My Childhood. Bill Douglas, 1972.
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Edition screened: Included on Facets 2-DVD set The Bill Douglas Trilogy, released 2008. Scots English with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 46 minutes.
Summary: Depictions of dead bird and cat.
Details:
1) At 18:33 Granny knocks down Tommy’s bird cage while clearing cobwebs with a broom, and at 18:39 beats the cage with her broom. Tommy rescues bird and battered cage.
2) We see the bird cage on the floor again at 28:20, this time with the cage door open and Bill’s cat eating the bird (not graphic in itself). Tommy grabs the cat, and beginning at 28:26 there is a 30-second sequence including the two boys struggling over the cat, brief off-screen sound of the cat being beaten, an image of a cat's body thrown over a banister, and a static shot of a dead cat lying on the ground.
3) 36:12 begins a 10-second sequence of a dead bird unwrapped from dirty newspaper and thrown to the ground.
Additional comments:
My Childhood is the first film of The Bill Douglas Trilogy. The important implications behind the cat/bird sequence and the subsequent killing of the cat are depicted with subtlety and are easily misunderstood. Our lifetime viewing of cartoons and comedies where the cat “gets” the caged bird makes us over-simplify the narrative in My Childhood. In fact, this domestic conflict and sadness was designed by Granny, and is a realistic depiction of the real trauma parents can contrive in the lives of their children. Granny’s first violence to the caged bird was unresolved and unsatisfying, so she then provided the open cage to the cat, resulting in the death of both animals and fortifying the misery that she demands must dominate the home. Too cowardly to suffocate her grandchildren in their sleep, she has murdered the animals that represent them.
Rarely does art dare to expose how adults use pets as surrogates for the resentment felt toward their own children. In the real world, a child's wish for a pet is denied or disdainfully granted to reflect undesirability of the child. The expense and work of keeping a pet is stressed, exaggerated, and used as a threat to express resentment over the time and money required by the child. Pets are treated impatiently and banished outside because of the child’s unwelcome presence. The pet mysteriously disappears or is treated cruelly by the parents because it is illegal to beat or kill a child.
@ BL