Archival Spaces

303: Three Minutes. A Lengthening (2022)

Archival Spaces 303

Three Minutes. A Lengthening (2022)

Uploaded 2 September 2022

In the Summer of 1990, after the fall of Communism, I visited Poland for the first time, training docents for a United States Information Agency exhibit on American cinema in Katowice. On a free day, I asked my driver to take me to Auschwitz which was a few hours away. We first went to Auschwitz I, which was the work camp, where both a film and all exhibition signage failed to mention the word Jew, but only the nationalities of those incarcerated and killed there. Afterward, I wanted to see Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death camp, which proved challenging, because there was no signage anywhere to give directions. When I found it, I was surprised to see that the Poles had built housing within 200 ft of the gas chambers. I was reminded of that moment, when in a new film, Three Minutes (2022, Bianca Stigter), the narrator, Helene Bonham-Carter) describes the market square in the town of Nasielsk, Poland, today, a small town where almost half of the pre-World War II population of 7,000 were Jewish, yet not a single sign, marker, or plaque marks their disappearance in December 1939, when virtually every last Jewish inhabitant was deported to Warsaw’s ghetto, before being murdered in Treblinka three years later.

A remarkable new documentary, Three Minutes recently opened in Los Angeles after a preview screening, sponsored by Hilary Helstein’s Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival. The film’s title refers to three minutes of degraded 16mm black and white and color footage, taken in the Summer of 1938 in Nasielsk’s town square by David Kurtz, a native son who had emigrated to America as a child and was now returning with his family and some friends. Kurtz’s longer film, Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France, and England, produced with a Cine-Kodak camera, documented their grand European tour. Kurtz’s grandson, Glenn Kurtz, discovered the footage in 2009 in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and was immediately intrigued by the three minutes of Jewish people in an unidentified Polish town, but everyone who would have known was dead. Glenn Kurtz donated the footage to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, which had the badly decomposed film – due to vinegar syndrome, – digitally restored at Colorlab in Rockville, MD. He then began the difficult process of trying to identify the town and its inhabitants. How do you identify something when there are no prominent landmarks or other identifying marks, like signage?

Glenn Kurtz assumed it was either the town where his grandmother or grandfather were born, but it was only after finding a photo of a Synagogue door adorned with two Lions of Judah that matched the door in the film that he knew it was Nasielsk, a town about thirty miles north of Warsaw, where his grandfather had been born. Finding survivors who might help identify the individuals in the film proved much more challenging. Two years later, he was contacted by a woman from Detroit who recognized her then 13-year-old father in the film; Maurice Chandler was still alive. Eventually, eleven of the approximately 150 persons seen in the footage were identified, of which only a few survived the Shoah. Chandler could only identify males, like his friend Chaim Talmund, because as an Orthodox Jew he was forbidden to look at girls. The story of their horrific deportation from Nasielsk’s town square that December 1939, the initial imprisonment in the town Shul of 1600 of them, their continual beatings by German troops, and their journey in cattle cars to Warsaw, was documented by a Jewish eyewitness who buried his report in the Warsaw ghetto and by a German Wehrmacht Commandant who made an official report. Another survivor tells the remarkable story of how he rescued his girlfriend from the synagogue by posing as a German officer, after an anti-Nazi German officer lent him his winter coat, both then fleeing to Russian-occupied Poland.

Before seeing the film, I was unclear how those three minutes could be turned into a feature-length documentary, but Kurtz and Stigter succeed. Using the tools of avant-garde filmmaking, the director not only repeatedly shows the three minutes in their entirety, while relating the story of the film, but crops, refocuses, reedits, and digitally manipulates the images so that the film seems at times in danger of falling into the abstract. But it doesn’t because while the film employs structuralist repetition, to stretch time, the way the 1960s avant-garde had, especially Ken Jacobs, it simultaneously focuses over and over again on the faces, their look into the camera, their movement out of the synagogue and into the street. While the ultra-Orthodox would not have wanted to be filmed, the narrator notes, the event still “scrambled social hierarchies,” mixing middle-class and working-class Jews, mostly young people and curious adults. One of the most emotional sequences is when the film digitally isolates in close-up every inhabitant visible in the film, creating a full-screen gallery of portraits of the dead. Holocaust researchers usually have names, not faces, while this film offers countenances as the only traces of their human existence, which Kurtz’s film memorialized. Finally, in questioning why so many had congregated in the film in and outside the synagogue, the film speculates that the famous cantor, Moishe Koussevitzky had performed that day: We hear the Cantor’s melodious voice on the track over an abstract image of b & w film grain, which eventually pulls back to reveal the darkness of the synagogue’s entrance, the diegetic source of the music, but also a metaphor for the film’s pulling life from the shadows.

