Infância e cinema: implicações para a formação das crianças na sociedade contemporânea

Abstract

Children's moral posture has been developed in a social environment in which audiovisual images catch their attention at an increasingly early age. Despite this, teachers still do not recognize the urgency to look carefully at these images and do not reali ze how they have affected the way children and adults are and act. With the intention of contributing to the construction of this recognition, this research proposed the following question: how has cinema portrayed childhood in modern society? Thus, the ge neral objective of this research was to make a critical analysis of the way the cinematographic images have approached childhood and how they relate to Adorno's ideas about an education that opposes barbarism and is inserted in a broader perspective of con tributing to the recognition of the urgency and importance of looking carefully at these images. The theoretical reference adopted was based mainly on the studies of Adorno and his concepts of Cultural Industry, Cultural Formation and Semi - formation, Barbarism and Education for Emancipation; in Walter Benjamin and his understanding of Childhood and its relation to culture and in Neil Postman with his thesis about the disappearance of childhood. The methodology used involved the bibliographic study and analysis of the films "In the Age of Innocence" (François Truffaut - 1976) and "Minions" (Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda - 2015). Associated to this analysis, the participation in a Research and Extension Project called "The cinema as an innovative experience of teachers’ cultural training II" in interface with the research of the Program of Post - Graduation in Education of the Federal University of Lavras - MG made it possible to watch films that presented different styles from those usually exhibited by commercia l theaters and were ironically called “quality cinema” by the twentieth- century cinematic vanguard. This research made it possible to have a different view about the childhood presented in the films and to think about other ways of looking at children. Finally, this paper highlights this different way of viewing and thinking as something fundamental for teachers to relate in a critical way to the artistic and cultural productions that the adult world today has presented to children, as well as other productions that have been devoted to the childhood theme.