Archival Spaces

240: Nollywood

Archival Spaces 240

Nollywood

Uploaded April 10, 2020

For years I was planning a Nollywood film series at UCLA, but the difficulty of researching and finding films in what was a very informal video-based industry proved insurmountable. Nollywood refers of course to the cinema of Nigeria, which only came to prominence in the 1980s and is now the largest film industry in Africa and the third largest in the world after the United States and India. It was the invention of VHS tape that catalyzed a boom in the Nigerian video film market. Jimi Odumosu’s Evil Encounter (1980), a horror film released directly to video was the first major hit, although pirated copies far outsold legitimate ones, and the market’s lack of regulation has continued to be a problem. The actual boom really kicked off with Kenneth Nnebue’s Living in Bondage (1992), a film about a Satanic cult that promises wealth to its followers. Suddenly, Nigerian film actors become household names across the African continent. By 2013, Nollywood revenue reached $11 billion, contributing 1.4% to Nigeria’s economy. While the first generation of Nollywood films was extremely low budget and poorly made, higher budgets and digital production in the last ten years have dramatically increased salability abroad, although copyright and distribution issues still pose major challenges. Apart from the domestic audience, Nollywood films are seen throughout Africa and in the Nigerian diaspora. Today, Nollywood subscription services for online streaming, as well as YouTube, have increased visibility even more; Netflix has more than three dozen films available. In preparation for my class on Hollywood’s international relations, I recently viewed a number of them and still want to see more.

The Figurine (2009, Kunle Afolayan), starring the director, Ramseay Nouah and Omoni Oboli, opened at the Rotterdam Film Festival and other international festivals, broke all box office records in Nigeria, and is considered the first critical success of the present Nollywood wave. It was also one of the first films to use various social media outlets to spread word of mouth, now an absolute necessity for online delivery. While attending a national youth camp, two friends find an ancient fetish in a shrine, Araromire, which, according to legend (explicated in an opening black and white scene), brings seven years good luck, then bad. The young men are rivals for the same girl, who chooses one of them, but both become hugely successful before the curse kicks in. Interestingly, the film oscillates between tribal superstition and modern crime, its “horror” elements downplayed in favor of very real human envy, jealousy, adultery, and murder. As in the case of Living in Bondage, material wealth is the great motivator in a society that is characterized by economic disparity.

Taxi Driver: Oko Ashewo (2015, Daniel Oriahi), starring Femi Jacobs and Ijeoma Grace Aku, is a film noir, but also a comedy. Registering the highest opening weekend gross for any Nigerian film at the time, it was shot mostly on the nighttime streets of Lagos, in high contrast digital. Color. The film opens with a young man from the countryside arriving in Lagos by bus, where he inherits a taxi from his late father. Naive and gullible, Adigun is plunged into a nether world of Yoruba gangsters who control the livery business, and the women of the night who are his primary customers, guided by the friend of his late father who turns out to be an evil opportunist. Somehow, he survives all of it and even falls in love, giving this noir a happy end. While some critics considered its ending over-determined and confusing, it is also a closely observed, socially critical tale of the brutal life of Nigeria’s urban poor who struggle daily without success.

Lionheart (2018) stars Genevieve Nnaji, whose debut as director this was, as an upper-class businesswoman, who must take over from her aging father, Chief Ernest Obiagu, an ailing bus transportation company, the Lionheart of the title. The film takes place in Enugu, in southeastern Nigeria, home of the Igbo people (formerly the capital of Biafra). Battling sexism in a male-dominated industry, and some duplicitous colleagues, the heroine must also negotiate the sensitive politics of family relations, because her father has named his brother and her uncle to head the firm when he has a heart attack. Opening at the Toronto Film Festival, Lionheart became the first Nigerian film acquired as an original by Netflix. The film was also the first to be nominated by Nigeria for a Foreign Language Academy Award but was ultimately disqualified, because much of the film is in English with only some Igbo, as are most Nigerian films playing in the upper classes.

Also situated among Nigeria’s upper classes, but in the capital of Lagos, The Wedding Party (2016, Kemi Adetiba) offers a comedic look at an ostentatious wedding, in the vein of Crazy Rich Asians. Starring Adesua Etomi and Banky Wellington, as the bride and groom, whose parents are separated by tribal and cultural differences, the groom’s mother is particularly aggressive in her opposition, because she believes her son is marrying beneath his station. Then there are the groom’s ex-girlfriends who want to upend the betrothal, and his father’s significantly younger mistress trying to crash the party, as do the poor relatives of the bride. The comedy is particularly revealing in presenting differing social mores in Nigerian society, codified in religion, fashion, and food, but ultimately everyone comes together. Opening to an enthusiastic audience at the Toronto Film Festival, it is small wonder the film was the commercially most successful ever made in Nigeria, supplanted only a year later by The Wedding Party II (2017).

