October 25, 2024
FILM: TIME PASSAGES
DIRECTED BY: KYLE HENRY
RATING: 3 ½ out of 4 stars
By Dan Pal
Here’s a film that really resonated with me and will likely do the same for anyone who has had a special connection with their mother – especially during the pandemic. Filmmaker Kyle Henry compiles Super 8 home movie footage, interviews, photos, and even some performance pieces to present a portrait of his mother Elaine. Like Elaine, my own mother documented much of our lives growing up. I was the one holding all of her films and photos when we had to put her into a nursing home. Henry painstakingly edits together much of what he has for his new film Time Passages.
Finding such footage is great when you have someone like Elaine who cared very deeply about preserving the past. So much of the material here comes from sources (reel to reel tapes, decaying film footage, etc.) that few people use in our culture today, which I know from personal experience, makes it quite challenging to convert to a more commonly used medium such as digital files today. But Henry does this exceedingly well. In addition to the home movies, he includes recorded phone messages, slides, FaceTime conversations, and of course hundreds of photos. He even recreates certain moments from his family’s history by using Fisher Price Little People which he (and I) played with as a child. This is particularly effective as he also incorporates background projections to give them an additional air of life and action. Henry also makes an interesting point when describing a lot of the footage he has saying that when we look at some of this history we can find the buried details about the subjects in the films to illuminate their lives even further.
Of course, none of this would be possible for us to study if it wasn’t for the materials developed by Kodak to record the people and places in our lives. Henry intersperses his own story with a few key periods in the company’s history, including its release of dangerous chemicals that could affect the health of those living in the vicinity of a Kodak plant.
The main focus here though is on Henry’s relationship with his mother. He was the fifth of five children and it is curious that, save for some childhood photos, most of his siblings are not at all interviewed or featured throughout the film. There is also a sense of the family moving around a bit when Henry was growing up but that and his own move to Chicago are not given any details. Elaine did some painting of which Henry places in various settings. It’s not clear what the significance is of each and why he made some of those location choices. Perhaps all of this was irrelevant to the story he was trying to tell but a few points of clarification might have strengthened these various sections of the film.
Henry also does something interesting in his creation of stage performance spaces for himself to interact and communicate with his mother. In some of these, he cuts between him asking his mother questions while he wears a wig and glasses to get a sense of what her responses might have been. Scenes like this offer a certain experimentation with documentary conventions and while the film doesn’t quite go as far Jonathan Caouette’s highly formalistic portrait of his own mother in the great 2003 film Tarnation, it’s clear that Henry has put his own unique spin on his mother’s story reflecting his own creative energies and personality.
There’s a good deal of attention given to the COVID pandemic in 2020 which represented Elaine’s final months. Due to the restrictions against seeing a nursing home resident in person (something I also know a lot about), the scenes can be emotional to watch. We were all physically separated from each other during that period but it was particularly difficult to not be able to see a loved one with dementia going through the final stages of their life. Henry handles this quite well with some positive uplifting moments.
A film like Time Passages further proves to me how important it is to preserve our own individual histories and to share them with others. It keeps the spirit of all those who once graced our worlds alive and allows them a place to shine again.
Time Passages played as part of the Chicago International Film Festival.
FILM: TIME PASSAGES
DIRECTED BY: KYLE HENRY
RATING: 3 ½ out of 4 stars
By Dan Pal
Here’s a film that really resonated with me and will likely do the same for anyone who has had a special connection with their mother – especially during the pandemic. Filmmaker Kyle Henry compiles Super 8 home movie footage, interviews, photos, and even some performance pieces to present a portrait of his mother Elaine. Like Elaine, my own mother documented much of our lives growing up. I was the one holding all of her films and photos when we had to put her into a nursing home. Henry painstakingly edits together much of what he has for his new film Time Passages.
Finding such footage is great when you have someone like Elaine who cared very deeply about preserving the past. So much of the material here comes from sources (reel to reel tapes, decaying film footage, etc.) that few people use in our culture today, which I know from personal experience, makes it quite challenging to convert to a more commonly used medium such as digital files today. But Henry does this exceedingly well. In addition to the home movies, he includes recorded phone messages, slides, FaceTime conversations, and of course hundreds of photos. He even recreates certain moments from his family’s history by using Fisher Price Little People which he (and I) played with as a child. This is particularly effective as he also incorporates background projections to give them an additional air of life and action. Henry also makes an interesting point when describing a lot of the footage he has saying that when we look at some of this history we can find the buried details about the subjects in the films to illuminate their lives even further.
Of course, none of this would be possible for us to study if it wasn’t for the materials developed by Kodak to record the people and places in our lives. Henry intersperses his own story with a few key periods in the company’s history, including its release of dangerous chemicals that could affect the health of those living in the vicinity of a Kodak plant.
The main focus here though is on Henry’s relationship with his mother. He was the fifth of five children and it is curious that, save for some childhood photos, most of his siblings are not at all interviewed or featured throughout the film. There is also a sense of the family moving around a bit when Henry was growing up but that and his own move to Chicago are not given any details. Elaine did some painting of which Henry places in various settings. It’s not clear what the significance is of each and why he made some of those location choices. Perhaps all of this was irrelevant to the story he was trying to tell but a few points of clarification might have strengthened these various sections of the film.
Henry also does something interesting in his creation of stage performance spaces for himself to interact and communicate with his mother. In some of these, he cuts between him asking his mother questions while he wears a wig and glasses to get a sense of what her responses might have been. Scenes like this offer a certain experimentation with documentary conventions and while the film doesn’t quite go as far Jonathan Caouette’s highly formalistic portrait of his own mother in the great 2003 film Tarnation, it’s clear that Henry has put his own unique spin on his mother’s story reflecting his own creative energies and personality.
There’s a good deal of attention given to the COVID pandemic in 2020 which represented Elaine’s final months. Due to the restrictions against seeing a nursing home resident in person (something I also know a lot about), the scenes can be emotional to watch. We were all physically separated from each other during that period but it was particularly difficult to not be able to see a loved one with dementia going through the final stages of their life. Henry handles this quite well with some positive uplifting moments.
A film like Time Passages further proves to me how important it is to preserve our own individual histories and to share them with others. It keeps the spirit of all those who once graced our worlds alive and allows them a place to shine again.
Time Passages played as part of the Chicago International Film Festival.