28 October 2015 – Bulmershe Theatre, University of Reading
‘Diamonds of the Night: Childhood Loneliness in World Cinema’
Profesor Hemelryk Donald’s will discuss the sounds of a child’s loneliness in film. Her paper draws specifically on films treating the child in accelerated motion, whether in flight from immediate danger or in search of home, a new home or a return to a previous environment. Part of a larger project on the child migrant, this paper attempts to hear how sound or its absence provokes the sense of loneliness in cinema, and discusses how this impacts the wider notion of cinematic childishness and maturation. Dealing with questions of presence and absence, with space and frame, and with youth and ageing, it aims to contribute to a review of twentieth century postwar thematics of childhood in a twenty-first century crisis of child migration.
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is Professor and Head of the School of the Arts, University of Liverpool. She is a recent Professorial Future Fellow (UNSW) and a CI on the Child, Nation and Film Network (Leverhulme). Her current project on child migration in world cinema, The Dorothy Project, will be published by IB Tauris in 2017.