Children Genesis

It is about 8 pupils of the International School in Rome who are following an advertisement of a man mysterious: "Wanted young men to act in a piece presented before God". As a result, they are led to a magnificent sea near Palinuro in the south of Italy, where they appear in the first few nights overcome by a feeling of paradise lightness and liberty (hence the movie's title).

This is the phase in which most nude shots appear. It is not a matter of sex allusions, but these moments are presented as a kind of dreamy holy dancing (see below). During the course of the "game" the young people venture into various, sometimes even strange activities to conquer increasing "boredom, starvation and homesickness" as well as aversion.

Perhaps the most useful thing for us to understand the movie is to look at it as the third part of a three-part truth in the following meaning. Another of the classics, shot from William Golding's novel only 10 years before The Genesis Children, this time based on R. M. Ballantyne's novel The Coral Island from the middle of the 19th cenury.

All 3 cases involve the action of a group of (male) children abandoned on an isolated or land-based site (i.e. without a directly civilised surrounding and in a pure nature environment), with the subtone of examining where it comes from or how it is overcame.

While in Ballantyne's novel the standpoint in the nineteenth centuries of colonialism ("Obsessed with the pureness of God, trade and nation and wrote for the prospective sovereigns of the world", The Coral Island) is clearly positive, Golding decisively destroyed the positive outlook on the whole of a self-appointed lordrake.

Like Ballantyne, its history still shows domination, battle and triumph or failure. These stimuli (combined with a constant failure of communication) do not provide a continuously expanding area of orderly civilization, but rather result in total devastation within a very short period of being. Aikman' s movie is an answer to Gold' "solution", with the aim of showing less rough stimuli than domination or battle and victor.

It is never aggressive in the meaning of a struggle for domination between these children. Unlike Goldings children, whose first joint action is to choose a "chief," the Genesis children practice a fully co-operative lifestyle with amazing lightness and great nativeness for at least the first half of their history.

Aikman seems to want to show that this way of life is at risk in a more subtile way - "Boredom, starvation and nostalgia were our foes, and that's why we began to argue". Rather than aggressiveness, it is a sense of senselessness in the search for "home" (which, of course, as much as starvation affects the mental sphere) in some of the young people that the group eventually shares.

This is what can be seen as the main point of the film: Nude shots account for about 1/8 of the length of the soundtrack. The " holy dancing " scene uses a lot of slowness and superimposition, presumably as a means to show a state of relief instead of evolution or action; furthermore, here and only here the musical changes to religious sounds of different origin (plainsong, bell, Russians -Orthodox) and can conjure up references to Psalm 126.