Journal of Contemporary
History
http://jch.sagepub.com
Exorcising the Post: Jewish Figures in Contemporary Films
R.M. Friedmon
Journal of Contemporary History 1984; 19; 511
DOI: 10.1177/002200948401900306
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R.M. Friedmon
Exorcising the Post: Jewish Figures in
Contemporary Films
The
representation on the screen of the genocide of the Jews gave
rise to a line of features soon named  Holocaust Films
by American
critics and academic
researchers, who even believed they had
discovered a new
Indeed, about
 genre . sixty feature films seem to
correspond to a preliminary definition of three areas in which genre
elements may be
present: iconography, structure and theme. The
distribution, as well as the
setting, the choice of characters and their
theme were dictated
by history. The scenario, usually ending
from
tragically, followed the same pattern of action: tearing away
the native
shelter,
background, flight, search for hiding, discovery,
deportation to the death-camps. One or another of these different
However, it seems
stages of persecution is emphasized in each film.
that,
although inspired by the theme of Jewish suffering during the
nazi era, films like Mr. Klein
(Joseph Losey, 1976), The Last Metro
Truffaut, Pakula,
(Franqois 1980) or Sophie s Choice (Alan J.
limitations, invalidating even the assumption
1983) go beyond these
of an The
existing genre. following attempts to suggest, moreover,
that the film
image of  The Jewish Catastrophe (to paraphrase F.
Meinecke) is closely connected to ideological fluctuations, and the
and downs of the
ups history of the last thirty years.
With Hitler s
films,
coming to power, some mainly in Anglo-Saxon
threat to the German Jewish
countries, hinted at the community.
The
Wandering Jew (1933) was produced in Great Britain with
German them the famous actor Conrad Veidt.
emigrants, among
Next, and most important, was Jud Suss (1934) based on L.
Feuchtwanger s novel in which the elegant Suss Oppenheimer wants
to live with the times and
ignore possible persecution, even though
old rabbi Isaac Landauer reminds him twice:
 They did it in 1430,
1830,
they could do it in 1730, they could do it in they can do it in
Journal and New
History (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills
of Contemporary Delhi),
Vol. 511-
,
19 (1984), 511-527
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512
1930. Who is the
historical
going to stop them? In the same way,
fiction The House
of Rothschilds (1934), produced by
Darryl F.
refers to
Zanuck, one of the few non-Jewish moguls of Hollywood,
an all
pervading antisemitism liable to break out in
Germany at any
moment.
These works were
warmly received by the public. Therefore, in
1940, when
Germany, victorious and triumphant, was
preparing for
its Goebbels was
offensive,
grand anti-Jewish only too pleased to
take over and distort their themes.
of The
Thus, the end
Rothschilds Shares at Waterloo
(July 1940) and the last
image of
JudSiiss
for
(September 1940) also convey a contemporary message
the German
people: expulsion and death for the Jews in the name of
the
purity of the race and for the preservation of the generations to
2
come.2
The hints at the
precariousness of the Jews situation in Germany in
such films as The House
of Rothschilds were unobtrusive and
indirect.
They disappeared from Hollywood films altogether when
America later chose isolationism. At that
time, Jewish
emigrants
were
crowding into the world of motion pictures, where there was
even a
powerful anti-nazi movement.3This was not mentioned,
few which dealt
however, in the films of the time
except for a very
with nazi terror without
1940,
emphasizing the Jewish problem. In
only Charlie
Chaplin tried to ridicule The Great Dictator,
allowing
the dictator s Jewish
counterpart to broadcast the only humane
words for the victimized that were to be heard in
those
days. A
the war.
change of attitude came when the United States entered
The same tactical considerations ruled Stalin s film
policy. Thus,
the
fight of the Russian people against the Teutonic Knights in
Alexander Newski or the nazi
persecutions against Professor
Mamlock were both
begun in 1938, but their screening was
German-Soviet Pact
1941, when the
temporarily suspended until
was broken.
As for France in the
days of the Popular Front, its films
cautiously ignored the existence of nazi Germany. And so Jean
Renoir, in his manifesto for La Grande Illusion
peace, (1937), tried
to endow the Germans in his film with humane and noble
features,
while
depicting the French Jew Rosenthal in an ambiguous way,
the traditional antisemitic
bestowing on him all stereotypes.5 At a
time when Leon Blum
was the
target of the most treacherous attacks
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513
and when the film flooded
world,
by German refugees, was reacting
with
xenophobia, Renoir without doubt wanted to show the inanity
of antisemitic
prejudices by showing on the screen a generous
Jewish officer. But certain clues in the
and, more
dialogue
reveal the
treatment,
especially, hints in the visual superficial
character of Renoir s liberal attitude.
