Forty-eight, going on fifteen

This is a review of A Story of Children and Film (2013)

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26 April (updated 28 April)

This is a review of A Story of Children and Film (2013)

Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) came to Cambridge with his film A Story of Children and Film (2013) (@ChildrenandFilm), which he told us that he had not been intending to make after – as he described it – six years making, and two years editing, The Story of Film : An Odyssey (2011).

The film was here both in its own right, and to introduce a series of films – The Cinema of Childhood – that has been curated by Cousins and by Filmhouse (@Filmhouse) (which was sourced with the assistance of Neil McGlone (@NeilMcGFilm)) and which has been showing since at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) (of which there are reviews here of Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949) and Bag of Rice) (Kiseye Berendj) (1998)).

Cousins had previously been at The Arts for the showing of the last part of Odyssey (which had been screened in full in preceding weeks), and of his new film What is This Thing Called Love ? (2012), and had been an agreeable and interesting guest.

This time, as well as eloquently introducing Children and Film and explaining how it had come about and how personal its genesis had been, Cousins was not making special pleading for the way in which he had constructed the film* : he had simply realized, in looking at the filming that he had done (in his home and with the camera in a static position) of his nephew and niece, that the patterns of behaviour that they showed, as they got used to the camera and, together and singly, played, gave him a way of being reminded of the roles for children in the best films that feature them, rather than those that impose an adulthood on a child before its time :

As he suggests at http://dogwoof.com/childrenandfilm/filmmaker, Cousins contrasted the sweet perfection of Shirley Temple (Curly Top (1935)) with the young girl who puts on a family entertainment with Esther (Judy Garland) in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and who is allowed to make mistakes and be out of key, as, of course, many a child would.

At the same time, Cousins is not singling out St. Louis as a film that we would necessarily go to, but wants to introduce us to examples from all around the world from Senegal to Sweden, and also reminds us to look again at others that we may already know, such as Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), and even Spielberg’s E.T. : The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).

Punctuated by returning to the Cousins’ flat for more development of what is happening with the relatives on screen, but looking first, by paying a homage to where Vincent Van Gogh lived in Provence at the end of his life, at the world that the painter created in his work as he interpreted his surroundings, Cousins wants to remind us that making a film is projecting a visual and aural view of the world (and the poetic element in what he said to us was patent). Those views, and real life in Cousins’ home, do provide a contrast and a structure – if we can take them on their own terms, and accept, when he tells us, that he did consider other structures to this film, rather than using the original one, but found that nothing worked as well.

Children and Film, though it has a shorter running-time and is a very different type of film, is as demanding of us as Slavoj Žižek is of us in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), because Cousins does not slacken his pace or his use of terms to describe the camera’s movement or position, and ideally one needs to see the film several times over to take in all that he is not only saying at any one point, but to absorb the action in the clips, and the information such as the film’s name, translation and where and when made.

An excellent reason to order the DVD from Dogwoof (@dogwoof) (available from 28 April), but, in the meantime, the list of films featured can be found here :


http://dogwoof.com/childrenandfilm/about.


The film was also reviewed here by Amanda Randall (@amandarandall5) for TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCFF) at Cambridge Film Festival in 2013


To correct an omission

Those who know Cousins' camera-work will be well aware that he is a skilled cinematographer, but the quality of the images, their framing and composition, when he had travelled on to the Isle of Skye is beautiful : a real treat where it comes, because what has gone before has been the footage captured in the flat and clips from his chosen films, even if the opening, which seems a while away now, had been in Provence. (Whether he had linearly been contemplating the possible significance as a frame for this film of his niece and nephew at play, and had developed detailed ideas by the time of his time on Skye, really does not matter, for, in a sense, this is a story just as even any memory that we have is, a way of telling to the world what happened.)


End-notes

* Cousins had the large sheet on which he had worked out the connections between films with him, which those daring enough to approach afterwards were able to see close to.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Clash of the trams

This is a review of Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

Easter Sunday

This is a review of Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949)

It was shown as part of the series The Cinema of Childhood (please visit the web-site at cinemaofchildhood.com for more information), which is presented by Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) and Filmhouse (@Filmhouse) and introduced by Mark Cousins' film A Story of Children and Film (2013) (with Neil McGlone (@NeilMcGFilm))

* Contains spoilers *

Adapted from Jens Sigsgaard’s text* by director Astrid Henning-Jensen (whose young son Lars played Palle), Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949) might have struggled to stretch to a feature, but perhaps it feels cramped in a run-time of twenty minutes. It is not that the conceits and concepts which the film handles are uninteresting, but they feel a little hurried, and therefore undigested : for example, Palle amusingly despises bank-notes as ‘bits of paper’ – which he throws to the wind – and favours the physicality of coins.

We recognize the childish preference for glistering things (although many a child will happily play post office, which is a good grounding in the bureaucracy of paperwork). However, it does not really ring true that, even at his age, Palle is unaware that the right denomination of note is worth many coins. (Perhaps we just excuse that as dream logic, just as it is dream logic that the choice between coins and notes exists at all, because they are conveniently to hand together on the counter.)

In any case, having liberated the coins from a bank that, as everywhere else, is deserted, he still thinks that he needs to pay for what he wants. However, no one comes to the counter to take his coin in the toy-shop – although it is all the same whether he leaves it on the counter or not, he takes the toy and it. It is only later that he realizes that carrying a literal load of heavy coins is pointless, and divests himself of them.

In the toy-shop, a huge Donald Duck had been dwarfing the figure that he takes, which again appeals to the notion that a child’s choice of what to play with may not be obvious (allegedly, often the box that it came in), and so a surprise to us. Not that we see Palle play with the toy, but instead we see him pass a ball to a footballing statue, and then be dismayed that it does not – as we half wonder if it might – take part in the game. Absent from their beds or anywhere else where Palle’s family lives, this is the closest that we come to any representation of mankind, other than Palle himself.

What we know is that, whether he crashes tram no. 8 into no. 2 or re-enacts Voyage dans la Lune (1902), no harm will befall him – as long as he stays away from his curious way of making what is translated as ‘porridge’. When he drives the tram, we of course allow that he somehow knows how to do so straight off (but his technical facility does not immediately translate to handling an aeroplane).

Most of the time, when he is speaking, Palle’s words are heard, but his mouth is not uttering them, which distances us even further from this delightfully deserted depiction of Copenhagen (?), which appears to have been caught that way by filming shortly after sunrise, and that quality of light intensifies our feeling of unreality (if also of the dread of the post-atomic age, with cities, to the extent that they had not been destroyed, rendered uninhabitable). Whether Palle is a real child, or already a stereotypical portrayal of childhood, remains to be considered, but he is the medium of addressing all sorts of issues about what it is to be alive, such as what makes for novelty, and what makes us miss what we know.

Some might want to say that the umbrella that features at the end of the adventure, by still being around**, but broken, shows that it was real. However, it is an element in the adventure that is not intrinsic to the world entered, but just a convenient device to return from it. Nothing precludes it from having been broken early, and brought into play by the guilty rumination of the dream.

Maybe one could see the Home Alone films as one successor to Palle, if not necessarily a worthy one, and with the likelihood that, in comics or other drawn media, the idea of one person exploring a desolate city has been fully explored…


Palle was screened with Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998) (which is reviewed here, and was shown second)


End-notes

* Which, in Estonia, was turned into an animated short, Peetrikese unenägu (1958).

** As with the blossoms in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)