The Boston Phoenix
Review from issue: November 4 - 11, 1999

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Diverting diversity

Expanding on the Diaspora in the Jewish Film Festival

by Chris Fujiwara

"BOSTON JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL," At the Coolidge Corner and the Museum of Fine Arts, November 4 through 14.

Photographer This year's Boston Jewish Film Festival offers an eclectic program of worthwhile films. Just as there's no consensus about what a Jew is, there's none about what a Jewish film is; "films with Jewish themes," to put it in the broader phrase that guides the festival's programming, could be anything from a documentary about New York steam baths to a Malian retelling of a story from Genesis.

The series opens with one of its best films, Dariusz Jablonski's Photographer (1998; November 4 -- that's today -- at 5:30 p.m. at the MFA). The film uses color slides taken in the Lodz ghetto by Walter Genewein, an amateur photographer who worked as an accountant in the Nazi slave-labor camp. Genewein's images have an eerie hollowness: seeking to promote a vision of Lodz as a site of productivity, he sought to remove all signs of distress from in front of his lens. The blandly documentary quality of his images is contradicted by the narration of ghetto survivor Arnold Mostowicz, with its vivid, harrowing precision. The film becomes a struggle between Mostowicz's memory and Genewein's slides. Jablonski's camera emphasizes the grain of the images, the breaking apart of their smooth fabrications: he zooms out from a leather bag hanging on a wall to reveal a room full of workers, some looking guardedly at Genewein's camera, some looking down at their work.

The Nazis appear to have been unable to conceive of the camera except as a tool for falsification. Further evidence of this warped outlook is provided by another documentary, Ilona Ziok's Kurt Gerron's Karussell (1998; November 8 at 6 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner). Gerron, a Jewish actor, director, and cabaret singer who became a star in the original production of The Threepenny Opera, was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. In 1944, he was ordered to direct a documentary about the happy lives of the Jews in the camp. Gerron threw himself enthusiastically into the production of this incredible propaganda, probably imagining that it would save his life. (He was wrong: after the film was completed, he was sent to Auschwitz and killed.) This astonishing episode in film history provides Karussell with its most riveting section; the rest of the film is mostly a tribute to Gerron in the form of an overly sacrosanct re-creation of Berlin cabaret by the likes of Ute Lemper.

Joan Grossman & Paul Rosdy's The Port of Last Resort: Zuflucht in Shanghai (1998; November 11 at 6 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner) deals with another little-known episode: the escape, from 1938 to 1941, of about 20,000 European Jews to Shanghai -- the only port in the world that would accept them without visas and without quota restrictions. Home movies, newsreel footage, still images, letters, and the reminiscences of four survivors evoke the lives of the exiles. The cosmopolitan sophistication of Shanghai in the late '30s, the industry and entrepreneurialism of the refugees, and the deteriorating conditions brought on by the Japanese occupation form the main strands of this spellbinding film, whose rich texture is enhanced by John Zorn's delicate score for strings and piano.

Two fiction films in the festival re-create France in the late '30s and early '40s. Gilles Bourdos's Disparus (1998; November 11 at 7:30 p.m. at the MFA) takes as its tantalizing theme the intersections between surrealists and communists in 1938 Paris. Dwelling on the ménage-à-trois formed by a Jewish Trotskyist and poet, a dour Stalinist, and one of Man Ray's models, the film cross-cuts between the 1938 story and a parallel plot set 50 years later. The actors are good, but the film fumbles its take on surrealism and fails to make its political material interesting either as politics or as melodrama. The period scenes have that deadly half-convincing airlessness typical of medium-budget re-creations of period.

Port of Last Resort The Happiest Place on Earth (1999; November 7 at 3:30 p.m. at the MFA) evokes its chosen period -- 1942 -- with slightly better results. The film tells the true story of the making of a Vichy-sponsored film apotheosizing a dead right-wing aviator named Mermoz. The stage actor hired to play Mermoz grows into the role but vanishes before shooting is completed. The episodic plot makes room for various incidents highlighting the turmoil of life under the Occupation, such as the expunging of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (a real-life friend of Mermoz) from the script on the grounds that he is "a Jew-lover." Claude Brasseur, as a tough production manager, stands out in the cast; Marcel Bluwal, a veteran of French teledrama, provides routine direction; and the whole thing moves along tolerably.

