De Natura: The Child-Centric Cinema of Lucile Hadžihalilović

Lucile Hadžihalilović opens De Natura (2018) with a signature triptych.  First, an extreme close-up ― ten seconds on a young human’s eye, flecks of orange on its eyelashes, freckles dappling its delicate Caucasian skin, blue-green swirls in the pupil.  Corporeal and technical motions then augment Hadžihalilović’s eye study: we see tiny jounces of a camera straining to hold shallow focus, the eyeball darting sideways and up, minute dilations of the pupil, a climactic blink.  Accompanying these visuals is a natural soundtrack, of an off-screen river’s white noise, trills of duetting birdsong, and gusts of wind caressing foliage.  Cut to Hadžihalilović’s second set-up: a vertiginous low-angle upwards into a grove of cypress trees, compressed by a long lens, as early morning sun back-lights the dense pine canopy.  After this, shot three is the short film’s credits, scrawled in blue ink in a child’s notebook lying open in grass and clover.  The De Natura caption itself comes in swirling capitals, a carefully composed two-line calligraphic flourish.  Initiating the film, Hadžihalilović’s three sensual instants converge: this hungrily perceiving child’s eye; an engulfing array of living matter; an effort to craft an inscription or write-up.

De Natura

De Natura

De Natura

Of Nature is Hadžihalilović’s title, and up-front here is her primer of child-centric cinema.  Not merely films with child protagonists ― that commercialist staple ― child-centric cinema is entirely calibrated by vivid non-adult subjectivity, whose deep curiosity about, yet brittle mastery over, unstable diegetic worlds, create lyrical miniatures like these.  In De Natura and her other work, Hadžihalilović aligns herself with a trajectory, often overlooked, that runs through French and Francophone cinema, among films like La Maternelle (Marie Epstein and Jean Bénoït-Lévy, 1933), La Première nuit (Georges Franju, 1958), Faustine el le Bel été (Nina Companéez, 1972), Maman(s) (Maïmouna Doucouré, 2015) and Un monde (Laura Wandel, 2021).¹  That child-centric cinema often manifests in enigmatic shorts or short features, made by non-traditional filmmakers and especially women, is crucial.  As Carrie Tarr remarks, these are films committed to a “foregrounding of the perceptions of child or adolescent protagonists whose experiences are normally marginal and marginalized [which] has the potential to challenge hegemonic adult modes of seeing and displace the fetishistic male gaze of dominant cinema.”²  Deeply immersive and fixated on organic materiality, the child-centric mode explores the perceptual input of non-adults to estrange us from, to look askance at prevailing urban social orders.  These are delicate but fiercely committed works.

A micro-short of six minutes, De Natura distills key traits of child-centric filmmaking.  A linchpin feature is its editorial opacity, the limited and elliptical scope of its narration.  De Natura’s wisp of narrative has two children, who present as five- or six-year-old girls, traversing a forest without adult supervision, as their daytime euphoria gives way to disquiet by nightfall.  Framed by that opening rivetted eye, Hadžihalilović engages Stan Brakhage’s notorious formulation of cinema as an “adventure of perception,” in which child-centric scrutiny uncovers “a world alive… with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color.”³  At times, the sensorial flow is rapturous: De Natura begins with shot-reverse shot encounters of the girls crossing a stream, delightedly splashing water; then low-to-the-ground close-ups of their goose-bumped flesh, feet on smooth pebbles brushed by bubbles and white-flecked spray.  Systematically, though, Hadžihalilović’s camera roams, gleaning patterns in the natural world that attenuate human agency.  Wandering from those young bodies we consider shots of rivulets cascading down scored rocks, groves of tree saplings in their spring growth phase, the everyday foraging of birds and insects, the choral blooms of wild flowers.  Underlying these organic textures, De Natura studies the implacable processes of the natural world, its rituals and structures, and how concomitantly fleeting a foothold these young roving humans exert.  

De Natura

De Natura

De Natura

De Natura

An implacable, at times sinister unknowability also nourishes Hadžihalilović’s child-centric spaces.  De Natura, typically for Hadžihalilović, reduces character agency and almost eliminates exposition and causality.  Film and filmmaker in sum pursue an insistent diegetic ambivalence, what Phil Powrie relatedly describes as idyllic (child) innocence interwoven with painful (adult) regret, films that “look backwards and forwards, but also sideways, outwards, escaping centrifugally into multiplicities, while at the same time coalescing in a specific moment, a specific place.”⁴  De Natura, in this context, punctuates its landscapes with totems of loss ― like an overrun human grave, insert shots of porcelain memorial portraits, cracked aged photographs of dour grown-up faces.  Are these trace objects of the girls’ missing family?  Signs of a larger-scale vanishing of adults, a post-human era?  Is De Natura, ultimately, a bizarrely understated post-apocalyptic fugue?  Hadžihalilović’s only stable parameter is her poised and sustained entropic rhythm, a mise-en-scène that alternates between human relics and the evanescent nature around them: rotting plums and leaves, dust and detritus hanging in a spider’s web, cotton clouds dissolving across a purplish panorama of magic-hour dusk.

De Natura

De Natura

De Natura

De Natura

The central irony ― and force ― of Hadžihalilović’s work, in De Natura and elsewhere, is that she embeds such visceral organic data within a flattened diegetic flow that refuses to decipher or extrapolate.  Hadžihalilović’s thesis shots are often primal, feral, decisively non-verbal, yet at the same time disconcertingly neutral, even blank.  De Natura, in this context, ends on a bravura nocturnal long lens abstraction, in which the barely legible faces of both girls ― pensive, fixed, eerily haggard ― hang in dark space above the flaming sparks of a crackling fire.  Far above this, drifting fronds of cloud pass over a gleaming hunter’s moon.  Such is Hadžihalilović’s call of the wild.  As Emma Wilson, responding to Laura Marks, suggests, the child-centric system is richly embodied but partial, anchored by how “the refusal of mapping ― overview ― or mastery recalls… the play with space and scale… [the] focus on texture and touch.”⁵  The effect of all this is to unmoor us brilliantly from our usual site of adult-centered (cinematic) comprehension.  We revel in mysterious yet rapturous minutiae, and the cyclical rituals of nature, while the larger social schemes of humanity recede and dissolve.  As Hadžihalilović reports, her child-centric films come to enact a kind of literal and conceptual generational breach: “The adults are enigmatic figures, not real characters but phantasmagoria, and that they are somehow oppressive… Mainly, there’s not much of a link between children and adults in my films — it’s as if they are living in separate worlds.”⁶

De Natura

De Natura

Endnotes