This conflict between intention and realisation introduces us to
such notions as
 mentality , or in its visual aspect,  representation .
 Representation is that set of images which remains beyond formu-
lated
is, however, permeated and influenced by
speech but
mentalities.  Mentalities can be defined as the
conceptual tools
which a human group gives itself to
organize its behaviour, to
its
convey experiences symbolically, and to transcribe reciprocally
the
ideological expression that is a film.
The end of the war revealed to the world the horror of the concent-
ration camps and the
magnitude of the Jewish tragedy. But
European nations were torn apart; they needed some collective
which would
body, suffering,
memory present them as a united
heroic, and resisting the invader. Films were to play that part very
efficiently. In the films of Eastern Europe chiefly, the Jewish fate
became the very
symbol of nazi oppression: the destruction of the
ghetto announced the destruction of Warsaw itself. Film fictions
complied to the pattern of actions quoted above. The depiction of
the
typical victim as a child, a teenager or a very young woman,
seemed to have been
fate, as if the
inspired by Ann Frank s passive
part of the sacrificial victim, in order to be moving, could only be
realized in
femininity. The narrative implication is two-fold: on the
one
hand, there is the devoted
help of the local population, its
concern
generally embodied in a
young man responsive to the exotic
On the other
beauty of the distressed hand, no
young Jewess. repre-
sentation is ever made of any Jew
invader, not even in a
resisting the
minor or
secondary role.
Such is the
recurring pattern to be found in the Czech film
Juliet and Darkness
Romeo,
(Jiri Weiss, 1960), the Yugoslavian
film The Ninth
Circle
(France Stiglic, 1961), the Hungarian film
Darkness at
Daytime (Zoltan Fabri, 1963) and the East German film
Stars
films,
(Konrad Wolff, 1959). Even two Italian Kapo (Gillo
Pontecorvo, 1960) and The Gold of Rome (Carlo Lizzani, 1961),
9
followed a more or less similar narrative model.9
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514
In
France, Alain Resnais s
documentary film on Auschwitz,
Night and intended
to recall a common
Fog (1954), also a
fate,
shared
of those who were
suffering, the obstinate resistance
sentenced not to return - the  Nacht und Nebel .
Thus, without
mentions  the nine
stressing the Jews, Jean
Cayrol s admirable text
million dead
haunting that landscape ...  . At the film s
to
delegation threatened leave; the French
premiere, the German
authorities demanded cuts of the shots of the transit camps to
French
Auschwitz, Pithiviers, where the
Drancy and gendarmerie is
seem to have been
caught at work. Twenty years later, these taboos
removed and the of German
murky years occupation arouse the
interest of
European directors.
A different attitude towards the
occupation has appeared, first in
France and in
Italy. A new word describes this changed outlook:
which may be an abbreviation of
 retro , a retroactive,
vague term
retrospective, or retrograde. French  retro in the
performing arts
and as far as films are influences.
concerned, is the result of three
First, from the  camp sensitivity born on American
campuses, an
amused, ironical and
nostalgic reassessment of formerly despised
cultural
products such as the movies of Hollywood s golden age,
which had
expressed America s good conscience now shaken by the
Vietnam war and student and black riots. The next factor was the
of a cinema of excess, of
appearance overload, of deliberate
baroque, if not of decadence, in
make-up, costumes and scenery.
This is the young German cinema of
Schroeter, Fassbinder, Schmid
and
Syberberg, whose first films strove to
forget nazism and to
return to the
extraordinary Weimar cinema which had preceded it. °
The last influence is that of a new theme in the Italian
cinema, a
theme which dares to
question a whole generation s adherence to
fascism. What Visconti had done for nazism in The Fall
of the
Gods
(1968) by displaying besides the historical, economic and
drives and will to
political causes of its rise, also the sexual
power -
intrusion of Greek
tragedy and Shakespearian drama into the
-
Bertolucci did for fascism with The
Krupp family Strategy of the
Spider (1969), which was inspired by Borges, then with The
Conformist (1970), which borrowed its title from A. Moravia but its
spirit from J.P. Sartre s Childhood of a Leader. V. de Sica joined
the movement with his free
adaptation of Georgio Bassani s The
Garden
of the Fin,zi-Continis, that elegy to a murdered Judaism.
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515
Later, however, the novelist refused to answer for a work that had
turned out melodramatic and once
tearful, and in which, more, was
stressed the even
passive resignation of the Jewish aristocrats,
though shown here as noble and lucid.
