So much of being disciplined into adulthood is a curtailing of the imagination.
In February this year, I watched around thirty kids movies: movies about children, a few movies made for children, and even one film made by children (1985’s Daemon, by the London-based Children’s Film Unit). Most of these films were made in the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century; most, although not all, were European or North American. They were not chosen systematically, nor for any project: I just happened to be thinking about children. Across these films, I was struck both by the representation of children as apolitical and by how often children, as a group, are portrayed as cruel. Child protagonists in these films are often ostracized and bullied by other children. Seeking allyship, these child protagonists find benevolent adults, imaginary friends, non-human animals, or supernatural creatures to help them. Occasionally a fellow child emerges, but almost never fellow children. Elsewhere, children are helpless, entirely vulnerable, and incapable of saving themselves. In stories where children are recognized as having a degree of political agency, it often arises in their capacity to operate as nefarious actors, endangering other children.
This might be explained by the fact that, as Jacqueline Rose argued in The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, children’s narratives aren’t written only or predominantly for children. Instead, they capture and reproduce adult fantasies about children, fixing them on the page since childhood outside of books persists in its unruliness, evading adult understanding. As such, stories that portray children as overwhelmingly cruel or overwhelmingly helpless contribute to naturalizing and justifying the ongoing domination of children by adults. Out of this barrage of adult projections, however, one film stood out to me in its own unruliness and in its commitment to taking children seriously as political actors. Jean Vigo’s 1933 Zero for Conduct sketches out possibilities for comradely solidarity with children by taking seriously their status as political subjects in struggle, and by embracing the utopian possibilities of fiction. Inspired by the director’s own childhood memories of boarding school and effectively banned in France upon its release due to its alleged “anti-patriotic” messaging, Zero for Conduct is an anarchist and surrealist text exploring the violence of disciplinary institutions and the joyful, persistent resistance of children in the face of their oppression.
Theorists of children’s liberation contend that children represent an oppressed group in contemporary capitalist societies. Produced as vulnerable and in need of protection by the privatization of care and the naturalization of the adult-child dichotomy, children are confined to the privatized sphere of disciplinary institutions such as the nuclear family or the school. In her 2018 essay “The Idea of Children,” Madeline Lane-McKinley writes that, “with innocence as its baseline, the liberal idea of children seeks to make natural (but also to moralize) a property relation between child and parent. ‘Innocence’ is code for powerless — a way to fetishize the child as both dependent and sub-human.” This naturalization of a property relation through the weaponization of innocence feeds into children being perpetually invoked in theory or politics as concepts rather than as political subjects. In this context, how can those of us who, like Lane-McKinley, believe in the need to “re-think the adult-child relationship as one of mutual care and learning” and wish to “take up the challenge of comradeship” begin to think with and write about children?
In La Domination Oubliée, the late Tal Piterbraut-Merx suggests that the answer might lie in the unique phenomenological closeness between children and adults. Indeed, every adult was once a child. This dynamic sets the adult-child relationship apart from other dynamics of domination, as this is the only such relationship where every member of the dominant group was once a member of the dominated group. Therefore, in “Conjurer l’oubli: pour une reminiscence politique de nos enfances” (Conjuring up forgetting: for a political reminiscence of our childhoods), Piterbraut-Merx invites adults committed to the work of children’s liberation to undertake a political and collective endeavor of critical remembering. Using memory as a tool, we might be able to critically examine our childhood memories, to remember the political condition of childhood in order to transform it into solidarity with people who are currently children. Although Zero for Conduct predates Piterbraut-Merx’s writing by nearly a century, it strikes me as a perfect example of this critical approach.
It is difficult to identify a clear plot for Zero for Conduct, a formal difficulty one might attribute to the budget restrictions and studio requests that forced Vigo to cut a much longer script to fit into an 8-day shooting period. The 40-minute film is dense, moving in elliptical leaps and jumping from scene to scene: a train ride back to school, the arrival of a new warden, a night in the dormitory, lessons in the classroom, a promenade through the streets of Paris, a food fight in the refectory, and the final riot. A central thread is three boys’ plot to disrupt an upcoming annual school ceremony. Another is the school’s director’s growing suspicion towards the possibility of queer attachments between two of the pupils, Bruel and Tabard. But these threads are only made meaningful retrospectively, through the pivotal dorm riot, an act of resistance ignited by Tabard’s refusal to submit to unwanted attention from a teacher. While the films at times disjointed narrative structure surely results, at least partly, from the aforementioned practical restrictions around shooting, this unruly plot and elliptical narrative structure both reflect Vigo’s commitment to surrealism and is embraced by the children themselves when telling stories. It is yet another way thatVigo’s film feels faithful to a childlike perspective on the world.
