upon itself, a return of cinema to its photographic pre-history, and in this turn
backward the film begins to attune itself to its subject: to the look back at the
rural and at youth, to the activities and temporality of childhood. A slowed im-
age, positioned by attunement squarely between photography and film, opens
itself to the in-between, suspended activities of the child: reading a book with
rapt attention; napping quietly; waiting distractedly; playing on swings, mov-
ing languorously back and forth; treading water slowly in a country stream.
Critics have remarked that all of these activities seem reminiscent of the unself-
conscious attentiveness often depicted in pre-modernist painting, where a de-
picted subject seems to block out the surrounding world, and that the art histo-
rian Michael Fried has called“absorption”. Moving from these absorptive
activities to the peculiarity of Lockhart’s mise-en-scène, which seems to drain
each episode of any sense of contrast between figure and ground, the point has
been made that Lockhart wishes to engage not only with painting, but with
modernistpainting, and with its self-reflexive and ultimately solipsistic project.
But this hardly seems the case at all. What appears to embody a belated mod-
ernism, again amounts to a project steeped in new analogies, connections, cor-
respondences. For Fried,“absorption”signaled a mode in which painting was
able to throw off its narrative functions, and begin an ultimately monomaniacal
focus on the self-reflexive logic of vision, paradoxically by negating the conven-
tion that a painting was meant to be beheld. Absorptive subjects were thus so-
lipsistic; they cancelled out the presence of the spectator, turning inward upon
themselves. Later modernist conventions of suspending oppositions between
figure and ground, foreground and background, achieved this eradication of
painting’s narrative basis in an even more radical way, severing the painting
from the task of depicting the world, securing its lonely autonomy. If Lockhart’s
Pine Flat“rhymes”with this history of another medium, recalling the prehis-
tory of modernist painting, it is in the spirit of canceling oppositions in a much
different manner, oppositions that modernism needed to uphold. It is in the
spirit perhaps of canceling modernism’s melancholic withdrawal from the
world altogether. Lockhart’s film is anything but“autonomous”, solipsistic,
self-absorbed. It is not“lonely”but a document of cohabitation, togetherness,
and collaboration.Pine Flatis not“absorptive”(selfish) but“attuned”(gener-
ous), perhaps linking its form both to photography and to painting.
Lockhart surelydoescancel all sense of figure-ground distinctions in her film-
ic images: grass spreads directly up the screen and merges through color match-
ing with the trunks and leaves of trees; horizon lines are rigorously suppressed;
snow and fog join figures with their hazy fields; we are oftentoo closeto a scene
to allow distinctions to emerge. And thisclosenessspreads to the children, who
fuse with these figureless fields inasmuch as we could say they become“at-
tuned”to their environment. Like an untimely sibling of what Walter Benjamin
After“Photography’s Expanded Field” 131