Screen Memory
For Bright Wall/Dark Room, I spent a month and a half re-watching movies about the Holocaust.
Hi friends,
I’m excited to share an essay of mine that was published yesterday in Bright Wall/Dark Room — an essay that has long been in the making: https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2024/09/10/screen-memory/.
(You may sense a theme here with my piece in The New Republic on The Day the Clown Cried from a couple weeks ago…)
For years, I’ve wanted to write a piece in which I watch/re-watch and review as many films about the Holocaust as I can. The problem with pitching the idea was that I didn’t have any clear sense of what I would learn from this experience. What would I gain from reviewing Schindler’s List for the thousandth time? Needless to say, I had multiple false starts.
At the same time, I’d started to write about my grandmother in other contexts (for example, in Real Life and GoldFlakePaint), and I eventually came to realize that the value of writing a piece like this would be in expressing the strange experience of encountering my family history through these films — on in-flight entertainment, while channel surfing, and beyond — and using these experiences as prompts to write about my grandmother.
A couple years ago, I stumbled across Bright Wall/Dark Room, which I’ve come to love, and whose sensibility matched that of the piece that I wanted to write. This is all to say that I drafted the pitch specifically for Bright Wall/Dark Room. I’m very thankful they commissioned it.
For much of August and September of last year, I watched only films about the Holocaust (with the exception of a single Friday night screening of Oppenheimer). This is the first long essay I wrote about my grandmother since her passing, and writing this proved intensely personal. I’m grateful to my friends and parents for re-watching these movies with me, suggesting new ones to consider, providing feedback, and generally taking an interest in this.
A particular thank-you to Fran Hoepfner for editing this piece so thoughtfully, and to Chad Perman for commissioning this piece and for providing helpful input as well.
With appreciation,
BCGL