Having literally seen hundreds of Holocaust documentaries, I can say Three Minutes is both unique and an amazing aesthetic experience because it personalizes the stories of six million.

**A still from *Three Minutes: A Lengthening* by Bianca Stigter,**

302: Summer of ’62

Archival Spaces 302

Summer of ‘62

Uploaded 19 August 2022

*Die Pist geht ab* (1962, Helmut Backhaus) with Vivi Bach

Heinz Erhardt was an extremely popular comedian in 1950s cinema of the German Federal Republic. I have been watching some of his films on YouTube because I’m writing about William Thiele’s penultimate feature film, The Last Pedestrian (1960) for a Thiele book I’m editing with Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert. In Die Post geht ab (1962), which translates as “the bus is leaving,” the actor is only seen in a supporting role. The film is really a wall-to-wall “Schlagerfilm” (German popular music genre), concerning a young jazz band, and various hangers-on who travel to Italy in a broken-down old bus. The film is completely forgettable, so my mind began to wander, its music, stuffy atmosphere, and nylon ready-wear fashions transporting me back to Germany in 1962. It was in the summer of ’62 that I took my first trip back to Germany and Europe with my parents, keeping a diary of my experiences as an eleven-year-old. The beginning of my writing career.

**My photo of iceberg, taken from Ryndam.**

We had emigrated to the United States as displaced persons in 1951, and this was my parents’ first trip “home” to see relatives and old friends. Almost exclusively my mom’s, since Prague and Communist Czechoslovakia was not yet possible. For myself, my twin, Michael, and my younger brother, Peter, it was an adventure in cultures we had only heard about. On 31 May 1962, we left Union Station in Chicago with our mother on a night train to Montreal, embarking on the S.S. Ryndam of the Holland-America Line. Eleven days later, we arrived in Rotterdam, the highlight of the voyage being a massive storm off Newfoundland and the sighting of icebergs in the north Atlantic. Taking a city tour of the Dutch city, while waiting for our train to Cologne, I noted in my diary that the city was totally modern, “because it was destroyed during the war,” but probably didn’t understand that it had been the Nazi German Luftwaffe that had leveled the medieval city in four days in May 1940.

**Bas Muenstereifel with 1200-year-old cathedral in the center**

**Bad Muenstereifel now defunct train station**

We arrived in Münstereifel (now Bad Münstereifel) in the early evening of the same day, having taken a single-track steam locomotive train to the end of the line for the journey’s last leg. My mother’s family had fled to this medieval town in the Eifel Mountains after losing their home and dry-goods store in Cologne to Allied bombs in 1944. I and my twin were born there, two months premature, brought on by the death of my maternal grandfather. My grandmother and a couple of great aunts still lived there. Walking from the train station to my grandma’s house, we passed Aunt Lisbeth, who greeted my mother with a matter of course, as if it hadn’t been 10 1\2 years since she last saw her. She and Aunt Sofie were both in their seventies, deeply Catholic, going to church every morning. The heavy incense at mass, in the first row at the insistence of “die Tanten.”

**Ruins of the “Felsennest,” Hitler’s Eiffel Mountain headquarters**

Over the next three weeks, until my dad arrived, the town became a giant playground for us, exploring the ruins of the castle above the town, climbing on the medieval wall that circumvented it, walking up to the “Felsennest” high above Münstereifel, the ruins of Adolf Hitler’s headquarters during the bombing of Rotterdam, hiking through the woods to a nearby water reservoir to go swimming with the five children of my mom’s former employer, the doctor who had delivered us. We attended the local German elementary school for two weeks, so “we could compare the differences between the German and American schools,” but also relieve my mom of childcare duties for her vacation. Surprisingly, even though the other children spoke a heavy Eiffel dialect, we soon picked it up, thanks to the fact that my mother, in particular, had only spoken German to us all the years of our childhood in America. The highlight of our time in Münstereifel for my 11-year-old self was a trip to the nearby Nürburgring for the 1962 trials of the Formula 1 German Grand Prix.

