1.
When the COVID-era lockdowns began in March 2020, it radically reshaped our relationship to space in curious ways. The size and layout of our environments took on a sudden urgency, not to mention their HVAC systems and windows; we all became spatial risk-assessment experts overnight. We started to eyeball six-foot distances, aided, increasingly, by helpful markers on shop floors when we did venture out. Graphics circulated depicting aerosol spread in indoor settings—anxious, hard-to-shake visualizations of the hidden threats our bodies posed to each other in public space.
It wasn’t just space, though. We’d entered a new era of time-keeping, one whose effects continue to shape our sense of self and history. This manifested in funny ways that took up a lot of room in the discourse at the time, like how we measured our hand-washing rituals with cute mnemonics. Singing “Happy Birthday” twice in your head got you to 20 seconds, according to the CDC. When that got stale, our most robust renewable resource, the listicle, stepped in with suggestions: the chorus to “Love on Top” or “Jolene” or “We Will Rock You” (three times, per a triage nurse quoted on NPR). Practical, and also a whimsical distraction from the relentlessly grim news.
There was also a pervasive, more destabilizing sense of becoming unstuck in time. Missed holidays, glitchy Zoom birthdays, postponed weddings, and work-from-home reimaginings of time management all contributed to this collective unmooring, a shift born of both the familiar notion that 2020 was a “lost year” and research around an altered pandemic “timescape” that missed key moments. “COVID restrictions,” writes Arash Sahraie of the University of Aberdeen, “particularly lockdowns, removed these markers that ‘anchor’ us in the timescape, and the absence of these markers distorted our perception of time. We can remember events happening, we just don’t know when they happened.”
A lot of strategies emerged to navigate this temporal uncertainty. For me, it happened to coincide with both new parenthood and a moment of spiritual exploration, both of which came to bear on my own sense of time.
Our daughter had been born almost exactly eight months prior to California’s stay-at-home order, and so we were, at first anyway, mostly alone in Baby World. Days blurred together, as they did for everyone, but with the added element of repetition that goes with tending to a newborn—sleep, eat, poop, walk around the block, sleep.
When I wasn’t changing diapers or singing lullaby renditions of the Velvet Underground, I was focused on an online class on Judaism, which I enrolled in to be a better dad to my Jewish daughter, as well as a more attuned, conversant partner and co-creator of our home. As our class worked its way through a curriculum structured around the holidays, I increasingly came to understand the Hebrew calendar, but by extension any calendar, as an expression of culture and basis for ritual understanding as much as a time-keeping device. Weekly Torah portions, vegan challah-baking, and lunar charts became ways of processing, grounding, and rooting into the soil of our family’s days.
The ways we keep time are communications of our values, what we deem worthy of remembering, and how we want to structure our experience of being in the world. As Jill Hammer writes in The Jewish Book of Days:
[The calendar] connects us with the line of past and future. Yet the Jewish year is also a circle reflecting the cycles of the natural world. Throughout this yearly circle, planting and harvest, cold and heat, become our spiritual teachers and guides. They lead us through moments of joy and celebration and times of mourning and destruction. The voice of the Divine comes to us not only from text and history but also from trees, the sky, the waxing and waning moon, and the wondrous and fragile functioning of our own bodies.
That wonder and fragility were never more apparent to me than when I was a new dad in 2020, when everything seemed to be simultaneously moving fast, slow, and not at all.
It was, in retrospect, the perfect era to encounter a short film—Jay Rosenblatt’s How Do You Measure A Year?—about a child growing up, and her father’s attempt to chart and map it, to build containers for ritual, and to find markers to return to in the rush of time.
2.
How Do You Measure A Year? fits neatly into a whole subgenre of films that foreground the passage of time in their construction, and whose ultimate impact depends on how we see and understand the changing central figures they depict.
Sure, every film foregrounds the passage of time on some level, because that’s a core aspect of “being a movie.” And the very idea of a sequel—or, even more so, a franchise—presupposes a continuity in our relationship to character (and, often, performer).
