{a glimpse of life}

Last week, the Anne Frank House posted a YouTube video of the only moving pictures ever captured the young girl, who is seen in this clip leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a better look at the girl next door and her new groom.

David Ulin, the book editor at the Los Angeles Times, wrote about the film so beautifully. Here are few graphs from Ulin's story: "A newlywed couple leaves an Amsterdam apartment building. People hover on the sidewalk, watching them go. Then the camera pans upward -- and there, gazing down from a balcony, is Anne Frank."The date is July 22, 1941. She's 12 years old. It's a year before she and her family will go into hiding, less than four years before she will die of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in the waning days of World War II. We watch her watching, watch her look back over her shoulder, quick and coltish, as if in response to someone inside."

As familiar as we are with images of Anne Frank," Francine Prose writes in her provocative "Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife," "as inured as we may think we are to the sight of her beautiful face, the film pierces whatever armor we imagine we have developed. . . . It's less like watching a film clip than like having one of those dreams in which you see a long-lost loved one or friend. In the dream, the person isn't really dead. You must have been mistaken. You wake up, and it takes a few moments to understand why the dream was so cruelly deceptive.'

Remarkable.

For the rest of Ulin's story, please click {here}. Thanks to English Muse for the story.