Miniature Lives,Intrusion and Innocence: Women Filming Children

Abstract

An examination of Lucile Hadzihalilovic's film of 2004, Innocence, this article argues that childhood, child experience and its representation, offer prescient and urgent material for thinking about the public and the private, raising issues about identity and newness/the newborn, about influence and intrusion, about intimacy and enclosure, about growth and metamorphosis. The malleable, mutating substance of children's bodies, of their environs and of their imaginings, is seen to offer new insights into the relation between private and public and new reflections on that relation as fluid and overlapping. Examining childhood offers evidence about identification and enculturation, the construction and production of social identity, and the position of the self within a community. Engagement with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy allows questions about intrusion and étrangeté to be pursued in material and political terms.

Keywords

children contemporary women filmmakers intimacy intrusion Jean-Luc Nancy Innocence (2004)Lucile Hadzihalilovic

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