Home Movies

I’ve been watching copies of my mother’s home movies – made with the 16 millimeter “movie” camera she asked for as her wedding present from my father in 1933 (along with a honeymoon to Europe!).

The films begin in January, 1933, after her wedding and go through the 1970s, about six years before her death. It was one of her passions, home movie making – anyone who knew her well was used to the eye-blasting lights she’d use for indoor shooting. I now realize that through them she was curating her sense of history and family. She always said, “If a fire came – after my family members – that’s what I’d run for!” It seemed an odd priority to me then. I understand better, now.

Today, it’s a strange sensation to see my parents young – watch them move and sit and kiss briskly, fluidly, with the lithe bodies they had long before I was born. There’s my mother walking down a flight of Spanish stairs while smoking like a chimney on her honeymoon (a totally new sight to me; she stopped in the ‘40s). There’s my father (also smoking), wearing a jaunty beret in Spain, as they motored along the highways, even happily dealing with a flat tire.

What I think most, though, as I see these cheerful European scenes, is the history playing out behind the staged moments. 1933, Europe. She told me she’d taken footage in Berlin on January 30th, the day Hitler assumed power and Jewish shops were vandalized – marked with signs proclaiming “Jude!”. (The German police subsequently questioned my father at the station and confiscated that roll of film.) They traveled through a bucolic-looking Spain, unaware of what Franco and the Spanish Civil War would bring. It was before that continent (and the world) was convulsed in the spasms of WWII. The honeymoon couple seem caught in amber.

As I watch, I want to reach through the footage and say “No, no – what is about to happen shouldn’t happen! You’re on the edge, don’t you know that? Don’t move forward – it still looks relatively peaceful!” Of course that wasn’t true. The forces unleashed in that world war (as in any) had started percolating long before.

On a more personal note, in those flickering scenes of black and white – then color – I also witness scenes from my family before the full story emerged: My older brother’s birth in 1935 (he’s gone from us now)… then my second-in-line brother’s arrival in 1937 (later struck by schizophrenia)... the happy toddler who was my sister (thankfully still with us). Then there’s my mother documenting the family’s crucial move from a simple Sheboygan Falls farmhouse to Riverbend, the enormous family property, in 1947.

What’s recognizable in these images? The beauty of the landscape and seasons: the snows, the trees in bloom, the bratwurst on grills in summer. The predictors of demise and death swim before my eyes. It’s like being a fly on the wall of the larger story I was born into but has not yet been fully unfurled. There’s no “me” yet… Until, wait – oh, there I am, too! Toddling and munching. Later, a desperately shy me being practically dragged to the first day of kindergarten… later yet, a Barbie Doll birthday party… my father’s illness… a “u-rah-rah” cheer on the lawn… then the triumphant papier mâché Pink Panther float for the high school homecoming we built in our basement. (By then my father had died). And, of course, the old boyfriends and old friends.

History unfolding. My mother’s testament to the passage of time.

Julilly House Kohler – Spain, 1933

John Kohler, 1933