Who will write our history

Jewish life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto was remarkably recorded and preserved by one history teacher, Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, and his cadre of dedicated friends who created the Oyneg Shabbes (i.e., “Joys of Sabbath”) Archive. It comprises 60,000 pages of writings, posters, announcements, photographs, product labels, doodles and other memorabilia. This film is based on historian Dr. Samuel Kassow’s book on the archive.

Dr. Ringelblum’s project undertook to record the minutiae of the Jewish people’s lives in Warsaw, from their prewar cultural richness, through the suffering under the Nazi occupation, to the tragic defeat of the uprising. “Will the Germans write our history,” he asked, “or will we?” Leaving it to the Germans would have left the Jews to be eternally defined by German propaganda.

  The intention grew from recording the day to day lives of the Jews in Warsaw, then detailing the gathering storm of persecution, and finally providing evidence for the postwar prosecution. The amassed material was buried in three caches in a cellar bellow a cellar. Recovering the two we have was like an archaeological probe under the ruins of Warsaw. Ironically, a church spire was used to locate the right ruins. Throughout the film, such poetic moments ruffle the wash of horrors.

Though this film is commonly labelled “documentary,” it actually interweaves documentary footage (in black and white) with dramatic reconstruction of scenes (in colour). Polish actors play the historic figures, with American actors (e.g., Joan Allen, Adrien Brody) doing the English voice-over. The  actors read the diaries from the Archive, but they’re still actors playing roles. That certainly does not diminish the realism of the drama, nor its significance and emotional impact.

The film was shot in Poland, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Its languages are English, Polish and most pointedly Yiddish, the momma loshen threatened with extinction. 

It was written and directed by the American, Roberta Grossman, who has worked in film and TV documentary for around 30 years. Her titles include In the Footsteps of Jesus (2003), Women on Top: Hollywood and Power (2003), Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action (2005) and Hava Nagilla: The Movie (2012). Her own career suggests she may have found some identification with the character who brings us into the film’s world, from the opening narration to the epilogue: Rachel Auerbach, a Warsaw social and arts critic whom Ringelblum persuaded to stay in Warsaw to help run a soup kitchen.  

There’s a curious touch in the title. Dr. Kassow’s book asks the question that inspired Ringelblum’s project: “Who will write our history?” The film drops the question mark. For now we know the answer. The Oyneg Shabbes heroes managed to write the history. This film passes it around.
     We should also observe how timely this history proves to be. It appears when Poland has been attempting to evade its historic responsibility for the Warsaw horrors. Worse, it recalls the kind of racist dictatorship that seems to be stirring itself back into life today.

Eighth Grade

There are so many beauties in this heart-breaking glimpse into contemporary adolescence.

It opens on Kayla’s YouTube video — a halting advice to kids to “be yourself.” Whatever that is, however to be it, that is the mystery engaged. These videos afford Kayla the appearance of confidence, self-knowledge, poise, success, in which her real life falls short.

Kayla’s day begins with her following a make-up instructional video to put on her face. Only then does she video herself waking up (“Ugh!!”). In scene after scene we watch her facial acne gradually reappear under her fading make-up. The film is about preparing a face to meet the faces that we meet. 

It’s also an anthropological record of the smart phone generation. The teens seem constantly plugged in, whether it’s Kayla at dinner or in her bed or the snotty Kennedy and her friend together/apart in the school halls. This constant connection betrays a tragic alienation. 

  Kayla’s scenes with her “shadow,” the four-years-older Olivia and her friends, replay that dynamic at another level. Olivia needs Kayla to be “cool,” “awesome,” to confirm herself. Riley’s backseat seduction attempt is a harsher version of the needy pretending to be strong. Kayla’s humbling there ends her YouTube pretence to grace. 

Her crush Aiden is the wouldbe bad boy, with his cool swagger, mouth-farts and rep for demanding sexy photos. Happily, Kayla abandons her training to give blow jobs and instead settles into the more civilized dinner party with Kennedy’s much nicer cousin Gabe. Over chicken nuggets and fries, across a long dining room table, Gabe and Kayla self-consciously attempt something so old-fashioned, a conversation.  

  This wonderful scene balances the pool party where they met. Kayla didn’t want to go to the party that Kennedy didn’t want to invite her to. The insistence comes from Kayla’s father and Kennedy’s mother. 

At the party Kayla’s slow approach to the pool conveys her excruciating fear, her sense of inadequacy, indeed shame. Her disastrous bathing suit emphasizes the inferiority she feels around those carefree, buoyant beauties. She seems to be trying to hide from that suit. Only Gabe shows any interest in her. He challenges her to a breath-holding competition, then shows off his pool handstand. Their dinner date is a hopeful parallel to this scene.  

As Kayla’s second “time capsule” box suggests, the struggle for a confident identity doesn’t end at any point in school — or any time soon after, as we elders know. Kennedy’s mom’s apparent interest in Kayla’s dad suggest these needs and ploys continue past puberty into adulthood, if not indeed adultery.

  As the film examines Kayla’s age-appropriate self-centredness we don’t learn much about the other characters. In her scenes with her father he tries to connect and she snappishly rejects him. 

They finally connect when he helps her burn her old box of dreams. Sensing her despair, he pours out his own emotions. He recalls his old fears about how he would raise her when her mother left them. He tells Kayla how much he loves and respects her and how confident he is in her ability to handle herself. She leaps into his embrace.   
      This connection should sustain Kayla — until her next everyday challenge. 

