Child's Play
On Bazin's "Montage Interdit," cinematic realism, and the children's film as represented by A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), Matinée (1977), and A Simple Event (1974)
“What are the conditions of cinematic realism?” Probably the most influential treatments of this question remain those of André Bazin, whose theoretical writings approach it from a number of angles. In a recent article, I discussed Bazin’s notion of the “image fact” in relation to Antoine Bourges’s Concrete Valley (2022). The text I want to consider here, though, is his 1958 “Montage Interdit,” also known as “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage.” In this famous essay Bazin uses two 1956 films, Albert Lamorisse’s Le Ballon rouge and Jean Tourane’s Une Fée Pas Comme Les Autres, to conduct “a simple analysis of certain rules of montage as they relate to cinematic expression, and more specifically still, of its aesthetic ontology.” Probing the conditions under which an action takes on “the spatial density of the real,” he arrives at what is by now a familiar principle: “When the essence of a scene demands the simultaneous presence of two or more factors in the action, montage is ruled out.”
In order for Le Ballon rouge to show us a balloon following a little boy like a dog, it is necessary that we see both in the same shot. Montage cannot break up the presentation of boy and balloon without changing the nature of the fable. Similarly, in Nanook of the North (1922), and despite the difference in subject matter, it is “inconceivable that the famous seal-hunt scene…should not show us hunter, hole, and seal all in the same shot.” In such scenes, montage is ruled out. To produce the desired effect, the elements of the scene must be captured within the same frame, presented with an irreducible simultaneity. (Otherwise, one could not strictly say that the balloon “follows” the boy, or that Nanook shows us a seal-hunt.) Bazin thus argues that montage may under certain conditions deprive an action of its filmic “reality.” Conversely, it’s also possible to go the opposite way: “That is to say, to restore reality to a recital of events it is sufficient if one of the shots, suitably chosen, brings together those elements previously separated off by montage.”
Given the example of Le Ballon rouge, it should be clear that “reality” here does not have to do with the possibility of something occurring in everyday life or according to established laws of nature. Realism in Bazin’s sense may encompass all manner of fantastic themes—animate balloons, for instance. What the law of montage specifies, then, are conditions for presenting action within a given type of reality. As Bazin writes, the law would specify different requirements in the case of “documentary films, the object of which is to present facts which would cease to be interesting if the episodes did not actually occur in front of the camera,” as compared to “didactic documentaries, the purpose of which is not to report but to explain an event.” Even more suggestively, Bazin considers “the fiction film, ranging from the fairytale world of Crin Blanc to the mildly romanticised type of documentary such as Nanook,” and comes to the remarkable conclusion that across this wide range, “It is the aspects of this reality that dictate the cutting.”
It is a remarkable statement because it suggests that one could, in theory, rewrite (and continue to rewrite) “Montage Interdit” using any fiction film—and a group that ranges from Crin Blanc to Nanook is certainly a large one—considering how its filmic reality dictates the presentation of action within it. Moreover, the statement implies some connection between the “aspects of reality” in a given film and the editing restrictions that apply to the presentation of action. What is the nature of this connection? And what implications does this connection have for the broader issue of cinematic realism?
So far, we have stayed within the orbit of Bazin’s discussion. A natural next step, though, would be to ask whether we can develop a notion of realism flexible enough to account for myriad “aspects of reality” while still respecting the requirements of action dictated by Bazin’s law of montage?
Agents of Abstraction
This, in so many words, is what Gilles Deleuze attempts in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, when he develops his concept of the “action-image,” which for him designates the domain of cinematic realism. In his first chapter on the action-image, he writes: “What constitutes realism is simply this: milieux and modes of behaviour, milieux which actualise and modes of behaviour which embody.” The region of cinematic activity defined by the action-image comprises “the relation between the two and all the varieties of this relation.” Realism, in short, comprises situations (milieux), actions (modes of behaviour), and the connections between the two.
At minimum, this definition of realism requires three sorts of specifications—and three “laws of the action-image” are precisely what Deleuze develops. The first concerns the articulation of the encompassing situation, a sense of how a film’s milieu organizes the weight given to the actions it contains—as in Ford’s exemplary Fort Apache (1948), where individuals subject themselves to a universal perspective of conflict and change. The second law governs the passage from situation to action—as we find elaborated in Lang’s Mabuse films, where a global situation gives rise to flexible chains of action and reaction whose development we follow until they reach a decisive moment. Finally, the third law deals with action taken “for itself.” And it is this that Deleuze identifies with Bazin’s law of montage.
