This is the only known film of Anne Frank, which was posted recently to the Anne Frank Museum website:
This piece from The Smart Set (AKA my new favorite website, after Seed) articulates what is moving about it so much more clearly than I ever could:
“The more you watch the clip, the more you see only Anne Frank, even in the 15 seconds when she’s absent. Everything happening in the center of the frame is haunted by one peripheral moment of … wait, there’s Anne Frank, is it really — there she…! Nope, she’s gone. The clip stops, and you watch it again. Twenty seconds of impressionistic filler starring a window and a ghost in the shape of a girl.
It’s funny how ghosts always appear at windows. They’re always trying to get in, peering out, or — seen from outside wandering back and forth — floating in and out of the window’s frame. Think Catherine in Wuthering Heights, Peter Quint in Turn of the Screw, the charming maiden in The Deserted House, Poe’s The Haunted Palace…the list is long. Nothing represents longing and loss like a window, especially a haunted one. It’s no wonder that the word “haunt” has its roots in the word “home.” Ghosts are always trying to find their way home, or find themselves lost in a home where they are unwanted. Even when they are in a home, they never feel “at home.” Ghosts are permanently homeless. They live in the space between inside and outside, between home and not home, like a window. Lurking about a window, the ghost hopes to see and be seen, aching to be free. But ghosts are by definition in limbo, and therefore never free. Anne Frank probably spent many hours at the window of Merwedeplein 37, caught in the limbo between being a 12-year-old girl who must stay at home, and a dreamer, a natural flâneur forced to wander the streets of Amsterdam in her imagination.”
