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Frank Britt
Time experienced and time anticipated mingle in each person's life to varying degrees. As the man said-- sometimes the past isn't dead, sometimes it isn't even past. This phrase kept springing to mind as I watched Lisa Lewenz's film A LETTER WITHOUT WORDS unfold before me.
Watching the film was akin to finding a yellow, dog-eared photo forgotten between the pages of a dusty book, and in the light we think we see in the eyes of a long dead man, discovering a glimpse of personality, the hint of a life. A captured moment rushes forward and envelops us, if only for an instant, linking us with things gone by and propelling us into the future.
The making of Lewenz's highly touted documentary began with such a moment. For over twenty years, a box of 16 millimeter films, made by Lewenz's grandmother Ella, lay collecting dust and defying the elements in a Baltimore attic, waiting for Lewenz to discover them in 1981.
The films form the foundation of what is now, over seventeen years later, A LETTER WITHOUT WORDS. Ella Lewenz was a member of one of pre-war Germany's most prominent Jewish families and her films depict a not so often encountered idyllic Germany set against the background of the burgeoning evil that became the Holocaust.
In some of the first color 16mm film ever shot, Ella filmed the life of her privileged, cultured family and the changes that were to engulf them and the life they enjoyed. After being stripped of wealth and position by the Nazis, they escaped to America where they built a new life in a new home. Upon her death, Ella's films were consigned to the dim recesses of the attic in Baltimore.
"It was a miracle that they were still there," says Lewenz, "and a miracle that they were still in decent shape, and a miracle that they were found by someone who would be able to do something with them."
For the next seventeen years, Lewenz struggled to make her movie, sneaking into editing rooms late at night, pushing her credit cards to the limit, seeking funding where she could. Though there were m many offers to purchase the footage, singularly unique in its type, she chose to retain ownership of the films, despite the lure of the easy financing.
"I didn't want the material to get overexposed," she explains. "I wanted the viewers experience to be fresh, like the first time you ever saw a flower unfolding in time-lapse photography."
Using countless interviews with surviving family members, passages from her grandmother's diaries, and a fascinating combination of old and new film footage, Lewenz explores her past and the Jewish heritage with what was kept from her. IN the process, she illuminates a crucial moment of our common history in a fresh and unique fashion. We see the streets of Berlin lined with swastikas, signs proclaiming anti-Semitic sentiments and the familiar black uniforms of the SS officers, and the strangest thing is that it doesn't seem strange. It doesn't' s seem evil or foreign. The streets are sunny and clean, the mood is idyllic. Lewenz the younger films footage on precisely the same locations, from precisely the same angles, as Lewenz the elder, and when the unsettling comparison is made, there is something safer, cleaner, and less threatening about the older footage. And then, the symbols, the tokens and signs that we know represent the evil, slide into view again. And it is frightening, the feeling that one gets, the feeling that the past could very easily repeat itself, that the past is in fact constantly repeating itself.
"What I recognize," says Lewenz, "Is that human beings have the ability to do evil things, that horrible things are happening around us every day. Things that we choose to ignore."
And yet, the voice of the film is not accusing, not blameful. It is oddly forgiving. It provides a ground for compassion and for understanding. Lewenz's poetic narrative takes us not just back to pre-war Germany and along with the filmmaker on her personal road of discovery, but helps propel us into the future.
DRAKEN, Saturday January 28, 1999 Goteborg, Sweden
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