The recent ubiquity of the handheld camcorder has had a significant influence on the overall aesthetic of motion pictures. No longer just an option for novelty cutaways, the camcorder's specific visual characteristics--shakiness; flat aspect; the frank, artless way it reveals light and shadow--have begun to inform the way we expect to see films, or at least, what we accept from them. In many instances, the video camera is just a cheap alternative to using film. But in some cases, like the fascinating documentary George, it becomes a uniquely subjectifying device, allowing subject and medium to become one inextricable unit.

In George, a project commissioned by HBO in 1995, filmmaker Henry Corra is charged with making a film about his 12-year-old autistic son. To begin, Corra buys George a video camera and assigns him the task of shooting what he sees. This footage constitutes a film within the film, wherein the boy's perspective is intercut with interviews of his peers in a special school, parents, teachers, neighbors, and experts--including Mark Ramoser, a very articulate autistic adult. Ramoser explains how autism causes a kind of sensory overload that carries with it a lack of sensitivity to the unspoken cues and codes that define conventional human interaction. On the other hand, he explains, "We see and hear things," such as the grain pattern in a piece of wood, "you neurotypicals have to have pointed out."

Ramoser's rational, insightful, and hilarious elocution--the disdainful word "neurotypical" is a great example--belies the idea that autistics are uniformly aloof and unemotional. But it's clear, from his slow delivery, that understanding the connections between things is a laborious process for Ramoser, one that has developed over the course of his long life. For George, that process is just beginning. As the film progresses, we see his amazing capacity for fact-retention, his charm and humor, and his mild disorientation. The lapses in emotional sensitivity are a bit slower in coming.

About 30 minutes in, we see Corra on the phone with an HBO executive, who pulls the plug based on preliminary footage because young George doesn't seem "autistic enough." The scene is played for a bewildered laugh, but you kind of see what the executive means. On the surface, George is not so unlike the average 12-year-old. He's a beautiful kid with a sweet smile and a fine sense of humor. He has some attention problems, and speaks a little too loudly--certainly nothing out of your typical preadolescent ken. That seems to be the point: that an autistic is, or can be, so close to "normal," that the proximity, not the distance, is what breaks your heart. Not until Corra has intercut more of George's first-person footage does the severity of George's condition assert itself. That footage, annoying and obtrusive at first, becomes the most important element in understanding what George, and George, are about. (HBO later reinstated the project.)

A shaky fusillade of uninterpretable images, the footage becomes a perfect visual metaphor for George's neurological disorder. The video camera works like the subject's mind, collecting a torrent of stimuli--here a party, there a book. The process of conferring meaning onto them, of arranging them into an order that brings a heightened understanding to the people watching, is, in a very literal sense, editing, which we later see George being laboriously taught to do. He never quite gets the hang of it.

The metaphor becomes all the more poignant during a later scene, when the filmmaker father, off-camera, explains to George that he is moving out. George is immersed in a video hockey game, as Corra tries to explain the difference between divorce and separation. Though seemingly more involved in the Sega, George asks and answers questions with a level of interest that escalates from detachment to distress as he realizes, "You're not going to live with us, ever? Never? Forever?" He never takes his eyes off the game, never loses the open-mouthed half-smile. When Dad asks why George thinks he should continue to live at home, the response comes casually, like a convictionless recitation of facts he must repeat to remember. "Because I like--I love you. I love you. I love you." It almost breaks your heart.