239: Czechoslovak Legions in WWI

Archival Spaces 239

The Czechoslovak Legions in World War I

Uploaded March 27, 2020

In the past couple of years, I have written blogs about my dad, Jerome (Jaromir) Horák, who was both a concentration camp survivor (https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blog/international-students-day/) and a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia (https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/archival-spaces/2018/08/31/abduction-petr-zenkl), and whose birthday it is today. More recently, I have been researching my father’s father, Jan Horák, and namesake, who was a member of the Czechoslovak Legions during World War I. According to the Central Military Archive of the Czech Republic, Děde, as we children called my grandfather, joined the Czechoslovak Legion on March 23, 1918, almost exactly 102 years ago. For more than eighty years, a large silk-stitched Gobelin of a Siberian tiger hung in the dining room of my grandparents home in Prague-Vysočany, which grandfather had purchased in 1920 in Vladivostok or possibly China on the long, ship’s voyage home from Russia’s Pacific coast through the Suez Canal to Trieste, returning to Prague in April 1920, more than 18 months after the Armistice. Throughout the latter half of the 20^th century, the history of the Czech Legions in WWI was suppressed by the Communists for reasons that will become clear below, and only recently has a spate of new research brought to light their amazing story.

The Czechoslovak Legions were formed in Russia, France, and Italy in 1914-1918, before the Czech nation even came into existence, and consisted of deserters and P.O.W.s from the Austro-Hungarian Army, who wanted to fight against the Central Powers on the side of the Triple Entente, in the hopes that their sacrifice would encourage the Allied Powers to give the Czechs and Slovaks their own independent country, rather than remain under the yoke of the Austrian Habsburg Empire, as they had been for 300 years. In Imperial Russia, the original core of the Legion, the Česká družina, was constituted as a unit of the Russian Third Army as early as August 1914, made up of Czech and Slovak residents in the Tsarist Empire. Officers and enlisted men alike addressed each other as “bratr” (brother). Until August 1915, the Russian military command had reservations about accepting Austro-Hungarian deserters and P.O.W.s into their army, given the 2^nd Hague Convention’s (1907) prohibition against P.O.W.s joining the armies of their respective enemy, because they would lose P.O.W. protections and be subject to execution as traitors, if caught again. Nevertheless, P.O.W.s continued to join, so that by 1917, two Czechoslovak Rifle Regiments had been created, who fought heroically at the Battle of Zborov on the Ukrainian front in July 1917, overrunning the Austrian trenches. By the beginning of 1918, the Legion numbered over 40,000 soldiers in eight regiments.

Czechoslovak Legions at Battle of Zborov. 2 July 1917

Born in Prostějov (Proßnitz, Austro-Hungary) in central Moravia in February 1886, Jan Horák had moved to Prague to study at university, and was probably already working in Vysočany at ČKD (Českomoravská Kolben-Daněk), one of the country’s largest producers of heavy machinery, when he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army in late 1914 or early 1915. Given the rank of Lieutenant, he was assigned somewhat inexplicably to the newly formed 14^th Rifle Battalion, 16^th Infantry Brigade, a unit that was made up almost exclusively of Polish and Ruthenians from Galicia (Ruthenia would become a part of the new Czechoslovak Republic until annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945). The Brigade was sent to the Western Ukraine, where the Russian Imperial Army was attempting to invade Austro-Hungary through the Carpathian Mountains near Nadvorna, just South of Liviv (Lemberg); there, my grandfather was captured on June 1, 1915. He was initially sent to Kiev, where he was formally registered as a P.O.W., then transferred to a camp near Samara, on the eastern bank of the Volga River in Russia, where he spent the next 31 months, before joining the Czech Legion with the rank of Private. Another inmate of the camp was Jaroslav Hašek, later author of the classic antiwar novel, The Good Soldier Švejk.

**Legionnaires surrendering weapons in Penza, May 1918**

By the time Horák put on a Czech uniform, the Russian Revolution had occurred and the new Bolshevik Government had signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 3, 1918), which ended Russia’s participation in the war, leaving the Czechoslovaks stranded. A month earlier, the Germans had launched a counter-offensive in Ukraine, forcing the Czechs to defend successfully Kiev and cover their own retreat. Weeks later, Tomaš Masaryk, the leader of the Czechoslovak independence movement and soon to become first President of the Republic (October 1918), was in Russia to enlist Czech and Slovak P.O.W.’s in the Legion, and negotiate with Lenin the transfer of the Legion to the Western Front via Archangel or Vladivostok. He also assured the Red Army in Kiev that the Czechs would maintain strict neutrality in the beginning civil war between Reds and Whites. Several thousand leftist Czechs and Slovaks actually succumbed to offers of better pay and joined the Red Army, including Hašek.

