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Cinema Tov and Mazel Tov
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The Jewish Film Festival kicks off year five
by JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN
All bunged-up on too much cinematic sausage? The Montreal Jewish Film Festival might just be the chicken soup enema you sorely crave. Entering its fifth year, the festival will be featuring films from 11 countries and will be dealing with diverse subjects that range from baseball legends to Holocaust survivors. Some highlights:
In the Israeli romantic comedy, Yana's Friends, a young Russian immigrant is left by her husband, pregnant and without resources. There's a slapstick sub-plot that revolves around a paraplegic war hero that's a little on the Weekend at Bernie's side, but if watching people chase a man in a wheelchair rolling down a hill is your idea of funny, get ready to laugh yourself well.
As the sun beats down on an Israeli cab driver, his shoulder hair suddenly becomes an angelic halo of light. Voyages offers great beauty in the most unlikely scenarios, it also reminds you how great cinema can reveal so much through small, poetic moments. Director Emmanuel Finkiel interweaves the stories of three different women in Poland, Tel Aviv and Paris in a heart-breakingly sad look at the effects of the Holocaust a half-century later. A must see. (Voyages plays with English subtitles as part of the festival; it also opens this Friday, May 12 at Ex-Centris in its French version.)
A Jewish shmatah salesman and a Christian miner's daughter fall in love in turn-of-the-century Wales in Solomon and Gaenor, a lushly filmed, melodramatic tale of forbidden love. It's a little schmaltzy, but if you're looking for an excuse to cry, ess gezundt.
Documenting triumph and tragedy
The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg is a nostalgic look at a Jewish baseball great who played during a time when many of the fans still thought Jews had horns. Greenberg's refusal to play on Yom Kippur made him a hero among American Jews in the '30s and '40s. The soundtrack includes great Yiddish versions of classic tunes and there's nothing like listening to old men with Bronx accents talk wistfully about "shagging balls."
In A Visitor from the Living, Claude Lanzmann (Shoah) interviews Maurice Rossel, a WWII Red Cross representative who prepared a favourable report after visiting the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt. Unbeknown to Rossel, the Nazis had prepared for his visit with elaborate, forced dress rehearsals, as well as the execution of 5,000 Jews to make the ghetto appear less crowded. The interview slowly reveals a tenacious fool holding on to mistaken observations he made decades earlier. Lanzmann doesn't try too hard to indict his subject--he just lets the camera roll.
In the short film category, director Elida Schogt presents her family's collision course with the gas chambers in Auschwitz in the short Zyklon Portrait, employing archival footage and personal imagery. :
CARTOONIST BEN KATCHOR BRINGS THE SAD, OLD CITY TO LIFE
I've always admired New York cartoonist Ben Katchor for his ability to infuse the mundane backdrops of the daily urban grind--the buildings, streetcorners, shop signs--with a resonant breath of life. The city becomes as much a tragicomic character as the desperate dollar-hounds populating his strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.
Sam Ball and Liam Romalis, the director and producer of the short film Pleasures of Urban Decay, felt likewise. "They were doing films about various urban design people, and they thought I somehow fit into that," Katchor tells me with an audible shrug.
He explains that the reason he's an anomaly in how he presents the urban environment is largely mechanical. "The size of comics is smaller. When people did comics as broadsheets in the 1800s, they were as full of information as any painting. Now comics have been reduced to this sign language, and all these little concrete details get thrown out--one building is as good as another. The particulars of the visible world get reduced to signs and symbols."
Katchor stops short of bah-humbugging the new school, and takes a surprisingly similar stance on matters of urban renewal. "Neighbourhoods and buildings go through these cycles of life, and the equivalent of death is demolition. You just hope something better springs up in its place. I don't advocate turning cities into museums of architecture. Sometimes, in the act of preserving a building, you ruin it, turning it into a museum-quality falsification. It's literally the building, but the culture it came out of is gone. The best moment in the life of a building is when it's in a state of neglect, but that happens when there's no reason to do anything. It's past its heyday, and yet it's not in the way of new schemes."
Another of Katchor's projects, The Jew of New York, serves not only as a wild embellishment of an overlooked chunk of Jewish-American history (set in the 1830s, its springboard was Mordecai Noah's efforts to establish a Jewish State near Buffalo, N.Y.) but also as a prequel to the capitalist hangover of some undefined pre-war era that Katchor captures so magnificently in the Knipl books--the aforementioned "state of neglect." If so, then his slideshow Carfare City could ostensibly be the follow-through.
It's a "crackpot lecture," by his own admission. "It involves this plan for urban design that was outlined in one of my Knipl collections, an elaboration on the way it's described in the book. It's a very dense structure, a self-contained little city, but everything within this five- or ten-block area is interconnected by an electric streetcar system. These streetcars actually run through everyone's apartment, every business, every street. They sort of obliterate the distinction between public and private space." :
-- with files from RUPERT BOTTENBERG
Katchor presents Pleasures of Urban Decay and Carfare City as part of the Montreal Jewish Film Festival at Cinematheque Quebecoise on Sunday, May 14, 7pm, $8 ($5 students/seniors). He will also be signing books at Fichtre!, 436 de Bienville, on Saturday, May 13, 5pm
The 5th annual Montreal Jewish Film Festival screens from this Thursday, May 11 to May 18. Info: 283-4826 or www.mjff.qc.ca
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