The American-British filmmaker’s poetic portrait of youth explores the power dynamics of the cinematic gaze
In the closing credits of Margaret Salmon’s Boy (winter) (2022), the childcare provided by a local primary school is listed alongside the colourist, sound designer and camera assistant who worked on the 30-minute short, which was shot in Glasgow throughout the winter of 2021. It is a quiet recognition of the invisible labour of raising children, and a fitting one at the close of a film which centres on the experience of both giving and receiving care within the parent-child relationship. Salmon, an American-British filmmaker whose intimate, observational works have explored everything from the female burden of domestic housework to a child’s-eye-view of a remote forest, is interested in the ways in which societal expectations around gender, age, class and race can shape who we are, and how we might break beyond these boundaries.
Boy (Winter) charts the various stages of boyhood through subjects that range from just a few weeks old to pre-adolescence and young adulthood. Salmon has an eye for the subtle flashes of expression that can animate a face when framed close-up to the lens: the twitch of a mouth, or the idle tug on a loose strand of hair. We see a baby sucking from his mother’s breast as he looks directly to the camera, before being taken into his father’s arms who holds his son up, his grinning, unshaven face filled with delight. In this moment, it is apparent that the birth of the child is as transformative for his father as it is for the baby themselves as they hold each other’s gaze with mutual wonder and trepidation. At the film’s close, we see another young man playing videogames as he gruffly admits in conversation with Salmon that he is waiting for the imminent arrival of his first child, his dissociation and nerves palpable as he is shown in profile, his face towards the television and his hands clutched around the console.
Throughout this improvised, highly subjective portrait of youth, Salmon allows neither her subjects nor the viewer to forget the presence of her camera. It is a conscious rejection of the artifice of cinema, and an acknowledgement of the power dynamics that separate the filmmaker from the person sitting in front of the camera. We hear Salmon’s own voice from behind the lens as she holds conversations with various (cis and trans) boys about their hobbies, interests and the way they see the world while they leaf through comic books, fiddle with a toy truck, do press-ups, play the violin or knit. One boy with long curly hair looks directly to the camera and then down again repeatedly. We slowly realise that he is busy sketching the filmmaker from life, bringing her image gradually into focus even as she remains out of our immediate sight.
Salmon has stated that Boy (Winter) was made in response to the expansive oeuvre of underground filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin, in particular his early portrait films, in which the boundary between the subject, the filmmaker and the camera is again interrogated and dissolved. For this self-reflexive filmmaking practice, Dwoskin’s work is often associated with British film theorist Laura Mulvey’s concept of the gaze, and specifically the male gaze, coined in a 1973 essay called ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ on how cinematic conventions can reinforce patriarchal fantasy. Mulvey draws upon the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s assertion that the act of looking is fundamental to the development of one’s identity, from the ‘mirror stage’ of infancy to identifying with those represented onscreen in the realm of cinema. For Salmon and her directorial gaze, the camera becomes as much a mirror to herself and her own intentions as filmmaker as it does to the boys who she films before the lens.
Screening dates:
Art Lovers Movie Club: Margaret Salmon, Boy (winter), 2022, 35mm, 28 mins, UK
1 April–22 April 2025
© Courtesy the artist
About the artist:
Margaret Salmon (b. 1975, Suffern, New York) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Her films weave together poetry and ethnography, focusing on individuals in their everyday activities to capture the minutiae of daily life, infusing them with gentle grandeur. Adapting techniques drawn from various cinematic movements, such as Cinema Vérité, the European Avant Garde and Italian Neorealism, Salmon’s orchestrations of sound and image introduce a formal abstraction into the tradition of realist film. Salmon won the first Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2006. Her work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and the Berlin Biennale in 2010 and she has staged individual exhibitions at galleries including Witte de With in Rotterdam and Whitechapel Gallery in London.
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