But the Bolsheviks also sent mixed messages, approving the transfer of the Legion one day, then ordering the Red Army to take all Legionnaires from their trains, shoot them or put them in labor battalions or fight for the Reds. While a small portion reached Archangel, the greater part of the Legion, now nominally under the command of the French Army, converged on the Trans-Siberian railroad, first giving up most of their weapons to the Bolsheviks, as per the Penza Agreement (March 26), then taking them back when they were continually attacked by Bolshevik troops (May 26), who cared little about orders from Moscow. By June 1918 the Legion controlled all 2500 miles of rail west of Irkutsk in Siberia with over 60 Legion troop trains running East; in September they owned all 6,000 miles to Vladivostok.

**Legionnaires with captured Russian Armored Train, Trans-Siberian Railroad**

**Legionnaires lived on these trains for more than a year**

By then, 40% of the Legion, including my grandfather, had made it to Vladivostok, only to be ordered to return West, either to open up a new Eastern Front against the Austro-Germans, or intervene in the Civil War against the Bolsheviks (along with U.S., Japanese, and British troops), or relieve their brethren still trapped in European Russia (west of Penza), the Allies couldn’t decide what they wanted. Ultimately, the Legion threw their lot with the Allies and White Russians, who controlled much of Siberia under Admiral Alexandr Kolchak, keeping the Trans-Siberian open (without the promised help from the Allies) for much of 1919, but quickly becoming disillusioned with Kolchak’s anti-democratic reign. They eventually captured Kolchak, handing him over to the Bolsheviks, while steadily retreating as the Bolsheviks conquered territory from West to East. In February 1920, the Legions signed an Armistice with the Reds, allowing them to evacuate from Vladivostok. The last of close to 60,000 Legionnaires left the Pacific port in September 1920, but by then my grandfather had been home for months and impregnated my grandmother, who gave birth to my father on March 27, 1921.

**Legionnaires on their way home, passing through the Suez Canal, 1920**

Between the World Wars, the members of the Czech Legions were treated as heroes, whether in civilian life or rising in the ranks of the Czechoslovak Army, like my great uncle, General Josef Kohoutek, who had joined the Legion in Italy, became the head of Czech Army Intelligence, only to be executed by the Nazis at Berlin-Plötzensee in September 1942, in reprisal for the Reinhold Heydrich assassination. After the Communist Putsch in Czechoslovakia, the Legion’s reunions were outlawed, and its history suppressed. Unfortunately, I didn’t meet my Děde, until he was 79, by which time he was suffering from dementia. When my grandfather died in March 1969, only a handful of aging Legionnaires were allowed to form a color guard to accompany him to his last resting place.

**Horák Family Crypt , Prague-Vysočany**

238: A Film Curator does what?

Archival Spaces 238

A Film Curator does what?

Uploaded 13 March 2020

I have been seeing the verb to curate with increasing frequency in the unlikeliest places, e.g. I was recently on a Delta Airlines flight where you can now purchase a Delta vacation with “the world’s best hotels and curated experiences.” Apart from the fact that my word processing program tells me that “curated” is underlined in red, i.e. misspelled, I wonder what is a curated experience? I didn’t really think much about the Delta pitch or other weird examples of the usage, until I read a New York Times published article (March 3, 2020) last week by Lou Stoppard, complaining that “Everyone’s now a curator.” According to the author, curating is the trendiest term around today, and curators are the new lifestyle superstars, curating food, wardrobes, restaurants, travel, Instagram feeds, even cheese. Having been a real curator for much of my life, I wanted to add a few thoughts of my own, from the front lines, so to speak, which put into context Stoppard’s comment that calling professionals who organize exhibitions curators is a new phenomenon.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb “to curate” in fact doesn’t exist; as a noun, a curate is one entrusted with the cure of souls or a spiritual pastor, which doesn’t exactly fit here; a curator has several meanings says OED, but the operative one is: “the officer in charge of a museum, gallery of art, or the like; a keeper, custodian.” This definition is relatively broad and doesn’t really specify the duties of a curator in an institution that houses collections of books or works of art, regardless s of medium.

