Kids flicks for Wittgenstein

In Cambridge in the 1930s and 1940s, Ludwig Wittgenstein loved going to "the flicks"—any films at all, provided they were not self-consciously starry or arty or (worst of all) posh-literary. His ideal was the run-of-the mill American western. He liked it because the actors, like the horses, seemed to get on with being themselves rather than putting on an act for the sake of the camera.

Westerns are not what they used to be, but in the past few years a new form has made a space for itself in world cinema. It would have fitted Wittgenstein’s requirements perfectly: the children’s film. I don’t mean high-budget glitz like the Harry Potter films, but the kinds of children’s films that are exhibited every year in the cheap and wonderful Kinder Berlinale, which runs in parallel with the annual Berlin Film Festival.

This year’s Kinder Berlinale happened to coincide with last week’s English school holidays, and it provided a fabulous banquet of education and entertainment for a little band of ten-year-olds, plus me. Gattu, which tells the story of a poor orphan in an Indian city who wants to fly a kite, struck a chord with all of us; Punch was a bit more challenging, with its tale of a boy who battles with violence and discrimination in a school in Seoul; but we were soothed by Mustafa’s Sweet Dreams, in which an apprentice baklava-maker from rural Turkey seeks his fortune in Istanbul. Isdraken was sharp and funny, with its focus on a bunch of kids in northern Sweden and their battles with social services; and there was melancholy beauty in The Mirror Never Lies which depicts the anguish of a little girl in an Indonesian fishing village who cannot come to terms with the death of her father.

It struck me that I might be witnessing the coming-of-age of a new art-form: movies that focus on the language, habits, and looks of children who have no notion of putting on a performance. It is as though the camera and the microphone were simply eavesdropping on them being themselves and at their ease. In the past, childhood has always been a challenge for the arts, especially the performing arts. Adults acting as children are an embarrassment, and so are children who have been coached to put on an act in front of an audience. But the latest recording techniques are sufficiently unobtrusive to allow children to figure as themselves in their own stories. I loved it, the kids loved it, and I think Wittgenstein would have loved it too.