to the memory of my brothers Hans Joachim, Detlev and Martin
Autobiographical or at least strongly autobiographical inspired films by more or less well known film directors are a fascinating pheonomenon in the more recent film history. They exists in all kinds of films; Feature films, short films or documentaries. A kind of prototype in autobiographical narrative cinema is for my side Hou Hsiao Hsien´s Tong nien wangshi (A Time To Live And A Time To Die, 1985). In between a lot of these films are existing now, among others by Terrence Malick, James Gray, Yang Yong-hi or Anjan Dutt. Two of the more recent examples are James Gray´s wonderful Armageddon Time and Steven Spielberg´s enchanting The Fabelmans. These films have only in common that they are taking place in the Jewish-American middle class. While Gray´s film is describing rather sober a youth before the begin of the Reagan-era, Spielberg´s film is almost an apotheosis of cinema. Most of these films are “Coming of Age”-films. The path into life of these protagonists have not only similarities with other autobiographical inspired films but sometimes as well with our own experiences. These films differ mostly in form or narrative style. It is a little bit like when friends or family members are telling about their lives, while each of them tells these often overlapping anecdotes in a different way, from a different perspective. It is evident in these films like Gray´s laconic Armageddon Time, Hou´s very melancholic Tong nien wang shi, Terrence Malick´s requiem like The Tree Of Life or the tragic-comic narrations of Spielberg´s The Fabelmans or Anjan Dutt´s Dutta Vs Dutta. All these films one experiences as not only very personal but as well as stories about people in a very datable time and located in a very specific cultural and geological landscape how for example in the documentaries of the Korean Yang Yong-hi (Dear Pyongyang).
Actually, I have discovered Steven Spielberg for myself around the begin of the 2000s. Before this time, I really did not like his films at all. Over the years, I began to appreciate most of his films and some of them I even adore. But this would be a different story. The Fabelmans is one of the most beautiful films about the interplay between the experience of a moment and to remember previous moments in this film. Of course – one can look for quotations from many films by Spielberg or one can enjoy the film as a relaxed summing-up of his work. But I still think the episodic structure of this film is rather unusual for a film by Spielberg. Sometimes it looks like a collection of more coherent short films. I think only another masterpiece by Spielberg, Lincoln, something like his pendant to Kubrick´s Barry Lyndon, impressed me likewise.
Each episode stands for important and decisive events in the life of Sammy Fabelman/Steven Spielberg. One of the miracles this film offers, is that the spectator does not only participate in the life of these protagonists but one also remembers with them. It is almost as one feels the caesura of a scene we just watched and which becomes already a memory. Just at the end when one makes the crazy try to recapitulate all the great moments in this film, one realizes how extremely compacted these 145 film minutes really are and that the montage is anything else than conventional. The film appears like a gigantic archive of memories. In my previous ignorance towards the films by Steven Spielberg, I considered him always as a blender, a master of manipulation. One of the movements in The Fabelmans is always to show but as well the reflection how it is showed. The first scene is about something like Spielberg´s cinephile primal experience, the first visit to the cinema of the little Sammy. While his mother promised him a magical experience, his father explains to him the technical principles of cinema. This is a beautiful introduction into the fascination of the young Spielberg for cinema, the interest in the devices which enable cinema but as well the fascination for the magic which can created with these devices. They see in a cinema The Greatest Show On Earth, by Cecil B. DeMille. The cinema hall is big and full packed. In one scene of DeMille´s film there is a spectacular train wreck. Many train cars derail and this moment traumatizes the kid. During the Hanukkha festival, his father gives him a model train. He reenacts the film scene, repeatedly derailing the train. To protect the model railway, his parents recommand him to record this “train accident” on film, so that he can watch it again and again. While we believe this is again such a typical introduction into a childhood of a famous filmmaker, one learns quite casually a lot about his family. The father is a computer engineer , the mother a pianist. As the father has to change often his domicile because of his profession, the family has to move often. They use, even on tradional Jewish festivals or family meetings entirely disposable cutlery and tablecloths. The career of the mother finally fails due to the frequent moves.
When Sammy undertakes his first filmmaking attempts and these films are projected for his schoolmates or his boy scout friends, the film reveals always these devices that enable cinema: the camera, the tricks the montage and finally the projection. Even though the film deals about childhood,- and youth memories of Steven Spielberg, it can evoke not only the own, almost mythical memories in our first visits of a cinema. Like with so much great “Coming Of Age”-films, I feel safe and secure here with my own memories.. Even though, the film is rich in unforgettable moments, it flows along quite quietly. A few dramatical events like the death of his grandmother or the divorce of his parents take turns with funny events and the other way around. The progression of time happens sometimes with small, but sometimes as well with big time jumps. The episodes from which the narrative structure of the film is composed, might be often funny and one laughs more than one cries – but nevertheless there is alwaysnoticeable a sometimes light and sometimes more heavy melancholy about the unstoppable passage of time. The more the film moves on, the more these just experienced moments are mixed with memories of past moments. The film itself becomes a reconstructed and recorded memory which will continue to exist independent from the mortal memory of its director and its spectators.
