by Suzanne Schulz
“It is a noble thing, the rearing of warriors for the revolution.” –Toni Cade, 1970
I approach this project as a newish parent, steeped in the magic and potentiality of children’s books and movies, but also hesitantly censorious towards uncertain boundaries of propriety and potentially harmful content including racial and gender stereotypes, cruelty, violence, and death. As I read and watch films with my child even more frequently during this stay-at-home era of COVID-19, I have begun to treat children’s arts as a source of sustenance. I believe that enlightenment values, homogeneous, linear time, and a universal definition of modernity are naturally elided in works for children. Children’s art, film, and media are, therefore, potent resources for a world beyond the one in which we live, and for the revolutionary imaginations of all. When it comes to revolutionary children’s arts, however, aesthetic strategies vary and boundaries of propriety according to locality, culture, identity and historical experience are continuously redrawn. This is a crucial lesson.
My project attempts to ask, which themes, images, motifs and aesthetic strategies are used most productively in revolutionary arts for children and how can we learn from them as adults? I discuss three temporally overlapping experiments in children’s art, film and media: the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in pre-revolutionary Iran (1965-1979); the Black Arts Movement in the United States (1965-1975); and the Popular Unity Government’s media in Allende’s Chile (1970-1973). I explore how these children’s projects realize several aims of third cinema. They engage in a dialogue with children, taking them seriously as thinkers and viewers of art; they productively incorporate indigenous traditions, the pre-modern, and magic to rethink the future; and they presume that childhood is always shaped by various forms of oppression, war and struggle.
I begin with a counter-example: an artwork that addresses the experience of a child and draws on aesthetics and motifs of children’s art, but which was not intended for an audience of children. The image below uses an innocent, brightly colored style to respond to the story of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year old Kurdish migrant from Kobane, Syria, whose body washed up on an Aegean beach near the Bodrum, Turkey on September 2, 2015. Most of us know of this even through a chilling, widely circulated news photograph by Nilüfer Demir of Kurdi’s dead body alone on the beach. Jamal Elias suggests that this photo “captured the essence of the tragedy—[Aylan Kurdi] was the victim of an antichildhood” (70) The artwork by Mahnaz Yazdani responds to the photograph and reminds us of the play and fun of which Kurdi was deprived. The children in this work look serene and are not isolated. The artist offers the companionship of other smiling, sleeping children—and a teddy bear. However, their softly resting figures are threatened. We all know that waves don’t stand still. The work utilizes materials of childhood art but brings into relief disparate experiences of childhood.
Another example, this time a work that was explicitly meant for children, draws on rich folklore to enrich children’s imagination and thoughts, but includes elements that push against the boundaries of children’s art. This is the book, The Story of Colors (La Historia De Los Colores), written in 1999 by Subcommandante Marcos, then military leader and spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico. (His name has since changed; he has said that Subcommandante Marcos was a “hologram.”) This book is an origin story for colors, set in a mythical time and includes references to smoking (Marcos was always seen with a pipe in his mouth), labor, blood, and making love.
It is striking that the first color emerges from pain: the red of blood. Marcos writes, “And [a god] tripped on a stone so big that he hit his head and it started to bleed. And the god, after screaming and squawking for quite a while, looked at his blood and saw that it was a different color, one that wasn’t like the other two colors. And he went running to where the other gods were an showed them the new color, and they called this color red, the third color to be born.” I take this book as an emblematic example of revolutionary children’s art. It draws on folklore, suggests a more enriching racial imaginary, and it takes seriously the child as thinker.
Children’s Film and Media in Pre-Revolutionary Iran
“No one put me up to anything,” said the little fish. “I have reason, and intelligence and understanding. I have eyes and I can see.” –The Little Black Fish
The Iranian Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, popularly known by its Farsi name’s abbreviation, Kanoon, was founded in 1965. It opened children’s libraries, children’s theaters and craft classes, published children’s books, and made films for children (Naficy 330-331). Between 1966-1979, Kanoon was a gathering place for leftists, some who had recently emerged from prison. Kanoon deliberately omitted American films from its collection, rejecting values and styles associated with Hollywood film (Solanas and Getino, Third Cinema Manifesto). In the words of one of its contributors, “Kanoon hardly let any commercial or empty American films enter the collection. [Later, that very collection would be the fuel for the post-revolutionary media to broadcast un-American films with educational and cultural values far removed from ostensibly Western or capitalist ideas.]” (Bidoun).