The reconstitution of an
epoch through plastic, literary, and
musical
quotations which suspend the assessing judgment, the
analysis of sexual motivations which
brought about what has been
-
here are the elements
ideology,&dquo;
aptly called  a pathological
which make of the fascist era an aesthetic
object to be endlessly
documented. Famous film directors such as Resnais
(Stavisky,
1974) and Fellini begin to tackle it. Its temporal limits broaden out.
In The
Serpent s Egg (1977), Bergman refers to the week preceding
Hitler s aborted
putsch in Munich in November 1923, and in Salo
republic of Mussolini as a
(1975), Pasolini portrays the short-lived
modern, sadistic Sodom.
In
France, where the spreading of the  retro phenomenon depended
not
only on the performing arts in which it was expressed, but also
on the countless comments which it
elicited, the New
Philosophers
of the
questioned this passionate interest in the dark years
occupation and the war.
According to Jean Baudrillard 2, the same process which, in times
of had chased
violence, history from the screen replacing it by myth,
now works the other way round  in an irreferential era, where life
and death are no
longer at stake . History, this lost referent, has
become a
myth which invades the cinema. According to
Baudrillard, the Freudian theory of fetishism (the last object seen
before a trauma becomes the
fetish) accounts for the craze over the
fascist era.
Michel Foucault 3 notes that the appearance of the retro
movement coincides with the rise of a new in France. Giscard
power
d Estaing s authority no longer owes anything to the glorious and
heroic man who from London launched his famous
appeal to the
French
people. Therefore it reconciles the national right wing with
the collaborationist one which had revolved around Petain.
In  retro films will obvi-
proposing this new collective memory,
by the Resistance. In place of the former
part played
ously weaken the
separation between the France of the Resistance and the nazi invader,
retro films substitute the
image of a passive people, where small
Resistance collaborators.
of of
groups fighters confront small groups
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516
Despite the known high percentage of Jews who fought in the
even Jewish film directors sanctioned the
Resistance, 4 nearly
absolving image of the victim resigned from the start to his tragic fate:
 What can we do? ... Where could we run to? ...
Everything that
surrounds us is hostile! says, in
effect, one of the characters in Black
Mitrani,
Thursday (Michel 1974).
The retro movement Lacombe
appeared in France in 1974 when
Lucien, Les violons du bal, Black Thursday and finally Night Porter
were screened. It must be understood within a
precise economic,
political and cultural context: the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War,
when the energy crisis vulnerable
proved to consumer societies how
and when the
they were, progressive degradation of Israel s image,
following the Six Day War, seemed to permit still another
representation of the Jew.
Thus can there be a more
troubling portrayal of a Jew than that of
Schlemilovitch, the main character of Patrick Modiano s
Raphael
first novel La
place de l étoile (1968)? Schlemilovitch s search for
himself leads him to
try a Jewish national identity, but the officers
whomhe meets in Israel brutalize him to make him
forget his Jewish-
then burn Jewish works of
ness, art, eventually turning into the very
same
policemen of the Gestapo who had tortured him earlier. From
La
place de l étoile to Les boulevards de ceinture and including La
ronde de
nuit, the whole of Modiano s work focused on describing a
double
hand, collaboration
ghetto: the Jewish condition on the one
on the other hand. This process seemed to end with the
script he wrote
-
for Louis Malle Lacombe
Lucien, where the sarcastic
writing of
the author meets the academic mise-en-scene of the director.&dquo;
At first born
sight, Lacombe Lucien is the story of a young man,
into a violence
labourers, whose taste for
family of agricultural might
well have found an outlet in
Resistance, if a series of
serving the
circumstances had not
pushed him on to the side of the militia (the
French
Gestapo). Through the militiamen, he is able to introduce
himself into the
family of the Jewish taylor, Horn, who owe their
the militia. But
precarious survival to the despite a
money they pay to
-
 Those who do
preventive
inscription quoted from G. Santayana
not remember the
past are condemned to live it anew - and despite
the last
image announcing Lucien Lacombe s execution and re-
establishing the chronology, the film merely obliterates history,
cutting off real confrontations with racism, antisemitism, or
any
class-struggle. Thus, there is a black militiaman and the maid who
foresees the nazi ferocious antisemite.
collapse appears as a
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517
In
criticism,
keeping with a common theme of contemporary
control,
according to which the creations of demiurges get out oftheir
the film director has confessed that he was
puzzled by the areas of
darkness and
However, the French
ambiguity in his film. people
portrayed were, at best, naive and limited, and at worst, corrupt
informers. The Jewish
family was no less dangerously stereotyped,
with its
accent, its trade, its behaviour. Thus, the first
foreign
sentence uttered
Lucien,
by the Jewish girl after she had slept with
reminded him that he had to
help her father escape to Spain.
