Child actors can rely on cuteness and clever editing to emerge from action movies and comedy. But, as two films screening at the London film festival show, proper drama is no kindergarten

Kid in Action has it easy. Usually running, usually screaming – the child actor playing KiA is basically at bigger, louder nursery school. KiC (Kid in Comedy) doesn’t have too hard a run either – just look cute, supply sass and say the words. Let nice uncle editor take care of comic timing.

Kid in Drama (KiD) works in a scarier playpen. He/she needs to hold an audience through more than hollering and hamming it up. Especially since the last 20 years have seen a number of bar-raising performances from child stars in prominent roles – Natalie Portman in Leon, Haley Joel-Osment in The Sixth Sense and Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider, to name an obvious few.

If the child’s role is too big for the actor, the whole film feels baggy. It’s a problem that’s so far swamped two movies at this year’s London film festival – John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Scott Hicks’s family drama The Boys Are Back. Both The Road (starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, alongside Viggo Mortensen) and The Boys Are Back (in which then six-year-old newcomer Nicholas McAnulty stars with Clive Owen) hinge on the death of a mother in the first act. Before this event Smit-McPhee and McAnulty are in their natural territory – bit-part players acting as another facet of their fictional parents’ relationship. With the mother gone, the weight of sustaining a believable family setup falls on the inexperienced child actors, and the responsibility is often too heavy for their small shoulders to bear. 

Smit-McPhee in The Road is cast as a famished nomad staggering through a world burnt to the brink of apocalypse. Of the few human survivors left, most have turned to cannibalism, as all plants and animals have died. The boy’s mother – horrified by the world she has brought her child into – has killed herself, leaving the boy to her husband (played by Mortensen). Now father and son (“The Man” and “The Boy”) trek a ruined highway, never sure if the next person they see will greet them, or eat them.

Smit-McPhee’s role asks a great deal – he must sustain the look of a starving, desperate, bewildered child through 119 minutes in which he’s rarely off camera. He manages bewildered, but looks as fit, healthy and alive as any normal child brought up in a secure, loving home. A key scene in which The Boy drinks his first can of fizzy drink is cut off from its poignancy by the fact that Smit-McPhee looks like he’s scoffed a Twinkie just before they called “Action!”.

In The Boys Are Back, Artie (Nicholas McAnulty) has been left alone with his sports writer father Joe (Clive Owen) after his mother suddenly dies of cancer. McAnulty and Owen share the screen for the first hour of the movie, with Owen as Bereaved Dad using the bored-looking McAnulty as a giant human tissue during scenes of Oscar-chasing hug and blub. Even Owen, normally an experienced and reliable draw, struggles with the ropey script. McAnulty, faced with lines such as “I want to die so I can be with mummy”, just hasn’t got a chance.

Some would say it’s unfair to ask a 13-year-old to starve himself for his art, or to expect a six-year-old to understand and master grief, anger, and oedipal rage in his debut film. But these movies live and die on their young stars – we need to believe them to believe the story. There’s a lot of competition out there, so they need to grow up and play the game. This is Hollywood KiDs. 

Just over a week has elapsed since the start of the 53rd London film festival. Here’s a quick pictorial catch-up, from Fantastic Mr Fox to Chloe

Joe Swanberg traces the genealogy of his film Alexander the Last, showing at the London film festival from 24 October

In this edition, Film Weekly visits the London film festival, now in full swing. Jason Solomons and Xan Brooks compare notes and discuss the three films that have starred George Clooney (Fantastic Mr Fox, Up in the Air and The Men Who Stare at Goats) before revealing their favourites so far – Jason highly recommends Jim Jarmusch’s latest, The Limits of Control, as well as a brace of films starring two cherished British actors: Clive Owen in The Boys Are Back and Colin Firth in A Single Man.

Still with LFF, Jason meets British film-makers Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas, who will premiere their “animated” documentary, American: The Bill Hicks Story, at the festival on 23 October. The duo reveal their technique of turning still photographs of the comic in performance into moving images (it takes a day to produce five seconds of footage) and discuss their debt to Hicks’s family and friends in the making of the film.

Jason also meets Jérôme Laperrousaz, director of Made in Jamaica, a documentary about the legacy of reggae, dub and dancehall that examines how and why the songs that express the contradictions and struggle of life in the Caribbean island have travelled around the world. Unsurprisingly, it has a brilliant soundtrack, with tracks from such legends as Toots and the Maytals, Bunny Wailer, Sly and Robbie, Gregory Isaacs, Third World and Bounty Killer. Listen to find out how you can win one of three copies.

