BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS

Jennifer Benn

Footage

An old Kodak cine film, dated 1938: well-dressed Americans, made good, visiting the old country, recording impressions of shabby streets, people. Long-forgotten, chemically unstable, unwatchable. Unearthed by chance sixty-odd years later. Archive material? Possibly. The Institute pays for restoration and preservation: painstaking, scrupulous work.

Inexpert cameraman, he never guessed his amateurish footage would capture, fleetingly, flickeringly, a life on the brink.

The camera pans along the street, watching children do what children always did, always do, in front of a camera. People jostle out of a doorway, emerge down steps. Banal background trivia: semi-opaque, patterned curtains, potted plants in windows, cobblestones in the market place.

A series of coincidences, fateful accidents, near-misses, internet connections and the film enters our lives. Someone recognises his fourteen-year-old self. The photographer’s grandson arrives – scholarly, quietly watchful, a skilful interviewer; knowing when to remain silent, when to proffer a tentative name; seeking corroboration but reticent, fearful of planting leading questions. He hopes these fragments of film may bear witness –but they may not. Memories are failing or faulty.

We are bystanders watching the retrieval of memories – the delightful sifted from those too painfully raw to touch upon. My father’s prior stipulation: nothing post-1939. But he talks anyway, in a darkened room, urgently.