On screen, the alienation of these small leads is the root of this moral challenge, and Theodoros Angelopoulos’Landscape in The Mistvisualises this with brutal grit. His film follows 11-year-old Voula and her five-year-old brother Alexandros as they run away from their mother in Greece, trying to reach an absent and unknown father they believe is in Germany.Hopping trains, walking desolate highways, accepting rides, in their vulnerability they encounter both kindness and brutal violence. Here is not the Greece of Homer; far removed in time and place,Angelopoulos explores amainland where romantic notions of past glory feel very distant. His is aGreece alternately desolate, cold, industrial, and muddy, the edges and backroads of asociety in decline.
And yet, it stillstrikes me as apoetic world. Shots unfold like Homeric similes – long, extended takes unpacking layers of meaning.For Deleuze, “the frightened child faced with danger cannot run away, but the world sets about running away for him and takes him with it”.Action often seems to happen around the children, bound tightly together in afiction erected as abarrier to the ‘real’ of the adult world. More than once we encounter grown-ups seemingly frozen, as Voula and Alexandros run through their statue-like stillness undisturbed.
But there is not only misery and impotence in little Odysseys. Wim Wenders makes plain, in his lyrical 1974 workAlice in the Cities, how the world unfolds for achild when an adult centres them. The filmlightly sends young Alice across great distances when she accidentally lands in the care of Philip, astranger, ultimately searching for her grandmother across the Netherlands and Germany. Like Mina, Alice is lost; asked where her grandmother lives, she admits: “l don’t know exactly, but l’ll find it when we get there”. Kiarostamicompared children to “sages we read about in books,” and Philip quickly grants Alice akind of mystical authority over their travels. Her caprices and whims lead them through foggy but recollections of place and memory. And although Alice seems hesitant to complete her journey, where an arrival would mean confrontation with her mother’s neglect, the world seems largely friendly.
These filmmakers resist the temptation to ‘get on the level’ of the child. Framed against their settings, space and scale render their quandaries grand.Alice in the Cities closes with Alice and Philip on atrain, as Wenders pulls out from aclose-up into an aerial view, positioning them both as determinedly fixed objects against aworld making way forthem.
The fact that we have seen fewer films in this vein in recent years is perhaps reflective of the ways that societies have made space for children away from the margins, and how the perspective of filmmakers has shifted. Works like Mike Mills’C’mon C’mon may share sensibilities withAlice in the Cities, but Joaquin Phoenix centres his nephew in away that feels natural to the world of the film. Likewise, while films like Sophy Romvari’sBlue Heron or Annie Baker’sJanet Planet reckon with the shape of adult spaces, they are more focused on the intimacy of family and community dynamics. But across these earlier films, the child’s Odyssey becomes ameans of measuring the specific world that bounds them. Their movement through the margins of adult spaces exposes their moral shape, monstrous or kind, and pushes at the walls of the world outside the screen.