A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
A01=Linda Ruth Williams
abuse in film
auteur theory
Author_Linda Ruth Williams
biographical influences
Category=ATFA
Category=ATFX
Category=JBSP1
child actors
child performers
child-centered narratives
child-focused cinema
childhood in film
children in Hollywood
children on screen
cinema and children
cinematic pragmatics
contemporary Hollywood
critical film studies
danger in childhood
dangerous settings
death in Spielberg's films
difficult circumstances
E.T.
emotional focus
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fantasy and realism
film history
historical perspective
Jaws
Linda Ruth Williams
loneliness in children
non-human children
Peter Pan persona
political themes
representation of childhood
Schindler's List
sentimental focus
sentimental narratives
Spielberg's aesthetic
Spielberg's branding
Spielberg's career
Spielberg’s branding
Steven Spielberg
The Color Purple
thematic analysis
Product details
- ISBN 9780813571683
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 12 Aug 2025
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Why has Steven Spielberg’s work been so often identified with childhood and children? How does the director elicit such complex performances from his young actors? Steven Spielberg’s Children is the first book to investigate children, childhood, and Spielberg’s employment of child actors together and in depth. Through a series of lively readings of both the celebrated performances he elicits from his young stars in films such as E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, and Empire of the Sun, as well as less discussed roles in films such as War of the Worlds, The BFG, and Jurassic Park, this book shows children to be key players in the director’s articulation of childhood since the 1970s.
Steven Spielberg’s Children presents children and childhood in some surprising ways, not only analyzing boyhood and girlhood according to Spielberg, but considering children as alien, adult-children who refuse to grow up, and children who aren’t even human. It discusses the way in which children have served to cast Spielberg as a sentimentalist, but also how they are more frequently framed as complex, cruel, and canny. The child might be dangled as bait in an exploitation horror scenario (Jaws), might become the image of universal higher beings (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), or might be a young cultural creator like the director was himself (The Fabelmans), "born with a camera glued to [his] eye." The child, on both sides of the camera, is a resonant image, signifying all that adult culture wants it to be, yet resisting this through authorship of their own stories. The book also looks at Spielberg's young actors in the long history of child stars in theater and cinema, and how Spielberg’s children have fared as performers and celebrities.
Steven Spielberg’s Children presents children and childhood in some surprising ways, not only analyzing boyhood and girlhood according to Spielberg, but considering children as alien, adult-children who refuse to grow up, and children who aren’t even human. It discusses the way in which children have served to cast Spielberg as a sentimentalist, but also how they are more frequently framed as complex, cruel, and canny. The child might be dangled as bait in an exploitation horror scenario (Jaws), might become the image of universal higher beings (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), or might be a young cultural creator like the director was himself (The Fabelmans), "born with a camera glued to [his] eye." The child, on both sides of the camera, is a resonant image, signifying all that adult culture wants it to be, yet resisting this through authorship of their own stories. The book also looks at Spielberg's young actors in the long history of child stars in theater and cinema, and how Spielberg’s children have fared as performers and celebrities.
LINDA RUTH WILLIAMS is a professor of film at the University of Exeter, UK. She is author of five books, including The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, and coeditor of Contemporary American Cinema.
