ABSTRACT
A child’s face elicits from us conflicting responses. We marvel at it because of its already unique yet specifically childlike characteristicshence Mickey Rooney’s success and the proliferation of freckles on the faces of young American stars. The days of Shirley Temple, who unduly prolonged her own private theatrical, literary, and visual aesthetic, are now over; children in the cinema no longer look like china dolls or Renaissance representations of the infant Jesus. But mystery continues to frighten us, and we want to be reassured against it by the faces of children; we thoughtlessly ask of these faces that they reflect feelings we know very well because they are our own. We demand of them signs of complicity, and the audience quickly becomes enraptured and teary when children show feelings that are usually associated with grown-ups. We are thus seeking to contemplate ourselves in them: ourselves, plus the innocence, awkwardness, and naivete we lost. This kind of cinema moves us, but aren’t we in fact just feeling sorry for ourselves?