Deleuze’s theoretical move is to see “Montage Interdit” as specifying just one of three requirements of cinematic realism. If the first law specifies the situation, and the second governs the movement from situation to action, Bazin’s law determines what counts as an action to begin with. It specifies something like the smallest unit of action within a given filmic reality. To break up the action any further would be to simply change the action, preventing it from being recognized as the action that it is, and altering its relation to its encompassing situation. Breaking up the action via editing would either result in a different action or prevent its recognition as an action at all.
In other words, despite the fact that “Montage Interdit” develops the question of realism from the perspective of action, Bazin’s analyses already depend on a reciprocal relation between action and situation—a connection that he presupposes without specifying. Throughout “Montage Interdit,” Bazin moves freely between discussing things from the perspective of either situation and action. When he looks at how “aspects of reality” in different types of fiction films “dictate the cutting,” he is performing a contraction from situation to action. When he analyzes the presentation of boy and balloon in Le Ballon rouge and finds that the imposition of a cut would change the essence of the fable, he is expanding from action to situation. Deleuze’s three laws of the action-image, then, render explicit requirements that Bazin himself presupposes, and which allow him to move reciprocally between action and situation.
The possibility of moving from action to situation and back involves a process of generalization Deleuze sees as characteristic of the action-image. The realism of the action-image entails a space structured by needs and desires—purposes whose fulfillment depends on a creature’s practical ability to coordinate perception and action, to screen out, as it were, everything that is irrelevant to a given scenario. It is a process of generalization because objects and entities are seen not in themselves but for what sorts of movements they provoke—and therefore as obstacles, functions, means, and ends. (The gleam of a knife is not of interest in itself but for what actions and reactions it gives rise to and links up with.) This process of generalization is governed by what Deleuze terms the “sensory-motor schema,” which he also calls an “agent of abstraction.” It is “sensory-motor” because of how it specifies the connections between sensation and movement, perception and action. It is an “agent of abstraction” because it retains from the image only what is relevant to causal, instrumental relations of action and situation. Realism, the proper domain of the action-image, is where the sensory-motor schema is most fully developed.
Growing Pains
“Childhood is the sleep of reason.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile (1763)
I take the time to develop these somewhat dry film-theoretical considerations because I am, for one thing, interested in exploring how Deleuze’s Cinema books “complete” some of Bazin’s theses. In this case, Deleuze integrates Bazin’s law of montage into a conception of the action-image and the sensory-motor schema, a theoretical move that offers a useful perspective on the question of cinematic realism we started with. In Deleuze’s conception, it is clear that we can discuss different types of filmic reality, so long as they respect the three laws of the action-image, which specify the recognizability of situation, action, and the relations between the two. For Deleuze, as for Bazin, realism “does not exclude fiction or even the dream. It can include the fantastic, the extraordinary, the heroic and above all melodrama. It can include exaggeration and lack of moderation, as long as these are of its own type.”
For another, Deleuze’s notion of realism provides a way of approaching a rich subject that Bazin himself raises, and then quickly abandons, in “Montage Interdit”: the notion of a children’s cinema. Mentioning authors like Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, and Jules Verne—“poets whose imagination is privileged to remain on the dream wavelength of childhood”—Bazin observes that there has been a paucity of genuine children’s films to rival this wealth of children’s literature. And though he doesn’t discuss the films of Lamorisse or Tourane from this perspective, our discussion of cinematic realism provides a useful means of exploring such work. For if realism designates a functional space of generality, where objects and gestures are seen in terms of their goals and purposes, then there must exist a different sort of space, one where the abstractions of the sensory-motor schema have yet to take hold. In such a space, practical relations would blur and dissolve; goals and purposes would be far more ambiguous, if they could even be said to exist at all. And it is this sort of space that a genuine children’s film would show us—perhaps by delineating the process by which the sensory-motor schema eventually takes hold. If childhood is, as Rousseau tells us, the sleep of reason, then a children’s film should show us the process of its awakening.
