Upcoming Programs & Events
Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - 5:00pm - 7:00pm
The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe
by Olga Gershenson. Book Launch and Author’s Talk Illustrated with Film Clips
Even people familiar with cinema believe there is no such thing as a Soviet Holocaust film. The Phantom Holocaust tells a different story. The Soviets were actually among the first to portray these events on screens. In 1938, several films exposed Nazi anti-Semitism, and a 1945 movie depicted the mass execution of Jews in Babi Yar. Other significant pictures followed in the 1960s. But the more directly filmmakers engaged with the Holocaust, the more likely their work was to be banned by state censors. Some films were never made while others came out in such limited release that the Holocaust remained a phantom on Soviet screens. Focusing on work by both celebrated and unknown Soviet directors and screenwriters, Olga Gershenson has written the first book about all Soviet narrative films dealing with the Holocaust from 1938 to 1991. In addition to studying the completed films, Gershenson analyzes the projects that were banned at various stages of production. The book draws on archival research and in-depth interviews to tell the sometimes tragic and sometimes triumphant stories of filmmakers who found authentic ways to represent the Holocaust in the face of official silencing.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Professor Mamlock
1938, dirs. Herbert Rapoport and Adolf Minkin, 100 min
Made in Stalin’s Russia, Professor Mamlock was one of the first films worldwide to tackle Nazi anti-Semitism head-on. Based on a famous play by a German-Jewish exile to Moscow, Friedrich Wolf, and directed by an Austrian-Jewish exile, Herbert Rappaport, the film tells with brutal honesty the story of a Jewish doctor and his family as he becomes a victim of the Nazis’ rise to power in 1930s Germany. Professor Mamlock is not only impressively acted but also beautifully shot—and was a hit with audiences both at home and abroad.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Goodbye, Boys
1964/1966, dir. Mikhail Kalik
In the lazy summer days of the late 1930s, three teenage friends roam the streets of the small Russian seaside town as their youth slips away and World War II looms. The boys, one of whom is Jewish, optimistically look forward to their military careers, getting away from overprotective parents, and becoming heroes. However, in the course of the film, it becomes clear to us that the inexperienced idealists will be sent off to the front lines where they will encounter horror and tragedy. To tell this story, Mikhail Kalik, a filmmaker of Goodbye, Boys!, used excerpts from other films, fictional and documentary, to function as flash-forwards to the war and the Holocaust. In Western Holocaust films flashbacks are common for depicting trauma, but flash-forward was Kalik’s remarkable innovation.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Commissar
1967/1988, dir. Alexander Askoldov, 110 min
One of the most striking films of Khrushchev’s Thaw, Commissarwas banned in the Soviet Union for its expression of overt sympathy for the Jews who were persecuted during the Russian Civil War. The most controversial part of the film is a scene depicting the future Holocaust to come, as envisioned by a Russian commissar woman.Askoldov’s brilliant cinematography, influenced by the silent Soviet masters, uses subjective camera to create arresting black-and-white images that made Commissarinto one of the best known Soviet masterpieces.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Ladies Tailor
1990, dir. Leonid Horowitz, 92 min.
Ladies Tailoris set in Kiev, on the eve of the mass execution on September 29, 1941 in Babi Yar. An old Jewish tailor Isaac (famous Soviet actor Innokentii Smoktunovskii) joins his family in their soon-to-be-lost home, and the film chronicles the last twenty-four hours in their lives. The violence is never fully depicted on screen and the night is almost mundane: the family members pack, bake cookies for the road, argue and reminiscence about the past. Yet, what appears to be a simple story emerges as an intense drama raising complex and terrifying questions about the fate of the Jews under Nazi and Soviet tyranny.