But in the timey-wimey subgenre, or tendency, to which How Do You Measure A Year? belongs, we watch the actual “actors” age, and we understand their changing appearance and demeanor as constitutive of these films’ meaning. In discussions around them, the word “project” reoccurs; there can’t help but be a sense of experimentation and risk, because no one involved knows at the outset how things will look on the other side. (It’s no accident that you could say the same thing about parenthood.)
Michael Apted’s Up documentaries, François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films, and projects like Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy and Boyhood are all entries in this catalog. “Think of this as time travel,” Ethan Hawke’s Jesse tells Julie Delpy’s Célineat the outset of Before Sunrise, the first film in their saga; he’s pitching her on a walk around Vienna with a stranger, offering up the hypothetical point of view of a future Céline who wished she’d said yes, but he may as well be describing the films themselves. Teasing the release of Boyhood in 2013, Hawke helpfully provided a motto for the film’s approach that applies just as well to Rosenblatt’s: the movie is “a little bit like timelapse photography of a human being.”
At the same time, Rosenblatt’s project, which compresses 17 years into 29 minutes, fits neatly into the world of home videos—and, now, the world of Google Photos memories, social media albums, and reels of all sorts. This is clearly one of the ways the film lands a sneaky emotional wallop.
One of the clichés parents constantly hear is that They Grow Up So Fast—which of course they do, and nowhere is that borne out more than in our vast photo archives. Our memories sit alongside each other, tucked away on digital shelves we could access at any time but usually don’t, like stills from a film we probably won’t ever make: hundreds and hundreds of images of babies turning into toddlers turning into preschoolers and beyond, an evergreen ‘time-lapse of a human being’ on the time machine in our pockets.
The difference is that Rosenblatt made that film, or his version of it.
We’re first introduced to Ella on her second birthday, and title cards explain the project: “When my daughter Ella turned two, we began a birthday ritual. She’d sit on the couch and I’d ask her the same questions each and every birthday, until she turned 18. I waited 17 years to look at what we shot.”
“Ritual” may or may not signify holiness here, but it certainly connotes observance, in both senses of the word: the documentary and the calendrical. But it’s useful to think of it here as an effort to separate and sanctify these moments, to mark and illuminate passages, to generate meaning through intentional action. “We slice our life into / segments by rituals, each a door / to a presumed new phase,” Marge Piercy writes in her 2015 poem “Doors opening, closing on us.”
Discussing his book Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living in 2022, Dimitris Xygalatas noted, “We tend to think about ourselves as very rational beings, and yet so much of what we consider meaningful sits in actions that are compulsively repeated and yet have no obvious outcome.” In watching Jay and Ella return again and again to their annual conversation, something non-obvious does emerge: a co-creation of meaning between parent and child, rooted in both continuity and change, held in the container of their interaction.
At the same time, watching the film as father to a young daughter, there’s an additional bit of uncanny displacement—the adorable early childhood segments are utterly relatable from my own recent memory, but the later moments with teenage Ella feel like free-floating prophecy, years I haven’t experienced but can certainly imagine, and even sort of recognize. It’s eavesdropping as fortune-telling.
After a first brief, endearing exchange (“My birthday coming up, Daddy.” “Today is your birthday.” “Today is my birthday!”), Rosenblatt inserts a montage of Ella across the next decade and a half: goofing off, making funny noises into the mic or flashing ironic jazz hands, rolling her eyes at the camera, sullenly looking away, waiting patiently.
It’s a smart way to begin the film, functioning both like an affective outline for what’s to come and an embodiment of Jesse’s hifalutin line in Before Sunset: “Time is a lie … it’s all happening all the time, and inside every moment is another moment.” Dennis Lim, discussing that very Jesse-like sentiment in his Criterion essay, writes, “In cinema and in life, time has a way of folding in on itself. The tricks of montage, and the unpredictable workings of memory and perception, can wreak havoc on our sense of chronology.”
