A Dream of Rural Still Life

Intimate and serene, Sharon Lockhart’s “Pine Flat” collection is a beautiful, yet ambiguous exploration of the lives of children in a small community in Eastern California. Culled from films and photographs made by Lockhart during her three-year part-time residency in Pine Flat, the exhibition currently resides at Harvard’s Sackler Museum.

The films, like their titles—”Hunter,” “Harmonica,” “Kissing,” and “Guns in Rain”—tend to be compositionally simple, but not simplistic. Each ten-minute film frames one or more children in a static shot, employing live-action but preserving photographic boundaries.

At first glance, it may be easy to dismiss Lockhart’s films as uninvolved, as not much “happens.” “What is this?” whispered a middle-aged visitor to her husband, as the two sat in an in-gallery screening room, “Kids just sitting around smoking?”

Only a handful of the 12 films have any discernible “plot,” but Lockhart’s films transcend this particular convention. The plots tend to be minimal—for example: “Boy waits for bus. Boy gets on bus,” or “Children begin lower down on the hill. Children finish further up on the hill.”

The stillness of the films can be eerie at times, but more often evokes a meditative sensibility. Further, Lockhart’s compositions are consistently striking and sophisticated; the static camera window draws close attention to the children’s subtle movements. Whether sleeping, reading, hiking, or rough-housing, the youths all appear to be dancing in free form. It is difficult not to be captivated by these otherwise ordinary actions.

Counteracting the urge to focus on one detail—for example, a boy’s foot in “Sleeper”—the unpredictability and beauty of these minute human elements force the viewer to be constantly aware of the entire subject and compositional framework.

Much as the stillness of the frame enhances the subtle motions of the subjects, the overall quietness of the films draws the ambient sound into the foreground. After settling into each film, one’s ears become attuned to the subtlest of sounds.

Becky Allen, a longtime collaborator of Lockhart’s, was responsible for recording the sound for the films. In some of the films, one can hear the crisp crackle of autumn leaves; in others, voices are reduced to murmurs. Most of what the children say is unintelligible, but at times one can interpret the general tenor of their exclamations.

The shifts between chirping birds, squealing kids on swings, roaring airplanes overhead, and mechanical rifle noises do seem unordinary, as does the intimacy of the films—but these films were not intended to be conventional documentaries.

Lockhart was in constant dialogue with the children of Pine Flat—although the name is actually a pseudonym, meant to preserve the town’s anonymity—discussing possible locations and activities for the films. Some of the children’s actions were improvised, though others were scripted; some films were shot as many as ten times. Lockhart created a fiction-as-truth version of Pine Flat, what curator Linda Norden describes as “artifice in the interest of capturing what [Lockhart] experienced.”

This posed reality becomes much more evident in the photographs on the walls surrounding the screening rooms. Two years after she began filming in Pine Flat, Lockhart set up a studio where the children could have their portrait taken. As posing is what many children do best, Lockhart aptly provided them with an open invitation to do so. All of the photographs have the same black background, gray concrete floor, and vertical dimensions.

Some of the photographs—such as “Sierra”—are interesting for the props they include, and others—such as “Dakota”—are captivating because of the expressions captured. However, compared to the films, the photographs, due to their lack of context, disappoint. Though Lockhart has arranged some creative combinations of photographs into diptychs and triptychs, they fail to transcend the stagnancy of their studio setting.

Perhaps even more disappointing than the photography is the full “stitched-together” film. While the museum plays two of the short films, each on continuous loop, on a rotating daily schedule, the original “Pine Flat” film—playing for a final time at the Harvard Film Archive on October 14–is a two-hour montage comprised of all 12 short films. Although this iteration is Lockhart’s original artistic vision for the project, the whole stands as less than the sum of its parts.

Indeed, the full-length film, especially when shown in a theater, lacks the intimacy engendered by the Sackler screening rooms. Furthermore, the original film leaves the audience with little time to absorb or ponder each shorter episode. Each of the ten-minute films requires so much concentration on the part of the viewer that it is taxing, rather than provocative, to watch 12 in succession.

The beauty of the films is in the details, which are revealed only upon multiple viewings; while this is enjoyable and readily achieved in the gallery, it becomes unfortunately impossible in the theater.

­—Staff writer Jeremy S. Singer-Vine can be reached at jsvine@fas.harvard.edu.