Young Children Crying in Movies

Hello,

While we are all in lockdown, many of us want to co-create a new world. 

My share as a hummingbird* would be to wish no more infants, babies or toddlers would be left crying it out in movies.

Last year in November, I started a petition, by printing it and collecting signatures the old-fashioned way. Because, guess what... I am not very young anymore. So let's try and move with the times...

If my arguments convinced you, could you please sign the online petition and who knows maybe our dream will come true?

Link to the petition Happy Babies in Movies :

http://chng.it/vRzW48ZS

Thank you.

Stay safe

M.-E.

* The Legend of the Hummingbird says there was an enormous forest fire. The hummingbird swooped into the lake and picked up a few drops of water, put them on the fire, went back to the lake and did it again and again. The other animals made fun of it, saying it was useless. The hummingbird replied: I know, I am doing what I can (Inspired by the philosophy of Mouvement Colibris, Pierre Rabhi).

Young Children Crying in Movies

Some of you may have been among the millions of Internet users to watch the video that made the buzz on social networks, a dad whose children burst into his office while interviewed by the BBC. « Hilarious, the most laughable video… », comment users. Am I the only one who did not laugh? Am I the only one who saw how roughly the mother took the girl out of the room? If the video was played in slow motion, would people see the brutality? And if it was a puppy or a kitten that the woman would have brutally pulled by its front leg - nearly dislocating the shoulder - and then dragged on the floor? Wouldn’t animal welfare organizations firmly criticize it? When focusing on the girl, you can see she firstly hits the edge of the table with her ribs and then you can clearly hear her scream when her mother pulls her arm: Ouch Ouch! while the lady makes the child almost pass under the little brother’s baby walker, the space left between it and the door frame being too narrow. If you listen carefully, you will hear the girl scream in pain.

Meanwhile, the video became viral and the family released new videos showing the little girl is fine. The mother had reacted in a rush because of the live interview and the parents were probably able to explain to their daughter why her mother hurt her.

What about written, scheduled scenes of a movie? Do parents explain to their children someone is going to make them cry for entertainment, to make people laugh or be touched?

Like the German film 3 Türken und ein Baby by Sinan Akkuş.

How many adults are there on a film set? Twenty? Fifty? One hundred? Several hundred? I wish I was a fly to see the reaction of all those people: were they indifferent to the crying of the little actress? Puzzled? Sad? Amused maybe since the purpose of the film was to make people laugh. At the expense of the little girl?!? Perhaps the fly would have been appalled to see what our species inflicts on its young. Because the baby girl is one of the best actors in the film: when she struggles, visibly trying to get away from the man who carries her, when - with loud cries and tears - she vainly tries to get her mother to come and take her from that man's arms, she cries FOR REAL. 

In the scene at the hospital, when she is on the man’s shoulder, she is quiet at first. If you pay attention to her little face and especially to her eyes, you will see she is looking down to something or someone and she suddenly starts weeping. What did she see? Is it right to find out WHAT would invariably trigger the girl’s tears and to use it on purpose? For fun? 

Another example is an Indian movie by Shonali Bose: Amu.

Although it is interesting to learn about the little-known story of the Sikhs, it is difficult not to have one’s heart torn asunder when focusing on the little boy during the whole scene: he starts crying when the whole family hears a crowd shouting while they are sitting on the floor for their meals. You don’t need to understand the language to know that the little one calls for "Mummy" while crying. The baby boy cries during the whole scene. Detonations, gunshots, screaming, glass shattering. The actress playing the mother exclaims anxiously: "What is all this commotion?", the father gets up, takes a dagger, tells "his wife" to stay inside with the children. The woman grabs the kids, makes them get up and hide under a shelf. If you focus on the boy during the whole scene, you will understand he is not pretending going through a scary time, HE IS! He cries for real and calls his mother for help! Probably nobody told him that it was just a part he was supposed to play in a movie, that there was no need to be afraid, that nothing of what he was going through was real ... Obviously. Otherwise he wouldn’t have cried and the scene wouldn’t have been credible.

How to instill confidence in this little traumatized being? How could we hope the child will successfully develop trust, will feel safe and secure in the world? 

According to neuropsychologist Bérengère Guillery-Girard, "Although we can’t remember anything of our first few years, they nonetheless leave a long-lasting mark on our adult personality". 

Do I really want to have young children traumatized for my entertainment?

How do directors think it can feel right? Because it doesn’t! It doesn’t feel right at all, once you conscientiously prevent yourself from getting carried away by the story.