And yet, Lim continues, “the here and now … is a reminder that the linear march of time is no lie.” The actors are older. The child grows up, relentlessly. Ella the mop-headed two-year-old, whose favorite treat is lollipops and who wants to “put on makeup and eat gum” when she gets older, sits next to Ella the eight-year-old Hannah Montana enthusiast who wants to be a singer, and Ella the 13-year-old vegan, and Ella the 15-year-old who worries that someone close to her will die, and Ella the college-bound 18-year-old who loves ritual because when you “mark something annually, you can see the way it stays the same or changes, and I like that.”
These multiple Ellas bear out Jesse’s conception of moments pregnant with infinity, even as the singular Ella destabilizes that idea. She’s caught up in this process of recursive becoming, like we all are. What else but ritual could hold us?
Rosenblatt’s project was designed with that holding in mind, even as it serves to chart constancy and change. Staring out the back window of a new house in Ohio years later, I found myself doing something similar.
3.
The first early morning picture I took of the yard was on September 14, 2022—18 Elul on the Hebrew calendar, the birthday of the great mystic the Baal Shem Tov. It was a little over a month after we’d moved into our new house about 30 minutes outside Cleveland, in a town notable for the popcorn shop on Main Street, as well as for being Bill Watterson’s hometown and the birthplace of Calvin and Hobbes.
It had been a tumultuous cross-country move. Since we’d arrived, I found the view out back calming, even captivating, and, at some point, the previous owners must have, too; the sunroom on this side of the house, facing east, was a more recent addition, all the better to look into the field at dawn. (It was called “the sunroom” when we moved in, morphed into the “living room” over several months, and at some point, so slowly we didn’t notice, shifted into “the playroom.” Another time-lapse.)
I don’t remember standing, phone in hand, by this three-paned window at 7:48 A.M. on a Wednesday, formulating a grand plan. Taking quick snaps of this undisturbed field was not my life’s work. But there was a pull there, some kind of tug on the sleeve. In the coming months, I’d choose a patch of grass behind that shed as a sit-spot, clumsily working my way toward a hitbodedut practice, an effort at alignment and grounding: to mark something, to see the way it changes or stays the same. And I’d take many, many photos.
The windows’ three panels were definitely part of the appeal, lending even the most hastily composed image a mythic triptych quality. I kept generating them for over a year, documenting natural shifts (the blooming and senescence of foliage, snowfall and early sunrise, the chance cameos by black squirrels and song sparrows) alongside the less wild ones (the construction of our fence and garden beds, one of our dogs pooping). Nothing too momentous, then, but they still emerge as landscapes poised at the edge of revelation. I stare at them and wait for the drama to crack through, like a suburban version of Abbas Kiorastami’s 24 Frames, in which the late Iranian director (and avid photographer) paired animation with still images to conjure up a fantasy of the moments after the picture was taken. But, in my images, that drama remains always a moment away. That’s part of their hold.
How do we honor the spaces we inhabit? How do we come to know, see, and hear them? How do we start conversations with the land and the life around us? One core way is by just paying attention. “Just”—as though such things come cheap. From my seat on a log behind the shed, staring at the explosion of goldenrod in the summer or freezing my ass off in the dead of Northeast Ohio winter, dedicated attention can seem, on some days, elusive, fleeting, hard-won.
Pictures are, by contrast, a relatively pain-free mode of engagement, no ass-freezing required. Bobby Seal—self-described “freelance writer, poet and psychogeographer”—embarked on a similar project years before I did, documenting it in his “One Year” time-lapse, and found in the slight differences between images that he himself was the variable. But no matter where the impulse arises or how it manifests, no matter to what ends its output serves, our being present in observance requires attention—calendars, photos, pen strokes on a white wall to chart a toddler’s growth.
Exhortations to be more mindful approach cliché, but the core idea—that we are what we pay attention to, that we are co-constitutive of the world we inhabit—is deep-rooted. A calendar is a chronicle of that attention, of being in the world. Sequenced images, with the frame fixed to emphasize small differences, are another. “Lapse” can mean either the passage of time or a failure of concentration, and there’s a deeply human impulse to document the former without falling victim to the latter.
