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Presented in collaboration with the Jewish Museum.
Welcome to the 1998 New York Jewish Film Festival! As in the past, the festival is truly international in character, featuring films from Russia and Belarus, France, Norway, the USA and Canada. Particularly focusing on experiences with a major impact on the lives of American Jews, festival special events include:
(1) three classic works from the silent era, two of which are rarely seen works from Hungary and Czechoslovakia;
(2) the US premiere of Ron Havilio's six-hour Fragments * Jerusalem, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel;
(3) a series of five films honoring Hollywood blacklistees, marking the 50 years that have passed since hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities began.
Fittingly, the festival closes with HOLLYWOODISM, a new documentary on the impact of Jews on American film. Join us for all of these enriching film experiences, each of which celebrates important moments in Jewish history.
Please note: Many screenings will be introduced by filmmakers and/or leading scholars of Jewish film.
This international film festival has been made possible by generous gifts from The Martin and Doris Payson Charitable Foundation and The Jack and Pearl Resnick Foundation.The festival was organized by a committee consisting of Jack Salzman, Curator of the Film Festival; Leslie Friedman, Festival Coordinator; Jim Hoberman, Richard Peña, and Elaine Charnow.
Note: This series will be accompanied by a special exhibit at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery at the Walter Reade: Zvi Rosenfeld's photographs:
Hidden Splendor: Synagogues in Ruin
Note: Information about subtitles is provided below.
program notes and times
BEST MAN
Ira Wohl, USA, 1997; 16mm, 90 minutes
This sequel to the groundbreaking Academy Award-winning best documentary of 1976, Best Boy, continues the story of Philly, the filmmaker's retarded cousin, 20 years later. Wohl uses the same intimate family vérité style to show us how Philly, who left home to find a new place in the world at the end of the last film, has become a man of many friends, attending classes and taking pleasure in new experiences like his bar mitzvah at 70, that enrich his life beyond his ability to actually express it. As affectionate and moving as its predecessor.
Sunday, January 11: 4 pm
Monday, January 12: 8:45 pm
Special Event: Presented with Special Funding from the Ira M. Resnick Foundation
THE GOLEM
Paul Wegener, Germany, 1920; 35mm, 75 minutes,
silent with translated intertitles and live accompaniment
composed and performed by guitar virtuoso Gary Lucas.
The most celebrated, spectacular, and stylized of Middle-European Jewish theme films (as well as precursor to Hollywood's Frankenstein), THE GOLEM recounts the medieval legend of Rabbi Loew who, seeking to protect the Jews of Prague, creates a man of clay.
Sunday, January 11: 2 pm
USA Premiere
LA VERITE SI JE MENS! /
WOULD I LIE TO YOU?
Thomas Gilou, France, 1997; 35mm,
100 minutes, English subtitles
This bawdy screwball comedy set in the world of Paris' Sephardic-run garment district proved a monstrous box-office hit in France. In a case of mistaken identity, a young drifter is hired to run a fabric mogul's salesroom and promptly falls in love with his beautiful daughter. Forbidden love takes us on an engaging and exuberant rollercoaster ride through contemporary French Jewish culture both comic and politically incorrect.
Sunday, January 11: 6:30 pm
Tuesday, January 13: 2 & 6 pm
New York Premiere
SOLEIL
Roger Hanin, France, 1997; 35mm,
90 minutes, English subtitles
Sophia Loren gives a stellar performance as the poverty-stricken matriarch of a French Jewish family exiled in Algeria for the duration of the war while their father remains hidden in France. Shot entirely as the flashback of one of Loren's sons now grown and dying (played by director Hanin), the film emerges as a bittersweet, beautifully photographed reverie of things past.
