In Our Eyes: Looking through Home Movies and Photographs in Cinema

In Wim Wenders’ quietly elegant Paris, Texas (1984), a scene featuring a home movie cements its lead (Harry Dean Stanton) as closer to an actual homecoming. Presumed lost and found out after four long years in the already isolating reaches of Texas, this drifter/loner/absent father experiences a rare moment of bliss when watching visuals of a day at the beach from those years ago when his beloved wife (Nastassja Kinski) and infant child were together with him in the sunlit California seaside location. Also in the video are his brother and sister-in-law who have raised his son for all these years in Los Angeles.

For all the awkwardness and tender unraveling of this homecoming, back to the son who meets him for the first time in comprehensive memory, this is the moment where all who comprise this family unit view the home movie as audiences. They are all smiles. The father looks back at the son and he reciprocates the paternal figure’s patient smile. It’s the only memory, the only remnant of togetherness and joy that undercuts the melancholy of their stations. The visuals are further illustrated with great empathy by Ry Cooder’s acoustic guitar score. If there is a human connection, then this cinematic use of imagery frozen in time, generating a present for all involved in the room, is the best way forward for picking up the pieces of lost years and bonds that yearn for rediscovery.

Cinema is a visual medium and hence the judicious use of home videos and photographs is part of its filmmaking ethos where everything springs from and then is committed to memory. Take the recent example of Charlotte Wells’ autobiographical Aftersun (2022) that lives and breathes by its analog video clips that recreate the 1990s through the eyes of a preteen girl (Frankie Corio); through its heartwarming conceit, Wells is looking at the past through her camera while making Frankie document the in-film odyssey of possibly the last summer vacation spent with her father (Paul Mescal), a habit she had herself developed, leading to a keen visual sense of the world around her. Who can possibly forget the final stretch where as her father leaves to board his flight, a sense of profound loss permeates this exchange of looks between them at the airport? The video camera records that, lingering on the faces and voices as if anticipating the loss that is to come. Wells preserves that final memory of her father to come to a deep realisation about familial bonds affixed with and set adrift by melancholy. Childhood and adult participation both come back to her (and us) through the act of remembrance.

Similarly in 45 Years (2015), Charlotte Rampling reflects the facial terrain of someone in the throes of realisation that all of her adult life has been built on an extended lie. While viewing photographs in a slideshow on the projector, in a corner of the home that she has never accessed much, she finds clues to the woman whose effect on her husband (Tom Hardy) hasn’t waned over the course of almost fifty years. That one intimate close-up of a possible baby bump, courtesy the deceased woman who was lost during an expedition to the mountains and whose remains have been found all this time later, trace the married woman’s life and times, imposed by her husband’s rules, including the decision to not have children with her, as one where she has sacrificed everything. In that dark room, the light and shadows reflecting on her face become graver, with her countenance registering the devastation of a lifetime dictated by someone else’s personal conditions. It’s a moment that uses the stillness of photographs to mark the passage of truth dawning on her.

In Indian films that defined the coming-of-age narrative in the late 2000s canon, photographs and home videos were central to both Taare Zameen Par (Like Stars On Earth, 2007) and Wake Up Sid (2009). In the former, a mother watches home videos of her dyslexic son Ishaan, him playing, enjoying the innocent glory of childhood and butterflies. Tears fill up her eyes as he’s now been sent to a boarding school by his stern father and ruled out as a problem child by almost everyone. In the video too, the mother, free from judgements, showers her unconditional love for him which makes this viewing all the more painful even as the screen turns to static. In a world of patriarchy, women and children bear the brunt of separation from each other. Viewing this moment makes us privy to that stark societal reality.

In the latter film, Wake Up Sid, the titular twenty something's new reacquaintance with photography lets him build bridges between his former slack ways and his budding future, full of potential. As he lovingly clicks pictures for his kindly neighbour and her preteen son, he looks at their shared world of love and affection through his lens. It’s a beautifully cathartic moment that speaks in contrast to his own journey of growing pains. It is also reminiscent of his patient mother who lets him move out and find out who he is. Photographs also find a frayed father-son bond thaw when the latter finds his old man’s cache anew— even Mehra Sr. had a love for images. Only he could not afford to turn it into a career, something Sid has apart from a real shot at self-sufficiency. Memories and family, hence, are linkages that are common to the media we make part of our legacies.

Or as in Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine, 1980) where the lead actress (Smita Patil) in a film adaptation shares horrific photos of poverty and malnutrition circa the 1943 Bengal famine with her fellow crew members to portray the apathy endemic to human endeavours especially as regards the past and history in general.

Just cue the brilliant Season 1 finale of Mad Men (2008) where adman extraordinaire Don Draper (Jon Hamm) taps into that internalised well of memory and history while presenting a winning pitch for the Kodak Carousel, adjunct with his own family’s journey through images in a slideshow.

***

It is humankind’s innate tendency to look for a reason to exist, not just in our current situations but in terms of achieving some kind of immortality through a medium that transmits deeds down decades and then centuries. The image is that powerful form that pairs with the written word to preserve generational and cultural history.

Think of happy people posing with pride and a spirit of travel on the Titanic, giving us welcome glimpses of a timeline now forever lost to maritime doom, to posterity. Or naturalist Jane Goodall’s advocacy for primates captured in multiple documentaries and still photographs. That empathetic image of a young chimpanzee reaching out to touch her nose is one among many, drawing from the conclusive compassion of her place on earth. Hence, the video and photographic image that helped her document the natural world become means of upholding her continued endeavours.

