 106; fantasy films 144; filmmaking 227 – 228; and films 2, 93 – 94; geographies 1, 4, 60, 69 – 70, 205; and GoPro 206, 207, 212; Indigenous (see Indigenous children, educational films for); learning with natures 206; and media 5 – 6; photographic cameras and 205 – 206; relational assemblage 206; researchcreation processes 206 – 207; research on work and play of 217 – 221; spaces of 3 – 5; street (see street children); struggling against patriarchy 94; and YouTube 203 – 205, 209, 212 children’s film: How to Train Your Dragon trilogy 144 – 151; Life and Nothing More (Kiarostami) 92 – 93, 98 – 99; transversality of 4, 92 – 100; Where Is the Friend’s House? (Kiarostami) 92 – 99 Chile 148 – 149 Christian gospels 117, 119, 122, 228 Christine, Ibu 57 Christmas at Moose Factory (Obomsawin) 102, 108 – 109 cinemas: accented 35 – 38; Canadian and Indigenous 102 – 104, 111; children’s 3 – 5, 104 – 106; ethnographic educational 103 – 106; Faroese 24 – 29, 31 – 32, 231 – 232; independent 7, 31; migrant 35 – 36, 45; youthful 31 – 32 Clapp, James A. 4 class 15 – 16, 79 – 81, 158; see also gender; race Clemens, Samuel L. see Twain, Mark Clement, Susanne 205 closed space 43 collective memory 15 commodity feminism 7, 171 commodity fetishism 138 – 139 Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) 63, 65 – 67, 229 counter-cartographies 79 – 80, 90 counter-fantasy 146 creation 135; hope through 117, 134, 139; wonder and 138 Crom Cruach cave 131, 133, 138

Daun di Atas Bantal (Leaf on a Pillow, Nugroho) 50, 54 – 55, 59 – 60; awards 55; social message 52; street children in (see street children, in Daun di Atas Bantal (Nugroho)) Deep Space Nine (DS9) 7, 156 – 161; Nog and Jake’s (characters) friendship 157 – 161, 230 De Franceschi, Leonardo 41 Deleuze, Gilles 96, 177 digital: content creation 203, 204, 209, 212; literacy 205, 212; platforms 203, 205, 212; see also YouTube Disney 3, 138, 170 Divines 78, 79, 232; escaping the banlieue 83 – 85, 88 – 89; gender norms, oppressive 83 – 84; inadequacy of education system 81 – 82; lack of employment 82; masculine appearances and behavior 84 – 87; oppression of banlieue 81, 83, 88 – 89; police surveillance on young people 83; racism 81, 83; rejection of traditional gender norms 86 dragons 7, 142, 150 – 151, 228 – 229; fantasy literature and film 144; historical story of 148 Dreams by the Sea (Stórá) 24, 26 – 29, 31, 231 – 232; departure-arrival on Faroe Islands 28 – 29, 31; Ester and Ragna 26 – 29, 231 – 232 Ea, Meng-Try 70 ecology/ecological 146 – 148, 229; imagination 143, 144, 150 – 151 Eisenberg, Daniel 218 Eisenstein, Sergei 3, 8n2, 125 Elena, Alberto 99 emotional geographies 16 enchantment 7, 117, 122, 124, 127, 130 – 131, 135, 138 – 139, 228 enclosed spaces 81, 84, 88 – 90 environmental: biodiversity 149; conflicts 149; context 146; education 143; protection 149, 229 escapism 197 – 199, 201, 229 Eslami, Majid 94 Ester and Ragna (characters) 26 – 29, 231 – 232 ethics 138 – 139 ethnicity 35 – 36, 41 – 42, 44, 46, 158 ethnographic educational films 103 – 106 extreme poverty 194 – 195

