Two young girls striving to understand the mysterious, dangerous world: that’s what The Spirit of the Beehive is about. It’s not a film about plot, so why even bother describing the handful of vignettes that drift together to form its sparse narrative? It’s a universal story set in a specific time and a particular place: a tiny town on the desolate Castillian plains, just after the Spanish Civil War. That atmosphere is captured with shocking intimacy, and there’s a subtle political subtext running throughout– but there’s a sense that all of that context is just icing on the cake in this uncompromising portrayal of childhood.
The things you are likely to take away form The Spirit of the Beehive are: mid-afternoon light pouring through honeycomb windows; the capacity in children for complex cruelty and fearless sacrifice; the unpredictable power of cinema. Opening on the seemingly inconsequential event of a mobile cinema rolling into an isolated village with a print of James Whale’s Frankenstein, the film unfolds like a dream haunted by the images in that seminal monster movie. By the time you’ve absorbed all that The Spirit of the Beehive has to offer, you too will find yourself inextricably possessed– not by Frankenstein, but by the unforgettable images of Victor Erice’s masterpiece.
Children are sticky. They’re smelly and messy and their fingers are dirty and their diapers are poopy. Elizabeth Fleming’s photos of her own family are about the beauty in that truth. Chaos and tenderness intertwine as she captures frightening bed stains bathed in late-afternoon sunlight, framing bruises and band-aids in soft-focus cocoons. Her aptly titled ongoing body of work, Life Is A Series of Small Moments, is a startlingly intimate meditation on both the rumbling anxieties of being a parent and the fleeting magic of childhood.
Books and movies have one small thing in common: they combine aural and visual stimuli to the purpose of telling a story. But what about the other senses? One’s mind gets to wandering.
Where Wild Things are concerned, the answer may lie at I Hate Perfume, Christopher Brosius’s laboratory of unconventional scents. Rather than pander to classical tastes with rose and lilac-scented vials, Brosius creates formulas designed to invoke the most intricate of memories. Three of the scents developed at the I Hate Perfume workshop happen to bear a particular relationship to Where the Wild Things Are, due to their relevant subject matter. To wit:
If Max’s voyage had an olfactory accompaniment, it would no doubt be Brosius’s Eternal Return, a perfume designed to simulate the scent of sailing toward the shore. The mixture blends the smells of ocean air, wooden ships, and “a faint hint of cypress trees growing on a cliff above the water.” Sounds about right.
Then there’s Wild Hunt (which NAILS the wild rumpus in odorific terms)––the bottled and compressed scent of an ancient forest complete with “torn leaves, crushed twigs, flowing sap, fallen branches, old leaves, green moss, fir, pine, and tiny mushrooms”. Finally, there’s Memory of Kindness–based on the perfumer’s reveries of childhood–which has to be the smell of Max returning home.
Gosh. Is there even a vocabulary for the way that smells influence our perception of things? Will we ever have the equivalent of an olfactory soundtrack to films? to books? Life comes with its own built-in version, after all. And childhood is definitely the most powerful origin of smells. For these reasons, the whole concept of I Hate Perfume is a slightly mind-boggling enterprise.
Maybe Smell-O-Vision is due for a high-concept comeback.
Photographer Bobby Neel Adams has created a literal wrinkle in time with his series Age Maps, an assortment of uncanny lifetime-spanning portraits spliced together. By taking “before and after pictures” to the next level, he pulls back the curtain on the mysteries of the face and the creeping onset of the ageing process. Adams has used a similar process in earlier hand-torn projects like Family Tree, which examines the poetry of genetics through a series of relative-merging portraits, and Couples– eerie proof that lovers really do tend to look alike.
Korean photographer JoengMee Yoon’s Pink & Blue Project was prompted by his own five-year-old daughter, whose obsession with pink was so strong that she refused to wear any other color, and insisted on playing with only pink toys. It wasn’t long before Yoon discovered other children (and parents) with the same spellbound affliction, building identities around the single color that corresponds to their gender. Crossing boundaries of nationality and socio-economic status, Yoon’s project starkly examines the state of childhood under globalization, where prefabricated ideals and desires are marketed to children from birth.
Every child needs an adventure of some kind. The process of becoming an adult is predicated on exercises in independence, facing up to intimidating circumstances, and finding out what it means to be alone. Laura Dekker is simply ahead of the curve. It’s easy to forget what being 13 can be like, and that it’s not the same for everyone. Unfortunately, grown ups’ instinct to protect the young often comes coupled with a proclivity for patronization. Here’s to Laura, and let’s hope she gets a chance to sail off through night and day, in and out of weeks and almost a year to wherever her journey takes her.
Capturing an intimate look at China’s first ever elementary school class election, Weijun Chen’s 2007 documentary Please Vote For Me is a surprisingly enthralling and emotional little film. Thankfully avoiding the easy route of superfluous historical exposition and grandiose politicizing, the film focuses not on the nation of China but on three very different children who have been thrust into an unfamiliar political framework.
While each candidate struggles for power, they exhibit familiar dark human impulses that are somehow rendered shocking in their tangibility. These are children old enough to think complex, sometimes manipulative thoughts, and yet too young to be covert about them. As a result, we’re treated to a brutally honest peek at the mechanics behind human relationships, and a portrait of childhood that’s at once adorable and disheartening.
If you have a Netflix account, Please Vote For Me is available to stream instantly for free.
Son of a cinematographer and a child therapist, Jan von Holleben must have been destined to create visually striking depictions of childhood fantasy. In his series Dreams of Flying, the photographer takes an old-fashioned approach to staging gravity-defying acrobatics. Hollenben’s work is Gondry-esque (though maybe it’s the “Ghostbusters” shot leaving that impression) in its lo-fi sensibility, favoring D.I.Y. fun over glossy special effects trickery. Check out his latest series, Journey to Everywhere for more adventurous kids, make believe and optical illusions.
Inuit illustrator Annie Pootoogook’s work wields the language of childhood to depict scenes of modern family life in the wintry isolation of Nunavut. Apdoting an elementary school artist’s tendency to produce sparse, minimalist cross-sections of domestic scenes, Pootoogook’s images are framed from a wide-eyed child’s perspective as they highlight the theatricality in small, quiet moments. She seems particularly fond of depicting children watching television, capturing moments of sedentary cultural engagement with what’s either an attitude of coldly voyeuristic detachment or heartbreaking melancholy.
McDonald’s PlayPlaces, tree houses, Nintendo, inflatable pools: these are the uniquely youthful worlds that serve as backdrops for Khalif Kelly’s staggering, nostalgic paintings. Freezing forgotten childhood moments of both the frenzied and docile variety, Kelly’s work is like a pre-raphealite rendering of Peanuts. His subjects’ gracefully expressive poses to seem hint at the dramatic depth lurking beneath youthful playacting.
A playground fight could be a monumental development for the children in Kelly’s paintings– a Radio Flyer ride has the power to transform identities, and an enterprising drink stand might shape attitudes about gender, race, and politics. Treading a line between the personal and archetypal, draped in drama but sharply comic, Kelly’s work seems to invite interpretation and intentionally push buttons to illicit a range of surprising emotions.
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