MEMORY OF THE CAMPS (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945, 1985)

At the end of the war, I made a film to show the reality of the concentration  camps, you know. Horrible. It was more horrible than any fantasy horror. Then, nobody wanted to see it. It was too unbearable. But it has stayed in my mind all of these years. —Alfred Hitchcock

 

As searing a film about the Holocaust as anyone could imagine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Memory of the Camps claims a curious history. Shot by cinematographers who accompanied Allied forces at the liberation of the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II, the raw footage was deemed worthy of preservation in the form of a whole film aimed at confronting Germans with the truth about the camps. Therefore, the project was launched by the British Ministry of Information and the American Office of War Information, under the supervision of British producer Sidney Bernstein. Bernstein, who would help produce Hitchcock films (Rope, 1948; Under Capricorn, 1949; I Confess, 1953), enlisted Hitchcock in the project. It is Hitch, the imaginative magician, who tamed the beast of the raw footage, giving it structure and coherence; the ideas behind its formal assenblage were all his. However, geopolitical propriety intervened; the shift in postwar Allied relations with Germany caused the project to be halted. Hitchcock’s brilliant work, incomplete, was buried alive in London’s Imperial War Museum, where it remained until the mid-1980s, when the U.S. TV documentary series Frontline appropriated the material, to which it added nose-rubbing script that actor Trevor Howard, possibly in his cups, read aloud with a voice that had dwindled down to a frail reed and in a smug, superior sing-song manner. Whatever damage the public television people inflicted, Hitchcock’s superlative movie shines through.

We tour a number of the camps, including Buchenwald and Dachau, just as those in charge there scramble to hide away the mass human slaughter they had accomplished (11 million people, including six million Jews). Mounds of corpses, limbs twisted every which way, were bulldozed into mass graves. These camp officials and their subordinates weren’t quick enough; we see, or imagine we see, everything. The coldness and cruelty of the entire enterprise of the camps are encapsulated in the attitude and behavior of guards: an example of the representative piecemeal strategy that permits the more delicate among us (including, ironically, Hitchcock himself) to get a grip on the enormity of the Nazi evil and horror. If you doubt that Hitchcock was a genius, consider the darkly magical dimension of this metaphor: structurally, the true nature of the camps is initially hidden behind the smiling faces of children, enraptured by the cameras, purportedly at the perimeter of Bergen-Belsen. Of course, in the actual chronology of events, who now knows when or where that shot was taken? How I love Hitchcock! How I love cinema! Perhaps our love for all this alone buoys our spirit as the imagery launches our descent into overwhelming depravity and inhumanity. Perhaps this is why Hitchcock elected to turn his Ed Gein-film (Psycho, 1960) into a black comedy.

Distancing is almost always necessary in art; this is most certainly the case when the subject matter is something so horrible as the Holocaust. I doubt, though, the folks at Frontline would agree.

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THE GREAT SADNESS OF ZOHARA (Nina Menkes, 1983)

The shot comes so early in the film I am not exactly sure that that is the protagonist, Zohara, with her back to the Wailing Wall while she is chewing an apple; but it must be. In the first of the film’s few interior scenes, the Jerusalem apartment she shares with (I assume) her parents finds Zohara on her bed in the throes of angst—and then eating again. Food, for this young Orthodox Jew, apparently, feeds her spiritual hunger. Zohara hastily packs a suitcase and, after a slapstick farewell to her (I guess) businessman-father, hits the road to the Moroccan desert—as the film’s promotional material puts it, “in Arab lands,” where she can sidestep distractions and spiritually self-commune. Our minds flash back to the Wailing Wall, to which writer-director Nina Menkes’s The Great Sadness of Zohara will eventually return: the remnant of a sacred past, part of the ruin of either a Jewish temple or (under a different name) an Islamic mosque, depending on which article and artifact of which different history and faith helps identify one, and thereby a perfect symbol for humanity’s alienation from itself.

Zohara’s solitary journey is by foot, train and boat—and foot again; we see this subjectively. Walking down a pathway between buildings, Zohara is disappearing as young children at equally serious play sturdily dominate the foreground of the shot. The children are in a holding pattern; Zohara is on her way.

But how real is her journey? Does it actually occur in grounded space, or is Zohara purely engaged in an interior journey whose symbolical signposts make up much of the film? There is no way of separating the spiritual from the material—although we do see after a while that Zohara’s suitcase has dwindled in form down to a bag. That magnificent subjectively-angled shot of Zohara looking down at throngs of humanity in the street: are we magically back in Jerusalem here, or are we at an intermediate point along the route of the journey? Is Zohara as isolated and alienated as ever, or is she absorbed by a crowd that she now wants, somehow, to be part of? Such ambiguity “plays fair” with us only when the alternative possibilities apply.

