Director Karl Nussbaum
Bay Area Premiere Director's Statement Special to SFJFF: Conversation with Director Karl Nussbaum	Raw Images From the Optic Cross United States, 1998, 35mm, color, 25 minutes, English. Director Karl Nussbaum (left) and his father A.E. Nussbaum superimposed with a diagram of the Optic Cross symbolizing their two viewpoints on the Holocaust. My father is a Holocaust survivor. He grew up in Nazi Germany in a small town called Rheydt. He left home in 1939, at the age of 14, with his older sister. His parents were later sent to the Terezinstadt ghetto and then to Auschwitz were they perished. His older brother was also killed, as well as his aunts, uncles and cousins. My father was in hiding throughout Europe during the war and finally came to America in 1948. My father was not in a concentration camp, but was briefly in a detention camp in France. I'd like to point out I am not a historian, but a filmmaker. Nor do I speak for all the 'second generation' Jews. I can only speak about my own feelings and what it was like to grow up in a Holocaust survivor's house. It seems inevitable, that if someone is in pain or grief within a family, everyone in the house can feel it to some extent. I know the survivors are very worried about the information of the Holocaust being passed on. The second generation is in a unique position to carry these stories into the future. We have the distance the survivors don't have to deal with the emotional aspects, not just the facts and history. Yet we are close enough to the source to feel some of the survivor's pain. Images lose their power over time. People have grown accustomed to the black and white footage of the atrocities and camps - they no longer present the horror or sadness they did in their time, when no one could comprehend their evil. I think its important to broaden the style in which we present the Shoah, so that we can bring the information to the next generations; and connect to Jews and Gentiles alike. For this to happen, new ways of imparting the stories and the feelings must be used, to continue the remembrance, and thus the chain of Jewish continuity. Father and son using our own actual hair. My film is a look at the effects of the Holocaust on the second generation. It has taken me many years to slowly unravel and understand the effects my father's experience has had on me and my family. The echoes of the Holocaust are so deeply buried in us we can't always see them. This is reflected in my personal style of filmmaking, which I call a 'narrative collage' - fractured, abstract and deeply personal. It is a visual attempt to convey the myriad of difficult and unspeakable emotions. I realize that combining beautiful imagery with horror and death can be unsettling for the audience. But I see this contradiction as my attempt to see hope in life, even when surrounded by horror and despair; an attempt to feel in control of the uncontrolable. To balance death with the beauty of the life force. In making my film, I have begun to feel some form of peace. I want to move from under that dark cloud, but not forget what happened or lose our history. I am trying to deal with a tragedy: the murder of my grandparents and my uncle. The subsequent 'emotional mutilation' of my father and finally, my own 'deformation'. I want to break this chain of suffering and to pass on hope to my future children. Part of my revenge is to live life fully - so that yet another Jew doesn't succumb to the emotional degradation of the Holocaust. Feelings my father learned as child and then I somehow inherited. Even in times of joy I don't forget my grandparents murder. In seeking this peace, I have traveled many times to Germany, collecting information and images. Going back is very emotional for me. I feel conflict reconnecting to German culture and my family's past. I remind myself I am trying to reconnect to the country, not the oppressors. It is much like my father's ambivalence about still feeling connected to Germany. Part of the difficulty is in accepting that it was his neighbors, his people, who murdered his family, not some 'outside others'. Going to my father's hometown, seeing Terezinstadt and Auschwitz, has helped me face the demons of history head on. It will always be sad, but its given me strength to confront the pain. I now have many German friends who support my filmmaking in different ways. This will ultimately help to pass on the information and stories of the Holocaust, especially to those who need to know it - the children and grandchildren of the Nazis. I'm trying to hold out the olive branch to the young Germans and see how they respond. I want my film and me, to be accepted in Germany - to be taken back by my father's people. If I can be taken back in, my father can too, and maybe the wound can be healed. In a way I hope my film, by delving into our hidden sadness, can help heal my father and let my family move through its grief. -- Karl Nussbaum, 1998 Please write or fax me any comments you have about my film. Thank you. Karl Nussbaum 475 Dean St. #3c Brooklyn, N.Y. U.S.A. 11217 Tel/fax: 001-718-636-5496
Production Notes	Karl Nussbaum has been developed a unique style of story telling ... a form he calls "Narrative Collage". Filled with literally thousands of double exposures and dissolving pictures, its an hallucinogenic experience that is always disappearing ...just out of reach. Some images only exist momentarily, between the frames. Its a very emotional and provocative style, open to suggestion, like dreams. Karl says," I'm trying to get that flow and density of images as in dreams or strange trips.... " Its definitely a radical new strain of cinema. Lush, painterly, moving, dense, mesmerizing, heavy, rich, and emotional are all words that have been used to describe Karl's new film, Raw Images From the Optic Cross. "I'm looking for the most iconic part of an image for the collage. I want to reference all the emotions that go with an image, and then combine them with another 'fragment' to build new associations and connections; that's why I love double exposures and dissolves: for combining, connecting and smearing images together. I have stories and feelings I'm hiding in the collages." The audience feels a dream logic