Sunday, January 11: 8:45 pm
Monday, January 12: 2 pm
Thursday, January 15: 6:15 pm
USA Premiere
FAREWELL
Arkadiy Yakhnis, Russia, 1992;
35mm, 27 minutes, simultaneous translation
90-year-old Jankel's emigration to Israel from his shtetl in Bessarabia becomes the stuff of which visual poetry is made in this beautifully evocative short subject shot in brilliant black and white. Translation is hardly necessary in a film where each exquisitely composed shot creates a world of haunting loss, unsurpassed faith, and human dignity.
with
STERNE
Konrad Wolf, East Germany/Bulgaria,
1959; 16mm, 89 minutes, English subtitles
Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival,
this film attests to a curious assimilation of the Jewish Holocaust experience on the part of Iron Curtain countries at a time when few in the West were willing to broach the subject openly. A sympathetic "love story" between a German soldier seized by his conscience and a Salonican Jew he is meant to guard en route to Auschwitz, STERNE, or Stars, is a film of surprising detail, visual clarity, and emotional depth.
Monday, January 12: 4 pm
Wednesday, January 14: 6 pm
A Special Presentation Marking the 50th Anniversary of the State of Israel
USA Premiere
FRAGMENTS * JERUSALEM
Ron Havilio, Israel, 1986-1996; 16mm,
358 minutes, English voiceover
FRAGMENTS * JERUSALEM is without precedent in Israeli cinema, at once an excavation and a monument. Archivist-filmmaker Ron Havilio spent a decade shooting and assembling a home movie epic that--as deeply personal as it is broadly historical--charts his family's course through two tumultuous centuries in Jerusalem.
Parts 1 and 2:
MAMILA and DISTANT TIMES
(100 minutes)
Represents the filmmaker's childhood in divided Jerusalem and his rediscovery of the Old City.
Monday, January 12: 6:30 pm
Part 3: ENGRAVERS OF METAL and PAINTERS OF LIGHT
(64 minutes)
Celebrates the visual chroniclers of 19th-century Jerusalem and marks the arrival of the filmmaker's family in 1812.
Tuesday, January 13: 8:15 pm
New York Premiere
Parts 4 and 5:
SARINA MENACHEM and WITH THE WALLS
(88 minutes)
The filmmaker's paternal grandmother arrives in Jerusalem, witnessing the end of the Ottoman, and the beginning of the British, rule.
Wednesday, January 14: 8:15 pm
Parts 6 and 7:
JAFFA ROAD and ABBA
(106 minutes)
Follows the Havilio family as they leave the Jewish Quarter for the new city, through the period of the British mandate to the creation of the state of Israel.
Thursday, January 15: 8:15 pm
THE HOUSE I LIVE IN
RKO, 1945; 16mm, 10 minutes
A ten-minute musical plea for political and religious tolerance written by Albert Maltz, featuring Frank Sinatra.
with
THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR
Director: Joseph Losey;
Screenwriters: Alfred Lewis Levitt and Ben Barzman;
RKO, 1948; 35mm, 82 minutes
The quintessential progressive family film is a touching allegory in which the fear of difference is bound up in the terrors of the recent war. With Dean Stockwell, Robert Ryan, and Pat O'Brien.
Tuesday, January 13
Monday, January 19: 4 pm
USA Premiere
EAST OF WAR
Ruth Beckermann, Austria, 1996;
35mm, 113 minutes, English subtitles
This deceptively simple film of strung-together interviews with former Wehrmacht soldiers silences any recent critique that these foot soldiers for Hitler had nothing to hide. Approached by the filmmaker at a traveling exhibit on "Crimes of the Wehrmacht" in 1995, the aging men speak candidly to each other and the camera about the authenticity of the exhibit, their own experiences, and, for most, their ultimate lack of conscience. A chilling and deeply disturbing example of how shame can surface as patriotism and self-delusion.
Wednesday, January 14: 2 pm
Sunday, January 18: 8:15 pm
I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE
Director: Michael Gordon; Screenwriter: Abraham Polonsky;
20th Century-Fox, 1941; 35mm, 90 minutes
Screenwriter Polonsky will be present after the film.
Deflecting Jerome Weidman's ferocious Seventh Avenue expose from ethnic stereotype towards proto-feminism, Abraham Polonsky's last credited Hollywood script provided a rare role for an ambitious woman striving to make it in a man's world. With Susan Hayward, Dan Dailey, and George Sanders.