Index fantasy 7, 119, 122, 124, 133, 139, 220; of Anthropocene 144; films, and literature 144 Faroese cinema: Bye Bye Blue Bird (Ottarsdóttir) 24 – 29, 31, 231 – 232; Cheers 32; Dreams by the Sea (Stórá) 24, 26 – 29, 31, 231 – 232; youthful cinema 31 – 32 fear 69 – 71, 80, 127, 138 female heroes 171 feminist storytelling 171 feral ecology 146 Ferengi (young extraterrestrial) 157 – 160, 230 fiction: and reality 17; speculative 143, 150, 151, 156, 161 film halls, in Harare 6, 194, 196; and films 197; gambling in 200; illegal activities in 198 – 201, 229; as informal shelter 198, 199, 229; as place of escapism 197 – 199, 201, 229; refuge 197 – 199, 201; risk and opportunity at 199 – 201; safety 229 – 230; sex work in 200 – 201; for sleeping 198; social and relational purpose of 199; theft/robbery in 199 – 201, 229; violence in 200 Finland 181, 189 First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (Jolie) 4, 63 – 66, 68, 71, 229; authenticity of 4 – 65, 69 – 72, 229; brutality of the Khmer Rouge 68; Cambodian genocide 63, 65 – 68, 71 – 72, 229; critics of 72; fear 69 – 71; forced labor on rice paddies 66 – 68; geography of everyday death 71, 229; historical accuracy 65, 66, 71, 72; memoir of Ung, Loung 63 – 64, 68 – 71; uncertainty 69 flaneuse (street walker) 6 forced labor 66 – 68, 70 forest 116, 127, 129 – 131, 134, 1387 fractal geographies 179n25 French Banlieue see banlieue Friedberg, Ann 3, 6 friendship 157 – 159, 230 fugitive geographies 90 gambling 200 gender 16, 79, 80; norms 83 – 87, 90; race and 79 – 80 genocide, Cambodian 63, 65 – 68, 71 – 72, 229 geographies: Black 89; children’s 1, 4, 60, 69 – 70, 205; cultural 4; emotional 16; fractal 179n25; fugitive 90

251

Girlhood (Bande de Filles) 78, 79, 232; escaping the banlieue 83 – 85, 88 – 89; gender norms, oppressive 83 – 84; inadequacy of the education system 81 – 82; lack of employment 82; masculine appearances and behavior 84 – 85; oppression of banlieue 81, 83, 88 – 89; racism 81, 83; rejection of traditional gender norms 85 global media 5, 6, 181 – 182, 184, 188 – 189 GoPro 7, 204 – 206; cameras 207 – 209, 212, 228; children and 206, 207, 212; and performing YouTube 209 – 212; research 205 – 207; selfie-stick 207 – 209 green country 144 Griffiths, Alison 103 Growing up on the Streets data 194, 196 Hakim, Christine 50, 53 – 55, 59, 61 Halilovic, Laura 34, 35; autobiographical production 36 – 37; becoming a filmmaker 38, 40 – 41, 225; becoming an adult 41 – 44; becoming an Italian 44 – 46; diegetic space of movies 37; shooting rites/rights of passage 36 – 46 Haraway, Donna 142, 143 Harvey, David 3 Hendrickx, K. 143 heroic sacrifice 189 – 190 heroine’s journey 171 – 172 hero’s journey 167, 169, 171 – 172, 175 – 177 historical film 64, 65 history 221; accuracy of films 65, 66, 71, 72; Canadian and Indigenous cinema 111; educational film 104; of film 2 – 3, 64; story of dragons 148 Hoffman, Eva 64 hope 116 – 141; through creation 117, 134, 139 How to Train Your Dragon 7, 143, 144, 146 – 147, 150 – 151, 228 – 229 How to Train Your Dragon 2 146, 150 How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World 147 – 148, 150 Huck and Tom (characters), comparison with Nog and Jake (characters) 159 – 162 human-nature relationship 151 illegal activities 198 – 201 immigrant filmmakers 35, 45 – 47 immigrants 18, 19 import substitution industrialization (ISI) 66

252

Index

independent cinema 7, 31 Indigenous children, educational films for: Obomsawin, Alanis 4, 102, 106 – 111, 231; Smith, Harlan Ingersoll 102, 104 – 106, 109 – 111 Indigenous films, in Canada 103 Indigenous subjectivity 109 – 111 informal shelter 198, 199, 229 ISI see import substitution industrialization (ISI) islands 166 – 167; banlieue (see banlieue); Skellig Michael 167, 172 – 178 Italianness 35 – 36, 45 Jameson, Fredrick 3 Jedi order 175 – 176 Johnson, Rian 167, 174, 176, 177 Jolie, Angelina 63, 68, 70 Jones, Owain 4 Jones, Sara 64 – 65 journeys 15 – 16; Ahmad’s (character) 92 – 99, 230; Anita’s (character) (see Anita (Carnevale)); heroine’s 171 – 172; hero’s 167, 169, 171 – 172, 175 – 177; storytelling 167, 177 Jungle Book, The 225 – 226 Kaikaivilú 148 – 149, 228 Kancil (Nugroho) 53 Kancil (street children) 51 – 54, 57 – 60 Katz, Cindi 156, 161 Khmer Rouge 63, 64, 66 – 72 Kiarostami, Abbas, transversality of children’s film 4, 92 – 100 Kind, Sylvia 205 – 206 Kiñe Rupa series 148 Kohn, Eric 70 Koker Trilogy 92, 95 Koushik, K. 7 Kraftl, Peter 182 Kulchyski, Peter 102 Lacan, Jaques 3 Land, Nicole 205, 212 LaPore, Mark 5, 217 – 218, 220, 221 Lay, Sody 63, 69 Leaf on a Pillow see Daun di Atas Bantal Lees, Dominic 64 LeFebvre, Henri 3, 71 Le Guin, Ursula, notion of green country 144 Lévy, Pierre 96 – 97 Life and Nothing More (Kiarostami) 92 – 93, 98 – 99

