once said about ruins, this vision of youth portrays its subjects as“merging”
into their surroundings. Lockhart achieves this in part through details of pose
and costume: blue jeans and a plaid shirt worn by the child in the episode“Bus”
rhyming with the blue-green and purple foliage of the surrounding valley; or
the position of the child’s body in the episode“Sleeper”curled up into the
same shape as the crook between two rocks, curved into the same form as the
land. In the episodes of pairs or groups, the children–even when bickering–
seem to ally themselves with each other. And as the children throw out so many
ropes to their environs or their playmates, attuning and attaching themselves to
their surrounds, we as viewers of Lockhart’s film hardly find ourselves“de-
tached”from the children before us, negated or separated by a scene of self-
absorption. Instead, we are“attuned”to the children’s absorption by Lockhart’s
filmic form; we are attuned to their attunement. As two children, for example,
tread water in unison and look down, away from the camera, into the water’s
fluid depths, we too look down at them, positioned by the camera in such a way
as to attune our gazing with theirs. And as the children wait, or listen, or play
with no regard for the passing of time, we too find ourselves as viewers waiting.
We find ourselves“attuned”to their attentiveness, joined in their temporal sus-
pension.
Our attunement to the children in Lockhart’s film provokes a sense less of
detachment, than of care. It has thus been suggested that Lockhart’s close atten-
tion to children, her camera’s open, capacious gaze in thePine Flatproject,
should be conceived in some analogy to that of the gaze of a mother toward a
child.In her work’s transformation of a camera eye that initially seems totaliz-
ing, perhaps oriented toward surveillance or visual domination, into one of pas-
sive attentiveness and care, we do sense the opening up of a maternal and pro-
tective logic within the project. But attunement, ultimately, amounts to a quiet
but unruly form of desire; the normative familial metaphors, even the redemp-
tive forms of maternal care, do not regulate all of its paths. Attunement, for
example, is not the same thing as what psychoanalysis calls“identification”;
not based on“misrecognition”nor the rapacious drive to possess–to beorto
have, as the psychoanalytic narrative would put it–attunement places two
forms into the same“key”. It precisely does not equate them.
Instead, this mutual rhyming preserves a crucial distance, evinced in the dis-
tanced tactics of Lockhart’s oeuvre. Indeed, inPine Flat, it is as if we gaze into
the distance–not just of so many gorgeous natural vistas, but also into the
intense mystery of the past. Ultimately, this is why the obsolete analog format
of Lockhart’s film seems so appropriate. It signals an analogy not just with the
threatened reality of rural youth in our present culture, like a pocket of histori-
cally surpassed experience subsisting against all odds; it points to the attune-
ment that the film’s images open up with Lockhart’s own memories, and per-
132 George Baker