So let’s get specific. My first job at George Eastman Museum back in the 1980s was as Associate Curator, Department of Film; I was promoted after three years to Curator of Film. In that position, I was responsible for both the care and preservation of the film collections, which included physical films in various formats (35mm, 28mm, 16mm, 8mm, etc), as well as film stills (photographs), film posters, and other paper documents, like the personal and corporate correspondence of filmmakers. The latter paper-based documents constitute the material culture of cinema, and are pertinent to any writing of film history. This curatorial work was essentially that of an archivist who must facilitate the long-term survival of materials under his/her care. In the analog era, that meant preserving the original materials as best as possible through proper archival housing and climate control, i.e. proper storage, and in the case of obsolete film formats, copying materials to newer, chemically more stable film materials. In the digital age, it now means moving from a culture of objects (films, paper-based images) to one of digital files, which are created by digitizing original materials. Thus, the curator’s job now entails keeping track of digital files in cyberspace, while still holding on to the original analog materials for as long as possible, in order to facilitate the making of more sophisticated digital files in the future.

But my work as a film curator at Eastman involved not just archival work, as it is traditionally defined. I was also responsible for programming film series at the Museum’s Dryden Theatre. Film programs were curated both from the permanent collection of films at the Museum, as well as from other sources that make films available for projection, either other museums and film archives, or film distributors, film collectors, etc. Putting together such film programs was not only a matter of organizing and scheduling film prints in a rational sequence, but also of research in film historical texts, biographies, newspapers and magazine, film reviews, online websites, and numerous other paper and digital sources, because film programming has to make curatorial sense, educate and entertain. Furthermore, film programs were accompanied by brochures and other publicity materials that explicated a program’s rationale, as well as providing descriptions of individual films shown.

Even before taking my position at Eastman, I had co-organized an exhibition, “Film and Photo in the 1920s,” a reconstruction of a famous 1929 avant-garde media exhibition, originally conceived by Constructivist artists, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Hans Richter. Shown in Germany at Stuttgart’s Kunstverein and Essen’s Folkwangmuseum, as well traveling to museums in Berlin, Hamburg, and Zurich, “FiFo” included both a film program and a wall exhibition. Not surprisingly, then, given the paper collections at Eastman Museum, the job of film curator included developing traditional exhibitions in the museum’s galleries. Thus, we opened the new museum building in Rochester in January 1989 with “The Dream Merchants: Making and Selling Films in Hollywood’s Golden Age,” a major exhibition which introduced the Warner Brothers film stills collection that had been in deep storage at Eastman since the late 1950s. The exhibition was accompanied by a Warner Brothers studios film program, and a catalog. Writing and editing that catalog, which made a contribution to film history was also a work of film curatorship.

Finally, given the realities of the non-profit status of museums in America, curators in recent years usually have to develop strategies for fundraising, in order to finance any part of the job described above. That is usually hard work in and of itself. I’ve had exhibitions fall through for lack of funding, despite great concepts. But film curatorship means there’s never a dull moment.

Old film stills archive and my office on the 3rd floor of George Eastman House

237: Hunters. Season 1

Archival Spaces 237

Hunters. Season 1 (2020, Amazon Prime)

Uploaded 28 February 2020

I have to say that I was put off by the first episode of Hunters, Amazon Prime’s new television series, because the opening in which Under-Secretary Biff Simpson (a member of Jimmy Carter’s cabinet, we later learn) murders his whole family, some neighbors, and guests at poolside, because one of the guests recognizes him as a former Nazi war criminal, seemed too cartoonish, given the subject of the series is a Simon Wiesenthal hunt for Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust. My European parents, one of them a non-Jewish concentration camp survivor, never allowed me to read comic books as a child, and I never have since, although I have watched a couple of recent comic book movies. I did read Art Spiegelmann’s brilliant graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus, ironically opening in 1978, one year after the Hunters’ story takes place, which is why I gave the show a second chance, binge watching season 1 in two days. I also remembered that mixing comedy and the Holocaust, i.e. popular culture and the most horrific event in the 20^th century, has often brought down the wrath of high brow critics, as Lubitsch experienced when he made To Be a or Not to Be (1942), now considered an absolute classic, or, more recently was the fate of Jo Jo Rabbit (2019, Taika Waititi).

