Kyle Henry remembers in “Time Passages” how his mother Elaine once said to his father Richard after having four other children, “This one’s mine,” creating a special bond between himself and his mother even as he competed for attention as the youngest of the brood. It would only be later that Henry would see how much she had given up already, not wanting to be married in the first place — ironically, Richard didn’t either, giving them something in common that would lead to the two eventually getting hitched – and a pursuit of a career in the arts that she had to set aside when the income from two jobs was required to keep a roof over their heads. She would encourage Henry to follow his own passions, insistent on going to college when it could mean the self-sufficiency that she craved for herself, and he would ultimately have the career in the arts, albeit in filmmaking, that she once imagined she might have as a painter.
Henry finds a moving way to give her a voice nonetheless in “Time Passages,” which begins in Elaine’s final months at St. John’s Home in Rochester, New York where her family is largely unable to visit due to the protocols put in place after the start of the COVID pandemic in the spring of 2020. Henry can be seen reviving her spirits via FaceTime calls in which singing familiar songs will lift her out of the dementia she’s suffered in her later years, but back in Chicago where he lives, he plots a more thorough resurrection as he goes through old scrapbooks and home videos, piecing together memories of her life that she no longer has herself. As Henry notes being nearly a decade younger than most of his siblings, he already saw a different version of Elaine than his brothers and sisters did as her marriage to Richard hit a rough patch and he uses all the cinematic tricks he’s picked up over the years, from stop-motion animation to old school visual effects that’ll have you seeing double, to reach into the past to have a conversation with his mother that he could’ve have been prepared for until now.
Henry’s portrait of his mother grows to become much more as it questions nostalgia and the very materials that we have to look back on history, potentially creating fonder memories than perhaps we should have when some necessary context always seems to lie just out of frame, yet he pays loving tribute to her and so many others whose lives may be left unexamined when for one reason or another they ended up living out a much quieter existence than expected. After premieres at Cinequest and the Chicago Film Festivals last year, “Time Passages” is rolling out to theaters across the country with Henry accompanying the film’s travel this month through the West Coast and beyond, starting out in Los Angeles, and the director graciously took the time to talk about how he embarked on the deeply personal project, using cinema to travel through time and bringing other perspectives into the mix in order to clarify his own vision.
How did it become the right time to make this?
I think artists turn crisis and trauma and pain into stories. That’s always been my hope as an artist — that can be the gold that we bring back to a community to transform and change. And 2020 was really bad for a lot of us, being separated from our loved ones who might be in nursing homes or in memory care facilities, or somebody that you loved that you couldn’t see who passed away. There’s a lot of unseen grief still lingering from that time, and for me, it was the right time in terms of just never stopping. The pandemic was the greatest creative restriction any artist was ever given, and traveling back in time through family memories was a creative challenge to bring to life all the complicated truth about my history. It was an opportunity for me to look back at my mother’s life and my life, which I think all of us do when our parents get older and are getting near the end of their life. We try to make a story out of it and this was my attempt to try to make a story out of our lives.
There’s an interview with your parents from some time ago. Was that an earlier attempt at an actual movie?
Not at all. That was over 22 years ago, and it was my first cheapie mini DV one chip camera. I started noticing my mother’s memory issues and I [thought], “You know what? It’s Christmas time. I should bring this camera home, sit them down, talk about their lives so they can show the grandkids.” But I was worried even then, they’re not going to become better storytellers the older they get. There’s a peak moment in our lives. After that, the memories and the thoughts are going to leave us, so I’m so glad I [shot that interview] because in many ways, it helped me understand both of them in ways I never would have if I didn’t have that to look back on.
You have a great line in the film talking about how the camera could pick up on things that you wouldn’t realize until later about their condition. What was that like to actually experience?
Yeah, we have our perception of events. Then the camera captures something else and it’s up to us to perceive those layers.In documentary or in any filmmaking, editors are really great at coming in and seeing the same footage and seeing something else in it. My editor, Karen Skloss and Abbigail Vandersnick really rescued my mother from me by making sure that her voice was in the film. Also my parents’ complicated relationship —there was stuff in the footage that was very much like “When Harry Met Sally,” those couples that are arguing [playfully] before the camera rolls, and if I hadn’t had editors that were humanizing and finding those things, I don’t think my own understanding of my parents’ deep love for each other, even though they were two highly cantankerous individuals, [would’ve revealed itself]. It takes multiple people’s point of view. Even in a personal documentary, very few people can edit personal documentaries themselves and get all the richness that’s there.
What was it like negotiating what your presence would be in the film? I imagine that’s a conversation with the editors as well.
Yeah. at first, this was going to be something short and it was just going to be about memory. I actually had shot the opening black box theater scene with all these projections of my mother’s voicemail messages the year before the pandemic began in 2019 because I had all these voicemails from my mother and you can hear her mind going. I needed an editor to edit them because every time I would listen to one of those messages, I would just be bawling. But I’m more in the film than I wanted to be and also less. You have to think of yourself as a character when you’re doing personal documentaries and [ask yourself] how will an audience perceive this? What journey am I on as a character? How am I changing over time? And my need to control things comes through often. Thank God for my editors. They’re like, “Kyle, let your mother talk.” Or”We don’t really need voice over here.” They were really good at taking my voice out so my mother’s voice could be stronger.
