Caring For Children in Wartime
Free play periods outside, young children doing anything they want to under adult supervision. Getting dirty, playing with farm animals, dogs, cats, and ducks. Not just boys but girls on tall jungle gyms. The kids move rocks to construct a pool.
For most of the nineteen minutes of A Child Went Forth (1942), happy children play at some property in the country. A narrator (Lloyd Gough) quotes Walt Whitman, about how a child went forth and the first thing that child encountered became part of him. The poem itself comes from Leaves of Grass, a big book I haven't read. My father read it many times, taught it in universities. My copy is his old Riverside Editions trade paperback copy, pages softened by frequency of reading them and pencilling notes in the margins, underlining, circling specific page numbers. The cracked spine predicts that one more reading of that copy of Leaves of Grass will split the text into two parts.
A Child Went Forth (Joseph Losey's second film--he made shorts before getting his own feature to direct, The Boy With Green Hair) from 1942 takes place at a summer camp run by a nursery foundation taking in orphans from the war in Europe. A blonde boy of about twelve is shown watching a tractor turning over topsoil, the narrator offers, "This English boy just a short time ago was watching bombs fall from the sky."
He's the only child identified in that way. The rest, we assume, are children traumatized by war, by the loss (probably violent) of their parents. In this outdoors kindergarten, children play and play, make mud pies, eat the lunches prepared for them by the female staff, of whom we see only about six, but there must be more working the place.
Most of the film shows little kids playing and sleeping hard later, eating, learning about things through hands-on training, like picking up mice and letting them walk about on their skin.
Let's toughen up these traumatized children!
As if what they've gone through already wasn't enough to scrape their souls. Still, the filmmakers have a point here. Learning to deal with reality isn't taught much in school, except when the school experience itself provides negative items on the menu of growing up.
After about minute sixteen, the message of children in wartime begins. The narrator seems to be thinking aloud. The war by this point is two years old. Lots of kids will lose their parents.
Yet, I get the impression there's the sense of keeping these kids safe, alive, trained, and ready to take over to help repopulate a decimated world.
Some of these kids were the right age to end up fighting in Korea, where some of them would be likely to take the lives of children's parents--more orphans, more schools to assuage a problem created by power-hungry idiots playing with economics and war.
These kids are new Americans, war refugees in a time when it was actually more survivable to be a refugee than it is now.
I'm fascinated by Losey's films, even this short one. He made a feature in the early 1960s called These Are the Damned, of which I've only seen the ending. In this sequel to Children of the Damned (which he didn't direct but I have seen that one) there are spooky alien/human hybrid children running a terrified town. The group of children in the 1942 documentary reminded me of those other children; coming about in this closed society from the outside world; playing, but communicating, as a group.
The suggestion in minute nineteen of A Child Went Forth that we're seeing what might happen
across the nation, with relocations of small children to country settings far away from bombing, reminds me of C.S. Lewis's premise for putting four children into a country house that contains a big wardrobe leading to a magical land. The kids in The Chronicles of Narnia get into that alternate world while playing hide and seek, a game Losey's subjects in 1942 may have played.
Lewis's child characters are sent away from bombing. The kids in Losey's film are depicted inside a bright peaceful world, but they fled crushing darkness, they're bound to be haunted. From what I remember of the Narnia books, the kids, if haunted at all, feel that disturbance from difficulties they've faced in Narnia. One can die there.
Losey's film, a kind of doomsday warning, shows humans returning to fresh perspectives, a vacation in Eden run by smiling women. We see the kids in their up moments, mostly. There's a little crying now and then. I thought as I watched, "The kids are immature but the mature ones are blowing up the world."
Vic Neptune
Free play periods outside, young children doing anything they want to under adult supervision. Getting dirty, playing with farm animals, dogs, cats, and ducks. Not just boys but girls on tall jungle gyms. The kids move rocks to construct a pool.
For most of the nineteen minutes of A Child Went Forth (1942), happy children play at some property in the country. A narrator (Lloyd Gough) quotes Walt Whitman, about how a child went forth and the first thing that child encountered became part of him. The poem itself comes from Leaves of Grass, a big book I haven't read. My father read it many times, taught it in universities. My copy is his old Riverside Editions trade paperback copy, pages softened by frequency of reading them and pencilling notes in the margins, underlining, circling specific page numbers. The cracked spine predicts that one more reading of that copy of Leaves of Grass will split the text into two parts.
A Child Went Forth (Joseph Losey's second film--he made shorts before getting his own feature to direct, The Boy With Green Hair) from 1942 takes place at a summer camp run by a nursery foundation taking in orphans from the war in Europe. A blonde boy of about twelve is shown watching a tractor turning over topsoil, the narrator offers, "This English boy just a short time ago was watching bombs fall from the sky."
He's the only child identified in that way. The rest, we assume, are children traumatized by war, by the loss (probably violent) of their parents. In this outdoors kindergarten, children play and play, make mud pies, eat the lunches prepared for them by the female staff, of whom we see only about six, but there must be more working the place.
Most of the film shows little kids playing and sleeping hard later, eating, learning about things through hands-on training, like picking up mice and letting them walk about on their skin.
Let's toughen up these traumatized children!
As if what they've gone through already wasn't enough to scrape their souls. Still, the filmmakers have a point here. Learning to deal with reality isn't taught much in school, except when the school experience itself provides negative items on the menu of growing up.
After about minute sixteen, the message of children in wartime begins. The narrator seems to be thinking aloud. The war by this point is two years old. Lots of kids will lose their parents.
Yet, I get the impression there's the sense of keeping these kids safe, alive, trained, and ready to take over to help repopulate a decimated world.
Some of these kids were the right age to end up fighting in Korea, where some of them would be likely to take the lives of children's parents--more orphans, more schools to assuage a problem created by power-hungry idiots playing with economics and war.
These kids are new Americans, war refugees in a time when it was actually more survivable to be a refugee than it is now.
I'm fascinated by Losey's films, even this short one. He made a feature in the early 1960s called These Are the Damned, of which I've only seen the ending. In this sequel to Children of the Damned (which he didn't direct but I have seen that one) there are spooky alien/human hybrid children running a terrified town. The group of children in the 1942 documentary reminded me of those other children; coming about in this closed society from the outside world; playing, but communicating, as a group.
The suggestion in minute nineteen of A Child Went Forth that we're seeing what might happen
across the nation, with relocations of small children to country settings far away from bombing, reminds me of C.S. Lewis's premise for putting four children into a country house that contains a big wardrobe leading to a magical land. The kids in The Chronicles of Narnia get into that alternate world while playing hide and seek, a game Losey's subjects in 1942 may have played.
Lewis's child characters are sent away from bombing. The kids in Losey's film are depicted inside a bright peaceful world, but they fled crushing darkness, they're bound to be haunted. From what I remember of the Narnia books, the kids, if haunted at all, feel that disturbance from difficulties they've faced in Narnia. One can die there.
Losey's film, a kind of doomsday warning, shows humans returning to fresh perspectives, a vacation in Eden run by smiling women. We see the kids in their up moments, mostly. There's a little crying now and then. I thought as I watched, "The kids are immature but the mature ones are blowing up the world."
Vic Neptune
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