Loncón, Elisa 149 Lopez, Barry 124 Lucas, George 167, 169 – 171, 177 Luke Skywalker (character) 166, 167, 169 – 170, 172 – 178 male hysteria 171 Mapuche 148 – 149; cosmology 149 mapu kipulme 149 Marin, Sanna 188 media 217, 219; aesthetic 5 – 6; children and 5 – 6; global 5, 6, 181, 182, 184, 188, 189; role of 188 memory 217, 220, 221; Ung, Loung 63 – 64, 68 – 71, 229 Me, My Gypsy Family and Woody Allen (Halilovic) 34, 37; becoming a filmmaker 38, 40 – 41 Meng-Try Ea 70 mental mapping, Top Gun: Maverick 184 – 191 Me, Romantic Roma Girl (Halilovic) 37 – 38; becoming an adult 41 – 44; becoming an Italian 44 – 46 Metz, Christian 2 – 3 migrant cinema 35 – 36, 45 mobility 15, 81 – 84, 89, 230 Mohammad Reza (character) 92 – 95, 99 monks 116, 117, 119, 124, 125, 133 monomyth 167, 177, 178 Moore, Tomm 4, 7, 22n1, 100n16, 116 – 117, 119, 124, 125, 127, 131, 135, 138, 139; Celtic myth 117, 139; creation of hope 139; enchantment 117, 122, 124; exotic and colorful characters 124 “more-than-social”, Kraftl, Peter 182 Morrison, Toni 161 movement-image 96 multilateral NATO treaty 189 Mulvey, Laura 3 Murdock, Maureen 178; heroine’s journey 171 – 172 myth/mythology 53, 60, 66, 133, 142, 145, 166, 169, 224, 228; Celtic 117, 139, 228; Star Wars saga 167, 169 – 170 natural disasters 148 – 149 nature 142 – 144, 149; relationship with human 151 Newgrange 131, 133, 134, 140n8 Niinistö, Sauli 188 Nog and Jake (characters): comparison with Huck and Tom (characters) 159 – 162; friendship 157 – 159, 230

Index  253 nomadism 93 nonrepresentational geographical theorization (NRT) 184 Nori (surrogate mother of Anita) 19 – 20, 230 Nugroho, Garin 50, 53 – 56, 61 Obomsawin, Alanis 4, 102, 106 – 110, 230; use of children’s drawings 107 – 111, 231 Oldman, David 5 open space 43 Ottarsdóttir, Katrin 24, 31 Pagan symbolism 117, 228 Pangur Bàn 116, 117, 119, 127 PAR see Participatory Action Research (PAR) Parry, B.L. 206 Participatory Action Research (PAR) 184, 185 participatory action research, Top Gun: Maverick 184 – 191 Phnom Penh 69 Pirker, E.U. 64 place 1, 4, 15 – 17, 20, 78, 90, 145, 149, 175, 199; of Anita’s (character) journey in 16 – 21; of escapism 197 – 199, 201; for film 6; of opportunity 196; of refuge 197 – 199, 201; of risk 198, 199; of safety 194, 196, 197 – 199; to sleep 197; see also film halls, in Harare pollution 149 post-social landscapes of youth 181 – 182 poverty 19, 51, 54 – 55, 196, 229; extreme 194 – 195 Povinelli, Elizabeth 189, 190 Pratt, Mary Louise 103 Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda 161 Putin, Vladimir 188 Pyyry, Noora 124, 135, 139 race 16, 79, 80, 158, 159, 161; and gender 79 – 80 racism 81, 83, 232 Rannvá and Barba (characters) 24 – 29, 31, 231 reality 45 – 46; fiction and 17; social 6; street children’s lives 53 Reed, A. 7 Rey (character) 166, 167, 170 – 171, 175 – 178 risk: and opportunity 199 – 201; place of 198, 199 rites/rights of passage, shooting 36 – 46 road movie 15 – 16, 21 Roberts, Dorothy E. 161