Filmmakers and writers of Kanoon drew on the allegorical and folkloric and sidelined Western classics: “Stories such as Baba Barfi (Father Snow), Amoo Norooz (Uncle New Year), The Journey of Sinbad, or Khorshid Khanoom Aftab Kan (Shine on, Lady Sun) were tales that all Iranian children would come to know and cherish. Prior to Kanoon’s founding, most children’s books in the country were translations of Western classics. There was Pinocchio, The Little Prince, and Tin Tin” (Bidoun).
In addition to excluding American films and Western stories from their collections, Iranian children’s art mobilized another aspect of Third Cinema: revolutionary engagement. Arguing against claims that Kanoon projects (and later the Iranian New Wave) were apolitical, some have argued that, “their more restrained, open strategy is very much in keeping with Third Cinema’s emphasis on dialogue between text and viewer and its aversion to conventional forms such as clear, linear melodrama” (White 94). The assembled group of filmmakers and artists “addressed adult audiences as well and were often philosophical in tone and critical in approach, encouraging the questioning of traditions and of received notions of authority” (Naficy 330-331).
In the Kanoon-produced book, The Little Black Fish, a female fish begins to think about the world and wants to leave the small pond in which she lives. When she questions the worldview of her small pond, she is maligned and accused of subversion by her neighbors. Her grandmother asks her what has gotten into her head—where has she received these ideas. She travels down a waterfall, through a stream, into a lake and is threatened by various animals. She attempts to politicize a group of small fish along the way, slashes a pelican with a dagger made of grass and eventually ends up either martyred in the belly of a bird or free and never heard from again, an ambiguous and exciting ending that leads to dialogue. Sadeghi writes, “The narrator of the story, a grandmother to many little fish, explains that the little black fish has disappeared by the end — a little like the martyrs who have died trying to find a better world. It was hard not to find political symbolism in this, along with other stories. Incidentally, its author, Samad Behrangi was an active socialist agitator who translated some of Iran’s most avant-garde poets, like Ahmad Shamlou, Forough Farrokhzad, and Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, into his native Azeri language. He drowned in the Aras River in 1967, and his death is generally blamed on the Pahlavi regime” (Bidoun).
Children and the Black Arts Movement
“We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetrators of evil.” -Haki Madhubuti
The Black Arts Movement began in 1965 in Harlem with the establishment of Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theater. By 1968, it grew to encompass literature, poetry, and other arts. Children’s education and art projects were part of the movement. Just as education in the Black Power Movement more generally was often conceived as a process of re-education, removing white supremacist knowledge systems to build anew, part of the work of the Black Arts Movement was destructive, to destroy, in the words of Haki Madhubuti “white-childhood artifacts” (Capshaw 160). But the Black Arts Movement didn’t stop there; it crafted an aesthetic of liberation in which the black child was central.
Black Arts Movement photo-book projects resisted the prevalent photojournalistic mode of expose and used photographs of black children to “[fly] in the face of white-created photographic representations of the decayed city and corrupt urban youth that were prevalent in the late 1960s in newspaper accounts of riots and social unrest” (163). They included oral and performance elements and enlisted children as poets.
Poems by Kali stands out among this work. The book was a collaboration between photographers Joan Halifax and Robert Fletcher and Kali Grosvenor, a seven-year old girl who wrote resonant poems like (“”love is my color/ black is my color””) and (“”Why are/ White Folks/ So mean outside/ and Inside in There/ hearts mean. . .”). In the Black Arts Movement, childhood was an “icon and as process in order to argue for the child as embodying both black essence and futurity” (Capshaw 157).
