Child, Part 3: Debbie and Robert: 12-24 Months
1974 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Robert Humble
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Siblings Debbie and Robert experiment and imitate through their second year, sometimes at cross purposes.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A observational doc about toddlers doing toddler things—it's exactly the kind of earnest, plotless cinema that makes most people switch off, which means Humble's probably onto something everyone else is too bored to notice.
This belongs in the lineage of Brakhage and structural cinema's engagement with the everyday; Humble's patient 28-minute study of sibling imitation and divergence is formally rigorous precisely because it refuses narrative convenience, trusting duration and attention as compositional tools.
The film's entire architecture hinges on Humble's willingness to hold on children's faces during moments of pure, aimless experimentation—that refusal to cut away, to impose meaning, transforms raw observation into something that feels like cinema thinking.