Helen Grace

SERIOUS UNDERTAKINGS

The film explores montage techniques with playful complex effects. The collision of images of child care and terror is stunningly effective: a pram is used as the device which stops the industrialist's car to enable the kidnap; the pram recurs in the famous scene from Eisenstein's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN where it goes careering down the Odessa Steps, and is pulled laboriously back up by a contemporary mother in a modern city...