[spectre] CFP: The Most Important of All Ages [Childhood in Soviet Cinema] (Paris, 4-6 May 25)

[Andreas Broeckmann LEU]

From: Stanislas de Courville
Date: Dec 1, 2025
Subject: CFP: The Most Important of All Ages (Paris, 4-6 May 25)

Paris, INHA, May 4–06, 2026
Deadline: Jan 18, 2026

The Most Important of All Ages. Children, Childhood(s) and Childlikeness 
in Soviet Cinema.

“Save the starving children!!!” the title card of the opening episode of 
Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda urges the spectator just before the images of 
street children looking desperately for food are displayed on screen. 
The fact that this first episode of the “film-truth” by the Soviet 
director, released in the birth-year of the USSR, took as its key 
subject the tragic fate of children, perfectly symbolizes the 
fundamental link between the new political regime and childhood: the 
most important of all ages, one could say, paraphrasing the famous quote 
from Lenin about the Seventh Art. The attention that the new socialist 
power paid to children, whose living conditions during the civil war 
caused a huge number of deaths and abandonment, is indeed immediate and 
lasting in the young country. This country presents itself as the 
“country for children,” built for them and shortly by them: the 
revolutionaries of those days were not certain that they would see their 
work finished during their lifetime, therefore it is tomorrow’s 
generation that will enjoy it when they complete its edification.
     The attention that the new power paid to childhood would be 
strongly reflected in cinema, whose educational value would be 
officially claimed during the very first days following the Bolshevik 
Revolution (Leyda, 1960: 121). The alliance wanted between art of the 
masses and the education of youth (including its ideological 
indoctrination) would, throughout Soviet history, be channeled through 
the desire to produce films dedicated to children. Such films would come 
to constitute a unique genre—with sometimes porous boundaries (Arkus et 
al., 2002: 100)—of “children’s cinema” (detskoe kino), which would at 
certain times draw on huge resources and generate great success, and 
which would also be expressed by the production of a more specifically 
school film (škol’nyj fil’m) (Arkus, 2010; Serov, 2023).
     Far from being limited to these latter two categories, the 
attachment of Soviet culture to childhood and its universe is so 
frequently expressed in current film production that Evgeny Margolit 
(2000), the author of several seminal studies on this subject, was able 
to speak of the child as “the symbol that most fully expresses the 
essence of Soviet cinema”. He has stressed how the child’s appearance or 
disappearance on screen narrates the political history of the country 
and its tragic events. As Margolit (2000) has astutely summarized, this 
symbol of the child shifts from a new world in the silent films of the 
1920s – a world in complete rupture with the past which is overturned or 
erased – , to the end of history in the carnivalesque world—the “eternal 
festival of labour”—of the mid-1930s: a joyful image of the country thus 
stands in complete opposition with a reality even more violent than that 
shown by Vertov in 1922. The symbol of the child becomes less important 
with the climax of the Stalin cult, when the place of the worshipped 
child is taken by the idolized figure of the leader; it is subsequently 
renewed in the shape of a “martyr” of the war that had shaken the 
country and its people (Hicks, 2016). At the same time, the figure of 
Stalin turned from “father” to “brother”.
     Finally, during the Thaw the childhood theme changes significantly 
in its cinematic representation, offering a rich variety of characters 
alongside the equally abundant portrayals of adolescents and young 
adults. Filmmakers lent an unprecedented maturity to the child figure, 
partly due to the absence of fathers, who had perished during the war or 
fallen victim to the country’s criminal history, as well as a newly 
found joyfulness in the innocence of play that stands in sharp contrast 
with the solemn rigidity of the mythologized children of Stalinist 
propaganda, acting only for the benefit of the collective. If, as this 
brief historical summary shows, the highly symbolic significance of the 
child figure made it such a central point, or even the “essence” of 
Soviet cinema, then it calls for a return to the child-figure, with 
renewed and sustained attention to the shifts and continuities in order 
to map further its historical, ideological, mythopoetic, poetic and 
philosophical metamorphosis within the Soviet cinematographic space.
     Beyond single figures of children, the child as symbol could even 
be expressed “independent of the age” of the protagonists, Margolit 
(2000) argued, revealing a “childlike principle” which inhabits Soviet 
film characters. Therefore, we should not reduce our field of 
investigation to the numerous child characters, such as Misha, Dunyasha, 
and Tom (Red Imps, 1923), Yasha and Galya (The House in the Snowdrifts, 
1928), Mustapha and Kolka (Road to Life, 1931), Nastenka and Katya (Once 
There Was a Girl, 1944), Seryozha (1960), Vika and Roman (The Girl and 
the Echo, 1964), Ivan and Marichka (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 
1965), Seit (Jamilya, 1969), Lena and Dima (Scarecrow, 1984), etc., but, 
on the contrary, to apprehend such a “childlike principle” in the 
multiplicity and heterogeneity of its expressions, as long as it is 
theoretically justified. Finally, the investigation focuses on the 
representation of childhood itself: its characteristics, its cultural 
plurality, its beginnings and ends, its memory, its nostalgia, etc., as 
well as on the historical bias that influences its conception and limits 
its perception.
     Among the themes that the contributors are invited to explore, 
without any limitation in their scholarly approaches (historical, 
aesthetic, cultural, etc.) and the genres studied (feature films, 
documentaries, children’s films, educational films, animated films, TV 
shows, etc.), the following examples may form focal points:
•    Figures and representations of childhood, children’s itineraries: 
