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81 son watches him shyly. Home movies from the life he left play, projected on the wall in front of him. Eventually, he starts to remember. The footage in these videos is some of the most beautiful in the entire film: a smiling woman playing with her husband’s moustache, a little boy gazing below the dock, the blue toned shot of a sea gull passing. It is as though Wenders sets the home movie up as an ideal that his own film hopes to replicate. It introduces the depth of emotion that, if his own, slowly rendered story does its job correctly, we will experience again once we come close enough to the characters. At the end, the man finds his estranged wife working at a peep show club in Austin. He tells her the story of their lives through the half-silvered glass of a one-way mirror. She gazes into her own reflection, listening to a story about a woman who “dreamed of running naked down the highway, running across fields, running down riverbeds, always running.” The man ties a cowbell around the woman’s ankle so that he can hear if she runs away. He ties her to the oven. At first she is sweet and a little chirpy, but she begins to cry when she knows the story to be her own. This is the payoff of Wenders’ style of filmmaking, because we too will realize, once we stare long enough at the man who “ran from a fire until every sign of man had disappeared,” that we are looking at ourselves. My father’s home videos have the attributes of a realist work. B-roll footage collaged together with captured moments from our lives create a kind of art film. The Italian Neo-realist Vittorio De Sica or the French filmmaker Eric Rhomer have both made movies as simply, with such casual dialogue, assembling plot from the pose of non-actors who are engaged in almost real life in front of a camera. Vittorio Di Sica believed that everyone could play one role perfectly: himself. So when I started to watch our home movies as a teenager, after watching hours of independent and foreign film on cable television, I started to invest in the story that the film created as though it lived both through and outside of myself. I saw it with just enough temporal remove to have to wonder at emotions and un-captured dialogue. I could encounter my own life as art, with the objective mindset of a film viewer, and when I had the film goer’s moment of epiphany— of identification with the characters— the poetry of the moment was incalculably strong. Awhile ago, I picked a book off of my father’s shelf: The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein. In it, he writes, “the lifelike acting

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