Avant garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage opened his 1963 book, Metaphors on Vision, with a sentence that would have a decisive impact on experimental filmmakers in the 1960s: “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green?'” Brakhage wished to replace renaissance conventional rational model of vision based on the laws of perspective with the baby’s naive, chaotic and un-educated vision that precedes linguistic knowledge and naming ability and is contingent solely on visual and optic knowledge.

André Breton, founder of the Surrealist Movement, expressed a similar sentiment forty years earlier in the First Surrealist Manifesto (1924). At the opening of the Manifesto, Breton extols limitless imagination and depicts the process of growing and maturation of children as one in which the imagination is set into logical and clear frameworks created in order to repress it so that it would not disrupt daily social functioning.

Breton and his fellow surrealists maintained that children’s paintings express a rich inner world reflecting a reality beyond the reign of reason and logic. As a result, in order to get nearer to these paintings and to their world, the surrealists adopted the technique of scribbling and automatic writing.

This exhibition is held within the framework of an experimental cinema project. In a like manner to children’s imagination, the field of experimental cinema is usually relegated to the margins by mainstream cinema with its countless laws and utilitarian and profit-based considerations. In the course of its history, experimental cinema was influenced by the silent film, especially in its early stage (1895-1906). The “primitive cinema,” as it is called, of that period can be compared to the medium’s infancy since it has not as yet learned to speak and use a verbal language.

The works in the exhibition correspond with various layers of the concept “childhood” – both as a period in one’s life and as artistic and cinematic language.

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