The glorious contours of Yellowstone National Park, with its expansive vistas, mountains and pristine view of snow-capped peaks and slopes as covered by Ansel Adams in black and white and the collective output of Life Magazine to inject joy into a Christmas day in New York or a ferret during winter down to political events, discovered from its storied archives, defines the manner in which we witness, our eyes watching and beholding the arc of civilisation, images speaking a thousand words. It is ultimately the camera that serves as our inner eye and external disc.

In that regard, Grey Villet’s indispensable contributions to the Life canon with his photo essays of Mildred and Richard Loving is etched in our socio-political/humanist consciousness for the unguarded tone it offers to an interracial couple’s journey during an era of bigotry. These images also trace that journey to where we stand now.

After all, the sole surviving portrait of Emily Dickinson or the many brooding side-profiles of Rabindranath Tagore are more than images of a time and place—they are literary sources that are poised between innumerable poetry readings of Dickinson’s verses and the restored video snippets of Tagore reciting his verses from back in the day. Technology has made these repositories exigent for all discerning individuals.

It is this predisposition to observe and interpret that make paintings an eternal life-spring. Our eyes see all, take everything in.

***

The beginnings of cinema were made on the same principle: of the image being paramount to understanding the human condition. Images exalted or brought us the miseries of timeless events and personalities.

In that regard, Dziga Vertov’s thoroughly modern Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is more than a time-capsule since its vigorous editing patterns, musical placements and sheer dynamism, capturing city life, become instruments celebrating humanity in all its hues. Even the very act of sorting through film or cutting is given a meta touch, implying the ubiquity that cinema would come to implement for the next century. The fact that it captures Ukrainian urban centres—even employing freeze frames contrasting an elderly woman with beaming youth—is a social commentary looking forward at its concurrent historical decimation in the contemporary epoch. This film remains safe as a picture of the past. Carl Dreyer’s use of Maria Falconetti’s facial canvas in the poignant The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) then becomes a companion piece to that realisation, bristling with verbal and psychological anarchy, positing the free will that patriarchy extracts in any timeline of war. That these films incorporate the everyday goings-on and a specific historic document of a bygone era without revealing a drop of dialogue makes the image a vital solution to the oftentimes needling use of verbose text. The image offers the text, subtext and context, all giving cinema its form.

There is a joy for cinephiles in watching Wim Wenders’ Room 666 (1982), a documentary short where filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Susan Seidelman, Jean Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni are given the space in a Cannes hotel room to reflect on the future of cinema and the proliferation of television. Looking at the rudimentary placement of a camera that the filmmakers themselves press play and then pause to share their thoughts is being attuned to their affinity with its omnipresence as creative, visual peers.

Their thoughts actually stand in line with our age of digital and streaming which is another way of preserving the memory of things predicted decades ago. We watch them and nod, sigh, share our sense of wonder and surprise.

***

On the other front, Agnès Varda has prolifically used her camera to throw fresh light into everything from the Black Panthers to the romanticism of erstwhile pre-revolution Iran as well as burgeoning feminism in several documentaries. Pair her filmography with Satyajit Ray’s The Inner Eye (1972), capturing the paintings and process of Shantiniketan’s resident pioneer Binod Behari Mukherjee, and Jill, Uncredited (2022), the latter using freeze frames, film scenes slowed down to unearth its subject, prolific film extra Jill Goldston’s legendary legacy, and you can see how beneficial videography and photography’s pairing has been. Spotting Ms. Goldston in the backdrop of scenes from Fiddler on the Roof (1971), Reds (1981), Tom & Viv (1994) and Kate Bush’s iconic “Hounds of Love” (1985) music video invites community with the primacy of on-screen images and the people who adorn it.

Martin Scorsese’s heyday with Italianamerican (1974) that lets the camera lovingly capture his parents at their gregarious best, in their apartment building in the 70s, is another storytelling feat, an extended and infectiously personable home movie cemented in the plurality of opinions and generations.

Speaking of freeze frames in Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen’s omnibus, the meeting of hands between man and wife at the end of Charulata (1964), the opening portrait like stance for the landlord in Jalsaghar (1958), the comic interludes and stream of consciousness employed through those frequent interruptions for the titular protagonist in Bhuvan Shome (1969) and the beauty and melancholy of interpersonal bonding in Mani Kaul’s entrancing rendering of a folk tale in Duvidha (1973) offer varied points of view.

That mystery in the opening shots of Bergman’s Persona (1966) puts Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann’s photographs on a screen as if to examine the depths of the human mind that begins with the foundation of images and, by extension, cinema. This use of the camera as a static, hidden eye is also at its spontaneous best in Asha Jaoer Majhe (Labour of Love, 2014) where it becomes literally a protagonist of merit, documenting the days and nights of two people who hardly meet each other even though they share the same home in Calcutta. It's cinema not as voyeurism but empathy, loneliness and observation.

These are the images that conflate paintings, sculptures, freeze frames, dance, folklore and biography, in vessels of documentary and feature film content seamlessly, in Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul’s iconic oeuvre—in works like Maya Darpan (1972), Dhrupad (1983), Mati Manas (1984), Siddheswari (1989), and Khayal Gatha (1989) respectively.

In his transcendental, impressionistic take on classical singer Siddheshwari Devi’s life of artistic riches, Mani Kaul reserves the last moments of Siddheswari to having lead actress Mita Vashisht watch multiple television screens in a room. They are all simultaneously airing the titular classical doyenne’s performance—the multiplicity of those stirring images, of artistry in its refined meta apex, is what cinema stands for.

When it delivers, the image fittingly becomes the final word, opening up the human experience. Hence, the camera becomes an inner eye, a point of view whose electrical and technical simplicity itself launches the preservation of our core values and principles.

The camera, the eyes never lie. They always arrive at the truth. That’s how the medium becomes the message and the future.