Outside the box
Recently I trekked north to Salem,
MA to visit the Peabody-Essex Museum
and see the Joseph Cornell exhibit. Pretty
much everybody knows about Cornell’s boxes, but his experimental films were new
to me, and a friend and myself sat in the screening room and watched,
entranced, a selection of his shorts. Most consisted of images of ordinary people and places and quotidian details, shot in long takes, silent,
often in black and white, and held
together by the barest of narrative or metaphorical structures. Or maybe held
together just by the sheer pleasure of
looking, of seeing something real through the illuminating medium of film.
At a certain point a mother brought her two kids in, a boy and
girl aged about 8 to 10, and I thought to myself, uh-oh, this will end soon and
badly. To our surprise, the kids seemed as rapt as we were, watching the films without a word and a fidget until their mother retrieved
them about a half hour later.
Weren’t kids that age, indeed, kids up the age of 24, supposed to
have a short attention span? How is it that these two remained engrossed in
images of sunlight through leaves, of pigeons, old people, children and
fountains, that were vibrant and real and immediate on some autumn day fifty
years ago? Don’t kids demand the special effects and rapid fire editing that leaves
only a Pavlovian impression on their jaded but readily manipulated retinas? Or
is Hollywood
conning us, and kids would really prefer Bresson (I’m serious: what kid
wouldn’t like “Balthazar?”)? Has anyone done any studies on this? If not, they
should.