Child, Part 1: Jamie, Ethan and Marlon: The First Two Months
1973 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Robert Humble
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
A pediatrician examines three newborns in hospital and at home, testing reflexes, muscle tone and eye movement.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A clinical newborn exam documentary sounds like the opposite of subversive until you realize Humble's refusing narrative, refusing sentiment, refusing every soft-focus instinct we bring to babies—and honestly, that restraint is more radical than any genre trick could be.
This sits squarely in the observational documentary lineage of the NFB's medical cinema, where the film's formal discipline—the measured pacing, the refusal of editorial comment, the camera's clinical steadiness—becomes the ethical stance itself; it's a study in how formal rigor *is* the argument.
The decision to let the pediatrician's hands—the gestures of examination, the touch itself—carry the entire emotional and narrative weight rather than voiceover or music is what transforms a potentially dry clinical record into something that actually sees these infants as subjects, not objects.