And finally, the week’s key releases are reviewed: the surprising meeting of the minds of Roald Dahl and Wes Anderson in Fantastic Mr Fox, the harrowing tale of African child soldiers in Johnny Mad Dog, and the cheap-as-chips zombie flick Colin.

Continuing our series in which directors with features at the London film festival place their work within the context of cinema. Today: Andrew Bujalski, director of Beeswax

Continuing our series in which directors with features at the London film festival place their work within the context of cinema. Today: Andrew Bujalski, director of Beeswax

The London film festival is screening three silent classics this year, reminding us just how eloquent dialogue-free movies are capable of being

Is there anyone out there who still needs to be convinced of the superiority of silent movies? They hold their own easily against sound, colour and widescreen films in any canonical list. Silent movies are the ne plus ultra of cinema. The rest is… theatre or literature. How exciting, therefore, that this year’s London film festival is screening three silent movie treasures: one British (Underground, 23 October), one French (J’Accuse, 24 October) and one Norwegian (Laila, 29 October).

Pre-sound movies are closer to Erwin Panovsky’s definition of cinema as “the dynamisation of space and the spacialisation of time”, and to Alfred Hitchcock’s belief in “pure cinema“. When film theorists attempt to define cinematic specificity, it is to non-talkies that they turn. I have a theory that if cinema history had started with sound, it would have been necessary to invent silent movies.

Actually, there is no such thing as a silent movie, because a musical accompaniment was an essential component of every performance. And how can anything so eloquent be termed “silent”? That is why I prefer to call them pre-sound movies, or non-talkies. Ironically, one of the few things that non-talkies couldn’t do was create silence. Silence as an acoustic effect exists only where sounds can be heard, as in Abel Gance’s The Life and Loves of Beethoven (1937), in a sequence where the composer loses his hearing. Incidentally, it is interesting to compare Gance’s non-talkie 1919 version of J’Accuse – which depicts death, delusion and insanity in the trenches – with his far less effective talkie remake of 1938.

Pre-sound films were more universal, with no need for subtitles or dubbing – FW Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) is so expressive that intertitles were unnecessary. Charlie Chaplin, feeling that talkies would limit his international appeal, and being popular enough, resisted dialogue for 13 years, making two of the screen’s greatest comedies, City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936), in the midst of an avalanche of talk.

Much is written about the cinematographic beauty and the use of montage in pre-sound films (for Sergei Eisenstein, sound destroyed montage, which he considered the essence of cinema) but of equal importance were the closeup and the performances. The absence of the spoken word concentrates the spectator’s attention more closely on the visual aspect of behaviour. Acting in non-talkies, now a lost art, had to be done in a manner different from the style on stage or the reality of ordinary life. This was precisely what the great actors of the silent period accomplished, far from the pantomimic exaggeration seen in films like Singin’ in the Rain. Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Conrad Veidt, Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino and Asta Nielsen were among those that gave the most extraordinary performances in screen history. As Norma Desmond (Swanson) says in Sunset Boulevard (1950): “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.”

Let me quote a lengthy passage by Béla Balázs, the esteemed Hungarian critic, screenwriter and librettist, on Asta Nielsen’s performance in GW Pabst’s Joyless Street (1925):

Asta Nielsen plays a woman hired to seduce a rich young man. The man who has hired her is watching the results from behind a curtain. Knowing that she is still under observation, Asta Nielsen feigns love. She does it convincingly; the whole gamut of appropriate emotion is displayed in her face. Nevertheless, we are aware that it is play-acting, that it is a sham, a mask.

But in the course of the scene Asta Nielsen really falls in love with the young man. Her facial expression shows little change; she had been “registering” love all the time and done it well. How else could she show that this time she was really in love? Her expression changes only by a scarcely perceptible but obvious nuance – and what a few minutes before was a sham is now the sincere expression of deep emotion.

Then Asta Nielsen suddenly remembers she is under observation. The man behind the curtain must not be allowed to read her face and learn that is now no longer feigning, but really feeling love. So Asta now pretends to be pretending. Her face shows a new, by this time, threefold change. First she feigns love, then she genuinely shows love, and as she is not permitted to be in love in good earnest, her face again registers a sham, a pretense of love. But now it is this pretence that is a lie. Now she is lying that she is lying. And we can see all this clearly in her face, over which she has drawn two different masks… Not even the greatest writer, the most consummate artist of the pen, could tell in words what Asta Nielsen tells in closeup.