In an episode from David Hare's British series Collateral, a baby cries in the arms of "his" junkie mother who is getting a pizza on which she is supposed to find the drug she ordered by phone. If you pay attention to the baby "actor", you will notice that picture and sound match: the baby cries real tears, and even starts crying before the deliveryman arrives, still wearing his motorcycle helmet, which probably brings added fear for the baby.

How did they do? Did they suddenly grabbed the baby from his mother’s arms to get him cry before starting to shoot the scene?

Besides, I always wonder how directors do. Do they starve the children or what? Do they keep them awake and wait until they are exhausted? Or do they prevent them from seeing their parents?

Is there no way to protect those babies and toddlers who are deliberately left crying it out when other options exist? Some directors simply use baby crying sound effects to match the picture of an adult actor or actress holding a newborn facing them. They trust the viewers will be intelligent enough to know what a weeping baby looks like without needing to traumatize one!

I started to notice the suffering of children when I saw Lore, an Austro-German-British film by Cate Shortland about Hitler's children. 

I had been invited to the preview in Brussels. I remember coming out of the movie overwhelmed with sadness and regretting not having left the theatre at the beginning of the film. The nine- or ten-month-old baby was the best of all actors. The film is not available on the streaming website I subscribed to and I certainly don’t want to pay any money to the movie makers to watch it again and find extracts of it but in my memory, the baby was crying from the beginning to the end of the film. For real. That's for sure: the little one did not play comedy.

When I see this film won 14 awards and 15 nominations (!), shouldn’t I need to worry about the future of humanity?

Ever since, I immediately stop being carried away by the fiction when I see young children crying in movies. But before, I was like most people. I think we are just getting used to seeing such scenes and do not realize the little ones are NOT acting. The problem is the more we see them, the more insensitive we get.

In Love, Rosie for instance, the actress playing the young mother is so brilliant I was carried away by her acting and I forgot for just a moment that the infant left crying it out in her arms wasn’t hers! Is this really fair to the newborn? 

And another example.

I also went to the preview of Kings, a film by director Deniz Gamze Ergüven. An intense movie about interracial violence, but cleverly balanced by profound human emotions of loving, caring and sharing. I certainly would have recommended to watch the movie if it wasn’t for three scenes. Was it really necessary to add two victims to the sad but true story? Did the baby "actors" deserve to be traumatized? I don’t think so. It doesn’t add anything to the intensity of the movie. 

Right at the beginning of the film, gunshots are heard. The mother in panic makes her foster kids take shelter under the dining table. If you focus on the baby boy, you can tell he is REALLY scared. The same goes a few minutes later during the scene where a saucepan catches fire and everybody shouts and rushes out of the house in panic: the little one DOESN’T KNOW he is safe! He really cries out in fear. And the same goes again during the riots, when you see two toddlers sitting on the floor and crying their eyes out.

This is 2020! We stopped a long time ago to harm animals for entertainment! Isn’t it time to stop harming young children for entertainment?

In Cargo, an Australian film by Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke, you can see several scenes in which the baby girl cries. Two scenes are particularly harsh, once you have opened your eyes on the fact that babies and toddlers can’t understand they are part of a fiction: when the main actor tries to keep the baby quiet by putting his hand over her mouth, you can see the man is gentle in reality but still, the little one doesn’t like it and tries to make her understood by shaking her head and crying. And the scene in which she is on another man’s lap. The actor is excellent and pretends using force while he is gentle to the baby girl. But still, you can clearly see she’s afraid of his scary face and calls her mother for help.

How can we allow this? Why do we keep looking and letting it happen? "The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.", said Albert Einstein. Well, I do not want to remain passive anymore. I no longer wish to see in movies young children whose needs were deliberately denied in order to get them to cry long enough to get the scenes shot. 

I ask the European and international authorities to enact legislation on the use of babies and young children for entertainment, to investigate the long-term psychological effects on them and to prohibit the exploitation of feelings of sadness, fear, pain, distress of babies or toddlers for the shooting of movies, videos or any footages.

And I wish to see one day the disclaimer "No babies or toddlers were harmed during the making of this film" on EVERY movie. 

What about you ?

M.-E.

Bibliography

Films

3 Türken und ein Baby, Sinan Akkuş, 2015

Amu, Shonali Bose, 2005

Cargo, Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke, 2017

Children interrupt BBC News interview, 10 March 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh4f9AYRCZY

(accessed March 27, 2017)

Collateral, British series of David Hare, S1E1, 2018

Kings, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2018

Lore, Cate Shortland, 2013

Love, Rosie, Christian Ditter, 2014 

Article

Le mystère de l’amnésie infantile se dissipe, article by Bérengère GUILLERY-GIRARD published in the journal La Recherche (special issue) n° 22 « La Mémoire », p. 41.