By Deborah Kaufman

From 3rd Edition-- (cont'd from page 1)

Many independent Jewish directors have used film and video either with the explicit intention of redefining Jewish identity, or in order to bend filmmaking genres. In KADDISH, New York filmmaker Steven Brand follows Jewish anti-hero Yossi Klein, the son of a Holocaust survivor, as he is repeatedly arrested for protests on behalf of Soviet Jews, as he starts an underground Jewish newspaper that features stories about the shared apocalyptic visions of punk rockers and Hasids, and as he goes through several depressions. At the 1978 survivors’ reunion in Jerusalem, Yossi declares that the Holocaust is over - that Jews can no longer define themselves as victims. It is a stunning retort to the multimillion dollar Holocaust memorial industry. In one of the defining moments of independent Jewish cinema, Yossi articulates an alternative to victim identification, “A Jew is someone who is always on the edge - on the verge of annihilation, on the verge of revelation.”

Alan Berliner intensifies the inquiry into Jewish identity. Like Brand and other Jews informed by the literary tradition, he begins with the life of the father. In Berliner’s INTIMATE STRANGER, his father’s multiple identities are a composite of the late 20th century Jew - cosmopolitan Sephardic Jew in Egypt, insecure immigrant in New York, behind-the-scenes businessman in Japan, absent husband, and complete mystery to the kids. He is simultaneously the enigma and embodiment of the exiled. Berliner’s experimental layering of multiple points of view reinforces the notion that as Jews we are all in the process of reconstructing new, hybrid identities. Jewish identity becomes the post-modern paradigm.

Two directors, Meredith Monk and Eleanor Antin, noteworthy for their deconstruction of both Jewish identity and traditional genres, emerged out of the art world and onto the screen in the ‘80s. In Monk’s short, ELLIS ISLAND, and in her feature-length story of a Jewish girl in a medieval French village, BOOK OF DAYS, history is remarkably recreated through performance pieces that weave together characters, music, movement, and a feeling for the passing of time, even as we are transported into timeless realities. The displacement and loss that accompany emigration, and the experiences of plague and doom recreated in these works are not unique Jewish experiences. If Jews are “chosen” for anything, it is to interpret what they have experienced for others who share a similar fate.

Eleanor Antin’s work scrupulously subverts sentimentality. Her fabrications of nonexistent, silent Soviet masterpieces have become cult items. In THE MAN WITHOUT A WORLD she creates a Gothic, comic melodrama set in an imaginary shtetl where a young couple’s romance is doomed by gypsies, dybbuks, and the Angel of Death. Antin produces an extraordinary period piece that could have been made at the turn of the century, except that it is imbued with the knowledge, humor and angst of our time. The effect is disconcerting. We are less comfortable and more confused by the deliberate appropriation of history when it draws attention to itself in this kind of film than when it is obfuscated in classic Yiddish masterpieces such as THE DYBBUK.

Meditations on resistance and survival have been treated with originality, passion and uncommon depth by several gay directors in films examining the AIDS epidemic from a uniquely Jewish perspective. In the short drama DEAF HEAVEN, a man whose lover is dying of AIDS befriends a mysterious Holocaust survivor. In this encounter, director Steve Levitt explicitly draws a parallel between AIDS and the Holocaust, telling a story of love, survivor’s guilt, and the importance of bearing witness. In FAST TRIP, LONG DROP, director Gregg Bordowitz takes first person documentary to a level of honesty, artistry, and political militancy reminiscent of the late Black director Marlon Riggs. A funny, angry and serious reflection on living with AIDS, Bordowitz gives meaning to his life by drawing on instances of Jewish oppression and resistance - songs of Jewish partisans are layered over images of ACT-UP demonstrations.

A number of independent filmmakers integrate questions of Jewish identity into their work, but more often as subplot. These works are compelling and noteworthy in terms of their attempts to integrate Jewish and universal subjects. Jan Oxenberg’s critically acclaimed THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT documents a tender yet devastating relationship with the filmmaker’s dying grandmother; Ralph Arlyck’s award-winning film diary, CURRENT EVENTS, chronicles his attempts to define what it is to be a “mensch” - an ethical person - in our complex, violence-saturated world; and Anthony Drazan’s commercially-released feature, ZEBRAHEAD, tells of a Jewish boy who falls in love with an African-American girl in contemporary Detroit. Academy Award nominee Deborah Hoffman’s COMPLAINTS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER chronicles the filmmaker’s coming to terms with her mother’s Alzheimer’s Disease. With honesty, compassion, and humor, Hoffman’s film deals with the specificity of the director’s Jewish background, as well as the universal themes of aging and death, family caregiving and love.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Schmeichen’s powerful Academy Award winner, THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK, about San Francisco’s charismatic and compassionate gay City Supervisor Harvey Milk, barely explores Milk’s Jewish background, but by implication raises important questions about the ways Jewish filmmakers choose not to make Jewish films. Many films fall in this category. Often, these films reflect the self-denial and desire for invisibility that have been key themes in Jewish history and culture. Connie Field (who is Jewish) and Marilyn Mulford’s (who is not Jewish) acclaimed documentary about Mississippi Freedom Summer, FREEDOM ON MY MIND, includes Jews who went South as an expression of their identification with the struggle against racism, but fails to mention that these people are Jewish, that Jews were disproportionately involved in civil rights, or that an entire generation’s Jewish identity was itself predicated on the idea of Black-Jewish alliance. Like their antecedents in the Hollywood studios, there will always be many independent Jewish film and videomakers who do not focus at all on Jewish subjects or identity in their work. What is interesting here are the different ways that these films can be seen as Jewish despite the surface self-denial.

Independent Jewish film producers have also been active over the last decades, and Jews have also participated in other aspects of independent production, distribution, promotion, and exhibition. They have been prominent in the fields of media theory and criticism and have written important scholarly works in the field of Jewish film studies such as: “Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust,” by Annette Insdorf; “The Jew In American Cinema,” by Patricia Erens; and, “Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation,” by Ella Shohat. The enormously successful phenomena of Jewish Film Festival presentations emerged and spread across the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, providing a bridge between independent Jewish filmmakers and Jewish audiences.

Despite innovations and achievements of Jewish independents, there is still much to be explored. A new generation of independent artists informed by identity politics has slowed down the slide toward assimilation and self-denial. Yet, recent film and video work has, to some extent, mirrored an entire generation’s retreat from broader social and political concerns. Clearly, there are limits to the pure form of identity-based work. Where are films about American Jews’ evolving and troubling relationship with Israel, and films exploring the critical role of Jews in American political coalitions and inter-group relations? Have Jews, with their cosmopolitan history, anything unique or profound to add to debates about multiculturalism that are raging in our country? Must struggles against assimilation and against the ‘60s generation take the form of first person, identity-driven stories? Can there be a successful synthesis of identity-based explorations with more universal themes? These are some of the critical questions the next generation of independent Jewish filmmakers in America must answer.

Deborah Kaufman was founder and former Director of The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. She is a film producer and partner in Snitow-Kaufman Productions (BLACKS & JEWS).

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Independent Jewish Film & Video in America