**Rainy Nuerburgring Grand Prix of Germany trials, August 1962**

After my dad arrived, we began our European tour, literally on “5 Dollars a Day,” traveling in an ancient grey Opel station wagon dad had bought with the proviso he could return after the trip. After stops in Cologne, Heidelberg, and Munich to visit friends and relatives, and a stop in the medieval town of Rothenburg a.d. Tauber, we spent several days in Salzburg, where we swam in the Wolfgangsee, took a funicular up the mountain, and saw various castles. The next stop was a village in the shadow of Groβsglockner, Austria’s highest peak, where we stayed in a Gasthaus that had no running water and hiked in the surrounding mountains.

**In Heidelberg with mom’s former boyfriend**

Heading south to Venice, we almost died in a car crash when my dad underestimated the power of our little car – not like driving an American car – while passing a truck on a mountain road in a rain storm. We stayed in Mestre outside Venice, where hotels were significantly cheaper, and were treated to the spectacle of a huge Catholic procession. In the morning we drove to Venice, which was not yet overrun with tourists, a three-course lunch cost slightly more than a dollar. We kids loved the Italian Lira bills, which were the size of a handkerchief. I was impressed with the vaparetto, the Venetian boat-bus, and the iron giant banging a bell at the top of St. Mark’s Square, but the endless churches and canals tried my patience.

Rainy Grosssglockner Pass with out grey Opel.

Subsequent stops included Verona, Lago Maggiore, the Simplon Pass, Geneva, Lucerne, and the Black Forest. In Geneva, we visited an old friend of my dad’s from Prague, and Michael’s godfather, who was serving on the Unite Nations world court and gave us a tour. In Lucerne, I loved the long, covered bridge, because “on each support was a written history of Switzerland.” In St. Gallen, we stopped to see the boarding school my dad had attended in the 1930s for a year.

**In Darmstadt with Uncle Werner, Aunt Anita, cousin Frauke**

After further visits to Darmstadt to see our cousins, we returned to Münstereifel on 22 July, my dad flying back to the States immediately, while we stayed with our grandmother for three more weeks, before embarking on the tiny S.S. Waterman for New York, a ship filled to the gills with students, professors, and Indonesian-Dutch refugees immigrating to America. During the eleven days on board, we hung out with much older kids and it was probably the first time I decided I wanted to be a professor.

Reading over my diary sixty years later, I realize I was already very interested in history, but also was too young to understand its consequences, such as the fields of rubble still visible in Cologne and Munich. Even today, I feel incredibly privileged that my parents, who were still scraping by economically, afforded us this trip to broaden our horizons. Little did I know, in my innocence, that the trip was also a trial run for my parent’s reemigration to Germany two years later. I didn’t know it yet, but I was no longer simply an American kid, but rather a somewhat schizophrenic German-American, living, thinking, dreaming in two languages, at home in Germany and America, never completely happy in either.

301: Restoring HYPOCRITES (1915)

Archival Spaces 301

Lois Weber’s Hypocrites Restored

Uploaded 5 August 2022

Several weeks ago, Phil Carli premiered his new Silent Cinema Salon (https://philipcarli.com/), presenting a new restoration of Lois Weber’s Hypocrites (1915, Lois Weber) in his Rochester living room with live piano accompaniment. Carli is, of course, very well-known in the United States and abroad as one of the premier piano accompanists for silent films. The film was streamed directly after Carli gave an introduction and is now still available on his site.

