Beyond Victimhood: Childhood and Vulnerability in Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

Buesa, Andrés

En : Radical Embodiment on Film: Time and the Cinematic Body
2026
Bloomsbury Academic London
ISBN: 978-1-3503-7062-3
Pp: 63-76

Resumen: Children feature prominently within filmic renderings of poverty and marginalization. From Sciuscià (Shoeshine, Vittorio de Sica 1946) to Cidade de Deus (City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund 2002), Kes (Ken Loach 1969) to Capharnaüm (Nadine Labaki 2018), many of the most widely acknowledged films on social exclusion, both past and present, choose child protagonists as vehicles for their stories. Very often, these films capitalize on a certain conceptualization of childhood which equates the child, in binary opposition to the adult, with ideas of purity and innocence. Emerging from Romantic thought, this ‘myth of childhood innocence’ (Jenkins 1998: 1) understands the child to be innately good, particularly vulnerable to the threats of the adult world but also invested with a capacity to unveil the ills and failures of society. To a great extent, the sense of innocence is projected onto the child’s body (Higonnet 1998: 8), its fragility and perceived weakness encapsulating their lack of knowledge about the world. As Robin Berstein contends, ‘juvenile bodies […] have the special ability to naturalize’ the myth of childhood innocence (2011: 24); this way, cinema – as a form of visual art – has the potential to foreground this myth by displaying the physical frailty of the child’s body. In films about children who endure social hardship, their vulnerability to circumstances is emphasized by the onscreen display of their corporeal weakness. Reflecting on the potential of photographic images of children, Patricia Holland contends:...

DOI: 10.5040/9781350370654.ch-4