Rene Clement

René Clément

No notes on director - just on the film

Forbidden Games (1952)
1) A timeless evocation of childhood innocence corrupted
2)Story of a girl orphaned by war. 
3)She is adopted by a family with a young farm boy. 
4)They both play macabre games "she joins in a fantastical world of macabre play."
5)They kill animals and bury them - since she had to bury her pet cat when it died
    it's her way to deal with death (my notes from the book).
6)Mythical and heartbreakingly real - excellent child actor performances. 
7)Honored with a special foreign language film Academy Award in 1952

All above except my notes from Criterion which was half of above. 

"The following scene from Clement's Forbidden Games shows the horrors of war and
its effect on the innocence people of France in 1940. 

Forbidden Games (René Clément, 1952): B&W
Trailer Click Here

Description of the scene we saw:

It says June 1940... there are people evacuating town with German planes above bombing the civilians. After the bomb drop people get up and keep running to evacuate. A man's car won't start so the mob pushes his car into a field. A little girl grabs her little dog who she thinks is scared. She's a beautiful little girl that looks like Heidi. The bombers are coming back and dropping more bombs on civilians. The little girl goes to chace her dog and the family is left out in the open and shot. The girl sees her mom and dad dead...she plays with their faces and doesn't really understand. She has a matcing dress with her mom. She smiles and lays down to sleep with her mom - starting to understand something is wrong. A family saves her and puts her in their wagon. 

Here is the clip we saw in class embedded in this essay Click Here
Well, we just saw the beginning in class - the bombing. 

Coffee with Aliens discuss Clement's Purple Noon Click Here