This is the opening
section to a long essay on the place of Jews in French cinema. Other sections will appear from time to
time.
Uncertainty is the very stimulus
that compels man to unfold his intellectual capacity. Every idea within Judaism is multifaceted and
filled with contradictions, opposing opinions and unsolvable paradoxes. The greatness of the talmudic sages was that
they shared with their students their own struggles and doubts, and their
attempts at resolving them, as when Beth Hillel and Beit Shammai debated the
essential, existential question of whether man should have been created or not (Eruvin 13b).[2]
Unless
we shift out focus to the bedrock attitudes, principles and modes of perception
within Judaism, it will be hard to find among the faces of those Jews who
appear in cinema—by which we mean, not only the often stereotypical expressions
and gestures of the comic or mocked stage Jew, but also the director,
cameramen, scene designers, writers, entrepreneurs, all of whom constitute the
movie industry from the very beginning—what it is and why it is that Jews play
such important roles. It is not
necessary to emphasise as many news media do the long black gabardines, shtrimmeleh and bearded faces of Hasidic
men to signal the presence of a Jew, a trick parodied by Woody Allen several
times in his comic portrayal of the archetypical neurotic Jew convinced that he
appears to be anything than the assimilated American he really is.[iii]
In
fact, we cannot engage with, let alone understand, the emergence of Jewish cinema
as a technology, an entertainment, an epistemology, and an aesthetic, if we
glide along the surface of what we think we know because that is what
“everyone” expects us to know, from the liberal critics to the rabid
anti-Semites. In this essay, rather than deal with the multitude of Jewish
films in America in the twentieth century and down to our own first decade of
the twenty-first, because any discussion will be saturated by familiar conceits
and unquestioned assumptions, I plan to look to French cinema and exploit its
three main differences from the Hollywood phenomena:[iv]
its general unfamiliarity to most American audiences, professional and popular;
its embodiment of assimilated ambiguity in a society that has a turbulent,
controversial and guilt-ridden history of engagement with Jews and Judaism; and
its almost unique repertoire of clichés and stereotypes that do not arise from
Yiddish music hall and vaudeville comedies and melodramas but from its Catholic
iconography and specific history of cultural exclusivism.
When I talk about Jewish films,
then, I do not only mean some combination of cinematic events that may have a
Jewish subject, Jewish characters, Jewish actors, Jewish directors, Jewish
technicians and technical artists, Jewish backers, and Jewish audiences and
critics;[1]
these are important facets of the phenomena, to be sure, but they do not
address the essential questions—who is a Jews, what is Judaism, and when and
how do Jewish perceptions, values and emotions come into play.[v] In a sense, too, because we are talking
moistly about French cinema, the questions also have to be posed: what is an
anti-Semite, how does anti-Semitism interfere or stimulate Jewish film-making
and the reception of Jewish films, to the point even where a non-Jewish film
becomes Jewish in the context of and in reaction to anti-Jewish pressures. I am one of those who consider that
Judeophobia, implicit and explicit—including the contemporary discourses of
anti-Zionism and anti-intellectualism or anti-rationalism (that is, most
versions of post-modernism)—cannot be brushed aside as marginal or incidental
to the subject of Jewish Cinema.
Mimes, Mirrors
and Masks
The fact is I’ve been haunted for
years by a line from Hotel Terminus, Max [sic] Ophul’s movie about Klaus
Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” that went like this. “Only Jews and old Nazis are interested in
Jews and old Nazis.”[vi]
French
feature films about Jews during the Second World War and at other times are a
strange mixture of poignant scenes of sympathy and regret for what happened
during the Shoah and a strange white-washing away of French complicity, both in
the occupied northern part of the country and in the fantasized autonomous
Vichy south.[2] But since the supposed emancipation of Jews
during the Revolution of 1789, the image and the role of Jews in the
nation—republic, monarchy, empire or whatever flavour of government was in
fashion at the moment—has also been ambiguous. But because disproportionately
Jews have been involved in the film industry virtually from its start, the
characters, situations and significance of the Jewish presence has been greater
than the reality out in the great world would have led one to expect. Take, for instance, the recent motion picture
called in English Sarah’s Key—originally from a novel written in English
with this same title but only made into a French-language film. On the one hand, it deals with a young Jewish
girl named Sarah who tries to return home after being rounded up during the Vel
d’hiv episode and on the other with a non-Jewish and non-French woman reporter
who tries to track down Sarah or anyone associated with her since her escape
from the Nazis.[3] In a good sense, this film reverses the
tendency of the French establishment to airbursh away the fact that the
Parisian gendarmes took a leading role in the rafle or round-up of Jews
in August 1943: General De Gaul had literally had the images of the local
police airbrushed from the very few existing photographic evidence of this
terrible event in French history. In a
bad sense, albeit not an anti-Semitic sense, however, the film, like the novel
from which it derives, does not explain why Jews were rounded up—or how Jews
reacted to the persecution: that is, other than this action being a show of
bureaucratic hatred in collusion with the occupying Nazi government and other
than mothers and fathers making vain attempts to save their children and being
cowed by police brutality. Even further,
while there are some hints that subsequent generations related to Sarah shy
away from being identified with Jewish victims of the Holocaust, no one, not even family who by discovering
their Jewish connections, show the slightest curiosity in finding out what it
means to be a Jew or a Holocaust survivor.
[1]
This essay began nearly ten years ago as a paper to be delivered to a
conference somewhere in the USA, but as I was too ill to attend I dropped the
preparations until more recently, and this version brings the argument somewhat
up-to-date.
[2] Nathan Lopes Cardozo, “Judaism:
The Art of Bold Ideas,” Part 1, The Jerusalem Post (23 November 2011)
online at http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=246743 (seen
03/12/2011).
[iii]
On the question of what constitutes a Jewish film or a Jew in a film or even a
Jewish element in cinema, see David Gillota, “The Diversity of Jewish Film,” a
review of Lawrence Baron, ed., The Modern
Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press,
2011) on H-Net (May 2013) at
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35075.
[iv] These matters are discussed from
a different perspective in Norman Simms, “A Cycle of Judicial Memory and
Immoral Forgetting: Vel d’hiv, 1942” Shofar 30:2 (2012) 123-137.
[v]
For a perceptive overview of books published on this subject in the last
several years and careful synthesis of the topics they deal with, see Shair
Ginsburg,” Jew and Cinema. Stereotypes and Self-Images,” a review of Nathan
Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring
Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2012) in H-Net Reviews
(June 2013) online at
http:www.h-net.org/reviews.showrev.php?id=35887
[vi] Michael Fox speaks of Arnaud
Despiechin, a non-Jewish director, who learned from Jean Renoir how to make
films in which Jewish characters are not made obvious by their personalities,
actions, appearance or way of speaking, and who may be admirable or despicable
or merely ordinary; Kings & Queen” director hopes to destroy Jewish and
French stereotypes” in Jweekly.com
(3 June 2005) online at http://www.weekly.com/ article/full/26165/-kings-queen-hopes-to-destroy (seen 29/11/ 2011). However, in Kings & Queen, the lead actor Hippolyte Girardot on his own
initiative has the Jewish drug addict Maramne don a yarmulka in a crucial scene
to indicate the irony, contradiction or simple paradox—or mere fact—of a Jewish
criminal who celebrates the Sabbath.
No comments:
Post a Comment