Film Forbidden Games - Movie Review Example

From the destruction caused by the war, and out of the ashes of the concentration camps as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is not surprising that the philosophy known as Existentialism became a significant force. Not only philosophers but also artists in different disciplines saw mankind as lost, 'thrown' from grace into a graceless universe which no longer gave purpose and meaning to existence. In the pale, death-like faces of concentration camp survivors one recognized the fragility of human life, realized how inconsequential - ineffective - the individual was against the monstrousness of the Totalitarian State which Hitler and his National Socialists - Germany - had created.

And, if the barbarism of the Final Solution and the cataclysmic destruction in Japan could happen, if human beings could imagine and create these infamies, where was God in the Universe Where was a moral center In his 1954 film Forbidden Games, Rene Clement and his screenwriters depict the effect of war's barbarity on a little girl whose parents have been killed as they were fleeing from the city. The girl, Paulette, is taken in by a family of peasant farmers and develops a close relationship with the family's young son, Michel.

Their attempts to make sense of death become Clement's expression of an existentialist perspective; the children create a world that is not rational but which at least gives them a structure that has meaning to them. To an existentialist, the world has no meaning other than what we give it because no ultimate order or meaning exists outside of our own being, i.e. there is no a priori consciousness, as rationalist philosophers asserted. Human beings are 'thrown' into existence without having chosen it.

They are cut adrift. Consequently, we make decisions based on what has meaning to us, not necessarily based on what might be considered rational. Though we try to avoid anxiety by being rational, an existentialist would insist that doing so only keep us from being free. Moreover, there is an aspect of Existentialism that considers humans and the world absurd; with no external purpose or meaning, our attempts to create meaning are laughable because they are merely rationalizations and therefore futile - absurd.

At the very beginning of Forbidden Games, Clement presents a scene that is almost an encapsulation of existentialism. Paulette is not the only one cast adrift. Hundreds if not thousands of people are fleeing the city, fleeing what is familiar to them in the face of what seems irrational, to escape its - and their - destruction by German bombers and fighter planes. But when her parents are killed, the girl is literally thrown into a world she did not choose. The death of her dog Jock further isolates her.

Even when she is taken in and surrounded by the Dolle family her isolation is apparent. What ensues between Paulette and Michel becomes the heart of the film and oddly echoes The Grand