Red Cow

Red Heifer would be a more appropriate title. It would replace the implication of bovine insentience with the tribal impulse to eliminate — the ennobling euphemism is “sacrifice” — something natural but irregular. That murder nominally serves the socially constructed “natural”. 

The obvious victim is the freakish red heifer, which is to be sacrificed on Rosh Hashannah to fulfill some biblical injunction. It will be killed, then burned, on the grounds that something unusual must be killed to protect the rather proscriptive version of God’s nature. 

  The other — more central — victim is the 15-year-old heroine Benny whose emerging sense of her lesbianism and increasing political awareness alienate her from her widowed father, Joshua. The first shot fills the screen with Benny’s cascading blonde/red hair. This introduction defines her in sensual, luxuriant terms. This is the natural beauty that here evolves into her lesbian passion, her sympathy for the pent and doomed heifer, her need to escape her father’s strictures and her own inhibitions. In the first shot she is starting to emerge from sleep (i.e., girlhood).

There’s another coming-of-age twist here. Joshua leads a radical movement against the Jewish ban from Temple Mount. As the film is set on the eve of Itzhak Rabin’s assassination, it prefigures Israel’s national shift of consciousness from its initial harmony into a new, internal violence.  

When Benny ultimately flees to Tel Aviv to make her own life amid that liberal modernity, where poems crop up around the corner, her personal quest reflects Israel’s potential shift away from archaic rituals into modern humanism. In contrast, the heifer stays put in its pen, even after Benny has offered her freedom. The question is whether Israel will turn modern or revert to its harsh orthodoxy. 

Though the woman writer/director Tsivia Barkai Yacov properly focuses on Benny, she makes Joshua an equally intriguing figure. He was widowed at Benny’s birth, so perhaps has made her too important a figure in his life. There are shots where his gripping her hand seems too firm. In naming her Benny he has made her his son (Ben) as well as daughter. In that spirit he lays the ritual teffilen with her, a rite not normally accorded women. He is remaking her in his image. 

Joshua admits to her his unfulfilled longing since his wife died, confirmed in his early morning cold bath in the cave. After his bath he first covers his privates, then puts on his skullcap, then his inner talles, then his pants and the rest. That order reveals his total commitment to religious propriety.  

He seems to have invested his emotions entirely into his religion and its political extension, to the point of violent radicalism. This fires his rejection of his daughter’s sexual identity. Because his religious and political extremism has overridden his human values, Joshua rejects his daughter’s lesbianism and independence. 
     He also expels her lover, Yael, the troubled teenager he brought into the community for therapy. She has been cutting herself, for the pain that briefly penetrates her emotional numbness. Joshua punishes both girls for their love, the girl recovering from emotional detachment and his daughter’s awakening.

Blindspotting

This is a contemporary classic opera. As our canonic operas were in their day, this uses an epic story of heightened emotions, poetic expression and musical energy to reflect upon contemporary issues. 

Oakland serves as a microcosm of America’s roiling racism, with trigger-happy white cops, a divided nation and blacks walking a quaking line to preserve their sanity, dignity and safety. It catches the current trickle-down racism.

This is the America that the blacklisted NFL QB Colin Kaepernick kneels at the anthem to protest, at which Republicans cower behind the pretence to patriotism. 

The film tips its hand when Verdi’s drinking song from La Traviata plays behind the opening credits: “let's not waste our time with things that don't give us pleasure. Let's enjoy life, for the delight of love is fleeting and all too brief….”

  Like most of our opera experiences today, for much of the time we don’t know what the characters are saying. That’s okay. The plot, emotions and psychology come through. For the most part this obscurity is due to the strangeness of the street language. 

But one scene is written to let us off the hook: Miles negotiates the sale of a rowboat to a free-wheeling African American stranger. Both speak languages completely foreign to us but — it turns out — also to each other! Unlike the larger communities they represent, they can strike an agreement and understanding with no idea of what the other is saying. The willingness overrides their differences.

  Unlike the Republican nightmare, here the good guy Collin is the African American, trying to get through the last three days of his probation without a lapse that would toss him back into jail. 

  His best friend Miles, the white guy, has the virtue of lifelong loyalty, total freedom from racism but a violent streak, short fuse and inability to foresee and prevent disaster. The film’s question is whether Miles will prove Collin’s undoing or Collin will effect Miles’ redoing. 

The heroes’ respective street argot plays like music, especially when they unleash their wit and musical energy to ex temporize rap. The language is as free-wheeling, energetic and apparently unrestrained as the shooting and editing are. This is one zippy flick. 

Indeed, in Collin’s climactic confrontation with the pathetic white cop Collin’s emotional tirade is a rap song. His art amplifies his emotions, expresses his terribly conflicted ideas — and by finding artistic form provides an alternative outlet to what his pointed gun threatened. This aria gives Collin and his story the soaring of our purest spirit. He makes his point with a poem not the gun.  

The title points to a central theme, our choice between two perspectives within the same frame. 

  Collin’s ex Val is living the same test she demonstrated in her psychology review. There the viewer sees either the two faces on the side or the vase between them. Read the foreground or read the background? Collin calls it “face-vasing.” (Jasper Johns did a famous silkscreen version with two Picassos and a cup.)

Val used to see his best side. Now she first sees the ugliness of his disastrous fight. That ends their love.

But even that perspective is queered. As bouncer Collin was just doing his duty, trying to get the dunk to take his flaming drink back into the bar. Which we see, the positive or the negative, the action or its context, depends upon our given bias. And on our ability to acknowledge and to transcend our biases. 
In its ambition, achievement and nuanced success this could be the best American film so far this year.