In its criticism of the
film, Positif l6 can therefore refer to the
 subservient tiredness of old Horn who does not succeed in
really
France,
pragmatism of his daughter
hating Lucien or to  the vital
who his will for
manages to overcome
manipulates Lucien whereas he
and allows true
power feelings to surface . So the work and its
Jew, whose
exegesis come back to the too famous portrait of the
masters,
against his Gentile
apparent submission veils his resentment
and who knows how to direct and then
exploit their feelings for his
own
good.
In its failure to
portray history, the film falls back on  eternals : the
soul, the unconscious. Thus, through hints or explicitly and with
various
degrees of irony, Lacombe Lucien can be read as a Christian
existential
quest.&dquo; Having sinned more through ignorance than by
deliberate choice of
evil, Lucien redeems himself through his love for
France. tried to save the Jewish
moreover,
Having, girl and her
grandmother, he can face the final sacrifice, not without first having
reached his
smile,
premonition of paradise, expressed in the only
fixed for ever in the last
film, which illuminates the face
images of the
of Lucien as he at last works out his salvation.
As for the
psycho-analytical interpretation, it emphasizes the
oedipal relationship, which allows access to identity. Lucien, that
immature
father, a recurrent theme in
primitive, is searching for a
Modiano. Hehas not been able to find a father
figure in his biological
lives with the
family, where his mcther, her prisoner husband away,
in the person of the teacher involved in the
farm-owner, or
the
Resistance, who has
rejected him, or among Gestapo. So, it is in
the Jewish
family that Lucien finds the symbolic father,
representing
the
law, and finds desire, embodied by pretty France,
implying the
death of the father. 8 On the other
hand, the
oedipal configuration of
the Jewish
father,
family (grandmother, daughter) hints at drama.
When Lucien enters France s room as the
master, Horn, the rejected
the
father, has but one solution left: to give himself up to Gestapo. In
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518
this way,
Lacombe Lucien takes up the
pattern of the
privileged
relationship which from Marlowe to
Feuchtwanger, and
including
Jewish father to his often
Shakespeare, Scott and Balzac, unites the
frivolous and
ungrateful daughter.
Defeated and debased
France s
by Lucien s presence at side,
Horn his
ablutions after the
gradually gives up purifying
militiamen s visits. He
dress, ominous
neglects his keeps to striped
the Jewish
pyjamas and grows mourning beard. By the same ritual,
he goes to his own death clean and
neatly shaven.
Running away
from
history into the hospitality of the countryside and with the
blessing of the grandmother, the two
young people reconstitute the
family nucleus, while Lucien,
according to M. Foucault,  reconverts
into love the excess of power which
trapped him . Still according to
former SS officer turned
Foucault, this is what Lucien and Max, the
have in common.
Night Porter,
Lacombe Lucien and
Night Porter have one more
point in common:
both
Instead
upset a typical situation portrayed in Hitlerian films.
of it is the Jewish
showing the Jew raping an Aryan woman,
girl who
illustrate the
complies with the sexual fantasies of a nazi. To
story of
that
ex-victimizer and
once-deported woman who runs across her
resumes their former sado-masochistic games, the
director, Liliana
restate her
Cavani, had to fact,
point. In contrary to what a by-no-
means
negligible number of critics thought they
saw, 19 Lucia, the
concentration-camp survivor, is no Jewess; Cavani s
arguments on
this character is not Jewish. In the
point are final:  The main female
dialogues, she is described, with no room for mistake, as the
daughter of a socialist. Moreover, the physical aspect of the actress
Charlotte
should have
Rampling as well as her catholic name Lucia
ruled out doubt. But
any people seem to have forgotten that there
were five million non-Jewish victims in the concentration
camps.&dquo;
of our
Night Porter
might therefore seem to be outside the scope
that
analysis. However, the fact nearly all the critics made the
mistake of
identifying Lucia as a Jewess,
together with the form of
the director s
refutation, only underline the vitality of the
in Cavani s case, of antisemitic
stereotypes and, even, prejudices.
