This fourth part of the long essay on "Jewish faces in French Cinema" begins now to delve more deeply into epistemological, psychological and anthropological explanations. I begin here to develop new ideas that will be the core of a new projected book tentatively called "How the Jewish Imagination Challenges and Transforms the World."
Secrets, Illusions and Films of Experience
Western civilization has had
serious difficulty dealing with the difference between appearance and
reality....The price of Greek certainty is illusion We can “know” the truth,
but only a “truth” that is not at all “true” in human terms....Levinas,
squarely in the Jewish tradition, a tradition abandoned by Paul’s Christianity,
marks God’s absence as a sign of our ethical relations. God is brought into “consciousness” of His
absence by the moral deed, performing the commandments.[1]
The
film Un secret, directed by Claude Miller, with the screen adaptation of
Philippe Grimbert’s autobiographical novel of the same name by Claude Miller
and Natalie Carter, came out in 2007. Again,
while there is a history of Jewish awareness of persecution and prejudice that
is normally passed on from generation to generation as a coping mechanism and a
way of being sensitive to signs of impending danger, the family decision to
keep the boy from knowing what had happened—and therefore who he and what he
really is—makes him feel alienated from those he loves and trusts most in the
world. But otherwise, there are no
visible or audible markers of Jewishness and no belief system that
distinguishes these people from anyone else in modern, secular France. There are, however, two scenes, that suggest
a Jewish background.
In one, the
stepmother and aunt of the young boy discuss how the child was not given a
circumcision but rather a “goy circumcision”. The discussion at best alludes to a proper rabbinical brit milah since two factors stand between the religious knowledge and memory and the boy's awareness of what is being said: on the one hand, the women do not have an intimate knowledge of the ritual itself other than as a family tradition; and on the other, the boy who recollects this occasion and projects it into the novel and then cinematic scene, is both too young and too distant from his own background to imagine it fully.
Another brief episode inserted into the
cinematic version that does not appear in the original novel[2]
occurs when the entire mishpucha in the late 1930s, before the young boy
is born but his older sibling whom he is named after appears, go to the cinema
together, during which they sit through a newsreel showing Hitler making
speeches at some mass rally. In this
flashback that imagines a body of knowledge that the narrator could not come to
know and which it is unlikely any of his informants would recall and pass on to
him, the director has the faces of the extended family reveal their shocked realization that the very worst is on the way.[3] When they are discussing these images on the
way home from the movie theatre, they attempt to comfort one another than such
things as they have just seen in Germany could not happen in France because of
its history of tolerance and justice; but then one of the aunts asks them to
remember what happened
to Dreyfus, an allusion which casts a dark shadow over their wished-for
optimism. At such a crucial juncture,
while Jewish sensitivity to impending persecution is highlighted on the faces
of the family, no one calls upon any traditional Jewish values, beliefs or
practices to give them courage, suggest a way of dealing with the crisis, or providing
a religious context to their apprehensions.
Again, as seems to happen characteristically in French cinema, though Jews suffer because they are
Jews, what it actually means to be a Jew
is never fully dealt with. Novelists, script-writers, directors, and actors--and perhaps even Jewish audiences--have separated themselves from the culture they were born into, and seek at rthe same time, perhaps because of this deliberate cultural separation, to present themselves as merely normal French men and women, iof not as ordinary human beings.
Nor does the question
of what a Jew looks like come into play: here is a point of deep significance. For while individual
French Jews may not see themselves anything distinctive or remarkable, whether in the historical past or their own private memories, the
anti-Semites around them believe they do see something distinctive, ugly, repulsive and dangerous—they recognize
in the men, women and children they see in normal life, as on the screen,
something that fits the grotesque caricatures purveyed by hostile cartoonists
and other propagandistic illustrators ever since the nineteenth century.
How does an Anti-Semite Recognizes a Jew on the Screen?
There is nothing in the universe
but what is hidden, but what is unknown[4]
Rebuffed by the larger society
they were celebrating, the Hollywood Jews constructed a parallel society of
their own...[5]
During
the Second World War, during the German occupation of northern France, the Nazi
government helped set up a publishing house to make available racist
anti-Semitic literature called La Nouvelle Edition Française. Among the books printed by this collaborationist
enterprise is a pseudo-scientific screed Comment reconnaitre le juif [How to Recognize a Jew} by George Montandon,[6]
someone purporting to be an anthropologist.
Although the same slanders and lies found in this pamphlet can be found
in German publications of the National Socialist propagandists, this book
expresses itself in far more sophisticated terms and illustrates its point, not
with the crude caricatures typical of Der Sturmer, with their grotesque
depictions of hook-nosed Jews, demonic faces, and subhuman activities, but with
clear photographs of influential and well-known French Jews of the early
decades of the twentieth century. Horrible
as is the message of such a mockery of anthropological scholarship, it does,
however, make quite clear what the range of anti-Jewish scare-mongering
consists of. Because it addresses a
French reading public, whether any literary or philosophically trained
individuals read and took it seriously—and the probability is that all too many
did—this kind of discourse embodies its clichés in a language that guides us
towards a way of interpreting and evaluating French films before, during and
after the period of explicit Nazi control over the organs of culture in
Paris. The discussion of how Jews are perceived on screen is not the same as how Jews are perceived in real life, but they are related, and bring into the analysis we are undertaking the problematic of how--as well as if--reality is a social construct, this culture being partly understood within the technical history of cinema, as it is of literature, journalism and historiography.
NOTES
[1] David Shasha, “When Illusion
Becomes Reality: Embracing the Cold Face of Evil” Sephardic Heritage Update (30
November 2011) online at david.shasha.shu@gmail.com (seen 01/12/2011).
[2] Philippe Grimbert, Un secret (Paris: Grasset,
2004).
[3] On close-ups and steady focus on
facial expressions in film compared to novelistic writing, portrait painting
and icons in religious art, see Italo Calvino, “Cinema and the Novel: Problems
of Narrative”, originally in Cahiers de Cinéma (October 1966), now in The Literature Machine: Essays, trans.
Patrick Creagh (London: Picador/Pan Books in association with Secker &
Warburg, 1987) pp. 76-77. “But the close-up gives the spectator a
special feeling: the larger the image the more he feels directly involved...”
(p. 76).
[4] René Francis Augustus, Vicount de
Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity, or the Spirit and Beauty of the
Christian Religion, trans. and ed. Charles I. White (Philadelphia, PA: John
Murphy & Co., 1856; rep. New York: Howard Fertig, 1976) p. 52.
[5] Charles Champlin, “The Founding Fathers of
Hollywood”, a review of Neal Gabler, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews
Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988) in the Los Angeles Times
(25 September 1988) at http://articles.latimes.com/print/1988-09-25/books/bk-4083_1_jews-invented-hollywood (seen 11/12/2011).
[6] George Montandon, Comment reconnaître le Juif ?
(Paris: Nouvelles Editions Françaises 1940; repr. Lenculus, 2008). On
the cover of this pamphlet Montandon is identified as “Professur à l’école
d’Anthropologie.”
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