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Ghostly, epic, and terribly moving, documentary filmmaker Alan Berliner's
The Family Album is both a collective portrait of a long-buried American age and of the universality and endurance of family experience. Assembled from the home movies of some 60 families from the 1920s through the '50s, and augmented by oral-history interviews and authentic audio recordings of weddings, funerals, birthdays, conversations, and the like, the film opens a thousand windows onto the private lives of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (depending on how old you are). Berliner organizes the movements of the film along life's natural arc, from childhood through adult joy and pain and then death. The global crises of yesteryear--the Great Depression, preludes to war--are deep in the background of images of children dancing, old people mugging, and thriving urban neighborhoods. But one can feel the ripples of a changing world moving through ordinary lives, creating future memories that Berliner has so poetically revealed here.
--Tom Keogh
