Good question.  The biopic genre, which I work in, provides almost 

innumerable examples of films that start in childhood and establish a 

continuity into adulthood.  Think of recent, conventional biopics like 

RAY and WALK THE LINE, which show the subject as steeped in specific 

childhood trauma that must be worked out in adulthood.  Actually, these 

films are also rooted in the therapeutic subgenre.  A film like MARNIE, 

which posits an adult protagonist with a childhood trauma is as much 

the prototype for those films as classical biopics are.  So many 

entertainer biopics of the '40s introduced the talented hero as a child 

(e.g., YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, THE JOLSON STORY) that the convention was 

ripe for parody in Don Lockwood's opening soliloquy in SINGIN' IN THE 

RAIN.



Films from ANNIE HALL, in which the adult Alvy Singer communes with his 

childhood counterpart to Jane Campion's AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE, based on 

Janet Frame's three-volume autobiography, make the child intrinsic to 

the adult.  ANGEL AT MY TABLE, in which the heroine is played for 

extended lengths by three actresses, in childhood, adolescence, and 

adulthood, probably comes the closest to the structure you're thinking 

of.  However, MYSTIC RIVER, in which a childhood event marks each of 

the three friends for life and INFERNAL AFFAIRS and THE DEPARTED, in 

which the gangster recruits his eventual cop mole while the kid is 

still in short pants, have to be said to feature childhood in more than 

just fleeting flashbacks (as in DEAD MAN WALKING).  The possibilities 

here seem almost countless.  Hope this helps.

--

Dennis Bingham

Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies

Dept. of English Indiana University School of Liberal Arts

IUPUI

501V Cavanaugh Hall

425 University Blvd.

Indianapolis, IN 46202

(317) 274-9825 (phone)

(317) 278-1287 (fax)





Quoting Barry Langford <[log in to unmask]>:



> Dear All

>

> Can anyone think of any movies which begin with a child protagonist and then

> move on to dramatise the same character's experiences as an adult? I'm not

> thinking here of film series (e.g. 400 Blows & sequels), nor films with brief

> childhood flashbacks (e.g. Silence of the Lambs, Day for Night, countless

> others), but individual films significantly structured  in this way

> (presumably

> employing different actors). I'm sure there must be several but at

> present all I

> can think of is Once Upon a Time in America (strictly speaking this of course

> starts in adulthood, then reverts to childhood, then advances to old

> age...but

> you get the idea). Any suggestions very gratefully received.

>

> Tx Barry

>

> Dr Barry Langford

> Senior Lecturer in Film & Television Studies

> Department of Media Arts

> Royal Holloway, University of London

> Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX

> (01784) 443734/443833

> [log in to unmask]

>

> ----

> Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the

> University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu

>



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