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CINEMA'S MISSING CHILDREN Emma Wilson. London: Wallflower, 2003, 181 pp.
Emma Wilson's Cinema's Missing Children appears at a pivotal time in children's cultural studies, a time of increased national awareness of the growing problem of child abuse. Her discussion of neglect, loss, and mistreatment of children in art films aptly reflects current news broadcasts and television talk shows. Yet photographs of Michael Jackson and the Crocodile Hunter, both placing their infants in precarious, even mortal, situations, seem tame compared to the child neglect, physical and psychological, recreated in the films Wilson addresses.
But the missing child is not a topic unique to twentieth-century films; the archetype of the wandering, lost, abused, or abandoned child dominates literary folk and fairy tales. In traditional versions, Hansel and Gretal are abandoned in the woods and forced to survive on their own, facing depraved adults with evil intentions. Cinderella's stepmother beats her and Snow White's stepmother tries to kill her. However, the films Wilson analyzes, all made after 1990, rarely end with a "happily ever after." Instead, a child dies or is murdered, leaving family and friends to reconstruct their lives and process their grief. In film after film, the chief aid in the healing process is a photograph of the dead child. Wilson concentrates, however, not on the child in the picture, but on the adult holding it.
In her introduction, Wilson limits the scope of her study, narrowing her focus to "the topos of the missing child in a first world, Western context," and she "contends more with the psychology than the politics of threats to children" (2). She recognizes previous sociological studies, but chooses a psychological approach instead. Wilson also acknowledges that many mainstream films deal with child victims. Yet she opts to work with independent art cinema because of its tendency toward reflection and emotion, and its predisposition to use photographic elements. Holding to this...