from Prooftexts Volume 22, Numbers 1-2The Cinema of Jewish Experience: Introduction
Joel Rosenberg and Stephen J. Whitfield
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The place of film in a journal of Jewish literary studies may still require some justification, even though the past two decades have witnessed an impressive burgeoning of interest in cinematic constructions of the Jew as a valid concern for historians and literary scholars. Indeed, the field of film studies itself, which one is tempted to call the foundling child of the humanities, has, over a somewhat longer period, progressed from an uncertain status at the fringes of literary interpretation and art-historical analysis to being a major preoccupation for those involved in study of mass culture in the modern era. Originally the private obsession of film buffs and the professional bailiwick of a few devoted film critics, belletrists, and theoreticians, the study of cinema has become a complex and ramified discipline, embracing many fields and approaches, and it was inevitable that sooner or later its problems and issues would come to be a proper concern of Jewish studies. But the nature of that concern has undergone a significant change in the past twenty years as it has become clear that more is at stake than the "image" of the Jew on film.
It is presently less a matter--as was the case for an earlier generation of ethnic film studies--of how authentic or inauthentic, how favorable or unfavorable, is the representation of the Jew (or of any other ethnic figure or group) on screen. It has come to be more important to consider what the ethnic screen image says about the civil society from which the film emanates. The image of the Jew in an American film is an image of America, just as the image of the Arab in an Israeli film is an image of Israel. The specific textures of cinematic ethnicity are a measure of a society's openness, its collective aspirations, its social and cultural anxieties, its era and Zeitgeist, its reckoning with history. The Jew on screen, moreover, does not function in a vacuum but is part of a larger fabric of experience that binds Jew and non-Jew inextricably. The notion of a "cinema of Jewish experience" is only a provisional--and, to some degree, wishful--designation. But it aims at comprehending the world portrayed in a film as a multidimensional whole, larger than any one character, scene, or signifier--a complex construction that, though the product of artifice, visual artistry, and narrative strategies, grows from a given society and era and, at its best, engages the spectator in a philosophical conversation with that larger context. This investigative orientation enables us to include within a common framework films that emanate from the Jewish world as such ("Jewish film" in a narrower sense of the term, whether Yiddish, or Israeli, or any other product of a specific Jewish society or subculture) and films from nations where Jews reside as a minority culture and are taken as subjects for film within a broader, cosmopolitan setting. That these two domains are by now so thoroughly commingled and mutually influential as to be inseparable is more or less taken for granted by present-day practitioners of what we can loosely call Jewish film studies.
Nowhere is this common framework better tested than in considering the historical relation of cinema to Jewry's two main crises of the past century: the destruction of European Jewry and the bitter and seemingly intractable Arab-Israeli conflict that has grown from the formation of the State of Israel. At stake in this relation is a more fundamental question: How was cinema, in some sense, a defining force of twentieth-century history? Such a role was already foreseen in Walter Benjamin's exploratory essay of 1935, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which raised, among other issues, the question of cinema's relation to the totalitarian experiments of his time--those undertaken in the name of communism, fascism, and National Socialism. Benjamin's underlying concern, however, was not limited to totalitarian societies, for he was inquiring, more generally, into the unprecedented changes in human consciousness brought about by forces of modernity--which had fostered the rise of a mass culture, employing sophisticated technologies of production and dissemination, that not only challenged our traditional conceptions of art and aesthetics but also affected the most fundamental processes of language, education, cultural transmission, and historical memory. To ask about the place of film--or indeed, of any one film--in this complex evolution is to do more than inquire into its dimensions as artistic creation, as consumer product, as mediator of desire, or as ideology, though film is surely these, as well. It is to engage with film as public spectacle, as a crosscurrent of social energies, as historical document, as philosophical or ethical problem, and, at times--as Benjamin especially might have seen it--as prophetic voice. Benjamin's own essay on the conditions of art transformed by technology was written on the eve of a great European convulsion (properly speaking, one already begun in 1914) that eventually destroyed a third of the world's Jewry and took tens of millions of other lives. The relation of a century of mass destruction to the culture of mass media and to a century of cinema is a larger question that film studies must eventually embrace, but, for the present, film scholars--especially those primarily devoted to the cinema of Jewish experience--have chosen a more manageable task: reckoning with the cinematic legacy of destruction and of the historical crises born out of it.
