Our Family Album is an essay film that interweaves a number of different elements and concerns. On the most basic level, it is a reflection on the construction, nature, and meaning of family photography, as filmmakers Maria Threese Serana and Charles Musser move back and forth between two countries whose relationship was forged by war and a half century of colonization – the Philippines and the United States. How they and their son John Carlos negotiate their lives between these two cultures is illuminated by and through the family album.
This intimate portrait gradually moves outward to engage scholars, archivists, and fellow filmmakers who have different perspectives and even conflicting views on the nature of family photography and how they deploy it and use it in their personal and professional lives. Here the Giornate del Cinema Muto plays a pivotal role. Three Giornate regulars are interviewed about their family albums. Giornate co-founder Paolo Cherchi Usai, then a senior curator at the world’s oldest photography museum (the George Eastman Museum) hates family photographs and keeps images of his beloved ones in his head. Early Cinema impresario Vanessa Toulmin created the National Fairground Archive, which is, as she explains, “a collection relating to a group of show people who are connected through kinship or family or business or through shared lifestyles of over 150 years. And that’s really my extended family.” There is also the legendary Thomas Elsaesser, who recently completed a documentary, The Sun Island, about his grandfather, the architect Martin Elsaesser. Finally, one of the many family albums investigated in Our Family Album is that of the Giornate del Cinema Muto itself, lovingly assembled by Paolo Jacob. For when past and present festival directors David Robinson and Jay Weissberg welcome us home to another Giornate, is it not because we are all family?
Our Family Album is also a documentary about an early cinema scholar – me! Indeed, I used a talk on early cinema (specifically Edison’s The May Irwin Kiss) as entry into Filipino culture – both romantic and cinematic. The film thus traces a journey, both physical and intellectual. Arriving in Manila to enlighten the formerly colonized about the film’s profound impact on American culture, I find that our relationship is quickly inverted as I become a student of Philippine film scholars – most notably Nick Deocampo. Nick talks about a different group of Edison films – particularly Advance of Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan (1899) – faux representations of the bloody battles by which the United States recolonized the Philippines. Eventually, I track down Victor Gross, the son of the filmmaker Edward Meyer Gross. I interview Victor about his father, a former U.S. Army nurse, and his Filipina wife, Antonia Molina – star of Manila’s Zarzuela theater. Together they made the first feature films in the Philippines. Their debut picture, The Life and Death of Dr. José Rizal (1912), was produced only a few months after Sarah Bernhardt’s Queen Elizabeth (1912). It is anti-imperialist achievement that has been an unacknowledged landmark of Philippine nationalism.

Charles Musser