There is
clearly in her mind a Jewish type, incompatible with the fair
the
elegance of sensual and
fragile Rampling. As for the young,
submissive
beauty who finds  happiness in slavery , she has her set
folklore: she is the  beautiful Jewess.&dquo;
place in western erotic
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519
which
includes not
Night Porter belongs to a mainly literary genre
only such masterpieces as Georges Bataille s, but also
by-products
which follow the
single narrative pattern of a Sade novel
(can you
the
machines rather
escape reference?). The partners are  desiring
than persons,
isolated in
out-of-way places where all their material
needs are
frolics.
provided, and absolute freedom allowed for their
Thus Lucia s memories from her concentration camp, all
dealing
with sexual refer to a deserted space
confrontations, where, in
addition, a few
deportees often take part in the event as voyeurs.
the usual
Night Porter resorts to apparatus and peripeteia of the
genre, even doubling them, since the
protagonists try to relive their
twice
past emotions. Lucia, enchained, twice travestied, twice
wounded; Lucia assaulted
by various phallic symbols: aimed at by
the SS officer s nubile and
revolver, shot by his camera; Lucia,
innocent,
depraved and perverted by her  instructor ; Lucia
of such films
announcing on the European screens the appearance
as
Emmanuelle, 0, and the flood of
porn.
The in the choice
significant difference, the infamy, is of course,
of
death-camp location and identity of the characters.Nevertheless,
those
Night Porter is but the luxury edition of
semi-pornographic
booklets called which have circulated for
 stalags years.
Concerning the reasons for their popularity, Michel Foucault
suggests an explanation:
How is it that nazism which used to be
represented by the pitiful, mean and
has now and
puritanical, everywhere, in France, in
Germany, in the United States,
and in the whole absolute
pornographic literature of the world, become the
reference for eroticism? Junk erotic
imagination is now utterly presided over by
which
nazism,
fundamentally raises the problem of the love for power.22
Foucault s
argument fits in with the
preoccupations of the New
French
contains hidden within it
Philosophers for whom any power
the
the way
temptation of fascism, and for whom
any power paves
to fascism.
Support is given to this argument in the film by the
submission of
the nazi
Lucia,  the
daughter of a socialist , to
fluctuations of events which allow the power
master, and
by the
situation to be reversed.
Foucault s also account for the
theory may contradictory attitude
of a leftist press
which first Cavani s
vigorously denounced
Auschwitz to the
manipulation and her shameful reduction of
the
priva,cies of bed-chamber, but which later highly praised Daniel
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520
Schmid s film The Shadow
of the Angels (1976), adapted from a
text written
by Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
Garbage, City and
Death. Fassbinder even declared in the booklet
introducing a film in
which a
Jew, a rich Frankfurt
promoter, ruled over the police, the
financial world
and, in effect, the whole town:  Tomorrow, or in
two be reversed:
time, with a closer look at it, the
years parts may
the fascist will
the
play the part of the pimp, the pimp that of Jew,
the Jew that of the fascist . ..
Fassbinder therefore chooses to tell the
love-story of a
singer,
who became famous in the Third Reich with a hence the
song;
reconstitution of a whole
period which makes Lili Marleen (1980)
the most
expensive film yet produced in West Germany. Elaborately
edited, the film shows idyllic images alternated with visions of
horror. On the one
hand, Lili Marleen shows the Swiss villa of a
highly cultured Jewish family, the Mendelsohns, whose agents are
-
endowed with
looks, and the usual attributes trench-
disturbing
-
coat, felt hat of the Gestapo, the mafia, or the characters of the
film noir. These latter are busy increasing Mendelsohn s immense
riches with the
help of German-Jewish possessions concealed from
nazi
vigilance and smuggled into Switzerland. The Jewish family
will union of its heir to the
apply itself to breaking the exogamous
stranger Lili Marleen and will also send her on a dangerous anti-nazi
mission.
Onthe other
hand, the film exhibits repeated shots of battle-fields
and mutilated young
bodies, the only respite from the cruelty
broadcast every
coming with the famous song night by Radio
before the soldiers on the
Belgrade. So when the singer appears
Eastern
Front,
they prefer to shout her name rather than  Heil
Hitler , as they have been ordered to. The anti-nazi spirit is thus
embodied in most of the
protagonists, reaching even into the
Reichskulturkammer ruled
by Hans Hinkel. If this SS Gruppen-
fuhrer in
charge of Antisemitische Aktion could not possibly be
transformed
by the script into an opponent, he is at least
apportioned sufficient good taste to recognize the singer s talent
and to career.23 In this
rehabilitate, the
promote her huge effort to
director, as Gunther Weisenborne, takes the
flattering role of a
central
figure in the anti-Hitlerian underground.
