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 […]
Tag Archives: Holocaust/grunes
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Dennis Grunes 