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Abstract: Vittorio De Sica used a child protagonist for the first time, not in his neorealist masterpiece Shoeshine (1946), but in his first truly serious film, The Children Are Watching Us (1943), which examines the impact on a young boy's life of his mother's extramarital affair with a family friend. The Children Are Watching Us proved to be a key work, thematically as well as stylistically, in De Sica's directing career. In its thematic attempt to reveal the underside of Italy's moral life, this film was indicative of a rising new vision in Italian cinema. And in exhibiting semi-documentary qualities by being shot partially on location, as well as by using nonprofessional actors in some roles, The Children Are Watching Us was a precursor of the neorealism that would issue forth after the liberation of occupied Rome.
Key Words: Vittorio De Sica; The Children Are Watching Us; Italian neorealism; children's films; Shoeshine; Bicycle Thieves.
Where children are concerned, two myths predominate on film: that of the original innocence of children, an innocence that only becomes sullied by contact with the society of grown-ups; and that of the child-as-fatherto-the-man, of childhood as a prelude to the main event of adulthood. Among films of the first kind, Jean Benoît-Levy's La maternelle (1932), Louis Daquin's Portrait of Innocence (1941), Kjell Grede's Hugo and Josephine (1967), Jilali Ferhati's Reed Dolls (1981), and Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly (2004) deserve special mention. Among films of the second kind, in the 1980s Lasse Hallström's My Life As a Dog (1985) and Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror (1988) were almost simultaneously joined by Idrissa Ouédraogo's Yaaba (1987) and Nils Gaup's Pathfinder (1988); they were preceded by such pictures as Arne Sucksdorff's The Great Adventure (1953) and Raoul Coutard's Hoa-Binh (1970), as well as followed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Abouna (2002). For the record, before 1900 the Lumière brothers had made the first films about children, and soon thereafter virtually every film culture grasped the new possibilities of capturing on screen children's cuteness and mischief and pathos.
In the vein of juvenile performance -with professional child actors as well as nonprofessional ones, or "non-actors" -no movie culture has done better than France, however. Think only, not so long ago, of Jacques Doillon's Ponette...