Forbidden Games

René Clément's Forbidden Games (1952) won the Golden Lion at Venice and an honorary Academy Award, and it is still one of the most affecting films anyone has made about childhood and war. Adapted from a novel by François Boyer, it sees the catastrophe of 1940 entirely through the eyes of the very young.

Brigitte Fossey, just five years old, is astonishing as Paulette, the orphan taken in by a farming family, and Georges Poujouly plays the boy who becomes her co-conspirator. Their game, a clandestine animal graveyard decorated with stolen crosses, is the children's way of making sense of death, and Clément films it with a tenderness that makes the adult folly around them look all the more absurd. Narciso Yepes's solo-guitar theme became famous in its own right.

The film was a critical sensation and helped define the international art-house cinema of the 1950s; its unsentimental view of innocence amid horror fed into later war films told from a child's point of view. There is no bombast anywhere in it. Forbidden Games compresses the cruelty and incomprehension of wartime into one small, secret ritual, and the result is among cinema's great elegies for lost childhood. Fossey's début, given by a child of five, is still one of the most natural performances ever drawn from so young an actor, and Yepes's guitar has stayed bound to the film's image of children confronting death.