Hunters is indeed consciously structured like a comic book with numerous references to Batman, and the hunters themselves being an Avengers type crew, while also being a post-modern mash-up of tv commercials, game shows, movie genres, animation, popular songs, stereotypes, over-the-top violence, melodrama, outright sentimentality, garish color, and purely metaphoric images. But it also visualizes for present day audiences – at a time when not more than a handful of victims and perpetrators are among us – the actual history of the Holocaust, including the “selection” process on the ramp at Auschwitz, life in concentration camp barracks, the KZ orchestras, the extreme cruelty of the SS (the human chess game is, however, a complete fabrication), the medical experiments, the Kindertransports, the cooperation of Swiss banks in hiding Nazi pillaged Jewish wealth, and maybe most importantly, the complicity of the American government in “rescuing” over 1,600 Nazi criminals after World War II (code-named Operation Paperclip), so they could participate in our country’s atomic/chemical weapons and space exploration programs, giving us a leg up on the evil Communists in Russia. Finally, the film consistently addresses deeply moral dilemmas about whether vigilantism is justified for a righteous cause in a seemingly corrupt world, without providing easy or pat answers, in particular through its central protagonist, Jonah Heidelbaum, who is likened to Batman and works in a comic book store.

Logan Lerman (Jonah Heidelbaum), Al Pacino (Meyer Offerman)

“The boy,” as the other hunters call him, is barely out of his teens, when he witnesses the murder in his house of his grandmother, Ruth, herself a Holocaust survivor and his only living relative. Through a series of clues among his “Safta’s” things he finds Heinz Richter, a Nazi war criminal running a Manhattan toy shop and attempts to kill him, but fails, and must be rescued by Meyer Offerman, the leader of the hunters and a survivor. Like his Old Testament namesake, Jonah fails this and subsequent tests throughout the narrative, when he is asked to kill Nazis, often accompanied by Ruth’s ghost who warns him that he will become like them if he does so. In the Bible, Jonah is sent to the utterly wicked city of Nineveh by God to announce their destruction, if they do not repent, but Jonah flees, only to be swallowed by a whale, where he realizes his duty and travels to the city to reveal the difference between good and evil. Not surprisingly, each episode of Hunters is described on the Amazon website in quasi-biblical language: “And on the second day, God created The Hunters, who at the behest of Meyer brought Jonah into their tribe….” In Hunters, though, Nineveh is the symbol not only of the whole community of Americanized Nazi war criminals but also of the present day the United States itself, which under Trumpism has revealed its previously sometimes hidden racist heart.

In a black and white television skit, a very young black girl and Lonny Flash, an unemployed actor and one of the hunters, ask the question: How do you recognize a Nazi? Yolanda answers 1) By the raised arm salute; 2) white people; 3) white people; 4) white people. Lonny corrects her and says that all white people are not Nazis, but she insists that all Nazis are white people. And indeed, the Nazis, whether German war criminals or their young American followers are white people who inhabit a world of “America First,” Confederate flag-draped Fourth of July barbecues, alt-right meetings, right-wing Republican fundraisers, Aryan Nations-dominated prisons, trans-national corporate capitalism or segments of the American government. Time and again the Nazis respond, “But we are Americans just like you.” When a Jewish couple is separated from their child on the ramp at Auschwitz, we cannot help but think of INS’s immigration policies on our Southern border. The central plot revealed in the latter half of the season involves the genocide of America’s brown people by feeding them a sugar substitute, just as some African-American critics have long contended that white America flooded the ghetto with drugs in another attempted genocide

Jerrika Hinton as FBI Agent Millie Morris

Thus, the most striking aspect of Hunters may be that this Holocaust story is chocked full of African-American characters, and not just because Jordan Peele is one of the executive producers. Two of Jonah’s three best neighborhood friends are black – he is sweet on the young woman. Also an African-American is the female FBI detective, Millie Morris, who is on the trail of both the hunters and the Nazis, but has trouble admitting her sexual preference to her deeply religious family. Several other black Americans become victims of American Nazis. And finally, the hunters themselves are an inter-racial group, including a young black woman with an Angela Davis Afro, an Asian-American Vietnam war vet with PST, a middle-aged Catholic nun, another elderly couple who survived Auschwitz, as well as the aforementioned Jewish actor and group leader. In fact, in their color-blind racial harmony, the hunters represent an inter-racial utopia that also finds expression in a joyous dance sequence on Coney Island to a Bee Gees tune from Saturday Night Fever, and in the general image of New York.

Saul Rubinek (Murray Markowitz), Kate Mulvaney (Sister Harriet), Louis Ozawa (Joe Mizushima), Josh Radnor (Lonny Flash), Al Pacino (Meyer Offerman), Logan Lerman (Jonah Heidelbaum), Tiffany Boone (Roxy Jones), Carol Kane (Mindy Markowitz(,

Some critics have complained that the last episode’s major reveal stretches credulity, but series author David Weil probably lifted the idea from Edgar Hilsenrath’s satirical novel, The Nazi and the Barber (1971), the black comedy that demonstrates that even racists, like their human forefathers in Nineveh, may have the capacity to repent and are then deserving of mercy.