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Id marks
Jay Rosenblatt’s shorts at the Brattle

BY PETER KEOUGH


Jay Rosenblatt makes films the way Frankenstein makes monsters: bits and pieces culled from the morgue and archives and the family crypt spliced together into a horrifying, hilarious, pitiable manifestation of the id. A former psychotherapist, Rosenblatt respects film’s power as a fetish of memory and desire, a pastiche of dreams and relics that can invoke the unconscious and perhaps induce clarity and reconciliation. And like any good therapist he keeps a sharp eye on the clock — none of his films runs longer than a half-hour.

Nonetheless, this 80-minute, five-film program manages to outline an entire psychic history, beginning with the binary desire/repression dichotomy of the minute-long “Restricted” (1999) and ending with the sublime, wordless apotheosis of “King of the Jews” (2000). The benighted, heroic psychological progression between these two extremes is mordantly filled in by the case studies “Short of Breath” (1990), “The Smell of Burning Ants” (1994), and “Human Remains” (1998).

“Restricted” is Rosenblatt’s method in miniature: a voiceover cheerily repeats “Take a chance! Don’t do it!” over ’50s-era images of such totems and taboos as a waffle oozing syrup, a filleted fish, a child held over the edge of an abyss, and a woman baring her breasts. This idea of ambivalence is further explored in “Short of Breath,” which comprises footage — therapeutic training films, civil-defense drills, what looks like a shot from the 1932 melodrama Three on a Match — that Rosenblatt claims to have found in a dumpster outside the mental hospital where he worked. A woman convulses in tears before a psychiatrist. “Are you short of breath?” he asks. Indeed. Hers is the typical malaise of the housewife who has sacrificed her individuality for her family. Her despair is observed by her son, who also witnesses the primal scene (a bestial blue movie) and a woman’s repeated, suicidal plunge and emerges bent and despondent himself. The oppressive opacity of the therapist’s title question is echoed in the end when he says, “Everything will be all right!”

Maybe so, but there’s a lot more grief to go through first. “The Smell of Burning Ants” recalls the origin and dynamics of male sadism. It opens with a continuous loop, a newsreel perhaps from China in the ’30s, of a man being pulled by his hair to what presumably will be his beheading. Over this image a voice counts to 10, as if preparing to play hide-and-seek. Next, a Buñuelesque entomological sequence demonstrates how a scorpion surrounded by a circle of fire will sting itself to death. Human males, however, prefer to lash out at others, such as insects, small animals, and weaker playmates, a process Rosenblatt illustrates with evocative snippets of children from decades ago tormenting one another backed by an autobiographical and sometimes pedantic commentary. The shot of an umbilical cord being cut juxtaposed with the snipping of a film strip, and the recurrent image of a boy grinning behind a movie camera reminiscent of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, suggests how Rosenblatt himself chose to sublimate the sadistic instinct.

Others chose differently. Rosenblatt’s most recognized film, “Human Remains,” offers wry portraits of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, and Mao via footage of surpassing banality and the dictators’ lighthearted first-person narration. And so we learn of Stalin’s delight in practical jokes (a tomato on a chair, 20 million people sent to Siberia), Mao’s personal hygiene (he never bathed but “washed his genitals in the bodies of women”), and Mussolini’s conviction that the “Italian people were capable of anything” (followed by shots of his own butchered corpse). Then there’s Hitler’s belief in the religion of art, his love for nudelsuppe, his undying love for his niece (who killed herself with his gun), and his problem with flatulence, this last illustrated by a shot of two interlocutors recoiling and waving their hands. By the end of “Human Remains,” the title doesn’t bring to mind the image of piled-up corpses so much as the notion that however evil a person might be, something human remains. Which makes the film all the more horrifying.

Nowhere in the Hitler segment of “Remains” are Jews ever mentioned. Rosenblatt makes up for that omission with “King of the Jews.” This three-part film begins with “Jesus and Me,” an autobiographical voiceover section in which Rosenblatt explains how as a boy he was led to believe that Jesus killed Jews. Then he saw King of Kings and learned that Jesus was a Jew too. In “One of Us,” the spoken word gives way to title cards and an impressionistic montage of persecution. In the concluding “The Light Is All About Us,” words are abandoned altogether for the surging music of Benjamin Britten and images of Christ’s passion, chainsawed redwoods, World War II bombers, and Warsaw Ghetto corpses that combine, somehow, into a radiant transcendence. Whether your faith is in Christianity, Judaism, psychotherapy, or film, it will be vindicated here.

Issue Date: March 15-22, 2001