“I think it’s really arbitrary,” 16-year-old Ella tells the camera. “I get 18 or 21; there’s, like, things that come with it, but I don’t really understand … Can we just go a little faster after this?” Off-camera, we hear a tinge of sadness in her dad’s voice: “I’ll try.”
I get both sides of that fragmented conversation—the teenager rushing headlong to adulthood and the adult trying to slow things down—but of course, as a 45-year-old dad myself, it’s the latter impulse that I feel most strongly. And so I would also find myself behind a camera lens, morning after morning, somewhere between 7 and 8 A.M., trying to go slowly.
One day, however, I realized that this photography ritual came from somewhere and someone significantly more profane than the teachers who initially prompted my renewed attempts at yard-based presence. Specifically, and unexpectedly, it occurred to me that this had something to do with Harvey Keitel.
4.
Wayne Wang’s Smoke was released in 1995, and distributed by a Miramax transitioning from indie stalwart to major Hollywood player. This era seems evident in the film itself, with a cast of recognizable actors bouncing off relative no-names, all of them voicing dialogue from the very au courant author/first-time screenwriter Paul Auster (z”l), the “Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn,” as The New York Times eulogized him in April.
Smoke is a film fixated on the slipperiness of time and identity, and Auster’s script, like all of his work, relishes paradox and doppelgangers. Auggie Wren, played by Keitel, is the central figure, waxing philosophical in his cigar store on the edge of Prospect Park, which is the locus around which everything turns. He’s also, as I suddenly remembered in winter 2022, an amateur photographer who takes pictures from the corner in front of the store at the same time every morning.
Pictures of what? “Sometimes,” he tells depressed author and shop regular Paul Benjamin (William Hurt), “the same people, sometimes different ones. And sometimes the different ones become the same, and the same ones disappear.”
The cloud over Paul issues from tragedy—his pregnant wife’s violent death years before. She’d stopped into Auggie’s shop just before the incident. “I sometimes think,” Auggie muses, “that if she hadn’t given me exact change that day, or if the store had been a little more crowded, it would have taken her a few more seconds to get out of here, and then maybe she wouldn’t have stepped in front of that bullet.” Keitel’s delivery is weighted as much by astonishment as sadness, transfixed, like Auster himself certainly was, by the vagaries of chance.
This sense of a random universe, filled with permeable selves, haunts Smoke. Theorist and critic bell hooks, who disliked the film for very good reasons and memorably told Wang so to his face, described its ontology perfectly: “In enclosed space, with not a great deal of attention to a large environmental context, Smoke reminds us of the way in which our lives are shaped and circumscribed by landscapes over which we have very little control.”
When Paul is saved from absent-mindedly walking into traffic by a passerby named Rashid, the younger man shrugs off Paul’s effusive thanks: “I just happened to be there. The right place at the right time.” And as an offbeat, occasionally spiky relationship between the two grows, Paul tells Rashid a story about a mountain climber encountering his own long-vanished father, frozen in alpine ice like a memory, preserved forever at a younger age than his now-adult son. Later, Rashid will slip covertly into his own estranged father’s life, introducing himself as (natch) “Paul Benjamin.”
Confusing? A little overwrought? Sure! I love Smoke anyway and always have; my aunt Elaine even gave me a copy of the screenplay as a gift when I was a teenager, with the inscription “Don’t let the smoke get in your eyes.” I’d read City of Glass and Leviathan, surely included somewhere to this day in an “Introduction to Postmodernism in American Fiction”syllabus, and counted Auster among my favorites. Whatever faults Smoke has as a film, it’s entirely of a piece with an oeuvre close to my teenage heart.
You’d think, then, that I would’ve remembered Auggie’s photographs. I suppose, on some level, maybe I did. But prior to a recent rewatch, it was really the film’s closing credits sequence that stuck with me the most: a black-and-white dramatization of the “Christmas story” that Auggie tells Paul, which is in fact about how he got his first camera. And indeed, Auster wrote and published Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story (1990) before the film; in a sense, Smoke emerged from Auggie’s lens, not the other way around.