The impact of the Holocaust on film studies seemed to intensify toward the end of the twentieth century. It has stimulated study of films portraying the Nazi era and the atrocities of the death camps, as well as films portraying survivor experience. It has brought into focus issues of trauma, remembrance, mourning, and memorialization (film itself being a form of memorial). It has fostered interest in the portrayal of Jews and Jewish experience in films made (in America, Europe, and elsewhere) during the era of the rise and fall of Nazism. It has influenced study of postwar German cinema and its relation to the catastrophic era. It has caused reflection on the persistence, in the postwar world, of Nazi sympathies, antisemitism, racism, and the genocidal impulse as they bear on the content and interpretation of film. And, while not generally acknowledged as such, it has played a significant role in nourishing film scholarship's overwhelming preoccupation with what has come to be called "otherness" in mass culture's representations of race, religion, class, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and sexual orientation.
Reflection on otherness has taken on a particularly urgent tone in Israel, whose society has come to confront the paradoxical situation of the postwar Jew, who, having lived a condition of marginality both millennially and, in the Nazi era, in extremis, was (in various stages, but still with some historical suddenness) caught up in the creation of a new Other: the Palestinian of the Occupied Territories and Palestinian Diaspora, as well as that most neglected type of Palestinian, the Israeli Arab. This paradox, virtually a founding problem of present-day film studies in Israel, encompasses not only questions of Jewish-Arab relations, but also issues of gender, of generations, of Holocaust survivor experience in Israel, of national self-image, and, in general, of Israel's troubled relation to its European and Middle Eastern past and to world Jewry. Such concerns have a counterpart in American Jewish film scholarship, which has highlighted the Jew's relation to racial minorities in the United States, to interethnic and intercultural experience more generally, and to the guilt-ridden state of having "survived" the Holocaust by a stroke of geographic good fortune. The differences between these two sets of concerns are obvious enough, but their common need of reckoning in some way with the events and legacy of 1933-45 is inescapable.
When we began planning an issue of Prooftexts devoted to "The Cinema of Jewish Experience," we did not anticipate how strong this need of reckoning would prove to be. Our call for papers specified a wide range of suggested topics, but we recognized, fairly early on, that the call itself had a certain probative value. In noticing the kinds of preoccupations that would emerge, we could perhaps gain a useful portrait of the field at its present state. As it turned out, all of the articles in the present issue are occupied in some manner, direct or indirect, with the historical currents leading into or emanating from the events of 1933-45. Most or all are, in some sense, defined by those events, even when the subject is not Nazism or the Holocaust as such.
Joel Rosenberg's "What You Ain't Heard Yet: The Languages of The Jazz Singer" reflects on the role of Diaspora Jewish languages (Aramaic, Yiddish, English) in America's first feature-length sound film, released in 1927. Although its subject is a film made prior to the rise of Hitler, the essay shows how The Jazz Singer articulates a symbolic erasure of the culture of the premodern Jew precisely at a time when differences of language, ethnicity, and national type were about to become all the more conspicuous through the advent of sound cinema. This is a process of which the film itself, through a subtle use of traditional texts and implicitly documentary modes, keeps careful and thoughtful account. This reading of The Jazz Singer is a way of viewing the silent and seemingly benign process of Jewish cultural erosion in the American landscape, to which our knowledge of the more deliberate destruction of Jews and Jewish culture carried out in Europe in the era that followed has perhaps sensitized us to an extraordinary degree. The culture of the premodern Jew that is generously (if also selectively) on display in this film gains a different meaning in the hindsight of the Nazi era, a meaning it did not have for either the filmmaker or the spectator of 1927, but toward which the film nonetheless points with a certain inadvertently prophetic clarity. There is, to be sure, a world of difference between cultural erosion and deliberate cultural destruction (both of which, through much of the century, would occur as well in the Soviet Union and its client states). But both processes, in some sense, have intertwined in the past century to significantly undermine Jewish cultural survival.
