Director: Thomas F. Mazziotti
With: Christopher Todd, Stephanie Ritz, Monica Stagg, John Walter, Rodney Rowland
Running time: 72 mins
Conceived by director Thomas F. Mazziotti, this fascinating time capsule documentary shows a snapshot of New York life in 1992. By turns funny, reflective and moving, it’s a simple, but effective portrait of life before the internet.
The film began when director Thomas F. Mazziotti placed an ad in the Village Voice, asking for people to contribute to a time capsule. 350 people responded, and eighteen of them made the final cut. The film was shot over five days, in January 1992, and then placed in a time capsule that was opened 30 years later, in 2022.
Mazziotti structures the film in an interesting way. After a short series of captions, giving a bit of context to 1992 (the year of John Gotti’s conviction, tennis player Arthur Ashe announcing he had AIDS, the Rodney King riots, Johnny Carson’s retirement etc), the film unfolds with grainy black and white footage of the various subjects telling their stories.
The film is also split into five parts, with each part using a quote from one of the participants, e.g. “It will never be a pound cake again” or “I feel happy now”. Typically, Mazziotti intercuts between three different stories in each part, with an occasional stand-alone story in the mix too.
If the stories in each group are related thematically, that isn’t immediately clear, but the film as a whole was intended to include people talking about love, life and the pursuit of happiness. That is mostly the case, but there are plenty of heart-breaking stories as well, such as Leah Palen, who recounts an upsetting story about losing her virginity with a wrong’un that evidently affected the rest of her life.
Several of the stories come down to the lessons that people have learned in life, some of which are deeply moving. One standalone story involves Joniruth White, who had harboured a lifelong hatred of Japanese people in the wake of Pearl Harbour, until her hairdresser retired and was replaced by a Japanese woman, who she gradually got to know.
In addition, several of the stories are reflections on death, in various ways, whether it’s Richard Castaldo, who was traumatised by his father dropping dead after he’d refused to take him to the hospital, Henry Pincus, who recounts a story about coming across a dead woman on the way home from school, or Marguerita Fahrer, who speaks movingly about her now deceased mother, and the way she managed to somehow bring a note of hope into her experience at Auschwitz.
On a similar note, several of the stories are also about love, most notably Gabrielle Corsaro, who tells a romantic story about falling in love and discovering the impact of passion. Similarly, Laura Yengo has the film’s funniest story, about an office crush that goes disastrously wrong.
If there’s an issue with the film, it’s only that it’s impossible to watch it without wondering how all the subjects are getting on, thirty years later. Here’s hoping Mazziotti has some sort of follow-up planned, as it would have been fascinating to see the people involved being shown their own footage thirty years later.
In short, this is a superbly conceived, frequently moving documentary that’s all the more powerful for its simplicity. Worth seeking out.
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