and meaning just under the surface of the beautiful, swirling chaos. Karl shot the myriad of images for Raw Images From the Optic Cross in numerous medical museums, cemeteries and Holocaust memorials in Germany, Poland, Prague, Vienna, New York, St. Louis, Florida and Philadelphia. Back in his Brooklyn studio he built and photographed numerous collages, small dioramas and landscapes using props he had collected. The use of double exposures brings out the two different but simultaneous points of view in the film - two generations looking at the same horrific event. Karl explains the title; 'The Optic Cross' is both a place and an idea. Its the place inside your skull where your two optic nerves cross on their way to the brain. This cross is where the visual information from each eye is combined, helping to create one stereoscopic image. The optic cross is also the memory of certain images burned into the mind's eye. How do those certain images stick with us when so many thousands of images just fly by us every day? Think of all the things you've seen in you life and forgotten... what magnetizes some of those images and keeps them preserved?" Karl's images draw upon his personal mythology, remembered stories, alchemy and traditional symbols, historical stereotypes and collected artifacts. Some images are based on traditional Jewish symbolism and funeral rites: the covered mirror after a death; leaving small stones on top of the gravestone; eating an egg before stepping through the threshold after a funeral; or leaving a small pile of salt upon entering a new house. Many images have personal stories behind them. During a recent bypass operation, docters shaved his father's entire body, leaving an outline of hair on the bed. Karl saved the hair and used it, with his own hair, for the "Father & Son" image. He photographed the long chest scar, superimposing rail road tracks and a pleading Jewish Frankenstein. His father, apparently unconsiously, wore blue and white striped pajamas, like the concentration camp inmates. The shooting took several years and wasn't with out its incidents: "When I needed flames for shots I'd set a fire in the studio or a spare bedroom. I'd be behind the camera, squirting lighter fluid and waiting for the flames to be just right. Suddenly I'd look around and realize I had an uncontrollable blaze on my hands and run frantically for water! Several times I almost burned my studio down." "One day I came across a dead rat in the street, and I decided I wanted to photograph it in the studio. I scooped it up in a bag. On my way home to photograph it, I had to stop at an electronics store. When I checked my camera bag at security I thought, "If the guard only knew....." Or the night my relatives offered me a ride home after dinner at their house. I declined. I had to. How could I tell them I just wanted to stop and pick up a dead pigeon I'd seen walking to their house?" Karl also put himself through many strange moments, including having himself buried in his friend's backyard during the winter; having to roll under a German railroad car so as not be run down by another train; breaking into abandoned houses and European cemeteries at night. A shot of a gas mask was secretly done in the basement shower of his childhood home, with his parents unknowingly waiting outside. In the studio he sewed pigs hearts together, like a junior Dr. Frankenstein. One night he cut the wings off a pigeon, as he thought of people actually dismembering dead bodies. "Even the weird meat and animal parts I got in Chinatown or the dead animals I found in the wild, made me think of my family's bodies. Some of the props I brought home from Europe, like rocks or barbed wire I'd collected at different concentration camps. I was afraid to touch them... they held the spirits of history for me." "I didn't always know what the image I was shooting meant to me. One day I shot five pieces of burned wood bound together under a black veil. I later I realized it was an image of my German grandfather holding his arms around his family... trying to protect them from impending danger. After that shot I began to cry." Karl works very closely with his long time composer, Joe Arcidiacono, on the music. The score includes strange European carnival music, a version of a horror movie soundtrack and one piece described as "Neil Young playing a Bar Mitzvah." The young boy singing is the 13 year old Karl. For the ethereal violin part they enlisted a friend to play sustained sections which were slowed down and overlapped, much like the images, and the two points of view. Karl said, "the first time Joe played me the music for the Fatherland section with the rhythmic breathing he had added, I just started to cry, thinking of my grandfather." This short film is actually part of a longer film called: The Optic Cross. The feature will be made up of equal parts narrative, collage and documentary pieces. worked together into a larger "Narrative Collage".
Director's Biography	Karl Nussbaum has been making films for over 18 years. His films have been screened in numerous European and American film festivals and museums. In 1997 he received a grant from the Puffin Foundation for Raw Images From the Optic Cross. In 1995 he won a jury prize at the Hamburg International Kurz Film Festival for Psycho-Biology, and was chosen to be a judge for the festival the following year. He's also won two prizes at the Long Island Film Festival. Nussbaum is a founding member (along with Scott Saunders and Matthew Harrison) of FILM CRASH, a N.Y. based film collective which has presented screenings of over 100 filmmakers in New York, Los Angeles and Europe in the late 80's. He has made over 25 short films and videos. He is currently at work on his feature film, The Optic Cross.
Credits and Cast	Written, produced, edited, photographed and directed by Karl Nussbaum Music composed by Joe Arcidiacono Additional musicians: George Carter, Tom Kelly, Karl Percoda Cast: Catherine Amandalara, Owen and Tobias Campbell, Sinead MacCloud, Karl, Lotti and A.E. Nussbaum
Screenings	Castro Theatre 10:00 pm Saturday, July 18 Ticket code:   CAS0718C   UC Theatre 10:00 pm Saturday, July 25 Ticket code:   UCT0725C
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