Family's old films offer view of North Jersey in bygone eraMonday, June 25, 2012 Last updated: Monday June 25, 2012, 6:41 AM
BY REBECCA D. O'BRIEN
STAFF WRITER
The Record
HACKENSACK — When Marion Sansone died in 2009, at the age of 90, it was left to her only child, David, to manage the family home on Ross Avenue where his mother had lived for nearly 70 years.
THOMAS E. FRANKLIN / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Videographer Jay Sansone, right, pictured with his father, David, has used old family films discovered in his late grandmother's home in the making of a music video that was shot in the empty Hackensack house. David Sansone, now a River Edge resident, and his 27-year-old son, Jay, a New-York-based videographer, spent weeks in the empty house, sifting through the clothing, papers and mismatched dishes that had accumulated over the decades. One day, feeling his way around a low, dark shelf behind the boiler, Jay Sansone found a stack of records and between them, a box of 8mm and 16mm film reels along with a 1938 projector.The discovery of these home movies linked the young artist to a family and a local history he'd never known. It also provided him with material for a music video and a major career break.
The films, dating from the late 1930s through the 1970s, depict the Sansones — a large Italian family that settled in North Jersey at the turn of the 20th century — in short, silent bursts: First Communions at Holy Trinity Catholic Church; uncles heading off to war from Fort Dix; a vacation at the Jersey Shore.
In the films, cars wheel through open streets, young couples pose in their Sunday best at Garret Mountain in Paterson. Long-gone ancestors are as spry and hopeful as the post-war North Jersey that served as the films' backdrop. Since then, the extended family has disintegrated, as had some of the film reels, and Hackensack and Paterson have stagnated.
"There was definitely a gold mine there," Jay Sansone said. He fixed the projector and made digital copies of the films. "I was pretty much obsessed with this for a couple of months," he said.
Jay was particularly drawn to the images of his grandmother, Marion, frequently captured by her husband — Jay's grandfather, Anthony "Hugo" Sansone — in the early years of their marriage.
A butcher by trade, Hugo Sansone was also an amateur filmmaker and could handle the manual focus and aperture of the camera.
The shots were carefully constructed, often posed, but with sudden moments of mirth. Jay said he was moved to tears by a shot of his grandmother bouncing through a yard, trailed by the family dog.
"I had never seen my grandmother moving, and to me this was kind of like a window," Jay said. "For the last 20 years, the family has been lax about taking pictures, but before that, it was an onslaught of pictures."
David Sansone, a piano instructor, was born in 1948; he appears as a young boy in many of the early reels, playing cowboys and Indians with cousins, now long-estranged. Still struggling with the loss of his mother — he cannot bring himself to fix up the house or sell it and calls it "a psychological disaster" — David Sansone expressed some ambivalence about the films, though he said he was happy for his son's sake.
"I knew what it would mean to him," the father said. "The films are Jay's, he's their best keeper. He's really into his family, and he works with film for a living."
Last year, Jay — who works at Essence Magazine — was asked to make a music video for folk artist Anais Mitchell's song "Coming Down." It was, he realized, a perfect vehicle for his family's films.
With a $1,000 budget, they shot the video in the basement of the abandoned Ross Avenue house, with projections of the old reels. Mitchell chose some of Marion Sansone's old clothing as her costume.
There was, Mitchell later told National Public Radio — which praised the video — "some kind of implied tragedy in the footage."
The films, like the abandoned home, suggest a generational progression — a grandparent's life, a son's painful memory, a grandson's art.
Email: obrien@northjersey.com
