A Gem from Argentina and a Backward Glance at France

The New York Jewish Film Festival continues apace at the Walter Reade, and my rundown on the second week can be found here. The new Daniel Burman, Empty Nest, is quite good, and he is going from strength to strength. Burman makes quiet, understated films, so he doesn't get the critical attention he deserves in the U.S., but he is gradually climbing the ladder of quality with low-key mastery.

Meanwhile, the Museum of Jewish Heritage is running a quite unusual series of French films in conjunction with their exhibit on the novelist Irene Nemirovsky. There have been, to the best of my knowledge, only two adaptations of her work for film, both in the early '30s, and they are showing one of them, Julien Duvivier's David Golder (1930). But Dudley Andrew has put together a very ingenious series of more recent films that dance around Nemirovsky's brief life to great effect. David Golder is definitely worth a trip to Battery Park; it's so rare that thre aren't any subtitled prints (the Museum will be projecting new subtitles under the image). It's Duvivier's first sound film and you can sense his relief at moving into talkies, from the film's explosive opening montage. Harry Baur gives a dominating performance in the title role, and who knows when you'll ever get another chance to see this one. I had a nice chat with Prof. Andrew, which you can read here.

The Right Way to Handle an Economic Downturn

Earlier today, I received an impassioned e-mail from an arts lobbying group in New York State, trying desperately to avert a $7m cut in state arts funding. My first reaction was that, although I make my living in the arts as a film and music critic and reporter, I can think of even more worthwhile ways to spend tax dollars. (I spent 20 years as a volunteer in the Buddy Program of Gay Men's Health Crisis, so I'm particularly peeved about cutbacks in AIDS funding at the state and municipal levels, to choose one obvious example.)

Then I looked at a series of stories that appeared in The Art Newspaper, an excellent trade paper covering the visual arts world. The headlines say it all:

Government in France Increases Cultural Spending
Government in Germany Increases Cultural Spending
Government in Israel Increases Cultural Spending

Two thoughts occur to me after reading these stories. First, The Art Newspaper needs some new headline writers and, second and more seriously, here are three western nations, each of them with plenty of problems caused by the worldwide economic -- oh hell, let's call it what it is -- depression, that have decided to use cultural spending as a kind of pump-priming mechanism, secure in the belief that major cultural projects create jobs, promote tourism and help keep money moving through their national economies.

Pretty radical idea, that. Somewhere, Jesse Helms is rotating mighty fast, I hope. In fact, UNESCO has recommended that member states have culture budgets that are 1% of the national budget. I'd love to see Congress implement that number in the U.S. The 2008 federal budget totals $2.9 trillion, which means that NEA funding would be just under $3bn. In fact, for FY 2008, the NEA budget is $144.7 million, the NEA's about the same. There are, undoubtedly, other culture-related items in the federal budget (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for example), but I'm betting that they don't bring total to $2.9 bn.

When President-elect Obama is thinking about economic stimulus, I hope he includes cultural funding in his infrastructure package. Franklin Roosevelt did, and the WPA was one of the great examples of what can be done by a government that is willing to put money into the cultural realm without meddling in the content of the programs that result. I guess I will write that letter after all. (And if you are a New York State resident, you can do likewise here.

There's Good News and Bad News . . .

The bad news is that the Masters of Cinema website is shutting down, as Eureka absorbs their DVD catalog. I will, regretfully, change my links list accordingly.

The good news is that, thanks to MOC webmaven Doug Cummings, who was explaining the situation on the DVD Beaver list (highly recommended, by the way), I was led to a new website that looks very promising indeed, The Auteurs. This website has a formidable library of films available to watch on-line (if you can sit at the computer that long!) and forums and a blog-like publication for discussing them. The selection of free films alone makes worth registering (a large selection from the Criterion Eclipse series -- Fuller, Ozu, early Bergman).

Big sigh. They come and they go.

A Surprise, Pleasant For Once

Moshe Mizrahi is not a director whose work I take very seriously. Although Omer Bartov makes a very interesting case for Madame Rosa in his recent book, The "Jew" in Cinema, my recollection of the film is that it is treacle on the half-shell. So when I saw that among the offerings in this year's New York Jewish Film Festival was Mizrahi's first feature film in over a decade, I was less than enthused.

For once, I got a pleasant surprise. Weekend in Galilee, Mizrahi's reworking of Uncle Vanya as a tale of domestic disturbances among the Israeli middle class, is actually quite a nice film. For more on this and some of the other films from the first week of the festival, which actually opens on the 14th, you can read my article in Jewish Week.

Off-Topic but Very Important

Important event in Washington Heights, Sunday January 18

On Sunday, January 18 at 1:30 p.m. Hebrew Tabernacle and Beth Am, the People's Temple will be hosting their third annual Amnesty International Write-a-Thon. Here is an opportunity to save a human life by doing something as simple as writing a letter. During last year's Global Write-a-thon, people in more than 30 countries sent over 150,000 letters, postcards and emails on behalf of prisoners of conscience, human rights defenders, and others at risk. At least three of the prisoners were freed because of your support.

At HT-BA, we sent out over a hundred letters in one afternoon. And you won't even have to pay the postage. Plus, we'll supply soda and pizza. It's a great opportunity to contribute to the ongoing struggle for human rights and share a pleasant afternoon with friends and neighbors.

When: Sunday, January 18, 1:30 p.m.
Where: Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation, 551 Fort Washington Avenue (at 185th St.)
For directions go to http://hebrewtabernacle.org/directions.htm or phone 212-568-8304.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Cleaning Up the Mess That Is My Desk

Maybe I should just forget the month of December happened this year. I certainly have seen movies this month, but I might as well have stayed home, given how much writing I got done.