The Popular Unity Government of Chile
“Among all these subordinate worlds there is one, however, which might be more important than all the rest, which might be the only universal world, and which constitutes the axis of all processes of domination: namely, the world of children…” -Ariel Dorfman, The Empire’s Old Clothes
In 1970, Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government was elected in Chile, and it began to produce “new comic books, inexpensive paperback literature sold on newsstands, a series of TV programs, [and] a magazine for adolescents” (Dorfman 4). As part of this effort, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart published the unique book, How to Read Donald Duck. This book critiques Disney comics in Latin America from a Marxist point of view. The Popular Unity publishing house was called Quimantú (Mapuche for “Sun of Knowledge”) and offered various literary and children’s works at an extremely low price at newsstands and depots. The company is reported to have published a book a day for the first fifteen days of its existence (Maldonado).
How to Read Donald Duck demystified Disney by demonstrating how Disney and other art and media from the United States represent the “third world” as children. Dorfman argued that “Since those communities, classes races, continent, and individuals who don’t fit the official mold tend to be viewed as ‘children,’ as incomplete beings who haven’t yet reached the age of maturity, it is children’s literature, or the infantilization of mass market adult literature, which forms the entire basis of cultural domination” (5-6). Like children who must learn to conform to social rules, residents of the “third world” must learn to act appropriately towards global capitalism.
In later works, Dorfman continued to critique children’s literature in relation to other children’s characters: “Supposedly the child starts from the same point as Babar, free from social influences, and only gradually begins to lose his savage and ignorant ways in order to become a responsible member of society” (13). Dorfman also wrote his own children’s book, The Rebellion of the Magical Rabbits.
One of Quimantú’s most important projects was Cabrochico, a children’s magazine that included locally made (rather than imported) comics and was incredibly popular. It also published science fiction works like Panchito En La Tierra De La Fantasia (Panchito in the land of Fantasy), which contained “interaction between the artist and the characters, and a surprising use of resources graphic and dreamlike elements rarely seen until then in Chilean artists in comics, we only knew them in advertising drawing” (Hasson).
Conclusion
“But the Emperor has nothing at all on!” said a little child. “Listen to the voice of the child!” exclaimed his father. What the child had said was whispered from one to another. “But he has nothing at all on!” at last cried out all the people. -The Emperor’s New Clothes
This essay rests on the premise that no children’s films or literature have ever been ideologically neutral. We need only look to 19th century Europe to see that children’s literature emphasized for girls “domestic service, childrearing, and nurturing, boys’ readings depicted exotic locales…and daring colonial exploits” (Tignor 658). We can safely say that all children’s art is political—even when it teaches an apparently moral lesson. But not all children’s art is revolutionary.
Children’s revolutionary film and media are made against prevailing power structures. This process is part of what makes them revolutionary. But the other crucial part is that their very form and process destabilize taken-for-granted notions and embedded structures of power. The projects of Kanoon did this with their open-ended structures and by drawing on folk tales and re-crafting them as allegories for the present. The Black Arts movement did this by putting children at the center of futurity and by collaborating with children to produce photo books. And the Popular Unity projects took a beloved children’s form, critiqued it, and retooled it for a brief revolutionary flourishing in Chilean history.
If we want to learn from revolutionary arts for children, we need to turn to the ones that succeed in these ways. Despite the intended lesson at the end of every parable, children are a particularly unruly audience and can resist intended readings, even revolutionary ones. We need to learn from the unique time of the child and the perspectives children offer in particular places and times—their traumas, vulnerability, limited agency, openness, and unlimited imagination.
Bibliography
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Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Ediciones Universitarias De Valparafso, 1971.
Dorfman, Ariel. The Empire’s Old Clothes. What the Lone Ranger, Babar, the Reader’s Digest, and other false friends do to our minds, Pantheon Books, New York, 1983 (2nd edition 2010) (Patos, elefantes y héroes: La infancia como subdesarrollo, 1985)
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“Poems by Kali.” Kirkus Review, 17 Apr. 1970.
Sadeghi, Arash, et al. “Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children & Young Adults.” Bidoun, 1 July 2009, www.bidoun.org/articles/institute-for-the-intellectual-development-of-children-young-adults.
Subcommandante Marcos. The Story of Colors (La Historia De Los Colores). Cinco Puntos Press, 1999.
“Towards a Third Cinema.” Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino. http://documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/camasgun.html
White, Jerry. “Children, Narrative and Third Cinema in Iran and Syria.” Revue Canadienne D’Études Cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2002, pp. 78–97.