Child spectators: towards a phenomenological perspective on the imaginary transformations of reality

ABSTRACT This paper establishes the motif of ‘child spectators’ within the self-reflexive tradition of modern European cinema since the 1940s and within discourses on the affinity of childhood and cinema, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Through a close reading of The spirit of the beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973) and Jacquot de Nantes (Agnès Varda, 1991) that deals with the impact of the cinema experience on a child’s life, I analyze how this motif stages spectatorship, cinephilia, and filmmaking. First, I show how these films reflect on the impact of film experience and the process of film education as based on the existential being described by phenomenology. Second, I argue that this motif implies specific aesthetic strategies that are often linked to childhood and cinema. The child spectator calls for the understanding of childhood as a film aesthetical category and invites us to engage in a distinctive form of spectatorship. If the children in these films represent and address the phenomenological dimension of film experience, they also invite us, third, to reconsider aspects rarely addressed by phenomenology, especially the integration of imagination and materiality in film experience, and the interdependence of film experience and education.