It wasn't all for naught. You can read my Jewish Week reviews of Valkyrie here and my review of Good, which opens today, below.

It was a terrific year for film, despite what many have said to the contrary. I won't post a final ten-best list until the Iras, sometime in March, but a list of some of the movies that impressed me is a long one:

Beaufort (Joseph Cedar)
Tehillim (Rafael Nadjari)
The Witnesses (Andre Techine)
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Christian Mungiu)
A Secret (Claude Miller)
The Band's Visit (Eran Kolirin)
Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov; his best film since Russian Ark)
Married Life (Ira Sachs; I seem to be the only person in America who liked this one)
Momma's Man (Azazel Jacobs)
Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)
XXY (Lucia Puenzo)
Paranoid Park (Gus van Sant)
My Father, My Lord (David Volach)
Warsaw Bridge (Pere Portabella)
Razzle Dazzle (Ken Jacobs)
My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin)
"Mother Economy" (Maya Zack)
Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman)
A Christmas Story (Arnaud Desplechin)
The Man From London (Bela Tarr)
Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar-Wai)
Return to the Scene of the Crime (Ken Jacobs)
News From Home/News From House (Amos Gitai)
One Day You'll Understand (Amost Gitai)

*****************

When a film is titled Good, it takes all the self-control a critic can muster not to spend most of a review playing with the title. Mind you, Good, the new film by Brazilian director Vicente Amorim, is much too somber a work to lend itself to any sort of playfulness. Given its subject matter, the ease with which a man of good will can be seduced by Fascism – the title is clearly meant ironically – there are not, understandably, a lot of belly-laughs on offer, and the film’s sobriety is at once both its greatest strength and its principal weakness.

John Halder (Viggo Mortensen, looking disturbingly like the young Kirk Douglas) is a professor of literature, who we first encounter in 1937 when he is called to the Reichschancellory, where he is asked, on the strength of a novel he wrote years before, to prepare a paper in defense of euthanizing the “chronically ill and disabled.” Then we are thrown back into 1933, where Halder is juggling his teaching, cooking for his two children, caring for his aging mother and catering to his neurotic wife, a pianist. Back at the university, he is teaching Proust when his department head, apparently Jewish, informs him that the French novelist is now on the banned list. Outside his classroom, Nazi students are burning books. In the meantime, a fetching blonde student, Anne (Jodie Whittaker) is taking a rather unacademic interest in him. Soon he finds himself immersed in an affair, drifting away from wife and slowly making accommodations to the new political force sweeping Germany. Needless to say, his best friend, a Jewish fellow WWI veteran and psychiatrist, Maurice (Jason Isaacs), is less than enthused.

Once the film has made good on the initial connection between Halder’s novel (about which we learn surprisingly little) and his agreement to write the paper, it drops the to-and-fro narrative line, reverting to a straightforward chronology in which we see Halder become increasingly immersed in the Nazi hierarchy, becoming an SS “reserve” officer, then being ordered into the streets on Kristallnacht and finally being sent to the East to report on the “relocation” of the Jews for Adolf Eichmann. His mother finally dies, he divorces his wife and marries Anne, Maurice is swept up in the maelstrom of Kristallnacht and disappears into the concentration camp system.

Screenwriter John Wrathall and Amorim have adapted C.P. Taylor’s 1981 play of the same name by excising all the theatrical elements and giving it a disappointingly conventional narrative structure, then dressing the entire enterprise up in nicely observed period detail. Their mistake lies in the belief that because film is “a more realistic medium” than theater, it has no room for artifice. As a result, the film is stodgy and predictable, a situation that is not helped by the plodding rhythms Amorim imposes on the material.

The one element of stylization they have retained from the original is that Halder hears Mahler being played by the people around him at key moments in the film, a motif whose payoff comes at the end when he follows the music, one last time, only to realize that this time it is coming from a real orchestra, the inmates of the concentration camp he is inspecting. As Mortensen stammers in disbelief, “It’s real,” and the camera dances crazily around the madness of violence, frenzy and chaos that surrounds him, finally halting on a long shot in which Halder is barely discernible, the lone still point in a Brueghelian nightmare panorama. It is one of the few outstanding moments in the film, a directorial coup de theatre of the sort that Good desperately needs more.

But even as a character study, Good makes little sense. Although Mortensen struggles mightily with the material, there is no center to Halder. We don’t know enough about his earlier life to understand why he wrote his novel or why he proves so susceptible to the Nazis’ flattery. Without some sense of the man’s inner life, his slow descent into the criminal enterprise that is the Third Reich registers as completely arbitrary, rather than as the slow slide down the slippery slope that it is intended to be. Consequently, Good fails a profile of the banality of evil, as a drama of the ease with which some people can compromise their morals and as a piece of spectacle. Instead, it becomes merely one more soap opera about the Nazis, the latest in an ever-lengthening line.

This Time, There's a Reason for the Long Silence

I'm struggling with router/adapter problems that have made it impossible for me to get on-line for almost two weeks. I can get a few hours a day on Margo's computer, but running up and down stairs between our offices, juggling files and so on have made it a damned nuisance to do anything more complicated than checking my e-mail.

However, I have not been totally idle. My piece on Adam Resurrected, including a few brief excerpts from my interview with Paul Schrader, can be found here, and when I get these idiotic computer problems resolved, I'll post a lot more from that interview, as well as several reviews of new films.

And in a few days -- technology permitting -- I'll be expanding the George Robinson Communications empire, adding a blog dedicated entirely to Jewish music.

Rupert Murdoch, giu la testa!!!