935 (76). Scenes from Under Childhood (1967-1970, Stan Brakhage)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Stan Brakhage’s approximation of what it’s like to see as a child, drawn from years of footage of his own children, is nothing as crude as a literal re-enactment of a child’s point of view, but something much more vivid and disturbing. The film opens with a series of red screens, suggesting light filtered through closed infant eyes, before launching into lightning flashes of white: a nascent gaze opening to the world and hardly able to take in its brilliance. This traumatic sensation is the underlying emotion that runs through the film’s four chapters, and it’s a marvel how Brakhage’s panoply of images—progressing from the abstract to the very literal—can be such an emotionally affecting account of how children come to perceive the world. Mostly shot in handheld with the flickers and jumps one expects of Super 8, the film has been described as the greatest home movie ever made, with Children playing in a yard bathed in impossibly beautiful tree-dappled light or a close-up the upturned carcass of a dead wasp on a bathtub lip strike the heart of a uncanny left behind by adulthood. There’s little nostalgic about this wonder though, as such images will be interspersed by recurring fades to a haunting, ghostlike formation of undulating crystals, suggesting human cells regenerating feverishly. At times the gaze is simply blank, looking at nothing or no one in particular, focusing more on negative spaces than objects, the indeterminate time of childhood with no purpose but to be. A soup of memory, liquid and light, churning with life.
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