It’s hard to view one’s photography, and photography in general, in quite the same way after seeing Everlasting Moments.  It just so happens I was taking photographs with my digital camera an hour before seeing the film, and a few hours after looking at a book on Jaromir Funke’s photos. And then came ‘Everlasting Moments’, which blew it all away. Every film deserves a warning of some kind, and the one for this one is: you’ll never want to shoot digitally again.

The film’s title is unfortunate, because it seems to indicate a sweet nostalgia. You won’t find it here. The film from Swedish director Jan Troell is easy to blow all out of proportion, to over-glorify in layer’s of synonyms for beauty. Movies about an art form have a way of becoming subservient to the art form, to confuse themselves with the art form (Basquiat, for instance). Troell’s film avoids this by holding back on the camera porn, stringing the moments of artistic beauty between moments of domestic horror. The story is of Maria Larsson, a lower-class housewife in a small town in fin-de-siecle Sweden. Photography is not yet in the hands of the average person. Maria comes by a camera, and finds momentary escape from her abusive, alcoholic husband. If this sounds shmaltzy, it’s not. We take for granted the idea that art transforms lives. It does, but it does so roughly, intermittently, through—and with—a great deal of pain. It’s easy to see how a Hollywood hack would remake this film. You could hang this narrative on the skeleton of ‘Titanic.’ It would be terrible, but it would work.

It’s the true story of one of the director’s own relations (wife’s-cousin’s-brother’s-something). In a way, it’s also the story of my own father, who grew up with a brute of a father with an insatiable appetite for a drink and a tendency to speak with his fists. My dad found his salvation through a photo-development kit from Eastman Kodak. Eventually it lead him out of that dreary and tumultuous situation and into his career. A career he retired from, as digital photography replaced its analogue precedent. He wasn’t bitter about it, but he was tired of being bored in his lab. In his retirement, he shoots exclusively digital now. It’s his anachronistic son who still keeps a supply of film in the fridge.