The artist equips the children with an optical device considered the ultimate technological wet dream of spy or James Bond type films. However, the kids shoot everyday routine events at their home and at the Museum of Science. This discrepancy is an important element of the work’s poetics.
Making a creative use of the hidden camera, the children stand still in front the filmed people and capture their natural reactions. This practice bears resemblance to the manner in which the hidden camera was used in the late silent movie period. During that period, it was used as an objective documentary implement, the aim of which was not the vulgar sensationalism of the candid camera genre, but rather the exposure of reality as, for example, in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Sela replaces Vertov’s collective Marxist endeavor with that of two children and one adult, which combines childish and artistic outlooks on the world.
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