Photoessay #1309 - Moving away

I often find meaning of pictures taken from the back or moving away.

Last weekend we saw the Spanish movie "Paper Birds". My friend Mary Ann said before the movie started, "Spanish Civil War movies are never happy."

The director was there to speak, he mentioned that his parents and grandparents had been itinerant performers during the time of the Civil War. Yet the stories they told were about being backstage or in the dressing room. This movie was about some itinerant performers during the years just following the Civil War. From the point of view of a small boy informally adopted by two actors.

Those familiar with classical narrative agree that the tragic hero must die on the way to the promised land. The movie ends as the boy, now an old man fondly remembers his actor fathers during a performance of his own.

A romanticized sequence at the end shows the young boy riding in a wagon with the two actors in a wagon crossing a field of mown grass. This scene is not in the movie and it's hard to imagine when such a scene would occur. but it doesn't matter, it's really in the imagination of the young boy moving away feeling safe with his guardians in a sunny rural landscape.

Reminded me of a cover of "Jewels and Ashes", a Holocaust descendant memoir I read several years ago. The picture spoke to me as a a young man in Australia tries to capture the essence of his grandparents as they disappear down the agrarian road, disappearing into the haze of history full of events that will doom them.