We encounter the Christmas story twice in the film: first, as told in a lingering one-shot by Keitel to Hurt, and then, with dramatic flair, in a bit of closing flashback. This final, time-warped telling is melancholy and oneiric. It’s another Auster tale of dubious morality, shifting identity, and the quicksand of authorship, all set to Tom Waits’s gorgeous, unsettling “Innocent When You Dream (78)” (“It’s such a sad old feeling / The fields are soft and green / It’s memories that I’m stealing / But you’re innocent when you dream”).
It’s a lovely and unexpected denouement, in part because of its formal choices, but I can now see that the film’s true centerpiece is the earlier scene when Auggie lets Paul into his photograph project. Huddled in the store’s backroom, Auggie lays his photo albums on the table—page after page of identically framed images. “They’re all the same,” Paul observes, flipping through with a mix of amazement and confusion.
“That’s right,” replies Auggie cheerfully. “More than four thousand pictures of the same place. The corner of 3rd Street and Seventh Avenue at eight o’clock in the morning. Four thousand straight days in all kinds of weather. [Pause] That’s why I can never take a vacation.”
Paul doesn’t get it: “It’s… kind of overwhelming.” This is the exact reaction I have to How Do You Measure a Year?, and even more so, to flipping through the pictures I’ve taken. (If Paul is moving through Auggie’s stolen memories too quickly, at least he can be grateful there’s no scroll feature.)
“You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend,” Auggie urges, before laying it all out:
AUGGIE: They’re all the same, but each one is different from every other one. You’ve got your bright mornings and your dark mornings. You’ve got your summer light and your autumn light. You’ve got your weekdays and your weekends. You’ve got your people in overcoats and galoshes, and you’ve got your people in shorts and t-shirts … The earth revolves around the sun, and every day the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle.
PAUL (Looks up from the album at AUGGIE): Slow down, huh?
AUGGIE: Yeah, that’s what I’d recommend.
5.
One of the great drawbacks to the time-lapse model is that it needs to come to a close. We can imagine an installation in which a looped How Do You Measure a Year? returns Ella from her 18th birthday to her 2nd forever, but we intuitively know we’d be cheating on some level. The cyclical, eternally-returning nature of the calendar is its core characteristic and power, but time-lapse films can’t replicate this. We need to arrive somewhere for the time travel to work.
The same goes for photos; the time-lapse effect needs a final image to sequence, or it’s just a strobe. Unlike Auggie Wren’s, my own photography project lasted just about a year. This was in part because, again unlike Auggie, I did take the occasional vacation. Anyway, it felt like one trip through the seasons marked the appropriate length. The grounding it provided continued in transmogrified forms; now, its observance is in the fruit trees, vegetables, and wildflowers we’re planting and tending.
At the end of Rosenblatt’s film, he dispenses with the questions, removing himself by asking Ella if she’d like to talk to the camera alone for the final entry. Here’s what she says:
ELLA: I just love you a lot. And I’ll miss you when I go to college. I’m really glad you do these kinds of things, these traditions. It makes me really happy and just reminds me how much you love me, but I don’t really need reminders because you show it a lot in everything that you do for me.
[cut to E and J hugging]
ELLA: I’m not leaving yet.
JAY: I know.
This is both affirmation of ritual and a true lump-in-the-throat moment of intimacy and grace. But on top of that, the closing words echo another scene I’ve watched many times, even as the relationship depicted is a very different one. That’s the perfect close to Before Sunset, the second and greatest installment in Linklater’s trilogy, in which a reunited Jesse and Céline realize they can’t end the story here. Céline dances to Nina Simone in her Parisian apartment while Jesse reclines in a chair, watching her in wonder as his flight’s departure time grows closer and closer:
CELINE: Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.
JESSE: I know.
We do know—that we can’t stay forever, and that it’s not time to go just yet. All of our observances reflect this tension. Instead of resolving or easing it, though, we mark it: in the spaces of wonder and fragility in between, in these records we create of our time, and in the kinds of time we create together.
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