Grownups are dumb

Gareth Moore’s Films for Children

Do children possess a specific mode of engagement with images, storytelling and music, or the world, even?

Films for children. Go.

Cue bright colours, shadow puppetry (children love puppets, right?), jangling song, child-as-protagonist (in a non-horror movie kind of way), and animals. Lots of animals. Here’s Tina, a recently castrated cat. Now two baby goats (what’s the name for a baby goat?), and a wild boar that grants wishes, apparently.

In Ulla Von Brandenburg’s Zwei Manner und das Wildschwein, a man, repeatedly kicked up the arse by his factory overseer, approaches a boar in a silhouette forest. The animal opens his jaw, silently grants him a wish. Back at the factory, it appears his want has not been fulfilled. The man returns to the boar, which clearly lacks the intention, or the power, to give him what he desires most. The boar is all talk; it’s up to the man to, you know, stick it to… the man. We don’t find out if he does. Grownups are dumb. They work and work, and still believe in magic, myths and fairytales.

We’re laughing more than the children. Technically, we shouldn’t have been allowed in here at all. Adults can attend screenings of Gareth Moore’s Films for Children but only in the company of a youngster; the small print reads Parents/guardians will only be admitted if necessary. Perhaps animated surface, shadow play, animals (always good) and a lightness of touch encourage a “childish” mode of engagement in adults. Or maybe they’re just funny.

The “baby goats” in Harrell Fletcher’s Pippi and Thelonius clamber along a wooden structure, two bits fixed together. One climbs on the other’s back. Goats are like that, their behaviour driven by the need to secure the highest vantage point. Adults like this stuff too; watch Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte for 40 minutes of “baby goats” successively climbing onto an upturned trough, pushing each other off the top and onto the stable floor. This one is shot on an iphone. Oh yes, a kid. The name for a baby goat is a kid.

Poor Tina, she’s had to grow up. In Kren Cytter’s weird (but less creepy) 6 minute reversal of Neil Diamond’s ‘Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon’, a voice sings ‘Tina… You’re no longer a woman… You can’t lick your belly with a collar.’ Tina Fenomena is stretched up at the window, wombless, the plastic cone pressed up against the glass. She’s bored of laser mice. She’s tired of these human grownups trying to entertain her, laughing while they drink wine and smoke fags. Later Tina is rolling around on a bed. She curls her body over coquettishly, looks towards the camera, and curls it back the other way. Words appear as letters punched into the image. Think of them as captions, cues for action, but also meme text, txt msgs, or a live feed.

Geoffrey Farmer’s The Drawer and Julia Feyrer’s The Little Hunchback join the three animal-centred films by Cytter, Von Brandenburg and Fletcher, edited together with title sequences by Moore. All five works have been transferred onto 16mm; video, HD and iphone footage is projected through the hiss of celluloid. The project summons associations with travelling Magic Lantern shows of pre-cinema, magic and showmanship meeting with the mechanically reproduced image, and analogue film distribution, a single copy passed between cinemas and towns. Indeed, Films for Children has travelled the world, and has been moving between Whitstable Bienniale sites – Sea Scouts Hall, Whitstable Castle Art Studio, Whitstable Labour Club – for the past three weekends. Yesterday they were screened in the Sea Scouts Hall again. You might have seen them today at Whitstable Library. Digital files are easily copied, moved, updated (and deleted); they are not passed from place to place, they are siteless, and multiple, all the same, everywhere, all at once. The material nature of the copy, not the means of production (or its “original” media), conditions encounter.

Films for Children is part of ‘Stages in the Revolution’, conceived to seek out and create spaces for the ‘provisional communities that coalesce and dissolve around the three weeks of the Biennale’, joining commissioned projects by Cara Tolmie, Iain Boal, Jesse Jones and Patrick Staff. Moore’s contribution doesn’t feel like an education project or a vehicle for community outreach. It’s proof that exhibition and education strands, so often kept apart, presumably to prevent some kind of contamination, can live inside one another as part of a splintered and shifting programme.

The films are hopeful for an “other” kind of engagement, a different kind of visual perception, narrative and sense of community that is lived out and represented by children. Films for Children doesn’t so much seek out a community; it produces one, or many, or a shifting community of viewers. Its a series of hopeful gestures, expressions of desire that these films are (fingers crossed) the kind of film they – kids today – want to engage with, the kind that deploys sophisticated humour and understated joviality, a kind of silent magic in the dark.

But what do I know; I’m just a grownup.