Childhood

On the platform of Hanger Lane station, holding my mother’s hand tighter when, at eye level, I caught sight of Peter Strausfeld’s woodcut poster for the Academy Cinema’s showing of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf(1968), primed as I was for cinema’s potential for fascination and shock, having already glimpsed Buñuel’s eye-slitting shot for Un chien andalou(1929) while channel-hopping on our black and white TV set at home.

TV also provided historical foreboding and high adventure at this time. Television images of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, as well as the epic saga of the Apollo missions and first moon landing are among my foundational image memories. The first of these play out as the silhouettes of my then teenage cousins from Long Island dancing hysterically in front of the flickering grey screen of my godparents’ wood-panelled TV as the Beatles performed `I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ on the Ed Sullivan Show, in 1964.