Menkes is her own exquisite color cinematographer. In perhaps her finest visual moment in this film, Zohara is at great distance from us in the Moroccan desert, walking away from the camera unswervingly. Typically, we are about to lose sight of her; beyond her, at a great distance from her, a line of buildings stretches horizontally, possibly a phantom-image or a mirage, mysterious and shimmering in a haze of heat. The grandeur of the image evokes both the freshness of the spiritual territory that Zohara is traversing and the illusory nature of the civilization that humanity has constructed on solid-seeming though shifting sands. Throughout the film, long-shots of Zohara’s becoming a distant dot as our eye loses its grip of her doubles ironically as a suggestion of her deepened intimacy with herself, her own spirit. This is profound and gorgeous filmmaking!

Menkes has underscored the autobiographical element in her film by casting her sister, Tinka, in the central role. Menkes holds Israeli, U.S. and German citizenship, and has used English for the haunting voiceover that accompanies Zohara’s journey: “He who descends to The Pit will not come up again. He will not return to his home. His home will never see him again. . . . How many exiles?” Menkes’s mother’s family settled in Jerusalem after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany; her father’s family, also Jewish, were killed in the Holocaust. Losses; separations; divides. The “great sadness of Zohara” is the same great sadness of all Jewish people everywhere.

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IN DARKNESS (Agnieszka Holland, 2011)

Subterranean handheld camera: flickering patches of light in darkness: human faces; human lives.

    There must always be the modern Israel: this is the message of Agnieszka Holland’s stunning In Darkness. About the almost inconceivably challenging ordeal of Jewish adults and children hiding for 14 months in the dark, rat-infested Lvov sewers during the German occupation, it is drawn from Krystyna Chiger’s memoir, The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow, and Robert Marshall’s In rhe Sewers of Lvov, itself drawn from recollections of survivors of the ordeal. (Lvov, Poland: Lviv, Ukraine, today.) Holland’s harrowing, tremendously moving achievement won her the best film prize at the Polish Film Festival.

    At least since Angry Harvest (1985), Holland has tackled material that reflects the divergent religious backgrounds of her journalist-parents, a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. In Darkness claims a double focus: the people in hiding; the Catholic sewer worker, Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz, best actor, Polish Film Awards), who assists them. Apparently, Socha was motivated by greed—he squeezed out of them whatever money and expensive material possessions “his Jews” had—until, over time, he responded to their plight. How accurate is this moral transformation? Even if it puts the best possible spin on ambiguous character matter, it is dramatically feasible. It isn’t the sort of whitewash that Steven Spielberg applies to a killer of Jews in the floridly melodramatic, cold-blooded Schindler’s List (1993).           

    Sparingly, the camera glides upward from below: to military boots on the ground; to Socha’s daughter’s confirmation ceremony above a makeshift Passover ceremony underneath the church. Sacred: the erasure of sound as a couple make love down below. “Stop here, or gently pass!”

    Liberation; Socha dies defending his daughter from rape: “Punishment for helping Jews.” The “liberated” escape.

    Israel.                                                               

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DOWN THERE (Chantal Äkerman, 2006)

Interviewer: “[S]o many of your films have to do with travel and moving from place to place—”

Chantal Äkerman: “You mean nomadisme. Well, I’m Jewish. That’s all. So I’m in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.”

Traditionally, documentaries “document” external realities. In 2006, two major, masterful works, however, both using digital video, exemplified “interior documentaries” (as distinct from Stan Brakhage’s  “internal documentary” charting the birth of his child): Jon Jost’s Passages, from the U.S.,and Chantal Äkerman’s Là-bas, from France and Belgium. Both of these are intensely personal works that admit a high degree of abstraction; both are in-depth revelations of the state of mind of their creators. Both works are inexhaustibly beautiful and haunting.

There is, though, a fundamental difference between them: Whereas Passages centers on the loss of a child, the mangling of Jost’s individual life by an ex-partner’s illegal separation of him and their daughter, Là-bas reveals the intersection of Äkerman’s personal history and the history of a people. In a seaside Tel Aviv apartment where she is staying while teaching in Israel, Äkerman totes the latter as an integral, defining part of the former. At root, Là-bas is about the persistence of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish life, memory and imagination.

Äkerman achieves here stillness and quiet; her static compositions, in mostly muted beiges and browns, are mostly inside her temporary apartment, the camera quite often gazing out a window at those across the way or down below in the street. A mildly fluttering curtain slightly relaxes the boxed-in suggestion, the sense of Äkerman’s entrapment—and of our own sense of renting space in her psyche. Among the sounds that soothe the quiet are the chirpings of birds and the droning of airplanes, the latter doubling as repeated projections of Äkerman’s landing in Israel and our own “landing” in her mind.