It should be immediately said that though the presence of a child may be a necessary element in such films, it is not on its own a sufficient condition. Kiarostami’s A Wedding Suit (1976) and Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), for example, both operate on strong principles of suspense, and these depend on the fact that their young protagonists unambiguously comprehend the rules governing their actions. Understanding that they will be punished for certain acts, the children in both films have already been socialized into the sensory-motor schema. Thus, although they are excellent films on their own merits, they are not children’s films in the sense we are considering. Kiarostami’s superb 1989 Homework, though, would qualify. Described by the director as a “visual study” of the habits of schoolchildren, it distinguishes itself by how it accommodates a range of material—the children’s accounts of physical and verbal abuse, oblique mentions of the ongoing war, a hasty poem recitation, a distressing scene where a child cries in front of the camera and backs away in terror—without fitting it into a governing schema of interpretation.
There are many more films that one could consider in this connection. Jacques Doillon’s The Hussy (1979) and Catherine Breillat’s The Sleeping Beauty (2011) astonish for how they use their fairytale frameworks to explore a passage from the fantastic space of childhood to the uneasy passions of adolescence. Nils Malmros’s The Tree of Knowledge (1981) derives its power from the degree to which its psychological observations are unburdened of narrative weight, and one might consider how this glancing, freeform structure beats a strategic retreat from the conventional identification structures of the sensory-motor schema. In order to keep things at a manageable length, however, I will restrict my discussion to two great children’s films, each of which achieve a remarkable tension between their action-adventure plots and their means of inhabiting the more ambiguous, amorphous space of childhood: Alexander Mackendrick’s A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s Matinée (1977).
Fantastic Voyage
Adapted from Richard Hughes’s superb 1929 novel, A High Wind in Jamaica opens with a hurricane that blows through the Thornton family’s plantation in Jamaica, threatening the couple and their five young children. Immediately, this passage lays out Mackendrick’s impressive visual plan. The wide CinemaScope frame and its layers of overlapping activity will establish the physical, goal-oriented, eminently practical parameters of the situation with force and visual clarity. At the same time, the assiduous externality of Mackendrick’s style will allow for an uneasy mix of relations to coexist, refracting the sensory-motor situation across a range of contradictory responses. The father’s attempt to move his family to safety cuts against his daughter’s search for her cat, the calm indifference of the younger children, the mother’s Christian prayers, and the rituals of the local population. Amid the wreckage of the next morning, a man lies crushed under their collapsed house—but the event gives rise not just to the mother’s socially conventional grief, but also to an ambiguous mix of indifference and fascination and incomprehension among the Thornton children. This dynamic, of a materially identical event giving rise to a multiplicity of reaction and response, recurs across the runtime.
The large-scale movements of A High Wind in Jamaica are determined by the logic of an adventure story. After the hurricane, the Thornton children are sent home to England on a ship with Captain Marpole (Kenneth J. Warren), which is subsequently held up by a pirate ship captained by Chavez (Anthony Quinn). Chavez manages to get some money off of Marpole, but when he sails away and finds that the kids have by accident made their way onto his ship, he gets more than he bargained for, and has to get rid of the children while evading the British Navy’s efforts to rescue them. The great originality of the film, however, derives from how this action-adventure framework exists in tension with the presence of the children, who are wilder and more unpredictable than any story structure can contain, and who frustrate the usual operations of the sensory-motor situation.
Throughout the seafaring voyage, the children are an endless source of unexpected actions and reactions. Early on, when Emily (Deborah Baxter), the second-oldest Thornton child, reports that Captain Marpole had been bound and had a fire lit up under him, she gets a varied set of responses from her siblings: “He smells,” “I don’t like him,” and “I would’ve liked to see that.” Bearing out Captain Marpole’s remark that “A ship is the finest nursery in the world,” the children subject the pirate ship to all manner of Keaton-like distortions, such as an iron nail used as a child’s doll, and a storage box used as a coffin for a mock burial-at-sea. The fact that most of the pirate crew speak only Spanish creates a language barrier between them and the children, and their interactions unfold in a mute world of things without names. Complicating matters further, the superstitious crew becomes increasingly unnerved by the children, convinced that they are bad luck.