Fassbinder s other ironical use of
Here, as in films, the
melodrama, of characters, of deliberate bad taste
stereotyped
should make derision
Moreover, a blatant
stop short of indignation.
resort to aesthetic devices such as the revival of the
experimental
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521
Ufastil for Lili Marleen, or the return to
expressionism in other
films should
prevent the  suspension of disbelief . Here lies the
usual
ambiguity of Fassbinder s films which confuse the
identification process.
This
denegation technique is also at work in Die Sehnsucht der
Veronika Voss
(1982), which takes the heroine back to the time she
was the beloved star of the UFA. She henceforth
expiates her nazi
from the film
past by being kept away studios,
finding solace in the
drugs supplied by a disturbing she-Caligari: the doctor Katz, to
whom she has
promised her heritage and who will drive her to
suicide at the
given time. As in The Shadow of the Angels, the film
underlines the criminal collusion of German
public authorities and
Jewish
influence, of German remorse and Jewish vindictiveness.
This overworked theme of the inversion of
roles, used this time by
a German film
director, had been dealt with, as we saw above, by
Modiano and also
by Cavani:24
You of us. That
might think nazism is dead. Not so. It is alive and well in everyone
sexual collective
phenomenon was but an inflation of the sado-masochistic
situation which exists in every the
couple ... Just let a government open gates to
these shadows .. any crime becomes ...
possible Everyone plays his part:
murderer or victim.
The cleverness of these vicious in their
remarks, triviality, lies not
so much in their
pointing out the pendulum movement and the
eroticization of power, but rather in of us in an
involving every one
intimate field where any denial becomes
impossible. For Auschwitz
-
was neither a ritual it was
 holocaust , nor a natural
 catastrophe
an act of men ...
At the end of this
Night and Fog, Jean Cayrol conjured up
unavoidable
thought:
The war dozes
off, with an eye always half open ...
Which of us
keeps awake at this strange observation post
To warn us of the
coming of new executioners?
Are their faces ...
really different from ours?
who
We, pretend that all of it belongs to a single single country
time, and a
And who do not think of
looking around us ...
And do not hear the endless screams ...
As
attitude, the retro-films
disquieting signs of a new re-stage the
past, obliterating history, reducing the universe of the concentration
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522
the instrument for the revelation of so-called
 human
camps to
nature and thus Jew.
falling back on a worn-out image of the
In the film Seven Beauties
(1975), Lina Wertmuller only hints at
Jewish extermination. She rows of
shows, in dream-like mistiness,
creatures
white, almost
draped in angels, shot down one after
another in the lush
glory of a forest. At the other extreme, the anti-
hero of the
film, Pasqualino, is an Italian capable of the worst in
order to
survive: to be The will to
rape, raped, murder his friends.
survive at
any cost is presented as axiomatic and as the behaviour of
the average Bruno
deported person. Bettelheim, both as
analyst and
as former
deportee, devoted a long, subtle and final article to the
film.25 The
controversy he aroused allowed him to refute
scholarly
and
pedantic theories about survival in concentration
camps,26 the
vulgar and vulgarized version of which was presented by Seven
Beauties.
As for
Ingmar Bergman, he has often been criticized for the
unhistorical of his work dedicated to
unpolitical, aspect
 remonstrating the emptiness of the heavens by exploring the chill
emptiness of the human soul .27 In The Touch (1971), it is a Jewish
intruder who introduces the corrosive memory of
genocide into the
cosy intimacy of a Swedish couple, and it is around a Jewish
character that
Bergman elaborated his first film, conceived as a
historical reconstitution: The
Serpent s Egg (1977). David Kovac,
crushed he had not
by the gone through, and
memory of the horror
Abel
Rosenberg, who catches sight ofit as in a serpent s egg,  when
one
through the thin membrane, perceives distinctly the full grown
reptile , both transmute their anguish into aggressiveness. These
violence in their
tyrannical victims find the best outlet for their
submissive Gentile women. Feminine masochism and
blonde,
Christian
guilt feelings may explain the infinite patience and
unfailing love of Manuela, of Karin. But what can Christian love do
self-destructive
against hubris, against devouring self-hate, a curse
originating, for Bergman, in biology ... ?