Wednesday, January 14: 4:15 pm
Saturday, January 17: 7 pm
THE CASTLE
Michael Haneke, Austria, 1997;
35mm, 125 minutes, English subtitles
Thomas Mann characterized Franz Kafka as "a religious humorist" in his introduction to The Castle. Now, with extraordinary fidelity to Kafka's language, as well as his uniquely dark comedy, Austrian director Michael Haneke has brilliantly adapted the last, and unfinished, novel by the 20th century's most influential Jewish writer.
Thursday, January 15: 2 pm
Saturday, January 17: 9:15 pm
Sunday, January 18: 5:45 pm
Restored Print / NY Premiere
NONE SHALL ESCAPE
Director: Andre de Toth; Screenwriter: Lester Cole;
Columbia, 1944, 35mm, 85 minutes
This anticipation of the Nuremberg Trials, powerfully directed by Hungarian refugee de Toth (and released despite concerns of studio boss Harry Cohn), was the first Hollywood movie to acknowledge the wartime extermination of Europe's Jews.
Thursday, January 15: 4:30 pm
Thursday, January 22: 8:30 pm
US Premiere
Special Event: Presented with Special Funding from the Ira M. Resnick Foundation
THE CROSS / UKRIZOVANA
(Boris Orlicky, Czechoslovakia, 1921,
35mm; 60 minutes,
silent with simultaneous translation and live piano accompaniment by Curtis Salke.
Set in the mid-19th century, against the backdrop of revolution and pogroms, a Jewish woman becomes romantically involved with a Czech officer.
Sunday, January 18: 2 pm
THE MASTER RACE
Writer/Director: Herbert Biberman;
RKO, 1944, 35mm, 96 minutes
Conceived eight months before D-Day, this ambitious melodrama predicts the problems of de-Nazification that would exist in Europe after the Third Reich's defeat. With Lloyd Bridges, Morris Carnovsky, and Yiddish cinema ingenue Helen Beverly.
Sunday, January 18: 3:45 pm
CHANTS OF SAND AND STARS
Nicolas Klotz, France, 1997; video,
90 minutes, English subtitles
Belgian director Nicolas Klotz set out to make a film about the Hazanout--the music that accompanies Jewish prayer. What he wound up with is a world tour of Jewish music! In a radiant and colorful melange, we are taken from Antwerp to Tunisia, from Morocco to Turkey and Azerbaijan, from New York City to Israel, to see and hear the chanting of Hazan Jacoob b'Chiri and the klezmer clarinet of Giora Feldman. The very essence of the Jewish people comes alive in often rare footage.
Monday, January 19: 2 pm
Wednesday, January 21: 4:15 pm
GRETA
Greta Haris Pasovic, Bosnia, 1997;
35mm, 85 minutes, English subtitles
Under difficult circumstances and with a limited budget, Pasovic unfolds the story of Auschwitz survivor Greta Ferusic, who after studying architecture at the University of Sarajevo and becoming the first female dean of the department, refused to leave the city when it was besieged in 1992. Ten thousand Sarajevans died in this chapter of the Bosnian war; Greta, the only survivor from her family of the death camps, must meditate on the twists of fate that have brought her so close to death and allowed her to survive the greatest attempts at "ethnic cleansing" in the 20th century.
Monday, January 19: 6 pm
New York Premiere
ODESSA STEPS
David L. Mehlman, USA, 1997;
video, 18 minutes
This brief documentary follows two young immigrant dance partners throught the Ukranian Jewish subculture of San Francisco where children's ballroom dancing has become a metaphor for competing for and obtaining the good life in the new world. Interviews with both the children and their parents offer a revealing and heartbreaking portrait of exile and assimilation that belies the modesty of the film itself.
with
New York Premiere
ROTHSCHILD'S VIOLIN
Edgardo Cozarinsky, France, 1996;
35mm, 98 minutes, English subtitles
Struggling to survive in Stalin's Russia, Dmitri Shostakovich would complete--but could never stage--a one-act opera by his student Benjamin Fleischmann, killed in action during World War II. Part documentary, part dramatic feature, Edgardo Cozarinsky's innovative film tells this story while incorporating a full presentation--the Western premiere!--of Fleischmann's haunting shtetl opera.