Across A High Wind in Jamaica, Quinn’s Chavez and Baxter’s Emily emerge as focal points for the film’s dominant tension between the action-adventure plot and the space of childhood. They are not identification figures, but their responses are an index of the film’s central dynamic, as we see when the eldest Thornton child, John (Martin Amis; yes, that one), accidentally falls to his death while the ship is docked at port. Both characters change across the film—Emily gradually ages out of childhood, Chavez develops a kind of existential detachment from his role as pirate captain—and these transformations isolate them from their respective groups, most clearly during the film’s climax. Chavez’s crew mutinies against him in order to take a Dutch steamship, only for the British Navy to swoop in. In the chaos of all this action, the captive Dutch captain enters the cabin where Emily is being treated for an injury, and grabs a knife in an attempt to get her to cut off his bonds. Perhaps dazed by the painkilling draughts she’s been given, she recoils in fear and stabs the Dutch captain. Chavez enters the scene too late to do anything but bear witness to Emily’s actions.
The film’s brilliant finale finds both in England on opposite sides of a British court—a space presented as even more alienating and foreign than anything on the pirate ship—where Emily asked to bear witness against Chavez for the death of the Dutch captain. Emily’s distress comes not necessarily from having to remember the traumatic scene (as the adults suppose) or even from having to articulate a perspective on events that she had up to then only embodied. Rather, it derives from her dim but growing awareness, particularly in that courtroom setting, that whatever she says is binding, that what she chooses to do will have consequences that she will be responsible for. It would be too much to call her testimony strategic, but she says enough for the judge to be convinced of Chavez’s guilt. She may not, as yet, understand the full magnitude of those consequences—in this case the hanging of Chavez and his entire crew—but she will. In the film’s final moments, Emily watches as a toy ship skims the surface of a park fountain, recognizing, perhaps for the first time, a distinct boundary for play, where a toy is just a toy, marked off from a realm of action. The space of childhood has given way to the sensory-motor schema.
Adventures in Moviegoing
Matinée includes a poster of A High Wind in Jamaica at one point, suggesting that Hermosillo had the film in mind while making his own. Unlike Mackendrick, though, he does not opt for an immediately assertive visual programme, and instead builds up his film more gradually. Matinée opens with Jorge (Armando Martín) and Aaron (Rodolfo Chavez Martinez) sneaking out of school in an attempt to catch an afternoon movie, and the film takes advantage of the fact that its schoolboy protagonists have been raised on a diet of adventure comics and movies. In A High Wind in Jamaica, the children remain fully within the action-adventure framework, placed in opposition to its physical necessities. In Matinée, by contrast, Jorge and Aaron are aware of the basic requirements of action, albeit without quite understanding its consequences, and this unreflective genre awareness allows Hermosillo to sync up their actions with the film’s larger movements. The film thus becomes something quite unusual: a robbery and kidnapping plot stitched together by two pint-sized protags, a sensory-motor situation held together by child’s play.
Matinée’s adventure-movie gears start turning when Aaron stows away in the moving truck that Jorge and his father are to take to Mexico City, which gets hijacked by a group of robbers, including former cellmates Aquilles (Héctor Bonilla) and Francisco (Manuel Ojeda), who need it for an upcoming robbery. The thieves take Jorge with them on the job, leaving his father bound and gagged in a spare apartment, while Aaron inadvertently manages to avoid detection. In developing the story, Hermosillo balances the action-film excitement of the story with character mystery and ambiguity. When Jorge’s father tries to make a run for it with the robbers’ money, effectively abandoning his son, this amoral behaviour comes as a complete surprise given our limited knowledge of him. At the same time, when he is shot by Aquilles during the escape attempt and dies, it is not entirely clear how Jorge will assimilate this shocking event. Nonetheless, the incident has immediate practical consequences: the thieves’ money burns up, the group disbands, and Aquilles and Francisco find themselves alone with the children planning another robbery—this time at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
The lead-up to this robbery sees Aaron grow increasingly attached to Aquilles, and by extension to the plan, while Jorge aligns himself with Francisco, who is more ambivalent about the robbery. (Apart from fearing that robbing a church is sacrilege and grounds for excommunication, Francisco also reminisces about his time sharing a cell with Aquilles, and the “blast” that they had in prison.) More than an artificial introduction of conflict, this realignment proceeds by what is, for Jorge and Aaron, a natural, mostly automatic process of identification.