The universe of Zero for Conduct is one of permanent injustice and constant disciplinary violence. Over and again, we hear figures of authority punishing children, sentencing the protagonists to privations of freedom. Yet, the institution never fully succeeds in its disciplinary attempts. Despite certain punishment, the children resist in every way imaginable. The first night in the school’s dormitory is the scene of multiple minutely rebellious acts, never quashed by the warden’s disciplinary attempts. Children who play fight are punished by the warden by being made to stand at the foot of the warden’s bed. There, the play fighting starts again. One of the children sleepwalks and as the camera follows him wandering through the dorm, we see a child reading in bed with a pocket lamp, others whispering to each other as they watch the ghost-like figure. In the morning, despite the warden’s best efforts, the children refuse to get out of bed. Upon a first watch, these quotidian acts of rebellion do not register as particularly important. But as the movie unfolds, they come to demonstrate the children’s refusal to concede to the threat of punishment—that is, their agency.
Moreover, children are not divided between those who behave and those who are “naughty.” While we spend more time with our protagonists, Bruel, Caussard, Colin, and Tabard, the other children are not merely an anonymous mass nor antagonists. They too refuse discipline, whether by secretly smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, by playing during study, or by reading past curfew. While the children are all afforded a sense of identity, most of the adults in the film are archetypes or caricatures of cruel authority with the exception of a new warden, Huguet. A Chaplin-like figure, Huguet plays with the children and hides Colin, Caussard, and Bruel from other wardens when they are drawing up the plan for their riot. He refuses to surveil them during study, and when the head teacher walks in, Huguet rips up the piece of paper on which the plot is planned out, preventing its interception. In Les Enfants d’abord (Children first), published in 1976, Christiane Rochefort wrote that “to be an adult is but a choice, through which one forgets and betrays oneself.” Huguet appears to have refused to make this choice, siding instead with the children against authority. Yet, the film does not hinge on his refusal, nor does it make him the main character. Huguet never becomes a leader or a wise advisor. At most, he uses the veneer of authority granted by his job to prevent children from getting caught, acting as an accomplice, and cheers them on when they rebel. Moving away from a model of paternalistic protection, perhaps Huguet’s character can model one path towards supporting children’s emancipatory struggles.
Of the four children protagonists, Tabard is at first excluded from the group. He deviates from gender norms – his hair longer than his classmates, some of whom call him a girl. He doesn’t spend the first night in the dorm with the other boarders because he feels too homesick, betraying his sensitivity. When his friendship with another pupil, Bruel, becomes too close for the authorities’ taste, he is called into the headmaster’s office and disciplined under the guise of concern. The tone here is markedly different from that of the disciplinary acts of surveillance that the pupils are subjected to. Rather than threats and orders, the principal expresses a form of anxious, vaguely threatening concern. Vigo films the scene like a horror movie, with stark lighting, low-angle shots, and the camera circling Tabard dizzyingly. While this interaction shows that the disciplining of pupils extends into their personal lives, the very existence of Tabard and Bruel’s relationship also reveals children’s agency, the various forms that their relationships can take on, and adult’s anxieties around the possibility of non-normative sexuality. That this concern is just an excuse for social control becomes even clearer when, a few scenes later, Tabard is punished for trying to defend himself from a teacher’s unwanted sexual attention, the episode which sparks the central riot. Taken together, these two events illustrate the perverse violence of disciplinary institutions, the way the authorities’ concern is used as a tool of oppression, intervening in Tabard’s consensual and joyful relationship with Bruel and punishing him when he reacts to the threat of sexual abuse from an adult.
