Good morning 🐣

Heath Ledger serenading Julia Stiles. Winona Ryder partying with the ghosts of football players. Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple, hand in hand.

They’re all revealing important character and story developments simply by dancing up and down stairs.

In the visual essay “Dancing With the Stairs,” Gia Kourlas explains how stair dancing on stage, in movies, even on TikTok, can convey joy, fearlessness, spontaneity, and even madness. As the dancers’ feet turn into wings, their bodies merge with the jagged edge, “transformed from flesh into an undulating, flowing ribbon.”

Kourlas writes:

On stairs, an ordinary dance suddenly becomes one of courage and vulnerability, a marker of coordination and grace. Whether rising to the top or hopping down — or risking it all to skip a step — the dance sits on the precipice between precision and instability.

And that instability is a calling card for Alfred Hitchcock, whose numerous films almost always include ominous stairways. Max Tohline has created a three-minute supercut titled “Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Stairs,” featuring footage from “Vertigo,” “Notorious,” “Rear Window,” and “North by Northwest,” among many others. Tohline writes:

In the first shot of Alfred Hitchcock’s first film, The Pleasure Garden (1925), a line of women stream down a spiral staircase backstage at a theater. In the last shot of Hitchcock’s last film, Family Plot (1976), Barbara Harris sits down on a staircase, looks into the camera, and winks. In the fifty years and over fifty films between these bookends, Hitchcock made the staircase a recurring motif in his complex grammar of suspense — a device by which potential energy could be, metaphorically and literally, loaded into narrative, a zone of unsteady or vertiginous passage from one space to another, always on the verge of becoming a site of violence.

Now watch this 👀

If you can describe one of my previously discussed fascinations as the presence of something in its absence, then “Three Minutes: A Lengthening” makes a case for the absence of something in its presence.

Based on the book “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film” by Glenn Kurtz, this documentary is centered around a three-minute silent home movie filmed in 1938 by David Kurtz in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland — a mere three minutes that get sped up, slowed down, rewound, zoomed in, and paused over the course of the documentary’s 69 minutes. That home movie sat rotting in a closet until it was rediscovered by David’s grandson, Glenn, in Florida in 2009. If it had sat another month it would have become unwatchable. Thankfully Glenn was able to get it digitally restored before then.

The movie starts off with the footage in question: A crowd has gathered outside and David is walking through town filming everything. Children laugh and make faces at the camera. A woman stands in the doorway of a shop and looks off into the distance. Finally the narrator, Helena Bonham Carter, states that “these three minutes of life were taken out of the flow of time” and what follows is a memorial to these largely anonymous individuals who would face an apocalyptic event only a year later with the German invasion of Poland. Through detective work, miraculously connecting with survivors, and drawing upon many contextualizing documents, the filmmakers discover when and where the footage takes place and the many stories that can be found within its scant three minutes, a rich tapestry of community, social stratification, daring escapes, childhood schemes, and famous singers.

Of the town’s seven thousand inhabitants, three thousand were Jewish, of whom fewer than one hundred survived the Holocaust. Glenn explains:

Nothing I learned about the people in my grandfather’s film could prevent their deaths or bring them back to life. No film, no memorial, and no recollection could restore, retrieve, recover, or revive this world. All I could do, all anyone could do, was to piece together the few fragments of their lives that remained, to show their edges and absences, defying the loss of that world by detailing the little of it that had been preserved. In this way, we might succeed in keeping the memory of the dead alive, of remembering them, despite the fact that they are dead.

The movie highlights a 1938 advertisement for Kodak cameras and film that boasts: “No other power on Earth can do what a movie camera does. You think your memory will hold it all, but no. It slips away. It grows dim. Only a movie camera can bring it back to you with all its freshness and thrill.”

…but the color fades and the edges go fuzzy and we are reminded that these people — forever young on film — are actually long gone, their absence forever linked to their presence on film. It’s a fascinating exploration, stretching three minutes into lifetimes.

Until next time! 👋

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