Matinée’s final stretch confirms Hermosillo’s canny construction. On the day of the robbery, Jorge convinces Aaron that in order to avoid being excommunicated, they should inform the police about the upcoming robbery. Aaron goes along with the plan, but still hopes that Aquilles will come out of it safe, because he was kind to him. (Jorge’s casual response: “Not to me. Don’t you remember they killed my dad?”) After milling about some arcades, they decide to go to the church and watch the robbery, and it is there that the significance of the title returns with redoubled force. For when they clamber up a construction site adjacent to the church to get a good view of the events that they helped stage, they are unable to watch things unfold with passive detachment. Just as children do when watching films, they relate to the events not through suspended belief but direct identification—identification that in this case gets translated into action, with both going into and out of the screen space, so to speak. After finding out that Aquiles and Francisco are to be disguised as priests, Jorge informs the undercover cops to ensure that the robbers are caught. Still hoping that Aquilles will come out unscathed, Aaron in turn runs toward the church to find Aquiles and warn him. Their actions make clear that they have identified with opposite parties, though neither of them are yet able to articulate their respective positions on the robbery—hence there is, as yet, no enmity between them. Only later are the consequences of their stances fully clear to them.
In Matinée’s superb final scene, Jorge and Aaron arrive by train into their hometown, to crowds chanting “Hooray, Jorge!” Before they alight, Jorge, obviously delighted at his triumphant homecoming, assures Aaron that because they are buddies, he won’t tell anyone that he was on the side of the robbers. That he and Aaron are able to see each other as having taken “sides” is a marked difference from their previous, uncritical identification. Now socialized into norms of action and consequence—into the regularities of the sensory-motor schema—they are now able to take responsibility for their deeds. In more than one respect, the adventure of childhood has ended.
Zero for Conduct
But if A High Wind in Jamaica and Matinée both show a process of socialization into the sensory-motor schema, can we imagine a film that more fully inhabits what we’ve called the space of childhood? If these works examine how we become inducted to the action-image, so to speak, can we imagine a film that simply remains at its point of genesis? Can we ask about a degree zero of the action-image? It is with these questions in mind that we might consider Sohrab Shahid-Saless’s A Simple Event (1974), which from its title on down, probes the conditions of presentation necessary to see something as constituting an event. Or, to use the terms developed in this essay, it probes the minimum conditions of cinematic realism.
A Simple Event presents the daily routine of an Iranian schoolboy as he goes to school, helps his fisherman father sell his catch, runs errands for his ailing mother, and so on. Throughout, the boy maintains a Keaton-like presence: silent, stoic, impassive, as if able to absorb everything thrown at him with virtually no change in expression. Of course, the fact that our hero is a child makes a crucial difference. Keaton’s comedy often depends on our full grasp of the hero’s comprehension of the situation, whatever that level of comprehension may be. Here, it is a genuine question whether any given occurrence is, for the child, a cause of wonder or pain or joy—or whether it is simply routine, part of a series of habitual repetitions. The tension thus derives from our very uncertain ability to read dramatic import, comic or tragic, into any given scene.
This tension, at play from start to finish, is heightened by Saless’s presentation of the boy’s repetitions through continual variations in shot sequence—all striking in their compositional beauty, fluid découpage, and heightened ambient sound. In a sense, Saless is asking how far one can go with changes in directorial presentation before a given incident takes on a sense of dramatic momentousness, before what is presented takes on the solidity of action and situation. A very early sequence alternates between shots of (what we later learn is) his father’s boat, initially seen as a speck on the horizon, and images of the boy waiting on the shore. But in stark contrast to, say, the ending of The Green Ray (1986), this back-and-forth pattern of watching and waiting is, for the boy, simply routine. What strikes us as a remarkable, even wondrous passage is to him merely everyday. The sequence thus functions like a variation on a Kuleshov experiment, where the schoolboy’s presence used to absorb all the dramatic phenomena and natural wonder he is cut against.