Now and then there is another sound: the shrill trill of Äkerman’s ringing phone. Someone, concerned, is inquiring how she is; Äkerman does her best to be reassuring.

Äkerman ventures outside to go to the beach: a lovely visit. This respite, though, becomes fearful, retroactively, when Äkerman learns that the beach was bombed after she left. Much of Là-bas mines the idea of shifting perspective for the purpose of establishing this as the foundation for another idea. Airplanes seemingly landing might also be taking off; the title, meaning “down there,” refers to Israel from the vantage of Europe but also refers to the street below once Äkerman, herself, is in Israel. It might also reflect the view from a plane in flight. There are reviewers, though, who miss the point that whatever Äkerman’s shifts in perspective, she is always a Jew, and consciously so, and therefore constantly vulnerable.

Nothing happens. (The bombing—the most salient “event” in the piece—occurs offscreen.) Precisely. The static shots; the lack of plot: the “nothing” encapsulates the stillness that cloaks the turbulence of Äkerman’s historic identity. Existence is. Identity is. Äkerman’s Jewishness is. The formal rigor, contemplative aura, long takes, and near perfect stillness in Là-bas all correspond to its is-ness. Perhaps the work it is most like, again one using digital video equipment, is the phenomenal Five Long Takes Dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu (2003), by Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, whose home base, like Brussels-born Äkerman’s, is, now, Paris, and whose tremendous onscreeen patience suggests the exquisite, clarifying pressure of eternity generating Wordsworthian “spots of Time.”

Under the pressure of Jewish history, both recent and prior, Äkerman employs a similar style. This style conveys her sensibility and spirit, particularly as her person—if you will, her image—is seldom on display in her minimalist mise-en-scène. When she is speaking on the telephone, we hear her voice but do not see her, and her voice is what we encounter in voiceover narration, where she may be sharing with us while not directly speaking to us. She is composing a diary as well as a “film”—something to help certify her bit of Jewish history. There is no telling what may happen to her, after all; who knows? Her modest record may count for something. Her sheer absence from so many frames—although in another sense she is “visible” everywhere—“embodies” the sense that she may “disappear” entirely, either by dint of diaspora, or worse. The calm of Là-bas distills, as it conceals, tension.

No, it is not calm; it is poise that is fraught with anxiety in and around dreams of Jewish extinction that permeate the world. Perhaps the stillness of Là-bas ultimately reflects Äkerman’s desire to hold onto her loved ones, to her commitment to the departed, including the Six Million, and to us, who may be anonymously providing her, in her imagination, with some measure of refuge. However much her compulsive “nomadism” translates into aching restlessness, we at least are “fixed.” We represent a kind of home.

Là-bas is the most brilliant and overwhelming work by Äkerman that I’ve seen since her incomparable masterpiece, D’est (1993). It radiates humanity and inner strength.

Grand Prize (co-winner), Marseille Festival of Documentary Film.

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ME AND THE COLONEL (Peter Glenville, 1958)

Danny Kaye did more than rein in his zaniness to play S.L. Jacobowsky, a Polish Jewish refugee attempting to exit Paris before the entrance of the Germans in 1940; he pretty much dispenses with it, giving a restrained, monotonous performance, and a nearly credible one, for which he won a Golden Globe. How I wish I enjoyed more Peter Glenville’s film version of Franz Werfel’s play Jacobowsky und der Oberst, or at least halfway believed the sort of détente reached by humble, philosophical Jacobowsky and the fellow refugee with whom he is attempting his escape, Colonel Prokoszny, an arrogant anti-Semite who comes from the same village in Poland. Actually, Curd Jurgens is far more convincing as the loutish colonel, and even he fails to convince on the score of this late-arriving détente between the two men. It doesn’t help that Suzanne, Prokoszny’s French companion and mistress, inflames his jealousy by warming up to Jacobowsky’s wryness and wit.
     It’s a slight (although long) thing, a comedy that takes poor advantage of the correct decision to be in black and white. It generates little suspense as to Jacobowsky’s fate because Kaye does not sufficiently inhabit the role he is playing; one knows that another Kaye film is soon to follow. However, I cannot dismiss the film entirely; it was a particular favorite of a friend of mine, whom I lost to leukemia a while back, and for the sake of whose memory I finally viewed it for the first time. Me and the Colonel, as it is called in this incarnation, is very gray and somewhat droll, but not imbued with the kind of power that we hope for from a film whose action needs to be measured against the sacred territory of the Holocaust.