Through a Lens Brightly

My last conversation with my grandfather was a production call. Picture me on my cellphone, pacing my garden in Venice, California, toddler on hip. Picture him (whom we called "Gar"), in his assisted living apartment in Essex, Connecticut. I briefed him on our 2 options: Cheap($600)= projecting the films at a wall to be videotaped and burned onto DVDs. Expensive ($2400)= a "telecine" transfer and shot-by-shot color-correction by a skilled technician. You know which one Oliver Stone would have picked. Gar would have no less for his version of history.

Gar was not a filmmaker. He made his long and successful career in insurance. But he was a notorious shutterbug and archivist. In retirement, he made an album for each year in the life of the family. The winter before he died, he asked me to help with a project. In selling their home to move into their assisted living apartment, my grandparents unearthed their disintegrating 8mm family movies. Would I help him transfer them to a more permanent format? I was finishing film school in LA and had contacts who could do the high-end transfer at a cut-rate.

Thus, with the Disney studios next door in the San Fernando Valley, do I owe my punk telecine operator Kevin for revealing the true magic of movies to me. My grandfather's first film dated to 1941, just a year after their marriage, and features my grandparents as newly weds visiting Hanover, New Hampshire for "Green Key Weekend" at Dartmouth College. It was faded and scratched, a visual distance to match the temporal. But in Kevin's skilled hands, my gorgeous 24-year old grandparents (younger that I was by this time) were suddenly bright and unmarred by time, walking the streets of what would become my own hometown. Smiling coquettishly to camera, my grandmother Memar's newlywed adoration for the camera operator made my own heart skip. In 6 hours of footage my grandfather himself appears in less than 30 minutes, and yet he is everywhere, deciding what will be framed and in what spirit... The family dressed to the nines for Easter. Kids running the waves of the Long Island sound. The Big One caught in Card Sound off Key Largo, Florida. Mule rides in the Grand Canyon. The last film was shot in 1964. Gar was in fact, if not in title, a filmmaker to rival Frank Capra. Through his hopeful eyes, it was indeed A Wonderful Life.

When my mother got wind of our project, she asked to throw our Davidson family movies into the batch for transfer. In contrast to my grandfather's footage, which I was eager to see, the prospect of my mother's made me anxious. Hers pick up in 1966 and end in 1974. In other words, I would have a glimpse into life B.D. and A.D. -- Before the Divorce and After the Divorce. If there were happy images B.D., I wouldn't trust them. If there were happy images after, I also wouldn't trust them. I wanted to see images of my father as a part of my household, since I was 14 months old when he left and had no memories, and I dreaded the prospect. Did anyone catch on film the moment our original family ended, which I understood to be when my mother received a letter from my father over Christmas 1970? I put the films in the telecine batch for transfer, but I let Kevin do those on his own.

If my grandfather was the family Shutterbug, I am the Shutterfly of my generation. I clog cyberspace with yet another photo or video of my kids. Duncan was not even a month old when I bought his first album, and I get itchy when my albums fall more than a year behind. My eye is always lusting for the picturesque frame, always editing. My husband thanks me for documenting our family's lives. Other relatives undoubtedly groan when "Shutterfly.com" cheerily announces that "Samantha has shared some pictures with you!" I am victim to the parental delusion that every single second (=frame) of your child's life is momentous and worthy of record. And what I can't catch on film, I write in their little books. Or blog about.

As I write this I am backing up 28 hours of video shot over 8 years, and I am racing against time. The electronics of my camera, once state-of-the-art for documentary filmmaking but now obsolete even for home videos, are nearly shot. In this footage, I am watching Jordy and me get married; our children are born and are growing up. Baby Duncan's hands wave in the air like a conductor's; Reeve jumps wildly in his bouncy chair; Tucker gets tossed in the air by his exuberant brothers. My pleasure in filming them is palpable in the images.

