Forbidden Games

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

Brigitte Fossey, just five years old, gives an astonishing performance as Paulette, the orphan taken in by a farming family, with Georges Poujouly as the boy who becomes her co-conspirator. Their game — a clandestine animal graveyard adorned with stolen crosses — is the children's attempt to make sense of death, and Clément films it with a tenderness that makes the surrounding adult folly 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 influencing later war films told from a child's perspective. Quietly devastating and entirely free of bombast, Forbidden Games distils the cruelty and incomprehension of wartime into a single small, secret ritual — and remains one of the cinema's great elegies for lost childhood. Fossey's début performance, given by a child of five, is still cited among the most natural ever coaxed from so young an actor. Narciso Yepes's solo-guitar theme became a standard in its own right, forever bound to the film's image of childhood confronting death.