o cinema dos primeiros tempos como uma infância do cinema

Abstract

Inspired by the multiple images of children found in early cinema, we propose a reflection on the relationships between childhood and cinema. According to Walter Benjamin (2009), both childhood and cinema can be considered modern creations: the concept of childhood as an important period of individual formation emerges inseparably from the technologies of image production and reproduction that allow us to see children in a unique way, first in the still images of photography and later in the moving images of cinema. From this starting point, we wonder if it would be possible to consider the "invention" of cinema as a gesture of childhood. We propose to think of a notion of childhood in cinema that goes beyond teleological reductionism. To do so, we start from a psychoanalytic perspective about the process of language acquisition, which coincides with the subject's process of individuation in early childhood. From this perspective, we establish an analogy between childhood and the development of cinema as moments equally marked by the entrance into language: from a situation strongly influenced by visuality, experimentation, discovery, and free play, towards an entrance into the structured symbolic system of language through constant negotiation with the conventions and limits of the adult world.