More challenging and satisfying is the interweaving of large-scale historical narrative and personal story in Ivan Nichev's After the End of the World (1998; November 4 at 7:30 p.m. at the MFA). Albert Cohen, a Bulgarian who emigrated to Israel and became a noted historian, returns after the fall of the Communist regime to give a lecture in a monastery in his home town of Plovdiv. Flashbacks to his past in Bulgaria under encroaching Stalinism are intercut with scenes in which he renews his romance with his childhood sweetheart, who's now unhappily married. This slow, handsome film is directed with panache: caressing camera movements and graceful natural light elevate the clichés of the flashbacks, and the tentativeness of the middle-aged protagonists (Stefan Danailov and Katarina Didaskalo) is appealing.

Also remarkable is A Chrysanthemum Burst in Cincoesquinas (1997; November 9 at 5:15 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner), the first feature by Argentine director Daniel Burman. In this transposed spaghetti western set during a turn-of-the-century Latin American revolution, two wanderers team up: Erasmo, who's seeking revenge for the murder of his Indian wet nurse, and Saúl, a Jew who is trying to get to a place called Loyola. Superbly shot by Estéban Sapir, the film is a profusion of dense wide-angle images: the opening scene of childbirth on a hill; the meeting of the two heroes at an outdoor dice table, one of a row of similar tables, each lit by a single lantern.

One of the best films in the festival is buried in a Veterans Day afternoon program: Green Fields (1937; November 11 at 2 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner). This adaptation of a popular Yiddish-language play was the first of four low-budget Yiddish films directed in New York and New Jersey by Edgar G. Ulmer during his exile from Hollywood (he would later return to make some of the darkest of all B films, such as Detour). Ulmer's visual intensity turns out to be an ideal match for the cheerfully nonexistent story of Green Fields: a young Talmudic scholar, wandering through Eastern Europe, is taken in by a farming family and, after 90 minutes of banter, becomes engaged to his host's nubile daughter. Much of the film is shot outdoors, with a Renoir-like sense of nature and space; the most Ulmerian moments all occur inside, such as the lovely scene in which a mother and daughter silently bustle about preparing dinner at a hearth in the foreground while the men gather at the table in the background. Ulmer's Yiddish films not only preserve a theatrical and cultural tradition; they testify to the resourcefulness and grace of a film artist.

Genesis Among the Israeli films in the festival, the standout is Arik Kaplun's engaging, well-acted Yana's Friends (1999; November 13 at 10 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner). The central characters are Eli, a wedding videographer planning to go to film school in the US, and Yana, a pregnant Russian immigrant who's abandoned by her husband shortly after moving into Eli's Tel Aviv apartment. In a subplot, an opportunistic Russian jerk uses his wife's paralyzed grandfather as alms bait until the old man is discovered by his former lover. The director's careful balancing of sympathies crumbles, unfortunately, under the pressure to contrive an ending imbued with the unanimity seemingly required in all light comedies about immigrants.

A program of two documentaries by Jonathan Berman (November 7 at 5 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner) highlights the festival's diversity. The Shvitz (1993), an excellent documentary about New York steam baths, celebrates second- and third-generation immigrant culture and the Russian-Jewish bathhouse as a (predominantly Jewish and not necessarily gay) center for unisex social interaction and physical regeneration. "The shvitz is far from being your typical aerobic health club," as one of the people interviewed on screen comments during the film. In the darker My Friend Paul (1998), Berman documents and tries to explain the delinquency of a boyhood friend who became a bank robber. The relationship between the filmmaker and his subject becomes increasingly tense after the latter is paroled and seeks to impose on Berman's generosity. The film is both a meditation on filmmaking and a painful study of the kind of relationship where you feel guilty about failing to live up to an obligation to a friend whom you know you can't help.

Closing the series is the extraordinary Genesis (1998; November 14 at 7:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner), which transposes the strife-ridden lives of Jacob and his family to Mali's desert. Through stylized acting and an elliptical narrative style, director Cheick Oumar Sissoko distances and theatricalizes the epic of tribal conflict, ultimately to rediscover its universality.

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