The London film festival’s outdoor screening of historic London transportation films reveals an endless cycle of logjam and innovation

London’s transport history sometimes seems to be an unending tale of a city struggling with the consequences of its own successes. Improve a road and prosperity ensues, but so does damaging traffic congestion. Install Underground trains to take the strain off the roads and such is the demand that the system eventually becomes clogged.

The upswings of this recurring cycle of logjam and innovation are captured and celebrated by the London film festival’s London Moves Me, a compilation of short films that speaks eloquently of Londoners’ historic longing to move round their metropolis with freedom and speed.

You can see it tomorrow evening at an al fresco screening in Trafalgar Square, assuming the rush hour doesn’t trap you on board your bus. The earliest clips are from the tail end of the 19th century: horse-drawn omnibuses trundle past Eros in Piccadily Circus; chaps in imperial bowlers, toppers and boaters promenade in private carriages or stride across Westminster Bridge towards Big Ben; Victorian ladies conquer billowing frocks to cycle down the Mall.

Soon, rails on the streets denote the coming of powered public transport. Panorama of Ealing from a Moving Tram (1901), with its parasols, tree-lined avenue and Union flags, documents too the development of London’s suburbs, for which good transport links were a prerequisite.

Footage of London’s waterways reminds us that the Thames and the canal network were once fundamental corridors of commerce. Barging Through London (geddit?) from 1924 follows in flickering, captioned silence the slow, Dobbin-led progress of a load of coal along the Regent’s Canal from Limehouse to Paddington Basin.

Then comes the internal combustion engine. Royalty opens a renewed Waterloo station, but leaves the scene by limousine. On an interwar London Bridge the horse-drawn cart is squeezed up to the kerb by the car and the petrol-fuelled bus. And suddenly the film is in Claude Friese-Greene’s washed-out early colour and a caption reads “4,000 motor-buses … a formidable item in London’s traffic”. We see a policeman in the road signalling “halt”. We see pedestrians waiting and scurrying. As 1920s London becomes proudly conscious of its “world city” status its authorities become obliged to manage competing transport mode priorities.

Mayor Johnson is but the latest leader to wrestle with this task, and who could blame him or anyone else for gazing nostalgically at the amateur reels of Scenes at Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner Underground Stations, with their uncrushed passengers and cinematic lighting? London Moves Me will close with a contemporary film by Yohan Forbes of a young Londoner’s journey from the Thames Barrier to the South Bank – by skateboard. Draw your own conclusions from that about the future. Before it, indulge in a little time travel under Nelson’s eye from 6.30 tomorrow evening, complete with live piano accompaniment. Be sure to leave in good time.

Mother Teresa, Sarah Palin and Oprah’s Dr Phil – Suzi Yoonessi traces the ancestry of her Alaska-set feature, showing at the London film festival from 25 October

Watch this world-exclusive new trailer for Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece and tell us what you think

I’ve been half-watching, half-hearing this new trailer for Michael Haneke’s Cannes-winning masterpiece in the corner of my computer screen all morning – maybe 200 times, give or take a dozen. And I’m still not sick of it (lasting effects may take longer to materialise, of course). There’s so much here to disturb, to provoke; and it’s so breathtakingly beautiful it makes me shivery.

The White Ribbon – three hours long, shot in black and white, set in a small German village in 1917 – is a film that genuinely only gets more impressive the longer it stays in your blood. As with Haneke’s US remake of Funny Games, I’ve only seen it once, but I find it comes back to haunt me almost every week.

But repetition makes your perspective slip. Does this trailer strike you as especially hooky or hypnotic? Does it invite or freeze out?

Am I right about my small, nagging doubts? Does this trailer, perhaps, ask the central question (“Did you ever wonder who tortured Karli?”) a touch too bluntly? And then point the finger (the children! the children!) rather over-insistently? Is it just me who has an unhappy flashback to The Village round the point they burn the barn down?

Mostly though, this is superb, isn’t it? From that opening shot to the opening of the barn door (hello Bresson!), the moments in the church (come right in, Bergman!), the touches of kiddie cuteness (like some morbid Etre et Avoir), all smothered in an awful ominousness. Two hundred times on and I still feel slightly queasy watching this. So I’ll stop now – over to you.

• The White Ribbon is showing at the London film festival on 21 and 22 October, then opens at the Curzon Mayfair and nationwide from 13 November.