Children’s Play in Documentary, Ethnographic and Research Film
A post by ReMAP associate, Dr. Grethe Mitchell, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Dept. of Culture, Communication and Media at UCL IOE.
On the 27th May 2025, scholars, students, artists and members of the public gathered at the BFI Southbank, for an afternoon of documentary and non-fiction films about children’s play. The event, curated by Grethe Mitchell, was a collaboration between ReMAP and the BFI and was made possible with the support of Nikki Parchment the BFI Head of Library and Learning and Prof. Jeff Bezemer, Head of the Dept. of Culture, Communication and Media at UCL IOE.
The audience was welcomed by Prof. John Potter, director of ReMAP and the respondent was Prof. Andrew Burn. The event was well attended and after the screening everyone came together in the BFI Blue Room for refreshments and an invigorating Q&A and audience-panel discussion session, facilitated and chaired by Dr. Michelle Cannon.
The idea for the screening arose from my doctoral and film research investigating the representation of children’s play in non-fiction film. I approached the event as an exploration, to highlight films of children’s play in non-fiction film and to counter my research findings that children’s own play culture is generally ignored with most documentary films focusing on adult concerns about children, often using well established representational tropes such as the innocent victim or the anarchic wild child.
These findings – along with some of the selected films – had informed how I approached and constructed my own documentary film ipidipidation my generation! made as Co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project, Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the new Media Age and as part of my doctoral research.
Most of these films are little-known, due to their relative obscurity and yet they represent an interesting variety of issues and approaches to documenting and representing children’s play on film.
The selection shown at this screening is not exhaustive and there are other films to be seen, though relatively small in number. I hope further screenings can be arranged for these in the future. In the meantime, if you have any, please contact me (grethe.mitchell@ucl.ac.uk) with your own suggestions to add to the repertoire of non-fiction films about children’s play!
The films shown were (in order of screening):
Vermont Kids: Sandbank (Marshall 1975) made by the renowned anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker John Marshall, is one of three segments in the Vermont Kids series. It adopts a ‘long take’ ethnographic approach, also seen in Marshall’s films about the iKung. The use of these same techniques in Sandbank conveys the idea that children’s activities are worthy of anthropological observation and documentation.
To view use institutional log-in to Kanopy.com streaming service:
https://www.kanopy.com/en/ucl/signup/auth/university?destination=%2Fucl%2Fsearch
Woodbine Place (McEvoy 1980 – excerpt) shows the street play of young children (mostly aged 3 to 7 years) during the summer holidays. The film is interesting for its filming and sound techniques which enable an intimate account of social interactions between the children. This portrait of street play demonstrates the complexity of children’s relations with each other, how they resolve conflict and the sophistication of their self-recognition and moral judgement. https://www.sirenfilms.co.uk/woodbine-place-30/
No Ball Games (Regan 2020) is a short documentary on how children pass their time during the long school holidays. A sympathetic, matter-of-fact portrayal of current childhood in working class communities, the film presents children’s culture – and children themselves – as resilient and optimistic, despite an anti-child narrative shown in the signs prohibiting play and the negative view of children remarked on by the participants themselves.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2020/oct/08/no-ball-games-life-and-play-through-the-eyes-of-children-across-the-uk-documentary
One Potato Two Potato (Daiken 1957) shows children’s games and traditions in post-war London. Made before the use of portable sync-sound, the film adopts a lyrical style and uses non-sync sound in an impressionistic manner, incorporating children’s songs and rhymes. Pointing to a view of children as playful and mildly transgressive, the film also sets out to capture the sensory aspects of play through swooping camera movement and montage, though in its lyrical style the film also seems to address adult nostalgia for a poetic childhood no longer available. Available on DVD: BFI “Free Cinema” collection.
Pizza-Pizza-Daddy-O (Lomax 1967) was made by the well-known folklorist Bess Lomax Hawes. It focuses on the clapping and singing games of young black girls in a Los Angeles school playground. The film is made in a ‘direct cinema’ style and benefits from sync-sound, but in spite of this, the children are not given the opportunity to speak about their games and play, thereby reinforcing a dominant discourse in which children’s voices are muted, even when the focus is on their activities and culture. The use of a white, male, off-screen narrator is at odds with the content and was controversial at the time. However, Lomax has presented this as a deliberate and subversive step on her part, to counteract the race, gender and class biases of an audience whom she perceived would otherwise trivialise the subject matter. Nonetheless, despite these issues, the film remains an important document demonstrating the complexity and sophistication of black girl’s culture.
To view use institutional log-in to Kanopy.com streaming service https://www.kanopy.com/en/ucl/signup/auth/university?destination=%2Fucl%2Fsearch and search for: ‘”The Films of Bess Lomax Hawes” or go to https://www.folkstreams.net/films/pizza-pizza-daddy-o
Let’s Get the Rhythm (Chagall 2014 – excerpt) provides an interesting contrast to the previous film as it looks at the history and evolution of clapping games, rather than focusing on one location and time. There are other contrasts, for instance in this film there are a number of interviews with children, though there are also interviews with adults speaking from a position of academic expertise or greater personal experience which risk creating a hierarchy of interviewees. The film nonetheless clearly shows the variety and complexity of clapping games, often accompanied by lyrics that address real-world issues in the lives of the players.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wym8tS8SFFk
ipidipidation my generation! (Mitchell 2011) was made over a period of two years in two English primary schools, in London and Sheffield and surveys the playground culture in the two schools, focusing entirely on the children themselves. In making the film I aimed to alter documentary film’s normative relationship with children and to increase the understanding and appreciation of what Geertz calls the “webs of significance” woven by children in their play. I therefore strove to develop a ‘film language’ that demonstrated the competence and agency of children in their own cultural world and the complexity and variety of their play activities – by filming them in a way that positioned them implicitly, within the fabric of the film and making cinematic provision for the direct expression of what they had to say.
For viewing requests please email: grethe.mitchell@ucl.ac.uk