Sunday, October 11, 2009

An amazing glimpse...


Last week, the Anne Frank House posted a YouTube video of the only moving pictures ever captured the young girl, who is seen in this clip leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a better look at the girl next door and her new groom.

David Ulin, the book editor at the Los Angeles Times, wrote about the film so beautifully. Here are few graphs from Ulin's story:

"A newlywed couple leaves an Amsterdam apartment building. People hover on the sidewalk, watching them go. Then the camera pans upward -- and there, gazing down from a balcony, is Anne Frank.

"The date is July 22, 1941. She's 12 years old. It's a year before she and her family will go into hiding, less than four years before she will die of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in the waning days of World War II. We watch her watching, watch her look back over her shoulder, quick and coltish, as if in response to someone inside.

"'As familiar as we are with images of Anne Frank," Francine Prose writes in her provocative "Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife," "as inured as we may think we are to the sight of her beautiful face, the film pierces whatever armor we imagine we have developed. . . . It's less like watching a film clip than like having one of those dreams in which you see a long-lost loved one or friend. In the dream, the person isn't really dead. You must have been mistaken. You wake up, and it takes a few moments to understand why the dream was so cruelly deceptive.'

Remarkable.

For the rest of Ulin's story, please click {here}.

18 comments:

Fiorella said...

I've watched in an online newspaper, it it amazing how she's inmortalized now

Polly Rowan said...

Oh my goodness. It just makes her so much more real.

Signe said...

wow!

LenoreNeverM♡re said...

Shall never forget this remarkable girl & her legacy!
~xo* Tina!!

Laura said...

This almost looks like it is a memory inside someone's head. There are less frames per second than in the films nowadays, so it looks very old and surreal. Lovely.

Geisslein said...

shall never forget...

I Think My Tummy Hurts said...

What beautiful film footage and what a beautiful girl.

magnoliaamber said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
magnoliaamber said...

for the second time I see the review about this latest video (the first one I read from Flux Capacitor).

She is just such a lovely girl...

Everybody should feel so sorry for her.

How life is precious yet how pathetic we human can be so unappreciative towards it.

Thanks for sharing, English Muse..
Just as lovely as usual:)

dee said...

It's so beautiful and sad... chilling. We are all so lucky to have been able to see the world through her diaries.

Ali said...

I have chills. This is incredible.

Anonymous said...

Bless her, it's such a sad story - thank you for posting this I've been looking for it everywhere and you're right, a long lost loved one.

x

Amanda Nicole said...

I'm amazed at how a simple, short clip can make us feel so much. All of a sudden I'm flooded with the same emotions I had after reading her diary the first, second, third time... I cannot understand what she went through, but only begin to imagine. Such an iconic figure of one of the sorest spots on human history.

Unknown said...

How fragile and yet poweful these images are. They remind us once again that keeping Ann's memory alive is the ultimate rebuke to her murderers. As the old Yiddish phrase goes, "May their names and memories be erased"--while her's lives on in our hearts. Somehow, Ann has come to stand for what is lost whenever the promise of young life is cut short by folly or evil. We know and cherish her almost by chance. Think of all the other Ann's we'll never know, girls from Rawanda and Darfur.

Passementerie said...

It's an extraordinary clip. I remember reading her diary when I was only about ten years old...

Cassandra Dias said...

Whoa that's crazy. It's kind of eerie knowing what she will soon be going through...

Jessica Ferron said...

Even though it's just a glimpse, it took my breath away to see the video because Anne has always just been 'that famous girl we read about in 8th grade.'

Love + Cake said...

That's amazing! Thank you so much for sharing it <3