Friday, October 15, 2010

A Film Unfinished, an admirable film by Yael Hersonski

A Film Unfinished, documentary film by Yael Hersonski. We saw the film Saturday night, October 9, at the West Newton Cinema.

I admired Hersonski's work in this film. She managed to identify a historical series of events -- how German soldiers staged and filmed scenes in the Warsaw Ghetto of starving and dying Jews being ignored by more prosperous-looking Jews as a way of further vilifying Jews -- and we believe in her reconstruction of those events, using the Germans' own film footage, and the testimony of Willy Wist, the only cameraman ever connected with the project.

I think the agonizing scenes of the Ghetto are worth preserving and seeing. Starving, dying people, Jews forced to drag and bury the dead, and the very subject of the film itself, the making of Nazi propaganda and the manipulation of victims in their own humiliation, are not easy to see. It's fortunate that Hersonski is a good filmmaker and artist.

One of the survivors interviewed in the film remarked about how crowded Ghetto life was, and I was interested in this. Strangers, whole families, were forced closer and closer together, into smaller and smaller apartments. There were numerous similar revealing details.

A few points left me a little confused. I was not always sure whose narrative I was watching, and would have liked a little more help from the filmmaker. In a sequence of scenes, were we seeing the work of a Nazi editor, or of Hersonski? This is an important point, given that the film centers around the Nazis' manipulation and forced staging of scenes. Sometimes the film narrator helped us with the context, but I would have liked more.

There were a number of references by the film narrator to the German effort as amounting to a theatrical-cinematic level project, not unlike a Hollywood project. That would involve large film crews, sound engineers, lighting specialists, squads of laborers. But we don't really see evidence of that. Willy Wist, the cameraman, refers to himself and three "reporters" assigned to the project. They were definitely creating propaganda, but a handful of reporter-cameramen doesn't make this a large-scale theatrical project as claimed by the documentary. Was something left out, or did I not catch something?

And there was Wist himself. Was that him interviewed on camera, in a Nurembergs style setting? Was that an actor? I don't recall a clarification in the film on that point, or if there was, I missed it.

But none of this detracts from Hersonski's achievement in constructing a subtle film narrative that we believe. Her film deserves to be seen by all types of audiences, particularly in a time when we are saturated with imagery and video, much of it staged, edited, and manipulated, yet presented to us as a supposedly truthful record of events.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

The Huntington Theater's production of William Inge's "Bus Stop" -- are we laughing at our poor country relatives?

We saw Bus Stop, by William Inge, at the Huntington Theater, Saturday, October 3. The play was directed by Nicholas Martin.

There is a scene in the play in which the lecherous professor Lyman and the young waitress Elma act out the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Elma recites the lines badly -- the scene could be very sad or very funny. The director Nicholas Martin had the actors play it funny -- Elma is depicted as so naive and earnest in her over-acting, so inexperienced on how to deliver lines of a play, so awful, that she is very funny. I laughed, as did almost everybody else in the theater.

But there is a meanness to our laughter, isn't there? The actress didn't have to mouth the lines so awkwardly. Martin makes her a clown. It made me feel a little guilty to laugh. And angry at the director.

I know, all humor supposedly has some element of cruelty in it. But laughing at Elma's ignorance, and all the small town, country characters on stage, seemed like a way to make us urban theater goers feel good -- we're better, smarter than they are. We're relieved to realize the ridiculous condition in which other people live their lives.

It's a sad play. The main story is predictable -- you know that Bo is going to soften, that Cherie is going to marry him in the end. What you don't know is that Bo and Cherie's happy ending (or happy beginning) comes with a sense of loss.