The Holocaust is more directly a subject in three articles on postwar cinema's reckoning with the Nazi era. David Coury's "'Auch ruhiges Land . . .': Remembrance and Testimony in Paul Celan's Nuit et Brouillard Translation" deals with the renowned poet's German translation of Jean Cayrol's narration for Alain Resnais's pathbreaking 1955 documentary film on the horrors of the European death camps, Night and Fog. Celan, himself a survivor (which Cayrol, a Polish Catholic, was as well), engaged more explicitly with the Jewish identity of the victims than Cayrol's treatment had done, and pinned responsibility for the camps more directly on Germany. Picking up themes from Celan's poetry, Coury shows how his methods of poetic construction and his overarching concern for historical witness rendered the version of the film shown to the German public into a more tautly political and historically specific statement, in an era when dialogue between Germany and other nations on responsibility for the Holocaust was particularly tense. Coury's article, perhaps more than any other in this issue, shows how a film's screenplay--quite literally, the lingistic substratum of cinema--is a material factor of vital importance to an interpreter seeking to parse the historical forces converging in and, in turn, shaped by the film.
Alan Rosen's essay "'Teach Me Gold': Pedagogy and Memory in The Pawnbroker" examines Sidney Lumet's watershed 1965 film on survivor experience, based on Edward Lewis Wallant's novel of the same title. Exploring the situation of "pedagogy"--a virtual Bildungsroman--that evolves between the film's protagonist, Sol Nazerman, a Holocaust survivor working as a New York City pawnbroker, and his Puerto Rican employee, Jesus Ortiz, Rosen traces the breakdown of their improvised teacher/pupil relation. He develops the theme of pedagogy in the context of a film criticism that has long favored European over American filmmaking styles and modes in representation of the Holocaust. Taking as his focus the question of how memory of trauma is represented and taught, Rosen shows how The Pawnbroker, a film American in origin but hybrid in its idioms and impulses, is keenly preoccupied with negotiation--literally, "brokering"--the divide between Europe and America, in the aftermath of a time when Europe, having taught the world the abysmal depths of human nature, had little left to teach. Ultimately, Rosen concludes that "[t]eaching fails because memory intensifies." That is, the individual and collective rituals of mourning and memorialization, though two decades beyond the end of the war, are still insufficiently evolved, and thus the raw power of memory and trauma remains explosive and dangerous, to the survivor and to all whom he encounters. As Rosen shows, far from being either a glitzy Hollywoodization or a stylistic parroting of European art cinema, The Pawnbroker breaks new ground in "preview[ing] a vast cultural trend that inquires into the nature of memorialization."
Elisa New takes up the question of how people (and institutions) remember, mourn, and memorialize Holocaust trauma in her essay "Good-bye, Children; Good-bye, Mary, Mother of Sorrows: The Church and the Holocaust in the Art of Louis Malle." Its focus is the renowned 1987 film Au revoir, les enfants, Malle's semi-autobiographical tale of witness to a Nazi deportation of Jewish children from the French village where he had attended primary school. Taking as an initial vantage point her own visit to a mass grave site of her murdered kin in Siauliai, Lithuania, New presents a purposefully sinuous reflection on certain well-known differences in Jewish and Christian memorialization of the slaughtered, and chooses the less obvious strategy of clearing a space for the proper task of Christian mourning and memory that has yet to be assumed, at least at the official level: to unlearn the familiar patterns of institutional triumphalism and redemptive Passion theology that have colored many or most Church-sponsored memorializations of the Holocaust and to assume the ambiguity of witness in a more open-ended state of humility and unknowing. This supplies the context for New's sympathetic reading of the film, wherein Malle "confesses his own organ of memory still broken and thus his story not a solution to, but a symptom of, that brokenness."
