Description
Book SynopsisChildren on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Nature, Gender, and Agency analyzes child and adolescent protagonists in Latin American cinema. This book contends that child characters have taken on a critical representational role within Latin American cinema because of their position on the threshold between nature and culture, which converts them into a focus of, and a limit to, state or colonial biopower. Rachel Randall provides a comprehensive examination of the key themes and developments in boys' and girls' cinematic representations since the adoption of children's rights discourses in the region. Recommended for scholars interested in Latin American studies, film studies, and cultural studies.
Trade ReviewThis is a highly accomplished book that makes a significant contribution to the field. Randall draws together in new and fruitful ways an impressive range of theories and approaches relating to the representation of the child in cinema. Her readings of the films are superbly nuanced and insightful. -- Joanna Page, University of Cambridge
In this skillful study of the representations and potential meanings of child figures and childhood in a fascinating range of contemporary films from Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, Rachel Randall provides extensive contextualisation (socio-historical, psychoanalytic, and theoretical) of the situations in which they were produced, as well as incisive and revealing analyses. She explores the ways in which these films, which range from conventional narratives to more experimental works and documentaries, portray children’s subjectivity and how the child characters’ status ‘on the threshold’ between nature and culture, innocence and knowledge, immaturity and maturity, comes to symbolize so much more. -- Claire Williams, University of Oxford
The corpus of films is geographically and generically diverse (including both fiction films and documentaries), and explores cinematic children from a variety of social, geographic and economic milieus; the theoretical frameworks are well chosen, solidly contextualized and smoothly integrated, as is relevant material on the social and political history of the countries in question. This is a clear and cogent book that makes a crucial contribution to the field, foregrounding questions of ethics and agency without eliding the child's difference from the adult as cinematic subject and scholarly object. -- Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas
Table of ContentsContents Introduction Part One Chapter One: Rural Boyhoods in Brazil and Colombia Chapter Two: Children and ‘Bare Life’ Under Military Dictatorship Chapter Three: Childhood, Movement and Play Part Two Chapter Four: Privileged Girlhoods and Processes of Transition Chapter Five: ‘I’m No Street Urchin!’ Chapter Six: Indigenous Girlhoods in Brazil and Colombia Conclusion Bibliography About the Author
