Everlasting Moments

How many moments are everlasting?

When even a second is measured in past tense, as soon as it has happened it is gone.

The only thing that lasts is eternity and . . . photographs. That moment captured in forever carpe diem. Perhaps this is why I’ve always been spellbound by old snapshots. Look, I don’t know how many times I’ve said, look at that cat. It looks so alive.

Why cats?

Maybe because sometimes when lazying about they often look dead.

I used to visit a Miss Puls in a nursing home down the street where I grew up in Centerville, Ohio. In an act of altruism, I began, all on my own, to walk up the hill to Bethany Lutheran and visit residents the staff indicated had very few visitors. So I’d stop by and say hi to Miss Puls. And it was always the same. I’d ask if I could look at her photo album. She had so many OLD pics from when she was a girl growing up in Dayton, to young adulthood. She never married and became a secretary and worked in an office. She owned her own home and shared it with a companion, a lady friend.

I swear, I had no idea.

Just like any family photo album, she even had photos of her friend as a young girl. And cats, on steps, in laps, swishing tails. I’d always exclaim—Look! It looks so alive.

In the film Everlasting Moments, by Swedish director Jan Troell, such moments are brought to life. As one captivated by photos and memoir, this film combines both. The movie was inspired by Troell’s wife who upon visiting an aunt and pouring over a photo album was intrigued by the story of how the great grandmother started taking photographs around the turn of the century after winning a camera in a lottery. So much rests on chance. She was a working-class woman with an unremarkable biography. Her life was filled with a myriad of ordinary moments—except that they were caught, captured by emulsion and film, between the pages of an old photo album. Here was a whole life.

Maria Larsson’s.

We see Sweden through many decades through the lens of Maria and her daughter Maja Larsson. It is a courageous story, one in which Maria moves uncomfortably between motherhood and art, lost in the world of her camera and consumed by a large family (7 children). She was able to inhabit both—though tension in the film revolves around her guilt. How to pursue photography and continue to serve her family.

Here is a trailer.

Everlasting moments--from a distance they seem worn and faded, but upon closer inspection, they are alive. They are me.