In 2002, two French films about children were released within two weeks of each other. Although Être et avoir (Nicolas Philibert, released 28 August) was a documentary focusing on a village school, and Les Diables (Christophe Ruggia, released 11 September) was a drama about two institutionalized children on the run, they had in common the fact that they focused on pre-adolescent children. While there are plenty of films about adolescents in most national cinemas, there are fewer proportionately that focus on pre-adolescent children (Spanish cinema being a notable exception). These films therefore exemplify a trend: since the 1990s, there have been an unusually large number of films in French cinema whose protagonists are young children. This essay will start by placing such films within a production context. Subsequently, it will be less concerned with explaining why there may have been a surge in such films during the last decade, than in theorizing their effect on spectators, with specific reference to Être et avoir and Les Diables. It will do so by working with concepts of space, as used by Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, familiar to theorists of the postmodern working in architecture, but not as yet particularly developed by theorists working in Film Studies. Using Foucault's spatially-focused 'heterotopia', the essay will develop a nexus of arguments focusing on the viewing position established by films with child protagonists. It will argue that the pre-adolescent child's view brings together time past and an alternative space. We will first consider retrospection, linked with the familiar idea of nostalgia, before moving on to what will be called 'heterospection', a coinage which attempts to bring together issues of time and space in these films. Heterospection, the essay will argue, involves a different way of seeing, and of conceiving of the spectator's reaction to a film. In that respect, the essay will return us to 'screen theory', but from a different perspective, as well as illuminating how the child film functions. Context The group of French films focusing on pre-adolescent protagonists since the 1990s show changes of focus relative to similar films which preceded them. There is a new focus on abuse, at its clearest in the controversial L'Ombre du doute (Aline Issermann, 1993), which deals with an eleven-year-old girl's abuse by her father; but it is also in La Classe de neige (Claude Miller, 1998) where the over-protective father of a boy who goes on a school trip turns out to be a child abuser and murderer. There is a related emphasis on death in Ponette (Jacques Doillon, 1996), which is about a four-year-old's attempts to come to terms with the death of her mother. There are also a number of films which improbably show their protagonists as drifters, homeless children seeking the parental affection which they have

A number of key events in the 1990s have helped shape the decade's cinema. The first of these is the conjuncture of the GATT negotiations (culminating in 1993) and the ascendancy of heritage cinema to main- stream dominance in French production at the expense of popular genres such as comedy and the polar. The second is the attempted return of the auteur through the influential 1994 television series 'Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge'. Finally, overlapping to some extent with the return of the auteur, is the arrival of a new generation of film-makers whose political impact in the call for civil disobedience of February 1997 has undoubtedly affected the way in which the French view the films of this younger generation of directors

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This article is a close analysis of a popular song by the Italian singer-songwriter Paolo Conte, ‘Sparring Partner’, in Ozon's film [Formula: see text] (2004). With particular reference to what Barthes called the ‘grain’ of the voice, the article shows how the song does not work anempathetically, cutting across characters and narrative and undermining them; nor does it work empathetically to support the characters or reflect their emotions in a straightforward way. Rather, the song creates a complex haptic moment, where affect and gender fluidity combine to form a ‘haptic metaspace’; this acts as a frame for productively unstable embodiments, marked by nomadic transitions and volatilities, focused on the male of the couple.

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