To Serve and Honor, Protect and Preserve

The pyramids of Ancient Egypt (along with many monuments from that great civilization) contain elaborate tombs filled with gifts for the Gods as well as wooden boats to carry a Pharaoh's spirit on its journey to the afterlife. Many of the rooms within pyramids contain wall carvings decorated with hieroglyphs which accompany artwork depicting deceased members of the royal family.

How we honor the living, the dead, and the Gods we imagine to be looking down upon us, varies from one civilization to another. While the cultural markers from a specific era may have once been few and far between (and are now primarily located in churches and museums), documenting and preserving a culture requires a concerted effort. Considering modern technology and a tendency to curate much of our lives through selfies, I'm not even sure that Elizabeth Warren has a plan for how to handle such a task.

Some nations honor their artists, poets, writers, and composers for their cultural contributions. Many historic buildings have been erected with time capsules hidden within a cornerstone. First introduced in 1835, the daguerreotype was the earliest photographic process to become available to the general public. For much of my life, taking pictures involved inserting a roll of film into a camera and, if you were planning to develop it yourself, having the chemicals and tools on hand to keep rotating the film through developer fluid before hanging the processed filmstrip up to dry. For most people, it was much easier and more economical to mail used rolls of film to a company that would process them and return the negatives with prints or slides.

After Nikon released the QV-1000C in 1988, digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras became commonplace. The fact that anyone can now take high definition photos with a smartphone and transfer the files through a wireless service to a computer without ever needing to worry about developing film is an indication of how fast technology keeps evolving in the digital age.

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Though anyone with a smartphone has the capability of taking a picture, that doesn't mean they have a photographer's eye for how to capture a moment. The 2019 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is screening a visually stunning documentary entitled Henri Dauman: Looking Up. After Dauman lost his parents during the Holocaust and became an orphan at the age of 13, he spent his late teens in Paris (where watching movies provided a soothing escape from the harsh realities of life after World War II). The images he saw of New York City in American films had a profound effect upon him.

On December 12, 1950, when the young photographer arrived in New York harbor aboard the S.S. Liberté (Germany's former Blue Riband-winning ocean liner, S.S. Europa, that was awarded to the French Line as a war prize to replace the S.S. Normandie), Dauman began a new life in which the artistic vision he had acquired from watching movies helped to launch his career.

“One day, as he walked the streets, Henri began to place his wide-angle Leica camera on the sidewalk to take photographs that mimicked his astonishment. He sold this photo story to The New York Times, calling the series New York Looking Up. The series is now included in the permanent collection of the MoMA. In every sense, Looking Up captures Henri’s boyish enthusiasm for life and continual refusal to ever give up.”

Looking up at the statue of Atlas above Rockefeller Center's
Skating Rink (Photo by: Henri Dauman)

Looking up at the Seagram's Building (Photo by: Henri Dauman)

Dauman's ability to infiltrate New York's arts scene put him in touch with many rising talents as well as some who had enjoyed long-established careers.

Henri Dauman captures the great Marcel Marceau in performance

Henri Dauman captures a spontaneous reaction by Harpo Marx

Henri Dauman captures the essence of Marlene Dietrich

Dauman’s website does not need to excessively hype the photographer’s achievements because, with a portfolio of more than a million negatives, Dauman got to know and deliver stunning portraits of such groundbreaking artists as Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley, and Louis Armstrong. Yet, as one reviews his breathtaking portfolio, it becomes apparent that Dauman possessed a remarkable artistic vision and uncanny ability to capture fleeting moments in history.




Having documented nearly three decades of movers and shakers ranging from Marshall McLuhan, New York's Mayor John Lindsay, and Nikita Khrushchev to Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, and Marilyn Monroe, it should come as no surprise that Dauman's work for The New York Times, Time, and LIFE magazines included some of his famous photos of American presidents Richard M. Nixon, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.




For those who dream of attending a dinner party with a half dozen of their cultural heroes (dead or alive), Henri Dauman: Looking Up offers a rich visual feast. The miracle of his career is that, despite all of his famous photographs, Dauman never sought or achieved any kind of celebrity status all his own (during interviews the master photographer is notably humble about his work while maintaining a keen eye on exactness and precision). This documentary offers an amazing perspective on American culture during the mid-to-late 20th century.

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Because the Nazis destroyed vast libraries of Yiddish literature and sheet music during World War II, it was estimated that barely 70,000 volumes survived the Holocaust. In his 2004 book entitled Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, Aaron Lansky describes his desperate efforts during the 1980s to salvage Yiddish-language publications that were being thrown away by elderly Jews and those whose Yiddish-speaking parents had recently died.

Thankfully, Lansky's efforts coincided with the introduction of digital scanning technology that allowed him to create and distribute electronic copies of the material he collected. Lansky subsequently founded the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, helped restore the collections of Yiddish literature in Eastern European communities that were devastated by the Nazis, and sparked a revival of interest in Yiddish as a spoken language.






While books, photographs, film, and musical recordings have been preserved (and in some cases restored or enhanced) through digital technology, our ability to capture, collect, and curate cultural artifacts has not been able to avoid some of the collateral damage caused by the passage of time. This has been a particularly acute problem with the continued loss of languages spoken by indigenous peoples. In much the same way that scientists have struggled to collect and preserve genetic material from endangered species, cunning linguists have attempted to record the speech patterns and vocabularies of dying languages before they are lost to history. In rare cases, some languages make a cultural comeback. As noted on Wikipedia:

"Lakota (Lakȟótiyapi), also referred to as Lakhota, Teton or Teton Sioux, is a Siouan language spoken by the Lakota people of the Sioux tribes. Though generally taught and considered by speakers as a separate language, Lakota is mutually intelligible with the other two languages (such as Dakota language), and is considered by most linguists as one of the three major varieties of the Sioux language.The language was first put into written form by European-American missionaries around 1840. It has since evolved to reflect contemporary needs and usage."

