Film Comment: Forbidden Games

The 1952 French film, Forbidden Games (Les jeux interdits) , won numerous best film awards including a 1952 special foreign film Academy Award and a Golden Lion best actress award for the five-year old Brigitte Fossey .  Some of the published comments describe the film as "childhood innocence corrupted," "the horrors of war through the eyes of children," "children using their powers of fantasy and denial to deal with death in wartime."  It is a film which is both funny, creepy, horrifying, and incredibly sad.  The children are real children, not little adults.

Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) really is the center of the film.  Film critic Roger Ebert says of her, "Fossey's face becomes a mirror that refuses to reflect what she must see and feel."  And it is her eyes that house the mirror.

The plot of the film: a young girl is orphaned in a Nazi air attack on civilians fleeing from Paris and is taken in by a ten-year old boy and his family.  The boy helps Paulette secretly bury her dog, which died along with her parents in the air raid.  Worried that the dog is alone in the ground, the children begin to bury other dead animals and they create a secret cemetery, stealing crosses to place on each grave.  They build an elaborate fantasy world around the cemetery.  The fantasy world will, of course, eventually come crashing down.

In this film, as with most others I view, I appreciate and understand the artistry and intentions of the filmmakers.  I also see things which may or may not have originally been intended; specifically, I see things through a Christian lens.

The main thing which I see in this film is how all the adults failed the children.  The Nazis callously killed adults and children alike with their air raids.  The adults who pulled Paulette onto their wagon were so intent on their escape that they failed to restrain or go after Paulette when she jumped off the wagon to retrieve her dead dog.  The kindly and basically well-meaning peasant family who took Paulette in were so wrapped up in their sometimes silly adult dealings that they basically ignored the children because they were "just" children.  The priest is more interested in catechisms and confessions and correct ritual than in understanding the children.  The government officials who come for Paulette want to make sure their papers are properly completed.  The kind nun at the train station tells Paulette to quietly sit on a bench and then leaves her alone.  None of the adults, except for the Nazis, are "bad people."  They just fail to actually see the children.   Sometimes you have to take a crayon, get down on the floor, and color with a child.

The Earliest Biblical Film

Albert Kirchner patented a motion picture camera, but he is historically significant because of his very odd body of film work as a director.  He directed the first known films in two widely disparate genres.  His personal views are unknown.

In 1896, using the pseudonym of Lear, he directed a film, La coucher de la Marie, which was a recording of Louise Willy's striptease stage show in Cairo, Egypt.  This is believed to be the first pornographic film and was prosecuted as such in 1901 in Europe.

After making a series of comedy short films, Kirchner then (1897) shot La passion du Christ, considered to be the first biblical film.  It is a recording of a stage play performed in Paris.

Kirchner died in 1898 or soon after.

Film Comment: Rabbit

This perverse (extremely perverse) little nine minute film is one I know you'll probably never see, so I'm doing no no harm in including spoilers in this comment. Rabbit (2005) is a limited animation film illustrated like a children's picture book with the names of each object printed directly under the object: ie. "rabbit," "flower," "house," "boy," and "girl," etc. You get the idea, it looks like an old fashioned British children's reading primer. The British director, Run Wrake, used educational stickers he found in a junk shop.

A sweet little boy and girl are playing in a garden when the girl decides to cut open a passing rabbit. The boy uses a cricket bat to whack the heads of several animals. Inside one animal, the children find a strange little animated idol (a demon?) which turns insects into jewels. The children come up with a plan; distract the idol with a tasty bowl of jam, kill animals to attract insects which the idol will turn into jewels, and the children get rich. They set their plan in motion and drive off to get more jam. The idol has other, deadly, ideas. The children end up eaten by insects.

This bizarre film was nominated for a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award and it deserved it. It speaks none too subtly about animal cruelty, consumerism, greed, corruption, and hypocrisy (false innocence). As seen by Christian eyes, it is an allegory about the dangers of consorting with evil and demonstrates graphically that death really is the result (wages} of sin.

For those who wish to see the film, it is available from Netflix in the compilation entitled Cinema 16: Disc 2 (European Short Films).