A consistent theme in postwar Italy, France, and the United States, childhood has served as the cinematic embodiment of the nation-state. Films such as Roberto Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1948), François Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) and Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed (1956) each examine the postwar cinematic narrative as nation. Yet the representation of the child in each film also complicates a clear national identity which marked Italian neo-realism, the French New Wave, and Hollywood as products of an era when film was still thought of largely in terms of discrete national cultures and the relatively limited influences of one country's national cinema upon that of another.

In order to re-envision the postwar child, my dissertation is a comparative study of national cinema. I have chosen to pair Germany Year Zero with Gianni Amelio’s Le Chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House, 2004), The 400 Blows with Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs (The Class, 2008), and The Bad Seed with Todd Field’s Little Children (2006). I have also chosen to pair each national cinema with a specific film theory or methodology: Italian neo-realism and the phenomenology of realism, the French New Wave and auteurism, and Hollywood and the genre of horror.

Each pair of films addresses the immediate postwar period, 1945 to 1953, but also expands the historical boundaries of the postwar with more recent films from the same national cinema. A comparative history of postwar childhood in three national cinemas that were closely involved in World War II, it is important to note how the subject of childhood plays into one of the presumptions of the national cinema approach: that while films make an interesting object of study in themselves, their ultimate utility lies in ways they produce a collective narrative of a people and national culture.