Scholarship on Israeli film has, for its part, tended to place the Holocaust and the Eastern European Jewish world in the context of a cinematic critique of Zionism. That critique, embodied in a whole generation of filmmaking, was wide-ranging and focused on the various privilegings of language, gender, and sabra identity expressed in earlier Israeli film--privilegings that have come under skeptical scrutiny in Israeli society at large since the late 1970s. The new cinema was a harbinger of the rise, in the late 1980s, of a cadre of Israeli "new historians" who likewise called into question long-cherished notions of national identity and destiny. In a broad historical overview of this trend, filmmaker and film scholar Judd Ne'eman, in his essay "The Jar and the Blade: Fertility Myth and Medieval Romance in Israeli Political Films," explores the contrast between what we now call the "conflict films" of the 1980s--those devoted to a critical perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian strife--and the Zionist films of an earlier generation. Earlier movies had portrayed the Zionist venture as a regenerative force for a land that purportedly had lain waste from neglect by its indigenous Arab inhabitants and now awaited the invigorating influence of the so-called New Jew, whose scientific and economic genius would supposedly benefit both Jews and Arabs. Using, as a conceptual model and interpretive key, ancient Near Eastern fertility myths and two cycles of medieval Holy Grail romance, Ne'eman traces the gradual breakdown of this "Zionist master narrative" in the films of the 1980s, in which the mythic quester in a languishing land fails to ask the right questions and only ends up inflicting further loss and suffering on the land and its inhabitants.
In her article "Space and Gender in the New Israeli and Palestinian Cinema," Nurith Gertz picks up where Ne'eman leaves off. She offers a closer look at two Israeli films exemplary of the new cinema, as well as one strikingly analogous Palestinian film. Gertz focuses on the representation of physical space as a way of talking about how certain Israeli and Palestinian films have sought to challenge the traditionally male-centered and nationally homogeneous biases found in films of the generation that preceded theirs. Taking as her initial focus two Israeli films, Avraham Haffner's Laura Adler's Last Love (1990) and Eli Cohen's The Summer of Aviya (1988), the author shows how these films continually bring to the fore the perspective of the Other in its various guises: the female, the child, the immigrant, the Eastern European, the Yiddish speaker, the Holocaust survivor, the damaged, the deranged, and the infirm. Gertz goes on to show analogies between this approach and that of Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi in his film Wedding in Galilee (1987), where the Other is the Galilean Arab villager, the dweller in shadows, the female, the child, the sexually rebellious, the sexually impotent, the officially humiliated, and the politically rebellious. By systematically subverting the privileged spaces of patriarchal authority, military triumph, homogeneous national identity, and dominant language, all three films search for an alternative space where heterogeneity, ambiguity, and dialogic counterpoint make their presence felt.
In this changed cinematic climate, as Jacob Weitzner shows in "Yiddish in Israeli Cinema," Yiddish could now enter Israeli cinema as a medium of humor and irony, as a marker of division between high and low, between pretension and practice, between ideological purity and the humanly flawed. At times, however, as Weitzner points out, the fragmentary presence of Yiddish in a film serves to introduce a moral perspective--the standard of mentshlekhkeyt (humanity), of familial closeness, love, caring, decency--into an often amoral or uncaring social setting. This afterlife of Yiddish, in a country that was often, at the official and ideological level, no friend of Yiddish, has a dimension of loss and sadness to it but is testimony to the power of the Eastern European Jewish world both to haunt and to vitalize Israel's life of the imagination. Nonetheless, the cultural death that it bespeaks had its analogy to what was already happening in America in the era of The Jazz Singer.