Rosenstone, Robert A. 64, 72 Rowlett, Jake (Jacob) 224, 225 Rüdiger, M. 64 Russian invasion of Ukraine 181, 187, 232 safety 197 – 199, 201; place of 194, 196 salvage ethnography 102 – 103 Sarkozi, Nicolas 82 Schmidt, Victoria Lynn 172 Second World War, Russian bombing in 188 Secret of Kells, The (Moore) 7, 116, 119, 125, 133. 134, 139, 228; Abbot Cellach 125, 127, 131, 134; Brendan (character) 116 – 117, 119, 122, 125, 127, 129, 131 – 135; Brother Aidan 116, 117, 127, 134, 135; Crom Cruach cave 131, 133, 138; enchantment 7, 117, 122, 124, 127, 130, 131, 135, 138 – 139, 228; heroine’s journey 171 – 172; hero’s journey 167, 169, 171 – 172, 175 – 177; Pangur Bàn 116, 117, 119, 127; Vikings attack 116, 127, 134 – 135 sensation: and motor action 96; movement and 95, 98 sex work 200 – 201 shadows and light 97 – 98 shooting rites/rights of passage 36 – 46 Silverman, Kaja 3 Sims, David 68, 70 Sim, Sorya 70 Skellig Michael 167, 172 – 178 Smith, Harlan Ingersoll 4, 102, 104, 109 – 111; children’s museum education 104 – 105; ethnographic educational cinema 105 – 106 Smith, S.J. 71 social reproduction 156 – 157, 161 – 162 Solomon, Charles 125 Sorenson, E. Richard 217 – 221 spaces 6, 97 – 98; accented, shooting rites/rights of passage 36 – 46; banlieue 80 – 89; of children 3 – 5; enclosed 81, 84, 88 – 90; film halls (see film halls, in Harare); film studies with 3; fugitive 88 – 89; of Gagé 43; of Halilovic’s movies 37; movements through 95, 96; open and closed 43; Skellig Michael for Star Wars journey 167, 172 – 177; and time 97 – 98; transversality of 98 speculative fiction 143, 150 – 151, 156, 161 spirituality 122, 228 Star Trek 7, 156 – 158, 161 Star Wars saga, mythic origins of 167, 169 – 170

254 Index Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams) 166, 170; critics of 171; gendered stereotypes 170; heroine’s journey 171 – 172; hero’s journey 171 – 172, 175 – 177; Luke Skywalker 166, 167, 169 – 170, 172 – 178; masculine representation 171; Rey 166, 167, 170 – 171, 175 – 178; Skellig Michael 167, 172 – 177 Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker 178 Stórá, Sakaris 24, 27, 31, 32 storytelling 5, 7, 108, 109; feminist 171; journeys 167, 177 street children and youth 195 – 196; film halls (see film halls, in Harare) street children, in Daun di Atas Bantal (Nugroho) 50; fame and glory 58; Kancil 51 – 54, 57 – 60; marginalisation of 54, 61; PhD research 51; poor support to 58, 227; poverty 54, 229; reality after the film 53 – 56, 58; rights 61; subculture 51, 54; Sugeng 51 – 54, 57 – 60; Warisno, Wiryo (Heru) 6, 50 – 56, 59 – 60, 90n2, 201n1, 213n1, 223 structural racism 81 Sugeng (street children) 51 – 54, 57 – 60 Sugihartati, Rahma 5 Suharto 50, 52, 55, 59 Tarc, Aparna 160 Tatar, Maria 172 Taylor, L. 206 testimonial films 64, 72 theft 199 – 201 TikTok videos 6, 188 Tikyan see street children Top Gun 6, 183; participatory research by youths 185 – 187 Top Gun: Maverick 6, 181, 183 – 184, 232; characters of 188; enemy 189 – 190; globalizing social 189; heroic sacrifice

189 – 190; participatory research by youths 187 – 191; redemption 190; women’s roles in 188 transversality of, children’s film 4, 92 – 100 Trentrenvilú 148 – 149, 228 Tuon, Bunkong 71, 72 Twain, Mark 159 Ukraine, Russian invasion of 181, 187, 232 Ung, Loung 4, 66; memoir 63 – 64, 68 – 71, 229 urban road movie 15 – 16, 21 Vikings 24, 146; attack 116, 127, 134 – 135 violence 68, 69, 78 – 79, 85, 86, 89, 127, 200; see also brutality; genocide Warisno, Wiryo (Heru, street children) 6, 50 – 56, 59 – 60, 90n2, 201n1, 213n1, 223, 227 Wente, Jesse 108 Where Is the Friend’s House? (Kiarostami) 92 – 99, 230; Ahmad’s journey 92 – 99, 230; Mohammad Reza 92 – 95, 99, 230 Williams, Timothy 69 Work and Play (LaPore) 220 – 221 Yan, Zhenhui 4 Yogyakarta 50 – 54, 56 – 57, 59 – 60 youthful cinema 31 – 32 YouTube 6, 228; children and 203 – 205, 209, 212; content creation 209, 212; GoPro and performing 209 – 212; research 206 – 207 Yúdice, George 72 Zimbabwe, street children and youth 195 – 196; film halls (see film halls, in Harare) Žižek, Slavoj 3