CINEMA'S MISSING CHILDREN

Photographs of missing children are among the most haunting images of contemporary Western society; the spectre of the child at risk from abduction, abuse or illness conjures questions of traumatic loss, nostalgia and innocence. This book argues that such issues increasingly return in the work of contemporary filmmakers and explores the representation of missing and endangered children in a number of key films of the last decade, including Three Colours: Blue, All About My Mother, Ratcatcher, Jude, The Sweet Hereafter, Happiness and The Son’s Room. This study makes the case for film as reflection on the real and as a space for revealing current personal and cultural anxieties. Through close analysis of film, television and photographic images, and via intense engagement with difficult emotions, Cinema's Missing Children is the first major study of an area of increasing cultural importance and thus offers a new point of focus in contemporary film theory and criticism.

January 2003
192 pages

978-1-903364-50-5 (pbk)

£16.99

£14.44 with 15% online discount - add to basket

Emma Wilson is Senior Lecturer in French at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University. She is the author of French Cinema Since 1950 (1999) and Memory and Survival: the French Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (2000). She is co-editor of Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (2008).

‘It is a rare pleasure in the world of film writing to find a book that deals so intelligently and thoughtfully with such a difficult subject … for anyone interested in what films have to say about experiencing the sense of loss which a missing person represents.’
– Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Queen Mary's, University of London

‘Looking at how recent film has portrayed the loss or death of a child, Wilson considers tender issues with sensitivity … She steers clear of the coded quagmire to pull together a fresh and intelligent study.’
– Hotdog

‘Wilson has pinpointed a rising cultural undercurrent and tied to it an emerging trend in independent film, breaking new ground in the process … Her book makes for compelling reading for anyone interested in thoughtful and compelling film analysis and her commitment to the subject matter should be unquestioned.’
– www.popmatters.com

'Minimal cinema interrogates film's capacity to depict emotional extremes, such as ‘the feeling, desperate subject of the missing child. This is an excellent analysis of a compelling theme ... Highly recommended.'
– Choice