The haunting influence, in Israeli cinema, of Eastern Europe and the destruction of European Jewry is brought into focus in a different way in Régine-Mihal Friedman's "The Double Legacy of Arbeit Macht Frei." The sole essay in this issue directly devoted to documentary cinema, Friedman's article examines two films about Arbeit macht frei fun Toitland Europa, a remarkable stage play first performed by the experimental troupe of the Acre Theater Center in Israel in the early 1990s. Israeli documentarist Asher Tlalim followed the troupe in its rehearsals and performances and interviewed its players for his 1994 film Al tig'u li basho'ah ("Don't Touch My Holocaust"), while German filmmaker Andres Veiel was creating his 1993 documentary on the same subject for German television, Balagan ("Chaos"). The play, an improvisational spectacle extending over five hours in performance, was an examination into survivor experience, the legacy of the Holocaust in Israel, and the unresolved tensions between Jews and Arabs in a disputed land, and between Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jewry. Friedman reads these works as a way into the complicated problematics of Holocaust memory as discussed by Lawrence Langer, Saul Friedlander, Dori Laub, Marianne Hirsch, Charlotte Delbo, Dominick LaCapra, and Thomas Elsaesser, among others. Friedman uses the well-known distinction between "common memory" of Holocaust trauma (the collective remembrance of events that supplies coherence, closure, and a measure of redemption) and "deep memory" (the personal recollections of survivors, which no common memory can reach and which dies with the survivor). She then explores a third category of memory, called "post-memory." This domain is mediated "not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation" (Hirsch), thus providing a realm where artistic, literary, theatrical, and cinematic exploration of Holocaust memory by successor generations can take root. Some of the best work in this vein, such as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, the Acre troupe's Arbeit Macht Frei, and Tlalim's Al tig'u li basho'ah, withholds a redemptive stance--its makers, its subjects, and its spectators remaining stranded between compulsive repetition and the acting out (what Elsaesser called "performed failure") of melancholies.
It is clear that Jewish film scholarship has been deeply immersed, directly or indirectly, in reckoning with the dimensions and effects of the historical crisis of 1933-45 and with the resultant forces that would transform the Palestinian Jewish Yishuv into the State of Israel and bring Jews into direct conflict with Palestinian Arabs and with the Arab and Islamic world more generally. These interlinked concerns are preoccupations that lie at the heart of present-day Jewish film scholarship. Yet they are in some sense prefatory to a much broader and more variegated set of concerns not covered by the present issue, which deserve to be stated here by way of encouraging future research and writing. These include: Yiddish cinema; the rise and flourishing of Jewish film festivals; the work of Jewish film and video archives; film portrayal of Jewish experience in postwar Europe, in Latin America, Africa, Asia (outside of Israel), Australia, and other lands; films of black Jewish life in America, Israel, and Africa; films about homosexual Jews; the role of independent filmmaking in Jewish cinema; film representation of premodern and pre-twentieth-century Jewish life; films about Jewish music, Jewish spirituality, Jewish orthodoxy and Hasidism, Jewish humor, the Jewish underworld, and Jewish charitable institutions; films dealing with the relation of Judaism to other faiths; films about the Jewish writer or Jewish artist; the Jewish biographical film genre as such; and, more generally, ways that the presence of the Jew in film affects issues of film theory and general cinema history. Certain maverick topics also suggest themselves: the use of the Kaddish in film; circumcision as a cinematic rite; film portrayals of the Jewish relation to food, to resort hotels, to matchmaking, to certain distinctively Jewish urban institutions such as the neighborhood shul, the deli, and the shvitz.
The range of issues and subjects in the cinema of Jewish experience is, in principle, limitless, and no journal issue can truly do it justice. What we have hoped to dramatize, in the present instance, is the peculiarly obsessive relation of Jewish cinema scholarship to some of the core concerns of twentieth-century history. As that century recedes from us--along with, perhaps, the Age of Cinema itself--this obsession may indeed prove to have been appropriate.
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