specific case studies, of fictional or real child characters portrayed 
on screen, of the staging and acting of children and their history; 
archetypes such as the pioneers (pionery) or the komsomols 
(komsomol’tsy), the martyr (of Revolution or war), or orphans and 
homeless children (besprizorniki), whose appearance spans the entire 
history of Soviet cinema from Kino-Pravda (1922) or Mr West… (1924) to, 
at least, Freeze – Die – Come to Life (1990), including films such as 
The Destiny of a Man (1959) or Dead Man’s Letters (1986).
•    Childhood memories and children’s visions: the staging of the 
memory of early years of childhood; the contribution of memory to 
filmmaking at its different stages (script, shooting, etc.); the 
manifestation of personal memory within images, or, on the contrary, its 
dissimulation; the cinematographic forms of childlike perception (child 
gaze).
•    Russian cultural imperialism and childhood(s): representation and 
obliteration (or rendering invisible) of children from other ethnicities 
than Russian in Soviet films; manipulation of representations (and a 
comparative perspective with Soviet visual culture, where appropriate) 
(e.g. Red Imps [1923], Circus [1936]), or on the contrary the 
affirmation of a cultural identity (My Name is Kozha, 1964; The Sky of 
Our Childhood, 1966); pluralities of childhood (telescoping, fusion or 
conflict in childhood of different cultures, such as Russian, Jewish, 
Ukrainian, Georgian, Latvian, Kyrgyz); Soviet education across the 
“Sixth part of the world” (e.g. Alone [1931], The First Teacher [1965]).
•    The symbolism of childhood: symbolic and allegorical dimensions of 
the subject of childhood; political aims or subtexts; variations of the 
“childlike principle” and links with the historical trajectory of the 
country; the embodiment of values or entities (utopia, people, future, 
goodness, etc.); the status of mother/father/daughter/son, links and 
symbolic variations; generational conflicts; the 
“feminine”/“masculine”/“childlike” poles (Margolit), and their dialectic.
•    Childhood in history, history in childhood: the child’s position in 
or out of the communist utopia. The constant emphasis on his role for 
the future tends to deny the child any carefree moments in his (filmic) 
existence, a dimension considered characteristic of this period of life. 
Could the child exist outside of the task the ideology attributed to 
him/her? Or is s/he led to struggle against this task to retrieve 
his/her innocence? (e.g. Sandu in Man Follows the Sun by Mikhail Kalik 
[1962], Kostya Inochkin in Welcome, or No Trespassing by Elem Klimov 
[1964]).
•    Childhood in war: the impossible place of childhood in the war, its 
negation through conflict, its shaping through violence; the trauma 
during and after the war, etc. (e.g. Red Imps [1923], The House in the 
Snowdrifts [1928], Chapaev [1934], Once There Was a Girl [1944], The 
Taras Family [1945], Ivan’s Childhood [1962], Wounded Game [1977], Come 
and See [1985], The Commissar [1967, 1987]).
•    The child and death: the death of a child as greatest injustice; 
the impossibility to build the future on sacrifice (or tears) of 
children; the reproduction of violence (living in death). From 
Polikushka (1922) and Battleship Potemkin (1925), or from Cross and 
Mauser (1925) and The White Eagle (1928), to I Want the Floor (1976), 
Come and See (1985) or Among Grey Stones (1983), not forgetting Road to 
Life (1931), Torn Boots (1933), Bezhin Meadow (1935-1937), Alexander 
Nevsky (1938), The Rainbow (1944), Triumph Over Violence (1965) and 
others, the death of a child is a haunting theme in Soviet cinema.
•    “As strong as death”: giving birth and coming into the world 
(pregnancy, childbirth, the plan for a child, rejection of the unborn 
child, etc.); the symbolism of reproduction (e.g. Katka’s Reinette 
Apples [1926], Bed and Sofa [1927], Salt for Svanetia [1930], Seryozha 
[1960], The Story of Asya Klyachina [1967], The Commissar [1967, 1987]).
•    Cinema and the great literary (re)constructions of childhood: 
Tarkovsky and The Life of Arseniev by Ivan Bunin; My Childhood by Gorky, 
and Socialist Realism; but also Childhood by Tolstoy, Kotik Letaev by 
Bely, The Diary of a Communist Schoolboy by Ognyov, Story of My Dovecote 
by Babel, The Noise of Time by Mandelstam, Before Sunrise by Zoshchenko, 
etc., and their possible or certain echoes in films; comparative 
approaches between cinema and literature to the symbolism of childhood 
(both in pre-Soviet literary sources and in Soviet literature), 
influence of Russian and Soviet literary myths of childhood: Tolstoy’s 
aristocratic childhood, Gorky’s proletarian one.
•    History and physiognomy of children’s film: creation and 
development of children’s film in the USSR; history of its productions 
and institutions (Soyuzdetfil’m); characteristics of children’s films; 
images of childhood promoted; figures in the history of this cinema 
(Margarita Barskaya).

Organizing Committee:
Stanislas de Courville and Eugénie Zvonkine

Scientific Committee:
Birgit Beumers (University of Passau), Stanislas de Courville 
(University Paris 8), Catherine Géry (INALCO), Julian Graffy (University 
College London), Macha Ovtchinnikova (University of Strasbourg), Valérie 
Pozner (CNRS), Irina Tcherneva (CNRS), Eugénie Zvonkine (University Paris 8)

Submission guidelines:
Proposals for presentations, in the form of abstracts (maximum 300 
words), written in English or French, must be submitted to 
stanislasdecourville at gmail.com before January 18, 2026, and accompanied 
by brief bio-bibliographies from the author(s). Presentations may be 
given in French or English. Applicants will be notified of the 
Scientific Committee’s decision during the month of February.

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French version of the CFP:
https://www.estca.univ-paris8.fr/le-plus-important-de-tous-les-ages-enfants-enfances-et-enfantin-dans-le-cinema-sovietique/

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Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: The Most Important of All Ages (Paris, 4-6 May 25). In: 
ArtHist.net, Dec 1, 2025. <https://arthist.net/archive/51255>.