‘REMEMBERING LIFE’: A TIMELY ERA RECAPTURED

I’ve often thought, and said, that the movies, with all their other charms, provide as near as the world comes to a kind of secular immortality. The Duke rides forever into a triumphant sunset; Bogie and Claude Rains stride off again and again into the Casablanca fog, aiming for Brazzaville and the Free French.

But for almost as long as Hollywood has played the Bijou, home movies have been seizing and fixing our private pasts as well, revealing an active and occasionally unnerving sense of the way we were, beyond anything that the diary or even the squinting snapshot can provide.

Now the home video cameras, so simple that even an adult can use them, have added easy sound and made instant nostalgia a mass art. The home tapes are still young, but they are like money stashed away at interest: Their emotional wallop is bound to grow with each passing day, the awkward, giggling waves and the blurred panning shots becoming emblems of change, and ultimately of loss, on a scale from raucous amusement to heartbreak.

Like photo albums of another age, the home footages are walks into your past, to be undertaken with some caution.

I stumbled into a piece of my own past the other night, previewing the tape of a documentary called “Remembering Life,� to air on PBS next week (KCET Channel 28 locally, Wednesday at 10 p.m.).

Like several of us at The Times, I spent a number of years at Life. As one of our colleagues said, when you left the magazine you felt even more like a civilian than when you had left the Army. I suspect that looking back on the Life days is not unlike remembering colonial service in India with others who were there. (The combination of “The Jewel in the Crown� and “A Passage to India� has made us all sharers of the Raj experience.) No one who wasn’t in Delhi, or Rockefeller Center, can fully appreciate the triumphs or the horrors--and there were both--the pride or the memory of elaborate practical jokes.

Most of the rememberers on the documentary, which is hosted by Walter Cronkite and was directed by David Hoffman, are old and admired acquaintances: the photographers Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks and Loomis Dean (Dean covered Hollywood for years and now lives in Paris), the editors Dick Pollard, Maitland Edey and Ralph Graves, who as the last managing editor had the task of assembling the staff on a day in December, 1972, and breaking the news that the businessmen were shutting down Life, a casualty of a more efficient mass-advertising medium.

(Characteristically the magazine died with a quip. The rumors had been around for weeks and, leaving the meeting, one of the writers said, “Well, this is the most solid rumor so far.�)

The resuscitated monthly Life, dazzlingly pictorial, still I think seeks the urgency and immediacy that the original had. The new issue includes a new news-picture insert in quest of that urgency.

Life was a still-picture magazine, but Hoffman’s documentary team unearthed a surprising quantity of film, including Margaret Bourke-White, who had shot Life’s first cover in November, 1936, recalling in 1970 how she had finally persuaded Gen. Jimmy Doolittle to let her go along on a bombing raid in North Africa in 1942.

There are even shots of a layout session in the office of the managing editor, Edward K. Thompson (who later shaped Smithsonian magazine into its present eminence). Thompson was a legendary mumbler, and after the layout sessions the other participants reassembled in the hall to try to figure out what he’d said.

“Remembering Life� does not document those post-session sessions, of course, but Cronkite, who provides his own memories and assessment, and the other witnesses do describe well the remarkable power the magazine’s pictures and picture essays--and indeed its reportage and its articles--had in the years before television had found its audiences, and its muscles.

What the show also catches, correctly, is the magazine’s esprit, born of success, the company of very talented people and, not least, the erratic working hours that tended to isolate and insulate the staff from all but their immediate families, and from each other.

The esprit leaned toward an arrogance at times, more often toward a mix of college and “The Front Page Revisited.�

The dark side was real enough, born of frustrated ambitions and early burnout. There was never enough room at the top. Yet with it all, a sense of togetherness, enforced but not entirely displeasing, prevailed. “Every week,� a picture bureau person said late one exhausting Saturday night, “we pretend we’ve never put out a magazine before.� So it seemed, and what we were, I suppose, were survivors together.

The documentary closes with “The Maitland Edey Going-away Film,� discovered in who-knows-what archive. When Edey, an assistant managing editor, resigned to pursue his own writing interests, a photographer wandered the corridors of the magazine, getting everyone in sight to wave goodby to one of the most popular editors on the staff.

For the documentary, Hoffman thoughtfully recorded Edey responding to the 30-year-old film. “My God, there’s. . . , that’s . . . the names, the names,� he says, working hard to control his voice.

I had forgotten the film was made. I don’t think I ever saw it before and, like Mait Edey, I found myself grasping for the names, shouting them. Then, suddenly, there was a junior writer, round-faced and brown-haired, owlish in his horn-rim glasses, waving and wiping at his eyes with his necktie, making a joke as was his custom, not dreaming it would haunt him in another time, another context, in a company of memories.

What “Remembering Life� will signify to an unconnected audience is hard to know, although I do find it a good assessment. But for one inadvertent participant, it is a blockbuster.