David Kovac is shown not
only like other Bergmanian male
similar to Nathan
protagonists, as an  emotional
cripple , very
Landau in
Sophie s Choice - the novel as well as the film it
inspired. He also hides an incurable sickness. Besides the
resemblance of their
plots, these fictions both deny liberty only to
the Jewish characters. The malediction inherent in the Jewish
condition is illustrated in The Touch
metaphor, a
by a disclosing
revealing mise en abyme.28 As an archaeologist, David has been
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523
invited to a Swedish
university to restore a medieval church. He
discovers there a
walled-up cavity enclosing a wooden sculpture of
the
Holy Virgin, which he shows Karin at their first rendez-vous. A
few months
later, he shows Karin, now his mistress, the
strange fate
of the  madonna with child . Larvae from unknown
insects,
dormant for centuries inside the statue have now
wakened, and are
from within. It is uncertain whether the pure
eating it away image
can be saved.
wrote,  are the
 Massmedia , Jacques Le Goff privileged vehicles
and matrixes of mentalities ... on this side of the
Gutemberg
Galaxy, they are the nebulae from which mentalities crystallize. 29
This central
part played by the cinema as an informant, shaped by
mentalities, informing and shaping them in turn, can be perceived in
the  retro
phenomenon, but now essentially in the cinematic
reactions it has raised.
The Red Poster
(1976) is the first film recalling, through
questionable political and aesthetic options3° the feats and sacrifices
of the
foreign and Jewish resistance in France. It emphasizes,
however, with all the Brechtian distancing obligatory in a modern
film, the main part played by the communist party in initiating and
the militants of MOI
resistance, which included
co-ordinating
(Main d Oeuvre Immigr6e: immigrant labour).
Finally, it was an American film director, exiled to
Europe by
McCarthyism, Joseph Losey, who first tackled both the collective
and the individual dimension of racism in Mr. Klein
(1976), the only
film
today where document, fiction and
metaphysical reflection on
Jewish and non-Jewish
identity coincide. The title seems to have
been
inspired by Marcel Ophuls s The Sorrow and the Pity (1969),
the first
documentary film about a small town during the
occupation. A tradesman from Clermont-Ferrand, Marius Klein,
advertises in the local newspaper
that, in
spite of his foreign-
he can his French
sounding name, prove racially pure origins.
and uncommitted art-
Losey s Mr. Klein is an elegant, still young
increase as Jews
dealer, whose riches
needing money to escape come
to him to sell their of the
objets d art. One day, he receives a copy
Jewish newspaper
Informations Juives, then realizes that he has
been mistaken for a Jew
bearing his name. In his twofold
contradictory quest, Klein attempts both to locate his namesake and
to establish the
impossible proof of his non-Jewishness. Hunted by
the French
another, his material
police, he loses one after
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524
possessions, his friends and lovers, his self-confidence. Like the
main becomes
Andorra, he
protagonist in Max Frisch s compelled
to
behave like a
persecuted Jew. Through intercuts
punctuating
Klein s bewildered search for observe the minute
Klein, we
organization of the  Grande Rafle du Vel d Hiv on 16
July 1942.
The
examination of a
prologue sequence showing the medical
woman
determine her
by the expert in racial anthropology to
must be linked with the short scenes of
J ewishness, 31 the
special
ominous
meeting of the French police, the checking of its files, its
black cars
rehearsing the timing of the round-up, and finally with
the last scene: the concentration of the Jewish
population of Paris
before its
deportation, where document, inquest and quest meet and
end when the
merge. Here, Klein s search comes to an
loudspeakers
of the stadium call his name as well as that of his elusive double and
railroad car
when, after him, he is herded into the
taking him to his
death.
But the
portrayal of Klein I has disclosed, as in an
engraving, the
reverse
image of Klein II, an involved, committed,
underground
character down to the smallest
fighter,  who resembles the main
particulars, such as name, voice,
clothing - likeness as though
 stolen from a mirror the main character
(Hoffmann) - appears to
as a reflection.
Completing his description of the double, Otto Rank
combined with a
adds,  This situation is
thoroughgoing persecutory
is even
delusion, or
replaced by it, thus
assuming the picture of a
total .32
paranoiac system of delusions
The insistent and
theme of the double has
precise resort to the
been read either as a
Kafkaesque thriller, or an
analytical search for
the
self, whereas the historical shaded.33
background is blurred or
richness of transcends any
Yet, the Losey s work absorbs and
film on
possible interpretation.  My purpose was to make a
indifference of
indifference , said Losey, referring of course to the
those Frenchmen who in Mr. Klein fill the
cafés, the restaurants, the
another
night clubs, while part of the population is isolated and
indifference is the liberal s need to make the other
persecuted. But
identical to oneself: indifference becomes and
non-difference;
indifference is also the racist s need to
reject the other as entirely
different.
As
Great
Chaplin did in The Dictator, and without indulging only
in an anti-racist
plea, Losey stresses the likeness between Jew and
non-Jew.
Klein s
growing madness, which drives him to discard
caution in his search to confront his
double, conforms exactly to
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unauthorized distribution.