Michelle Williams as Sammy´s mother is probably one of the most complex and most impressive female character in a film by Spielberg. But that is not completely surprising because his previous film Westside Story is focused especially on its three female characters (opposite to the Robert Wise-adaptation). In The Fabelmans, Mitzi is literally rubbed between her different roles as a mother, wife and artist. Combined with the several changes of residence, it will become impossible for her to live her artistic career. Especially Michelle Williams performance is for my side one of the most beautiful and moving aspects of this film. Inbetween the family has moved again, this time to Arizona. The career of the father and the development of the boy, who will become a famous director – all this happens at the expanse of Mitzi´s career. In between, Sammy shots more amateur films with his boy scout friends. Once hthe Fabelmans make with Bennie, a friend of the family, a camping trip. At the camp fire they sing Russian songs (Spielberg´s ancestors were Russian Jews) and parody these songs later. When Mitzi becomes tipsy and begins to dance, Bennie encouraged Sammy to film that. The scene will be illuminated by headlights. For a moment this multifaceted character becomes entirely a projection of light and shadow. This moment is totally rapt from her complex reality and becomes almost one of these alien light beings from Spielberg´s early masterpiece Close Encounters.
After the death of Mitzi´s mother, she becomes depressed. To cheer her up, the father asks Sammy to finish the editing of the camping trip film. Reluctantly, Sammy begins with the editing. There is a sequence of three settings that refer long before the divorce of the parents to the loneliness of the single family members. Sammy is editing the camping film fully concentrated, alone. The mother plays on the piano, alone. The father reads his working notes, alone. The montage of Spielberg who is often considered as a master of Old School of filmmaking, appears here not conventional at all. The kind these three moments foresee the alienation and the imminent breakup of the family reminds almost in the films by Ozu. During editing the camping film, Sammy discovers aspects for the first time. Among others there are some tender interactions between Bennie and his mother. This upsets Sammy, and for the next scenes, his relationship with his mother is strained. He begins to rebel against his mother and after some time the overwhelmed mother hits him on his naked back. After she apologized he shows her the outtakes of this camping film. He is alone with her, and they take a walk-in closet as a projection room. Mitzi is stunned and he promises to her not to show these outtakes to anyone. The discussion and reconciliation between mother and son belongs to the most beautiful moments of a “Coming Of Age”-film I can remember, anywhere between the “Bonsai scene” in Ozu´s Dekigokoro (Passing Fancy) or the mother-daughter conflict in Rituparno Ghosh´s Titli.
The last part of the film (the Fablemans have moved again, this time to California) tells about the last high school year of Sammy, whose sisters go on the same school. Before the new house is ready to move in, they have to live for a time in a rented and smaller house. At the first sight, this chapter appears like foreign body. Since this last move from Arizona, Sammy stopped to make films. Neither Mitzi nor the children are happy about this new relocation and the family is developing further rifts. Just towards the end of this school year, Sammy will film again for recording the “Ditch Day” for the graduation ceremony. But for now, Sammy seems more unprotected exposed to his environment. He has to endure anti-Semitic hostility which sometimes escalate into violence. But he also experienced one of his first love stories (Chloe East as the wonderful overexcited Monica). As Sammy is too much occupied by his new life and surviving and his family is unable to give him support, this chapter appears even more than the other chapters like an own little film. When they finally move into the new house, there is a small moment (modeled after private Super 8-films) where we see the chaos of a new home with a lot of moving boxes and rooms, which are not yet really inhabited, is another hint to the forthcoming dissolution of the family. At the end of the school year, the parents pronounce their divorce. Mitzi will move with her daughters, Sammy will stay here with his father. Once I was not a big admirer of the scores by John Williams and like Spielberg, it took some time for me to appreciate his music. In The this film, the music is woven in like unspoken memories. In The Fabelmans(the music titles itself sound like memories) there are two almost identical pieces performed with different instruments. One of them is called “Mother And Son). We hear it during the last appearance of Mitzi in this film and finally at the ending credits.
The epilog is about Spielberg´s memory in his first encounter with his admired idol John Ford. I knew already this story from an interview with Steven Spielberg, in which he also imitates Ford´s voice. For his film, Spielberg has found with David Lynch as John Ford an ingenious solution. Before I saw the whole film, this scene was already available in the net. Isolated from the whole film, I found it very amusing but in the context of the whole film it appears rather sad and even a bit uncanny. The encounter between Spielberg and the old master must have been close before or after Ford made his last film Seven Women. Ford shoos him from one framed painting to another to explain him where the horizon must have placed in a picture or not, just to dismiss the nervous young man very soon from his office. This last scene appears to me as a strange encounter of three old men; David Lynch, who passed away last year and who was just as marked by serious illness as the character he portrays, John Ford, who had just a few more years to live and finally Steven Spielberg who was during making The Fabelmans around the age like John Ford in this scene. Even though when the young Fabelman/Spielberg leaves the studio office very euphoric and with encouraging perspectives for his future, one senses suddenly that these last images tell about a time long passed for decades. It is a strange sensation, I had finally during the end of this film: despite or even just because of its episodical narrative structure, the films appears to me as dense like a 5 hours long film condensed to 145 film minutes. The very long ending credits is a true blessing to find from this marvel back into the world.
Rüdiger Tomczak
The theatrical version includes a short recorded introduction by Steven Spielberg, which even appears before the Universal-fanfare. Unfortunately they did not uses this beautiful introduction for the DVD,- and Blu-ray releases.
This is the english version of my German text, published in shomingeki No. 29, January 2026
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