But I also notice that the shot often cuts out precisely when the fun and love turns to sadness. Tucker tires of the tossing and cries. Reeve and Duncan's game of chase ends up in a collision. In truth, my displaced attention through the eyepiece seems to precipitate -- or at least fails to ward off -- the meltdowns. When the hard things hit, the screen goes dark. It occurs to me that the dark gaps may contain the parts of the story we most need to understand.

The most important gap in my photographic record spans June to August, 2005. On June 25, 2005 my brother-in-law Gary Lehmann was killed by a drunk driver. I remember at the time feeling that it was inappropriate, even sacrilegious, to film anything, and it didn't seem necessary. Images and feelings from that summer are burned vividly in my memory. But now I wonder about my nephews Christopher and David and niece Katie, who were 8, 4 and 2. Will they wish I had kept the camera rolling?

Less than a year after their father died, Christopher and David came down with the chicken pocks. It was mud season in Binghamton, New York, which tries the spirit in the best of times. I did the only thing I could think of -- Home Video Therapy. I edited a special episode of "Sesame Street", re-titled Duncan Green Street, of goofy vignettes intended to make them laugh. My good-sport husband submitted to a time-lapse of sticker "chicken pocks" appearing and disappearing on his face. Baby Duncan in the bath turned into "The Creature in the Tub." The Lehmann kids make an appearance as a mariachi band from video shot earlier that winter in Arizona. The episode ends with a montage of all the cousins to a folk song -- "There's a dark and a troubled side of life... But there's a bright and a sunny side too!"

The other day my oldest, Duncan (now 5), wanted to clarify that the movies I make are "real" versus Scooby Doo and the Cyberchase, for example, which is "just a story." This led us to a discussion of "Duncan Green Street". Duncan was emphatic that they are real. I tried to reveal my hand in spinning the story a bit. He rejected the idea that this makes them in any way "just a story." Worthy ethical questions arise from my editing of my children's, nieces' and nephews' memories, not to mention questions about my own character and courage. But if I could make these kids laugh, ethics be damned.

By the time I looked at my mom's family movies, it was two years later. We had left California and lived in Brooklyn. I had begun a new feature screenplay about a couple with two kids fighting to save their marriage. I was aware of the intersections of art and life: Jordy and I now had two kids under age 3 and our marriage was strained. The photo record wouldn't reveal this fact; stunning photos from a family trip to Jones Beach on June 7, 2008 belie the fact that Jordy and I fought most of the car ride home, for example. As I sat at the Lonelyville Café one morning struggling to craft the courtship of my fictional couple in such a way as to plant the seeds of their relationship's demise, the bomb of awareness went off. Duncan was nearing 4, Reeve nearing 14 months. I was fast approaching the exact point in the life of my new family when my original family died. More than anything in my life, I was determined to give the story a different ending.

I decided to watch at last my mother's 8mm family movies as research for my script and for my life. It was impossible not to look only for clues in absolutely everything leading up to the end of 1970. Lots of Springer Spaniel puppies. My older sister as a newborn in my father's arms on a sunny July day. Stunning vistas of the Rockies. My mother and little Kristin feeding ducks. A few years later: Memar and Gar take my mom and Kristin to a zoo in Colorado. Then I appear in a crib. Kristin grabs a zipline and fearlessly flies across the back yard. My father smiles encouragingly at Kristin as he teaches her to ski in the driveway. I wish I could hear. I search my parents' faces. I search Kristin's. I find no clues, no foreshadowing. Baby me appears again in my crib; clothed, unclothed, rolling, on my tummy. I assume my mother is filming. I can feel her eyes on Little Me through the lens, craving these fleeting moments the way I crave my kids'. My father makes a goofy face at toddling me, then breaks into a big smile. The camera tells something very true but also feels as if it is trying very hard. Taking turns filming, my parents never appear in the frame together at the same time.