Monday, January 19: 8:30 pm
Tuesday, January 20: 2 pm
FROM HELL TO HELL
Dmitri Astrakhan, Germany, 1990;
35mm, 110 minutes, English subtitles
The violent and emblematic struggle of two women--one Jewish, one gentile--over "ownership" of a hidden Jewish child is played out against a raw and provocative recreation of the Kielce pogrom of July 1946 in which residents of a small Polish village massacred 41 Jews returning to reclaim their former homes and rebuild their lives. Astrakhan (Get Thee Out) has made one of the few films to address a brutal and rarely explored period of the war.
Tuesday, January 20: 4:15 and 8:30 pm
USA Premiere
Special Event: Presented with Special Funding from the Ira M. Resnick Foundation
SIMON JUDIT / JUDITH SIMON
Adolf Mérai, Austria-Hungary, 1916;
35mm, 55 minutes, silent with simultaneous translation and live piano accompaniment by Curtis Salke.
The poet Jószef Kiss's tragic ballad of a Jewish woman seduced and abandoned provided the basis for this melodrama, remarkable for its location photography of Hungarian village Jews.
Tuesday, January 20: 7 pm
World Premiere
IN OUR OWN HANDS
Chuck Olin, Canada, 1998; 16mm,
90 minutes
Here is the previously untold secret history of the only all-Jewish fighting unit in World War II. Denied the right to fight as Jews by the British, the men of the Brigade eventually see combat during the final Allied offensive in northern Italy. After the war, they remain in Europe for a series of clandestine operations including the hunt for Nazi war criminals and the safe transport of Holocaust survivors to Palestine. It is a story of extraordinary heroism and determination.
Wednesday, January 21: 2 and 6:15 pm
New York Premiere / Sneak Preview
MENDEL
Alexander Røsler, Norway, 1997;
35mm, 98 minutes, English subtitles
In the 1950s, Norway began to receive a small quota of Jewish DPs. Among those who arrived was the director Alexander Røsler, who here captures those strange, almost exotic, times. Although Norwegians were well-known for their anti-Nazi stance, Jews still were strangers to them. Nine-year-old Mendel must learn to live in his new country, while trying to understand the secret, fearful past of his parents. It is a coming-of-age story told with great humor, warmth, and compassion.
Wednesday, January 21: 8:30 pm
Thursday, January 22: 4:15 pm
Closing Day / Night:
Thursday, January 22: 2 and 6:15 pm
World Premiere
HOLLYWOODISM
Simcha Jacobovici, Canada, 1998; 16mm, 90 minutes
Did Jews "invent" Hollywood? Did they use blackface to express their concerns about assimilation? Were the HUAC hearings driven by rabid anti-semitism? Taking off from Neil Gabler's best-selling An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Created Hollywood, this provocative film explores the ways in which Jewish immigrants helped shape the American Dream. From Hollywood moguls like Louis B. Mayer and Adolph Zukor to George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, the American Dream is seen as "a dream dreamt by Jews who were feeling a nightmare.
Hollywoodism Part I:
DEEP IN THE HEART OF EUROPE: IMAGINING JEWS IN THE HAPSBURG EMPIRE
Reflecting the gentile fascination with Jews in the years immediately before and after World War I, the film industries of Central Europe produced a number of films featuring exotic Jewish characters and themes.
Hollywoodism Part 2:
HALF A CENTURY LATER: REMEMBERING THE BLACKLIST
The winter of 1947-48 began the purging of Hollywood leftists, leaving wounds that have yet to heal. Characterized by their strong anti-fascism and an emphasis on political tolerance, these films--all written and/or directed by Jewish blacklistees--suggest a socially aware American cinema that was lost.
This program has received generous support from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Open Society Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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