As the school prepares for its annual ceremony the day after his disciplinary meeting, Tabard appears moody and troubled. The biology teacher, a comically disgusting character — sweaty, greasy-haired, spitting phlegm into his handkerchief — repeatedly pats Tabard on the head under the guise of concern. His hand lingers a moment too long, and it is clear that this touch feels invasive and inappropriate to the child, who becomes increasingly agitated. Vigo then cuts to a close-up of the teacher’s hand, glistening with sweat, caressing Tabard’s. Although this scene lasts for only a split-second, it is one of the most viscerally disturbing in the movie, hinting at further unwanted infringement on the child’s bodily autonomy within the confines of this institution. Tabard, then, removes his hand, and, faced with the teacher’s mumbling protest, stands up and screams “Et bien moi, je vous dis merde!” (roughly translated, “fuck off”). The school’s figures of authority – the headmaster, all the wardens, other teachers – descend upon Tabard, siding against him. The headmaster tells Tabard that the biology teacher is willing to let the incident pass without consequences if the child agrees to a public apology. But Tabard refuses, once again exclaiming “Monsieur le professeur, je vous dis merde!” In the next scene Tabard’s classmates gather around him as he reads out a revolutionary statement, brandishing a pirate flag: “War has been declared! Down with the wardens! Down with punishments! Long live the rebellion! Freedom or death! Let’s plant our flag on the school’s roof! Tomorrow, everyone, rise up with us!” It is unclear who wrote that statement, although it feels like it might have been prepared as part of the wider rebellion plot. That disciplinary institutions are a site of physical and sexual violence for children was not news, even in 1933, but here Vigo also insists on children’s ability to resist this violence, both individually and collectively. Children are not merely oppressed; they are also involved in a struggle against their own oppression.
After the rebellion begins in earnest, the movie increasingly leans into its utopian elements. The initial riot, in which the children trash the dormitory in protest of the institution’s unjust discipline and in solidarity with Tabard, is depicted as a surrealist ballet in slow-motion, set to an otherworldly score. Tabard runs out to the roof to replace the French flag with the children’s own pirate flag. Children jump up and down on beds as feathers swirl around them and the warden, overwhelmed by their concerted efforts, is entirely incapable of quashing their rebellion. Unlike the initial dorm scene, where rebellious acts had to be hidden and whispered, the children are now able to loudly express their resistance. In the morning, Bruel, Tabard, Colin, and Caussard tie the warden to his bed, hoisted upright, and walk past their sleeping comrades to the attic. Down in the schoolyard the headmaster and other wardens try to keep up appearances in front of city representatives who have joined up for the ceremony. As the festivities begin, the four children start to throw various projectiles (old school books, dirty shoes, empty tin cans) onto the assembly. Down in the yard their comrades and their ally Huguet stand aside and cheer them on, adding to the chaos, to the joy. The school’s authorities set firemen in uniform after the children, but by then it is too late to stop them. Our four rebels are already fleeing across the rooftop. The last images of the film sees them running up towards the sky, as children’s voices sing a victorious song in the background. The frame freezes as they reach the top of the roof. Rather than ending with the children on the run in the “real” world, Vigo ends on the children radically committing to freedom, like pirates sailing out to sea. This utopian ending strikingly opens up possibilities in the viewers’ minds: it forces us to imagine what might have been changed by the kids’ rebellion and refuses to provide a singular or straightforward answer. Perhaps the firemen catch the boys, or perhaps they set off on the run, hiding in the streets of Paris. But maybe this one revolt in one school is a spark that sets off a wider riot. Maybe all children in the city, in the country, decide to rebel against authority, against their oppression. In any case, this is not where Vigo takes us. In fact, he does not take us anywhere, he leaves us hanging, with only the feeling of freedom to hold onto. The unknown can be exhilarating, and this move away from what is plausible, or possible under current conditions is one of the affordances of fiction, one that too often is foreclosed by a commitment to realism. Here, Vigo dares to open the door to the implausible: the children run off into the sky, into the open-ended infinite of revolution.
So much of being disciplined into adulthood is a curtailing of the imagination: stop playing pretend, be reasonable, wish only for what is possible, what can happen. Incidentally, this is also how the capitalist-realist status quo is maintained, through a foreclosure of the imagination. Zero for Conduct, in its unruly form, helps us imagine: what if children’s minute acts of everyday resistance coalesced into something larger? What if we, like Huguet, decided to act in solidarity with children? What if we ran off into the sky? The film works on the imagination by inviting us to think differently about ordinary acts of care and rebellion. It asks us to critically remember our childhood memories so that we can think through children’s domination, and in doing so recognize the many ways that children already work to resist their oppression. The question of children’s liberation from adult domination remains as urgent today as it was in 1933. Children continue to be harmed in all the institutions (from the family to the school) meant to “protect” them. Therefore Zero for Conduct, with its centering of children’s desires and struggles and its move away from a framework of protection towards one of solidarity, continues to be a precious resource, nearly a century on.
Sophie Marie Niang is a Lecturer in Cultural Policy at King’s College London. She loves disco, roasting chicken, and having the correct opinion.
Hold Up is an opportunity to re-encounter a “classic” or “canonical” work—novel, academic monograph, film, album, art exhibit, performance—and ask, does it still hold up? A “Hold Up” feature must historicize its object: why or how is this object able to speak to a cultural or political context that it did not anticipate?
Thumbnail photo via Wikimedia