"Assimilating indigenous tribes into the expanding American society of the late 19th and early 20th centuries depended on suppression or full eradication of each tribe's unique language as the central aspect of its culture. Government boarding schools that separated tribal children from their parents and relatives enforced this assimilation process by corporal punishment for speaking tribal languages. The Lakota language survived this suppression. Speakers of the Lakota language make up one of the largest Native American language speech communities in the United States, with approximately 2,000 speakers, who live mostly in the northern plains states of North Dakota and South Dakota. There is a Lakota language program online available for children to use. There is also a Lakota Language Program with classes for children at Red Cloud Indian School."

TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is currently presenting a poignant production of Julia Cho's 2009 play entitled The Language Archive. Commissioned by the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York, the play received its world premiere from South Coast Repertory in 2010. Audiences who attended Berkeley Rep's production of two other plays by Cho (2016's Office Hour and 2017's Aubergine) are familiar with her solid craft as a dramatist, her ability to use humor as a means of building empathy, and the sheer beauty of her writing.

As directed here by Jeffrey Lo (with set design by Andrea Bechert, costumes by Noah Marin, lighting by Mike Palumbo, and sound design by Sinan Refik Zafar), I found the experience of watching The Language Archive unfold to be tantalizing in surprising ways. Not only was I eager to experience Cho's wry plot twists and displays of human fantasy, foolishness, and fallibility, as both a theatregoer and writer I found myself hanging on every word in admiration of her exceptional craft.

Jomar Tagatac (George) and Elena Wright (Mary) in a scene
from The Language Archive (Photo by: Alessandra Mello)

As the play begins, the audience is introduced to George (Jomar Tagatac) and Mary (Elena Wright), a childless couple whose marriage is quietly imploding. A devout word nerd, George is obsessed with the research he is conducting in his language laboratory, where he eagerly awaits the arrival of a couple from a faraway land who may be the last speakers of their native language. George is the kind of emotionally constipated academic who is so deeply involved in his work that he has forgotten that he is in a relationship. Despite discovering curious notes that Mary keeps slipping into odd places where he might find them, he treats his wife like a piece of furniture and never demonstrates the slightest bit of emotion. For a man with such a formidable intellect, it's stunning how clueless he is that is Mary is about to leave him.

Francis Jue (Resten) and Emily Kuroda (Alta) in a scene
from The Language Archive (Photo by: Alessandra Mello)

While George focuses on his research and recordings with the kind of intensity some men lavish on baseball statistics, his assistant, Emma (Adrienne Kaori Walters), is focused on her boss. When Resten (Francis Jue) and Alta (Emily Kuroda) finally arrive, George is so excited about working with them that he (a) doesn't fully comprehend how Mary's departure will affect his daily life, and (b) is shocked to discover that his two new lab specimens spend most of their time lobbing bitter insults at each other in English. When he asks why they insist on speaking in English instead of Elloway, Alta calmly informs him that "English is the language of hate."

Francis Jue (Mr. Baker) and Elena Wright (Mary) in a scene
from The Language Archive (Photo by: Alessandra Mello)

Soon, each character's life undergoes dramatic change. After stopping by George's lab on her path to freedom, Mary meets a lonely baker who plans to jump in front of an oncoming train. As she engages him in conversation and distracts him from his suicidal thoughts, he tells her a fascinating story about how his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all bakers who handed down the family's precious "starter" for making bread. Intrigued by his story, Mary makes an interesting trade. She will take the starter and bakery off his hands and, in return, give the baker his freedom from a burdensome family legacy. Soon her breads are enchanting local customers and, for the first time in years, Mary is genuinely happy.

Elena Wright as Mary in The Language Archive
(Photo by: Alessandra Mello)

Samples of Mary's delicious bread soon find their way to Emma and, from her, to George. Seeking a way to get through to George, his devoted assistant starts taking a course in Esperanto from a wildly eccentric teacher (Emily Kuroda) who tells the young woman that until she can express her love for something or someone she really cares about, she will never be able to master Esperanto.

Emily Kuroda and Adrienne Kaori Walters in a scene from
The Language Archive (Photo by: Alessandra Mello)

Freed from obsessing about her emotionally unavailable boss, Emma boards a train and (through a lovely bit of magical realism) ends up sitting opposite an elderly bearded man who turns out to be L. L. Zamenhof (the creator of Esperanto). Their encounter changes her life.

Francis Jue (L. L. Zamenhof) and Adrienne Kaori Walters (Emma)
in a scene from The Language Archive (Photo by: Alessandra Mello)

Meanwhile, as his health has continued to decline, Resten and Alta have returned home where they find themselves speaking more Elloway. Both remain as stubborn as ever, but express their affection in words and gestures that, like many parts of indigenous languages, cannot be translated into English.

Francis Jue as Resten in The Language Archive
(Photo by: Alessandra Mello)

There is much to love about Cho's play which, in addition to many laugh-out-loud moments, allows each character to undergo substantial emotional growth and display surprising amounts of empathy. TWSV's five-actor ensemble does an exceptional job, with Jomar Tagatac showing how someone as emotionally shut down as George can learn how to cry and Elena Wright portraying a woman who continues to gain strength once freed of any responsibility to "stand by her man." As Emma, Adrienne Kaori Walters travels the greatest psychological distance while Emily Kuroda nails every comic moment that comes her way. Doing triple duty as Resten, a suicidal baker, and L. L. Zamenhof, Francis Jue continues to amaze audiences with his versatility and comic instincts.

Performances of The Language Archive continue through August 4 at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto (click here for tickets). Here's the trailer: