Sunday, June 20, 2010

Outside, Looking In

I have been watching myself all week long.

Instead of wearing the same thing every day, I have mined my frugal wardrobe for something colorful. I have put on makeup, have combed my hair, polished my fingernails, lamented my wrinkles.

The reason for all this extreme self-consciousness is a documentary filmmaker from Rome who was here Monday through yesterday shooting footage for a show about my daughter Anna, who went missing 37 years ago.

The show isn’t even about me, but there seems to be something in us, or at least in me, which wants to put a good face on things. Literally. “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

The Italian journalist, a charming and engaging second-generation movie man, must have worked ten hours a day behind his camera. He filmed the house, inside and out. He set up interviews which necessitated moving all the furniture and changing all the lights.

He filmed us talking, practicing, going through trunks and boxes, trying to find what he called “artifacts”. Taking a break to pull a few weeds in the garden, I looked up to see that I was on camera and hoped that I hadn’t shown an unflattering backside.

This may seem like a lot of camera work, he explained, but images go by in just a few seconds, and we have to have images to match the script. All this is expected to form a 15 or 20-minute segment on a show called “Que l’ho visto”, which has been running for some 22 years in Italy.

By yesterday, as we ate spaghetti (was it sufficiently al dente for an Italian? Was the sauce good? Should I have hand-grated the parmesan?) and prepared to say goodbye, I felt completely looked-at. Nicodemos and I went to play some music for our guest before taking him to the airport.

“But I don’t have my camera!” he said.

“Good,” we said. “So you can’t work.”


(Searching for Anna, published by Lulu Press, is available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.)

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