51 Birch Street

Infobox Film
name = 51 Birch Street


caption =
director = Doug Block
producer = Doug Block Lori Cheatle
writer = Doug Block Amy Seplin
starring = Mike Block Mina Block Carol Block Doug Block
music = Machine Head H. Scott Salinas
cinematography =
editing =
distributor = Truly Indie
released = September 14 2005 Toronto Film Festival (October 22 2006)
runtime = 88 min.
country = USA
language = English
budget =
imdb_id = 0468442|

"51 Birch Street" is a documentary film about the universal themes of love, marriage, fidelity and the mystery of a suburban family, directed by Doug Block.

The characters

* Mike Block, a mechanical engineer by trade, was born in Brooklyn, New York. He returned home from service in World War II and married Mina Vogel in 1947. In 1951, they bought a house and moved to Port Washington, New York, where they raised their three children. Mike worked as Chief Engineer, VP and Plant Manager for a number of different manufacturing companies in New York City and on Long Island. He eventually became a partner in a machine shop, then sold the business and retired in 1990. After Mina’s death in 2002, Mike re-connected with a former secretary, Carol "Kitty" Duffy, and they married in 2003. They sold the home in Port Washington and moved to Kitty’s house in Key Largo, Florida. In 2005, they bought a house in Sun City Center, Florida, where they currently (2007) reside.

* Mina Block was born in 1923, and grew up in the Bronx and Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1945, and married Mike Block in 1947, a year after he returned from service in the army. Their first daughter, Ellen, was born in 1949, and Karen was born a year later. In 1951, the family moved to Port Washington, New York, where their third child, Doug, was born in 1953. From 1962 to 1964, Mina worked full time as a marketing researcher, and took occasional part-time jobs over the years as the kids grew older. Mina's real passion was writing. She wrote prose and poetry, and periodically contributed freelance articles to local newspapers. In addition, she was a longtime peace activist, and was an active board member of the Long Island Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives for many years.

* Carol "Kitty" Block was born Carol Duffy in Brooklyn, New York in 1935, and moved to Glen Cove, Long Island in 1949. In 1956, she began work as a secretary for a manufacturing plant. She married in 1958, and had 2 children. When she returned from her second maternity leave, her new boss was Mike Block. Kitty eventually divorced her husband, remarried in 1968, had a third child, and moved to Key Largo, Florida. Her husband had a fatal heart attack in 1988. She owned and directed the Key Largo Bridge Club for 28 years. She has also worked as a bookkeeper, home nurse and driver.

Plot

"51 Birch Street" is the first-person account of a family's unpredictable journey through dramatic life-changing events. Having observed most of his parents' 54-year marriage, Doug Block believed it to be quite a good one. A few months after his mother's sudden death from pneumonia, Doug Block's 83-year old father, Mike, calls him to announce that he’s moving to Florida to live with "Kitty", his secretary from 40 years before. Always close to his mother and equally distant from his father, Doug and his two older sisters were shocked and suspicious. How long had Kitty been an intimate part of their father’s life, they wondered.

When Mike and Kitty marry and sell the longtime family home, Doug returns to suburban Long Island with camera in hand for one last visit. Among the lifetime of memories being packed away forever, Doug discovers three large boxes filled with his mother's daily diaries going back 35 years, in which she recorded her unhappiness, her rage against her husband, her sexual fantasies about her therapist, a brief affair with an unnamed friend of her husband — and her suspicions about Kitty. The marriage, Mike told Doug on film, "was not loving, it was a functioning association". Realizing he has only a few short weeks before the movers come and his father will be gone for good, Doug is determined to explore the mystery of his parents' marriage.

Through conversations with family members and friends, and surprising diary revelations, Doug finally comes to peace with his parents who are more complex and troubled than he ever imagined. However, unlike other notable documentaries on family from the years around 2000, such as "Capturing the Friedmans" and "Tarnation", "51 Birch Street" does't reveal terrible secrets or extreme dysfunction of an ordinary family. Instead, the documentary explores more subtle forms of repression, secrecy and denial within a family, and confirms the complexity of marriage.

cquote|Aren’t you glad we got married? :You’d better be.

Response

"The New York Times" film critic, A.O. Scott, and Jim Emerson of the "Chicago Sun-Times" named "51 Birch Street" one of their top ten films of 2006. [ [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20A11FE3B550C778EDDAB0994DE404482 FILM; Private Ryan Is Gone, And War Is Global] by Stephen Holden, in "The New York Times", 2006-12-24] By December 10, 2006, the low budget film grossed $ 84,689.

ee also

*Capturing the Friedmans
*Tarnation

References

* [http://www.51birchstreet.com/ 51 Birch Street] Official site
* [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468442/ 51 Birch Street] IMDB
* [http://www.dougblock.com/ Around the Block: Doug Block's Doc Blog] The director's weblog
* [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/11/03/DDGSCM4ANF1.DTL&type=movies Son mines parental secrets in hypnotic documentary] by Ruth Stein, in "San Francisco Cronicle", November 3, 2006.
* [http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/10/18/movies/18birc.html?ei=5070&en=b7bbc8fcaf3d5704&ex=1161835200&adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1162957763-lS0gRsPFB5Q2+C4OSwJ/ig Scenes From a Marriage, Revealed by a Son] by A.O. Scott, in "The New York Times", October 18, 2006.

External links

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkzpz3Kb6_Y 51 Birch Street (video)] Trailer