Imagination and Midrash
The camera exists to create a new
art and to show above all what cannot be seen elsewhere: neither in theatre nor
in life; otherwise, I’d have no need of it; doing photography doesn’t interest
me. That, I leave to the photographer.[1]
Though there may be films about Jews and Judaism not
made by Jews or in a Jewish manner, just as there maybe films made by Jews
which are not about Jews or Judaism, or even films produced by Jews who know
little or nothing about Jewish life or the Jewish religion, other than some
simple homiletic or sentimental concerns for the sufferings of people caught up
in the Holocaust, or about the supposed evils and arrogance of Israelis and the
so-called Zionist entity, the whole conglomeration of such cinematic history
can be studied for several serious reasons.
For one thing, as the art of motion pictures developed from the late
nineteenth century, from the earliest attempts by the Lumière Brothers’ short
scenes of people and events in action right through the development of silent comedies
and sentimental narratives, along with operas, epics, erotic features and other
stage-like productions, and on to the
first talkies, this new technology was more than an extension of still photography.
By both creating new kinds of recording
of the world to supplement painting and enhancing the memory of those who lived
through complex times, motion pictures developed new kinds of memory and
perception, and then eventually new forms of behavior, speech and
understanding of the world. These
advances at first seemed to conform to, then imitate, and eventually to see the
emergent modernist individual and collective self with unthought-of modes of pseudo-reality. Hence it is possible to approach all these
phenomena as forms of midrash, that
is, of analysing, interpreting and applying insights from the readings of texts
and textualized lives. Some critics have
noticed these dynamic changes, but usually only in regard to radical innovative
cinematic breakthroughs, that is, as technology on the same footing as steam engines,
telegraphs and daguerreotypes, forgetting
that cinema was an even more radical breakthrough in epistemology, that is in
formulating conceptions of reality, testing the validity of experience, and
discovering unexpected psychic and aesthetic dimensions of the world outside
the normal passages of time through slow-motion, high-speed, and other
manipulations of the camera.[2]
Since
we are focusing on images of Jews and Judaism in French cinema, the more broad
revolution in aesthetics, epistemology and perception can be put aside for the
moment. There is also a special emphasis I have placed on the images of
anti-Semiticism, on the distorted, grotesque and slanderous depictions
emanating from the Third Reich, although such pictures have their roots deeper
in European history, The significance
here begins simply by forcing oneself to note how the enemies of the Jewish
people believed they saw and experienced the Jews around them and how they
wanted to ward off whatever evils they perceived by demonizing them, still
further and passing on their fears to others.
It is not enough to dismiss such outrageous pictures as untrue and
unreal, no more so than one rids the world of madness and violence by calling
the hallucinations of mentally ill criminals mere fantasies. Such hallucinatory images contain a kind of
truth, the reality of the pains and fears of those who are projecting their archaic
and chaotic demons outside of their own minds.
The second significance is that the perpetrators of
these horrible anti-Semitic pictures, and perhaps even more so those who
produce more subtle, less overtly grotesque faces, bodily forms and contorted
gestures are sensitive to aspects of Jewish life which are indeed different,
and especially, let us add, to the pained and humiliated expressions of Jewish
people living within hostile, intolerant or merely uncomprehending
societies. Just as small children mimic
the words and deeds of their parents and surprise their elders by having
imitated what the older relations, friends of the family and community members
do not consciously recognize in themselves or have attempted to suppress for
the sake of social harmony and personal ambition, so anti-Semites sometimes
reflect—in however a distorted way—actual characteristics of Jewish life. In other words, those who are perpetually
tense, anxious and fearful can appear as cold, angry and manipulative from the
outside.
But
when it comes to the faces of Jewish children, with their fresh, supple bodies,
there is less opportunity to show the more haggard, tension-ridden faces of
adults, as we have noted in the few examples of French films discussed
above. The young boys and girls are only
vaguely aware of who and what they are, let alone why they and their families
are subjected to the difficulties they experience. In this way, although there may be an
occasional family ritual they participate in—such as candle-lighting on the Sabbath
or attending a synagogue—the children remain neutral, drawing sympathy
precisely because they are no different from any other French child around them
at school or in the street. They are
different because they are singled out by the forces of history, not by any
intrinsic personality trait or visible feature of their anatomy. Unlike Hollywood directors, Jewish
film-makers in France do not play casually with racial or cultural stereotypes,
indicating that they are self-consciously aware of not being full assimilated,
although in some recent American-made film characters do appear as intermarried
with gentiles, deliberately separating themselves from domestic and community
engagement with other Jews, and yet speaking with recognizable Yiddish accents,
displaying caricatured brashness and even using hairstyles, beards or
ostentatious mannerisms to signify their identities.
Occasionally
some celebrity or other remarks on the unfairness of Jews dominating Hollywood
and thus forcing certain moral or political issues to receive undue attention,
or exploiting their positions to favour other Jews or Israelis in the upper
ranks of the industry. While these
comments are almost immediately denied or retracted, they do show a residual
layer of anti-Semitism in the United States.
In France, however, even while certain executives, producers and actors
are manifestly Jewish, usually by their names more than their physical appearances,
their moral lapses and other financial or sexual peccadillos tend not to be
reported as due to their Jewish backgrounds.
Thankfully, the Hollywood sickness has not spread—or reappeared—in
Paris.
[1] Max Ophüls cited by Tag
Gallagher, “Max Ophuls: A New Art—But Who Notices?” Senses of Cinema 22
(4 October 2002) online (15 December 2010) at
http:www.sensesofcinema. com/2002/feature-qarticles/ophuls (seen 03/12/2011).
[i2 Lucien Rebatet, Les tribus du cinéma et du théâtre
(Paris: Nouvelles Editions Francaises, 1941; repr.Lenculus, 2007). On the cover the author is identified
parenthetically as François Vinneuil.
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