LEGEND has it that in the old days of Hollywood, producers would bring in what was known as a "wildie" to throw curveball suggestions at blocked writers - and the crazier the better.

For Edinburgh-based critic and filmmaker Mark Cousins, children can have a similarly anarchic effect when placed in front of a camera. To him, they are cinema's "wildies" and it's their place in movie history that he celebrates and analyses in his latest documentary essay, A Story Of Children And Film, and in Cinema Of Childhood, a UK-wide programme of screenings he has curated.

"It's the vitality of children, their lack of inhibition, their unfettered imagination, that sort of surrealism you get in childhood," he explains over coffee in a cafe near his home. He doesn't need to look far for an example of what he means. "When I first made this film, my nephew said to me: 'Uncle Mark, when we're doing one of these Q&A things on stage, can we dress as monkeys?' Never before in my career has any filmmaker asked me if they can dress like a monkey!"

That nephew, by the way, is 10-year-old Ben, and he and his 11-year-old sister Laura are as much the stars of Cousins's film as Shirley Temple or any of the other child actors who feature in it, which is why they're now veterans of the film festival question-and-answer circuit. In fact without them there would be no film - it was when Cousins casually set his camera running to capture the siblings setting up, playing with and then destroying a marble run that the idea for it came to him.

The resulting footage of the siblings runs as a linking motif throughout A Story Of Children And Film as Cousins uses clips from almost a century of cinema to explore the universal themes of childhood which interest him. Among these are loss, loneliness, shyness, dreaming, class (a particualr preoccupation of British and Indian filmmakers, he says), the yearning for adventure and something he calls "stropiness". This last is most vividly illustrated by a scene from the great Iranian film The White Balloon, just one of the 53 films from 23 countries that he mines for examples.

But while Ben and Laura provided the eureka! moment, Cousins's project is underpinned by his belief that a view of cinema history which overstresses the importance of America and ignores places like Iran, Japan, China, West Africa and Eastern Europe is dunderheaded and wrong. His 15-part 2011 Channel 4 series The Story Of Film illustrated this by championing the unsung heroes of world cinema and, refreshingly, he takes the same approach here.

"When I made this film it would have been very easy to concentrate on the classics," he admits, "but because over the years I've seen so many other great films about children it becomes exciting to connect the known with the unknown, to cut from ET to a Japanese film from the 1940s. Suddenly you realise you can take the idea of shyness, for instance, from a Chinese film to a Japanese film to a Jane Campion film and say 'Actually there is a territory here that is consistently under-investigated'."

Nor is it under-investigated for any good reason, he adds. "Films about children aren't marginal. If you want to understand a country's cinema, look at the films they make about kids. It's a wellspring in a way."

Thanks to A Story Of Children And Film, we can now do just that. None of which explains why nephew Ben wanted to dress like a monkey, but there you go. Kids, eh?

 

A Story Of Children And Film is released on Friday; see dogwoof.com/ChildrenandFilm

The Cinema Of Childhood season launches at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh, on April 11 with selected films then touring to Dundee, Inverness and Glasgow; see www.cinemaofchildhood.com