Jewish Faces in French Films Part 2

Part 2

I have indicated from the opening motto in Part 1 of this essay that there is a recognizable set of personality and intellectual qualities that tend to set Jews apart, whether they are modern Americans or Continental, old-fashioned Ashkenazi or Sephardim, though, to be sure, there are very important specific differences among these groups.  For the perspective of this essay, however, the differences between how American film-makers present Jewish faces is very different from that which is done in France.  Hollywood, as we shall see, reacts off and reflects a community that is comfortable and highly secularized, whereas Paris directors and actors experience and project a Jewishness that increasingly feels uncomfortable in its national circumstances and has experienced again first-hand the rising threats of anti-Semitism.

So far as Sarah’s Key is concerned Jews were and are just ordinary people called Jews; they have no differences in their history, religion, or attitude towards history.  Though Sarah’s parents are recent migrants from Poland, they have no accents and do not speak Yiddish.  There is nothing stereotypical about their dress or mannerisms, food or personalities.  They are empty ciphers with the odd title of Juif or Israelite.  A related film almost contemporary with this one called Le Rafle (The Round-Up) seems to use some of the same scenes constructed of the velodrome and goes over a lot of the same episodes.  But its characters are based on historical persons, whereas Sarah’s Key is totally fictional other than the round up itself.  This Round-Up attempts to be more documentary than structured as a novel or a drama, with an enlargement of resonance, so that Hitler is seen for a few moments making a hate-filled speech against the Jews, and the characters aware that being Jewish means something a little more than just being perpetually victimized by irrational people. 

            But is there a mythical Jew in French films as there is in American popular cinema?  Does mythical here mean typical or stereotypical, a caricature, a travesty, a theatrical mask?  In the sense that some Jewish types seen on screen, large and small, derive from comic routines seen on the old vaudeville or Catskill circuit—self-mockery based on the immigrant and  second-generation experiences of East European Jews, gentle, nostalgic, and bitter-sweet—there really aren’t any in French movies.  In a European context, those images, voices and shticks come too close to the horrible grotesques in Nazi newspapers and propaganda films.  British actors can imitate some of the types found in London’s East End and in the theatrical history of Shylock and later Fagan.   

In one sense, the development of cinematography is an extension of the invention of photography, the ability to fix light rays passed through a lens on to a chemical plate, and thus preserve that picture for study and manipulation.  In another sense, once it was realized that a series of such photographic images taken in rapid succession and projected in an overlapping sequence could give the impression of movement, this illusory phenomenon could be further manipulated to reveal aspects of reality never before noticed or available to the naked eye at all, such as the galloping of a horse, the opening of a flower, or the patterned movements of persons in social intercourse.  But from its very beginnings, cinema as entertainment went in several directions: on the one hand, following Georges Méliès, it would embellish and enhance the tricks and fantasies of prestidigitation; while on the other, following the Lumière brothers, it would pretend to document historical persons and events and imitate such accuracy in fictional dramas.  Entertainment, however, was only one venue and goal of cinema in its first developments.  There were also continuations of scientific exploration, coupling motion picture technology to microscopes, telescopes and x-rays, the cinematic camera breaking down and reassembling the images produced, filtering lights and colours to expose unexpected features of reality, altering angles of perception and merging perspectives to analyse and speculate on prior and as yet undeveloped aspects of growth and evolution.  Aesthetic and epistemological speculations also could be carried out through technological refinements of capturing, fixing and printing images, reshaping reality, distorting natural shapes and textures, and interpreting impressions, expressions and hidden potentialities of the imagination.  Making, showing and reacting to the cinema became more and other than a theatrical event or educational spectacle.  What was projected on to the screen in a darkened room was only a part of the experience.  What was going on in the cellars beneath the stage and thus hidden from the sight and hearing of the audience, as well as in the projectionist’s booth behind the audience and in the factories where the films were prepared, edited and distributed, all created new dimensions of affective and cognitive knowledge to the phenomenon.