Born in a Ballroom by Clara Lehmann and Jonathan Lacocque (review)

In the 2010 book Helvetia: The History of a Swiss Village in the Mountains of West Virginia (West Virginia University Press), David Sutton writes that Swiss settlements in the Appalachian Mountains were an anomaly in the context of larger Swiss immigration to the United States in the late 1800s because most Swiss villages were settled outside of the mountains in areas with good farmland and access to economic activities. One of these Appalachian settlements is Helvetia, West Virginia, located in the Potomac Highlands and settled by Swiss immigrants in 1869. In her 2017 article "One Year in Helvetia, West Virginia," in the Bitter Southerner, West Virginia state folklorist Emily Hilliard argues that Helvetia's cultural heritage and sense of place are best understood through its seasonal celebrations and foodways. At the heart of both is Helvetia's Hütte Swiss Restaurant. The Hütte was founded in 1968 and is open daily. Despite its remote location, it is a gathering place for locals and tourists due to its Swiss and Appalachian foodways, charming décor displaying Helvetia's history, and comfortable atmosphere (Hilliard 2017).

Clara Lehmann and Jonathan Lacocque's documentary Born in a Ballroom tells the story of the life of Eleanor Fahrner Mailloux, co-founder of the Hütte Swiss Restaurant. Folklorists will be interested in Mailloux's work to preserve and present Swiss Appalachian foodways, as well as the documentary's exploration of themes relevant to folklore studies, including storytelling form and representation, family folklore, and performance of identity. Lehmann, the film's director, is Mailloux's granddaughter, and viewers get a sense of Mailloux and Helvetia filtered through her lens. Lehmann explains in the film that she had been in the process of helping her grandmother write her memoir; however, Mailloux passed away before they could complete the project. Lehmann decided to create a documentary about her grandmother using previously filmed footage of Mailloux and newly shot interviews with community and family members. Throughout the film, Lehmann expresses her remorse, self-consciousness, and tension inherent in her necessary reliance on third-person perspectives about Mailloux, suggesting that Mailloux's story may suffer due to her inability to speak for herself. Despite this, the film includes a surprising amount of interview footage of Mailloux, some of which also appears in Gerry Milnes' 2005 film Helvetia: The Swiss of West Virginia.

Though Lehmann is unable to write her grandmother's memoir, she does, through interviews with family members and Hütte employees, effectively produce a heteroglossic document of family folklore. From a folkloric perspective, the family is not a static unit, but instead, is a group defined, enacted, and negotiated through stories. Family narratives are dialogic, and Lehmann's curation of interviews presents the many voices and perspectives that represent Mailloux's and the Hütte's family. The interviewees themselves discuss how the Hütte creates familial relationships and has become an anchor instilling pride and a sense of identity in the community. Through the accounts of family members, the audience learns emic details about Mailloux—that she was "very Swiss" and that she did everything "whole hog." Overall, the family interviews present a nuanced picture of Mailloux—whom they call Mütter (the German word for "mother")—which includes adoration of her eccentric personality alongside critique for her stern work ethic and perfectionism.

Mailloux and her family's identity are tightly linked to the identity and culture of Helvetia. A theme in Mailloux's characterization of Helvetia is that the town "possesses" people, that it is a dream to live there, and that it is in people's blood. A strong connection to place is a common trope and sentiment in West Virginia, though this film situates that feeling within a geographic and culturally specific locale. Born in a Ballroom shows how the Hütte facilitates this sense of place through food and its cultivation of a public domestic space. The restaurant's food is shown being made...