A Home Movie for Daniel

Place Bel Air, For DanielThese two films are premièred here at Rotterdam. I have not seen Place Bel Air which Gehr shot in Geneva, filming a traffic intersection. Gehr tells me he thought of it as a sort of contemporary version of Louis Lumière’s first film Workers Leaving a Factory. For Daniel, Gehr’s longest film, deals with the first four years of his son’s life. While Gehr himself calls it a ‘home movie’, it lacks the home movie’s sense of recording special events or relatives and friends. Instead Gehr presents, as few film-makers have, a direct portrait of a child emerging into the world. Although deeply caring, and with the most engaging subject one can imagine, the film observes with clarity and even detachment the child’s gradual mastery furstly of his body, then objects and finally the ever-extending space of the world. Rarely has a film (or a father) observed so unflinchingly the pain of a child’s first encounter with the world, or as unsentimentally chronicled the effort and practice by which he opens up to the word around him thorough an unwearying process we adults call play. Tom Gunning