We may see A Simple Event’s originality more clearly if we think back to Bazin’s law of montage: “When the essence of a scene demands the simultaneous presence of two or more factors in the action, montage is ruled out.” For what Saless confronts us with are, precisely, scenes repeated with different shot sequences and conditions of presentation, with the interventions of montage changing each time. But if an analysis such as Bazin’s seems ineffective or inappropriate in this case, it’s because we are unable to clearly distinguish action and situation to begin with, unable to say what the “essence” of a given scene even is. If Saless’s alterations in presentation do not change how we take the boy’s movements, as we might have expected given Bazin’s law, it’s because we are unable to identify an encompassing situation to which his actions are related, and which would allow us to see his gestures as “actions” to begin with. His movements have not (yet) entered into the domain of the action-image and the abstractions of the sensory-motor schema.
Thus, we see the extent to which Bazin’s analyses of action—and by extension his conception of realism—presuppose a tacitly recognized situation to which the action is related. At the same time, we see how A Simple Event probes the conditions of realism by turning the very recognition of action and situation into an active question: How is it that we are able to recognize anything like an action and situation to begin with? To enter the domain of realism and the action-image, we have to be able to take a scene as marking a change in action or situation—to see it, in short, as an event. What, then, is the “simple event” of the title?
The question runs throughout A Simple Event, but emerges most forcefully around the one-hour mark, when the boy’s mother, who had been bedridden for most of the runtime, dies. In a different film, such an occurrence would inevitably signal some important change—but it is a mark of Saless’s strategy that this incident gets absorbed, alongside all others, into the ambiguity of the schoolboy’s unchanging expression and the mellifluous regularity of his routine. A Simple Event ends with the boy’s father bringing him to buy a new suit—only to decide to forgo the purchase for reasons of cost. Is this, rather than the mother’s death, the event referred to in the title? Do we only think so because of the scene’s placement at the end of the film? It is part and parcel of Saless’s rare achievement that we cannot resolve such questions.
Homo Ludens
“Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” —Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938)
Earlier I compared the schoolboy of A Simple Event to Keaton, which suggests a connection—perhaps an intrinsic one—between what we’ve called the children’s film and clown figures of silent comedy. Keaton in particular raises some useful connections to the subjects we’ve been considering, so by way of ending, it’s worth considering his place in our discussion of realism and the action-image.
In Cinema 1, Deleuze sees Keaton’s originality in his knack for connecting the smallest possible action directly to the largest possible situation. Pursued by enemy forces, the hero of The General (1926) realizes that he can prevent a beam from derailing his train by throwing another beam right on its tipping point, while in the finale of Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), Buster faces off against a cyclone, and narrowly avoids being crushed by a falling house façade not by running away, but by opening a door. In both cases, the comic gesture is not produced incidentally, as a kind of reaction, but really is able to meet the demands of, and even dominate, the encompassing situation.
Keaton’s affinity for machines and contraptions has been noted time and again. In this sense, his genius lies in seeing the world as a grand machine of geometric relations and physical causality, which he then sums up in one comic action. In so doing, Keaton performs what Deleuze calls a “minoring” function. And he calls it that because, as in The Navigator (1924), where an enormous machine (a cruise liner designed for hundreds of people) becomes adapted for the purposes of one or two people, the “minoring” gesture enacts “Keaton’s dream of taking the biggest machine in the world and making it work with the tiniest elements, thus converting it for the use of each one of us, making it the property of everyone.” Keaton’s dream is something like a world where all instruction manuals have been lost, and the uses of objects and things must be rediscovered. But if Keaton remains in the realm of the action-image and the sensory-motor schema, it’s because his films are still in a realm of functions, where means and ends dominate. Objects and gestures undergo surprising transformations of function in Keaton’s work, but still we see them in terms of use.
If Keaton’s dream is possible, however, that’s because it presupposes the space of the children’s film, where the regularities of the sensory-motor schema have not yet taken hold. Keaton’s unique ability to connect the smallest possible action to the largest possible situation is in a sense founded on this space of childhood, where action and situation have not yet been distinguished. Matinée, A High Wind in Jamaica, A Simple Event: these films offer us glimpses of a world where we find movement without function, purposiveness without purpose. If cinematic realism is possible, it is because it presupposes a world prior to the abstractions of the sensory-motor schema—a world before action, where every gesture is child’s play.