When you were obviously limited in how you could bring your mother to the screen, you find a number of creative ways to have her presence in the film, whether with the projections of her paintings onto blank canvases or the wooden house depicting your family life. What was it like to figure out?
This film was shot over the course of three years and sometimes it was trial and error. But as an artist, I think you really shouldn’t self-censor during the ideation and production phase. If you have an idea, try it. It might not end up in the final film. The little [wooden] people became a way of going back in time and using the stop-motion animation to show my memories physically in a way that I couldn’t otherwise through a very organic form, because I would play with things that looked like that [as a child]. So it wasn’t some random animation. I tried to think about what could organically fit with my story and that was a discovery along the way. I also had to shoot them all over again because I originally shot them with Fisher Price little people, which is owned by a little company called Mattel that made a movie called “Barbie.” They’re not going to give you licensing for any of their toys anymore. But luckily, peg dolls have been around a lot longer than little people and some wonderful artists helped me bring my family to life in more detail and more individual care than those little Fisher Price dolls.
It gave a wonderful energy to this, and sifting through all these materials that you have, did the story ever take you in a directions you didn’t expect as you were getting deeper and deeper into this?
The whole issue of care started coming out in ways I didn’t know it would. Maybe it was because my mother was trapped in this nursing home and we were dependent upon all the care workers. You see and hear them off screen a lot in the film, but I wanted really to communicate what it’s like to be a family caregiver or advocate and the position you’re put in where these are still your parents, but you’re now the parent. That came out in ways that I didn’t expect, partly just out of fear.
Then thinking deeply about how we capture our memories brought to my attention all the Kodak things that are in the film. I was involved for about 10 years in something called the Jungian psychoanalysis from Carl Jung, about storytelling compared to mythology and thinking about things in our lives that are universal and [how] everything has light and shadow in it. I was looking back at my whole filmmaking career, wondering what’s the dark side about our history with capturing memories? What came to fore for me was the unfortunate chemical pollution byproducts of celluloid film that sadly Kodak dumped a lot into the Genesee River and their headquarters is in Rochester, New York [where my mother was in a care facility]. They settled a lot of court cases out of court and I just wanted to put that in there, [the realization] it’s not the Kodak commercial,. It’s not all just happy moments being captured. There is a cost always for these things.
I don’t know what we do with it. I’m just an artist. I have a feeling [now] these things [pointing at an iPhone] also have their costs and we’re seeing that. It’s now the new device that’s even more pervasive than the home movie camera was when I was growing up. I like history. I like political science. I like sociology. I just like to think about things through lots of different ways, and the challenge of the film was that process of sifting, sorting, thinking through a problem and giving the audience the feeling of it too. Not just like, “Here’s the end result,” but how do you give an audience the feeling of what it’s like to be lost and to be sorting through things?
You really show a great deal of restraint in limiting this to your relationship with your mother, though you allude to siblings and obviously there’s a number of directions overall the story could go. Was it easy to find that focus?
Yeah, I’ve always been a storyteller who believes when you’re really specific and focused, the universal comes out. I’ve seen documentaries or stories that try to take too much to handle. I also knew during the pandemic, I couldn’t tell a story about a community. It would end up being me and my brothers and sisters all on Zoom, and we don’t need to see those films anymore. Limiting it felt organic. Also, I didn’t want to speak for them and you see in the film that I’ve had this history as a political activist in this country and I didn’t want my brothers and sisters to be in this position where they’re having to prove or not everything that’s put into the film. So I checked in with all of them and said, “This is going to be a personal documentary about my relationship with mom and dad,” and as I say at the beginning, every child makes the parent into their own. I feel my brothers and sisters who are much older than me got my parents when they were in their thirties, and they weren’t going through a midlife crisis then. So they all saw a rough cut at some point and gave notes. I feel like my sister’s notes in particular were really helpful of making sure that the voice of my mother was front and center. They’re not in the film — Lauren, one sister, is briefly — but they all approve of my making this film. And that was really important to me.
What’s it like to have this on your hands?
I am so happy to be on tour across the United States meeting with audience members who see themselves in my family’s struggle. That’s what every artist wants, and to be there to listen to their stories, to their struggle dealing with their mother or father who might have dementia or Alzheimer’s, to the losses that they suffered during the pandemic and just giving them a place to also grieve during the running time of the film has been extremely satisfying. I want my work to be a tool in the world that does some good and I think distribution ends up becoming at least one third of every journey you take with a film. I also had this sweet thing where one of my nephews came to one of the screenings in New York and he said, “I didn’t get to know Nana as well as I would have liked to because I was a little kid. And now we have this and we can look back at this and know her as a person.” That made me feel good on a personal level. It’s like, this is a memento for future generations of my family to look back on.
“Time Passages” opens on February 14th in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Glendale and open up across the west coast in the month ahead. A full list of theaters and dates is here.