Shooting the Past - BBC miniseries (1999)
I'm trying to think about how to describe "Shooting the Past" without making it seem boring, because it isn't, but it is all about old photographs, which no matter what sounds so dull. Well, anyway here goes:
"Shooting the Past" is a British miniseries from 1999 written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff (who made Close My Eyes). It stars Lindsay Duncan as Marilyn Truman, a smart middle-aged woman who manages a photo archive. A huge photo archive, actually - it has over 10 million photos. It's housed in a mansion that was once owned by an insurance agency and was just sold, photos and all, to an American business man (Liam Cunningham) who wants to turn the entire place into a business school. And he doesn't want the photos. In fact, he wants to split up the collection and possibly let the less valuable photos be destroyed.
What will Marilyn do? She tries to advocate for the collection using logic and common sense. Her colleague, Oswald Bates (the ever-wonderful Timothy Spall), wants to use guerrilla tactics - to fight dirty and crazily. Eventually Oswald does take some very drastic steps, but there's always a method to his madness and we know (even though the characters don't) that the archive needs the combination of Marilyn, with her wisdom and elegance, and Oswald, with his genius and idiosyncrasies, to save it.
Throughout the miniseries (three parts each lasting about an hour and a half), we see lots of beautiful and interesting photos from the last 150 years. Twice, Marilyn tells stories using the pictures - she takes us through decades of people's lives with only photos, and the way it is done is revolutionary in the quietest way imaginable. It suggests that film might be too fast paced, and that what we might need are photos - moments captured for us to stare and ponder at as we try to understand them. Each moment is a puzzle, after all, an endless one. We move too quickly to the next thing before we understand the first.
The performances are all very good (although Liam Cunningham does a questionable American accent, and I never really believed in his American-ness, like I never believe in Renee Zellweger's English-ness in Bridget Jones). However, Lindsay Duncan and Tim Spall are particularly touching. There's something very sweet about these two people who both realize that they are dinosaurs, but who respond to that fact differently. In the end, the film makes you think not about photos but about the past, and how much of the past we leave unexplored because we think it is irrelevant, or worse, finished. "Shooting the Past" suggests that the past is never definitive, it changes as we change and we always need to look at it again and again.