I first saw Hypocrites decades ago, when Kino International put the film out on VHS, and I was always a bit troubled by the somewhat confusing narrative structure. True, Lois Weber’s first directed feature is a pure allegory, mixing as did many films at the time, both a historical and a modern story, so continuity seems rather arbitrary. But in what order do these events occur? This becomes an extremely difficult question for film restorationists when only one original source for a film is known to exist. Without a script or other sources, archival practice prohibits changing the order of individual sequences or shots based on some film exterior logic, because of the danger of perverting film history; the most famous example being The Life of an American Fireman (1901), when a MOMA curator intercut two separate geographical spaces where none had existed, leading film historians to surmise that this was the first case of parallel editing.

Given its convoluted structure, film historians and critics for decades discussed Lois Weber’s film not only as an allegory but as a film that defies the conventions of what was to become known as classical Hollywood narrative. An original print of Hypocrites had been discovered in the 1970s at the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia and was repatriated to the Library of Congress’s American Film Institute Collection. That tinted version, which is available on YouTube was considered definitive. It opens with an allegorical image of a female nude walking through “the gate of truth,” then cuts to the minister Gabriel preaching to his congregation; after reading a newspaper article about a statue in Paris representing “Truth” that had been censored, he imagines himself a Benedictine monk who unsuccessfully leads his parishioners up a steep path of virtue, another allegorical scene. The film then flashes back to medieval times in the third reel where the monk has created a sculpture of a nude female depicting “the truth,” and is killed by an angry mob for blasphemy. The fourth reel has “the naked Truth” holding up a mirror to contemporary politics, society, etc., thus visualizing the congregation’s hypocrisy, before returning to the church where the minister expires.

*Hypocrites* (1915, Lois Weber) with Margaret Edwards

However, when George Willeman, a preservationist at the Library of Congress restored the film last year, he was troubled by the film’s wonky continuity, until he realized that the first and third reels had been switched at some point, whether in the original Australian release version or later. Once he made the switch, the film made much more sense. Happily, the change was confirmed when Willeman found an original synopsis in The Motion Picture World (23 January 1915). Finally, in order to reconstruct the film’s tinting scheme, Willeman asked the Australians whether they had tinting notes and was told they had made a color negative back in the day.

*Hypocrites* (1915, Lois Weber) **Hypocrites in church**

*Hypocrites* (1915, Lois Weber) Holding up mirror to false love

The film is now presented in chronological order with the medieval tale coming in the first reel, followed by the church sermon, which is rejected by most of the parishioners. Afterward, the minister dreams that in the guise of the monk he is leading his flock, but most reject his more difficult path in favor of the broad road, which results in the monk, accompanied by the “naked truth,” holding up a mirror to society’s hypocrisy before the minister dies in the church.

*Hypocrites*: Holding up the mirror to Egoism

*Hypocrites* with Courtenay Foote as the Monk

While the film’s new/original structure makes more sense in terms of classical narrative, Lois Weber’s Hypocrites is still unique for its unabashed moral allegory and Weber’s aesthetic treatment, e.g. truth’s mirror is an oval iris shot that reveals politicians preaching honesty while collecting bribes in the back room. The film caused a scandal at the time of its release, because of the extensive female nudity of ‘truth,” shown in superimpositions, but still revealing specifics of the female form; it was outright banned in Ohio. But also of interest is the film’s cinematography by Dal Clawson and George W. Hill, the latter later the director of The Big House (1930), which utilizes a constantly moving camera to reveal hidden truths. Such overtly allegorical films would soon fall out of fashion, though isolated examples continued to be made, because they self-consciously called attention to their own artifice, rather than creating a seamless reality, the goal of classical Hollywood narrative..

Lois Weber portrait at the beginning of *Hypocrites*

300: Film Scholarship Without Films?

Archival Spaces 300

Tel Aviv Symposium: A Film Scholarship Without Films?

Uploaded 21 July 2022

Back in the early 1980s, my colleague and friend, Ute Eskildsen, and I organized an exhibition and published a catalog on Helmar Lerski, the New Realist photographer in Weimar Germany and a pioneering filmmaker in Jewish Palestine. Out of that research, a historical essay grew, “Zionist Film Propaganda in Nazi Germany” that described German-Jewish filmmakers involved in Zionist propaganda filmmaking in the 1930s, after their expulsion from Berlin; for the project, I conducted research in the World Zionist Archives in Jerusalem and combed through microfilms of German Zionist newspapers. I was continually reminded of that work while attending virtually the symposium, “A Film Scholarship Without Films? Reimaging the History of Israel Cinema Culture Through the Archive,” held at the Steve Tish School of Film and Television at the Aviv University on 5-6 July 2022.