Suddenly it is Christmas, 1970. A Christmas tree hemmed with packages. In our pajamas, Kristin and I gorge on gifts. The camera follows us for several minutes. My father is gone from the frame. Our toy-drunk little selves are oblivious. But then suddenly he is there, helping us to blow up a punch-dummy toy. I am totally confused. How can this be? The story I remembered was that Mom, Kristin and I flew back to New York to be with my grandparents for Christmas while Dad stayed back in Colorado to work on his dissertation. Then my mother received the letter in the mail that it was over. But here we are together, sharing the most normal of American Christmases. Dad helps me get on a little ride-on toy. Kristin tries to make her new bicycle go.

Cut to: Easter. My hair is longer, my walk more steady. The wrapping paper is cleaned up. And he's gone. I am carrying a little Easter basket. Maybe I was looking for eggs? Now I am looking for those missing three months between the Birth, the Death, and the Resurrection.

My mother kept her wedding photos in the closet; I've never seen one at my dad's. My grandparents' houses were purged of images of my Other Parent by the time I was conscious. This always made me very sad in a child's inarticulate way. A lot of my own childhood must have been edited out in the process. But I got used to it. I assumed what had been erased was too painful to re-visit.

So I was wary of my mother's nostalgia in asking me to transfer these films; I felt she was never been able to accept fully that things happened as they needed to, whereas I had had to craft my own version of the tale that made the divorce inevitable. I was fearful of opening mine to question. But as I watched, I felt a growing strain. I was imposing the narrative of divorce over delicate images trying to reveal other things to me.

Through her lens, my mother lingers lovingly on my little waving hands -- exactly as I once lingered one morning in Los Angeles on Duncan's little hands. She captures a quizzical look on my face that could be my own son Reeve's. She zooms in on my little feet, a shot I could match cut with Tucker's just this winter. I get to see myself crawling across the grass, then attempting a first step. Her camera must have had an on-board spotlight, as it literally lights up its subject while the corners of the frame sink into shadow. As I am watching, I let down my guard. Whatever else was going on between my parents, she captured my father's loving eyes on Kristin as they watch a 4th of July parade together, and on little me as I deliver a present to him in his arm chair. I let myself begin to trust these tender moments as also true.

My grandfather's home movies can seem naive to suffering, but he was not. Gar's mother died suddenly when he was two years old. I imagine his first memories were of his grief-stricken father and his own grief, both for his mom and for any conscious memory of her. It is probably true that Gar's impulse to film his family in the cheeriest light was a sales pitch, even to himself. (After taking a good snapshot, he used to exclaim, "That one'll cost you a million bucks!") But it does not follow that what Gar filmed was a lie; rather, they reveal how he too enjoyed the parental delusion that his kids' (and grandkids') lives were momentous and worthy of record, come what may. So too for my mother. Perhaps she rolled camera in hopes that the film itself would hold the family together, but maybe she just responded to the poignant moments that are the gifts of parenthood without knowing how the story would unfold. It wasn't until I became a parent and looked through the other end of their lenses that I understood.

Now I am eternally thankful for my mother's few captured frames from a past that resists retrieval. I forgive the eternally hopeful eye for any fictional license taken in her efforts against what I imagine was a bleak emotional backdrop for my parents. My mother's determination not to leave our past on the editing room floor, whatever discomfort it may cause, gives evidence of the greatest force in the universe, more powerful than divorce or death: A parent's love.


Postscript

By some mysterious orchestration, my universe pulled back together two years ago when my father and step-mother moved back to the New Hampshire valley where both my mom and step-father and my in-laws live. From my boys' perspective, not only don't they travel between houses to see their parents, but they get six adoring grandparents in one place. This winter during a rowdy lunchtime visit of cousins and various grandparents I was captivated by a loving conversation my father was having with my 3-month-old Tucker. I framed them up and rolled camera. After our return to New York, I got an email inviting me to view my sister Kristin's "Kodak Gallery album." As I clicked through her photos, I came upon a mirror image of Dad and Tucker, with me in the background behind my video camera. We caught the same moment, or it caught us. The kids hold the camera now, and the dad stays in the picture -- illuminated by the bright reflection of sun on fresh February snow.