The Begint

I read that children brought up in a multi-linguistic environment had an inbuilt flexibility of mind, an ability to grasp different points of view, that early experiences were the touchstones of future personality. The first film that I ever saw was Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. I do often wonder what the impact was on the mind of a five year-old?

My parents went out to a village Christmas dance, leaving me in the good care of two neighbors, Ukrainian refugees from Stalinist Russia. They basked in the relative comfort of our living room, warmth, food, drink and, most importantly, one another’s uninterrupted company. Ivan stared longingly into Katya’s eyes, she sighed a deep acquiescent sigh. Ivan walked over, switched on the television and placed me directly in front of it.

They did what they had to do and I did what I had to do; sit riveted to a tale of the 1905 naval mutiny. It is a silent film released in 1925, so when the Odessa Steps sequence opened with shooting of the crowds, dying mothers, babies and children bayonetted and all duly trodden on by the implacable advance of the callous White Guard, no sounds echoed around our living room to alert my baby-sitters. I think I would have resisted any attempt to interrupt my viewing anyway. Clearly I had grasped the point made by a later film critic that, “Potemkin was a work of extraordinary pictorial beauty and great elegance of form”.

The artist Francis Bacon acknowledged the influence of the Odessa Steps sequence in his 1957 ‘Study of Screaming Nurse’. I took my young daughter around Bacon’s retrospective exhibition in London. Years later she asked me what on earth I thought I was doing, exposing her to such imagery? Such nightmare horror - such pictorial beauty and elegance of form. There is no answering an inquisitive intelligent child.

‘A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life’ Robertson Davies