Ten Minute Childhood

Looking forward to seeing Mark Cousins's 'film-essay' A Story of Children and Film. One of its inspirations is Ten Minutes Older, Herz Frank's short film from 1978, a single-take look at Latvian childrens' faces as they watch a puppet show. While the camera pans across a number of children it lingers mostly on one in particular, his face an unselfconscious display of emotions; alarm, fascination, fear, attentiveness. It's about as low-tech and simple a concept as you could get and yet the purity of the child's responses speaks to a desire in all of us to return to that unmediated immersion in things. 'He that increases knowledge', as the man says, 'increases sorrow.'