Taking its dictum from Eric Smoodin’s seminal essay “As the Archive Turned: Writing Film Histories without Films,” which describes American film studies’ historical turn in the 1980s to archive research-based film history, the Symposium hoped to effect a similar sea change in Israeli film studies. According to conference organizers Dan Chyutin and Yael Mazor, conventional narratives of Israeli cinema history have relied almost exclusively on close readings of the films themselves. In contrast, a cinema history based on archival research, on the analysis of advertising, posters, company production records, balance sheets, interviews, and other non-filmic documents would result in a much richer history of Israel film culture that could also gauge the cinema’s impact on larger political issues.

Chyutin in his following conference presentation analyzed Israeli film fan magazines to theorize that these publications deviated from the austere 1950s Zionist project of national sacrifice to embrace the consumerist ideology of Hollywood. Next, Boaz Hagin details film theoretical, technical, and practical discourses in modernist Hebrew language art magazines, contrary to the conventional narrative that Israel film discourse prior to 1970 had been a wasteland. Olga Gershenson, on the other hand, discussed her research methodology in researching the production, distribution, and exhibition of an Israeli horror film wave post-2010.

Giora Goodman began the next panel with an analysis of the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s film politics, which again a counter-narrative theorizes that they were more interested in international commercial hits than in Zionist propaganda, which meant only films about the Arab-Israeli Conflict; that sold tickets abroad. Naomi Rolef and Hilla Lavie described archival documents, specific to their research. Rachel Harris’ contextualized close reading of Menachem Golan’s film noir thriller Eldorado (1963), Elad Wexler’s reconstruction of script changes, both aesthetic and political, in Hole in the Moon (1965), and Iddo Better Pocker and Orit Rozin’s dissection of the commodification of Israeli history in Manahem Golan’s Operation Thunderbolt (1978), all argue that these films existed outside the box of the Zionist project.

In the final session, Israela Shaer-Meoded analyzed the film career of Palestinian-Israeli filmmaker Edna Politi, whose 1973 film about the Yom Kippur War is known throughout the world, except in Israel. Finally, David Shalit contrasted Menachem Golan’s own constructed legend of his film career with the reality of Golan’s Americanization.

*In the* Empire of the Senses (1976, Nagisa Oshima)

Wednesday morning began with a panel on Israeli film censorship issues. Jonathan Yovel began by noting that there is no general theory of censorship because cases are too varied, but that censorship records tell us not only what is removed from public review, but also the taboos and obsessions of a culture, then discussed a number of foreign film censorship cases, noting that the Israel State Censorship Board’s decisions were often completely arbitrary. Ori Yaakobovich followed up with the more than two-decade-long struggle to get Oshima’s In the Empire of the Senses approved for public screenings in Israel, due to the Board’s intransigence in regards to sexual content.

The remainder of the symposium was largely informational. The late morning saw a roundtable of film archivists from the Israel Film Archive, the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, the Yad Tabenkin Research Center, the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, the University of Texas Library, and the Israel Testimonial Database, discussing methods of access and contents in their respective archives. In the afternoon, Christian Olesen and Sarah Dang introduced the digital databases of the Amsterdam Desmet Collection of early cinema and the Women Film Pioneers Project, respectively. While the former includes films and metadata, the latter offers biographical information, as well as numerous analytic visualizations of the data.

The symposium concluded with Eric Hoyte’s keynote in which he introduced various American film magazine databases, including Lantern and the Media History Digital Library. The construction of such digital archives depended on 1) what kind of research questions govern them, 2) Which historical sources are potentially available, and 3) what kind of inter-disciplinary research collaborations can such databases generate.

As the conference amply demonstrated, archival research is clearly migrating to cyberspace with ever more magazines and other paper documents becoming available. Israeli scholars are therefore much better equipped to make the historical turn, than American film historians three decades ago, when historical research still meant traveling, e.g. to the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, as I had to do in the early 1980s.