Vulnerable Children: Collective Resistance in Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015)

Buesa, Andrés

En : Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film
2023
Routledge New York
ISBN: 9781032268446
Pp: 1-15

Resumen: This chapter explores the representation of childhood vulnerability in cinema through the example of Chloé Zhao’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015). By bringing together film analysis, childhood studies, and theorizations of vulnerability, it analyzes Zhao’s debut film as a text that acknowledges the potential of vulnerability as a source of collective resistance. Beyond a straightforward association of childhood with helplessness and lack of agency, the film foregrounds children’s increased openness to the material and social relations around them, which turn them into embodiments of the relational dimension of vulnerability. The chapter starts by addressing how criticism and academia have accounted for the vulnerability of children in social-realist-oriented cinema in the past. It then moves on to the film analysis, where it is argued that the potential of vulnerability, materialized only when approached as a collective condition, emerges as both a source of resistance for the child characters and a model of ethical coexistence for audiences. Drawing on approaches to spectatorship and ethics, it concludes by exploring the effects that the film’s portrayal of childhood has on the ideological and emotional involvement of viewers, thus questioning the value of the empathetic spectatorial position created by the film.

Nota: Postprint Research toward this chapter was carried out with the funding of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation of research project no. FFI-2017-83606 and the DGA research project H23_20R.