525
Rank s
However, it proceeds from Klein s bourgeois
description.
individualism as he
persists in ignoring historical and social realities
even when
matter ,
they threaten and encircle him.  It s a personal
he says
about the invisible Klein.  He bears a
grudge against me .
And to an anxious Jewish woman arrested with him:
 All this
doesn t
apply to me ... 
In Galileo what he
stated,  A man cannot unsee
(1975), Losey had
has seen .
But, as for other Loseyian protagonists, the experience of
persecution and suffering does not bring Klein to a moral choice, his
encounters with truth do not lead him to consciousness. In
Losey s
pessimistic but lucid view, no final revelation may enlighten the
blindness, be it Jewish or Gentile.
night of human
Notes
1. B. Nichols
(ed.),  Genre criticism in Movies and Methods (Berkeley 1976),
2. R.M. nazi
Friedman, L image et son Juif. Le Juif dans le cinéma (Paris 1983).
3. L. Furhammar and F.
Isaksson, Politics and Film (London 1971), 62f.
4. D.M. White and R.
Averson, The Celluloid Weapon (Boston 1972), 78-79,
recall another film
depicting the persecution of the Jews in nazi Germany: Frank
Storm, Short,
Borzage s The Mortal produced by MGM in 1940. See also K.R.M.
 Hollywood Fights Anti-semitism 1945-1947 in K.R.M. Short (ed.), Feature Film
and
History (London 1981).
5. Asked Rosenthal answers:
by his fellow POW why he wants to escape,
 I was born in father
Vienna, capital of Austria. My mother was Danish, my
France...   Old Breton Lords and
Polish, both naturalized citizens of Maréchal:
Ladies, eh? Rosenthal:
 Perhaps ... But the rest of you, Frenchmen from way
don t own a hundred square meters of your country. the
back, Well,
you
Rosenthals in 35 years have
managed to get hold of three historic castles with
shoots, lakes, fields, orchards, rabbit warrens, fishing rights, stud farms ... and
three
galleries full of ancestors, everyone guaranteed ...  (He turns on the rest of
think it s not worth and defend? Boeldieu
for, to go
them)  If you escaping
had never
(looking surprised):  I must say, I thought of patriotism from that
odd!
angle. How ( Grand Illusion in Masterworks of the French Cinema
[London 1974]).
6. M.
Ferro,  Double accueil a "La grande illusion" in Cinéma et Histoire (Paris
1977), 71-77.
7. P.
Sorlin, Sociologie du cinéma (Paris 1977), 39, 271-80.
8. J.
Doneson,  The Jew as a Female Figure in Holocaust Films in Shoah 1,1979.
Downloaded from http://jch.sagepub.com by ewa ciszewska on November 22, 2007
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unauthorized distribution.
526
9. H.R. Blum
(ed.), 30 Jahre danach (Cologne 1975).
10. W.
Schuette,  Akte des Widerstands in Herzog, Kluge, Straub (Munich
1976),
7-45.
11. J.
Gabel,
La fausse conscience (Paris 1962).
12. J.
Baudrillard,  L histoire, un scénario retro in
Ça-Cinéma, 12/13, 1977.
13. M.
Foucault,  Anti-Retro in Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 251-52
(July-August
1974).
14. See among others : Annie Juive en France
Latour, LaRésistance
(Paris 1970);
Lucien Larévolte des Justes
Steinberg, (Paris 1970); David Diamant, Les
Juifs dans
la Resistance Résistance
(Paris 1971);Jacques Ravine, La
française organisée des
Juifs en France (Paris 1973).
15. P.
Modiano or the
Modiano, La place de l étoile (Paris 1968); Ch. Wardi,  P.
Quest for Identity in Mahbarot, 2, (Tel Aviv 1980) (in Hebrew).
16. M
Sineux,  Le hasard, le nécessité, la
chagrin, la pitie in Positif, No. 157
(1974).
17. F.
Chevassu, La revue du Cinéma, No. 282
(1974).
18. P.
Bonitzer, Le regard et la voix, 10/18 (Paris 1976), 87f.
19. others : M.
See, among Grisolia, Nouvelle Revue (June
Française, No. 258
1974); R. Rasp, Der Spiegel, No. 8 (1975), 121-26.
20. Der
Spiegel, No. 10 (1975). (Author s italics.)
21. J-P.
Sartre,
Réflexions sur la question Juive (Paris 1954), 58-59.
22. M.
Foucault, art. cit.
23. W.A. 85-88.
Boelcké, Kriegspropaganda 1939-1941 (Stuttgart 1966),
Boelcke s short a
biographical note on Hinkel discloses personality somewhat
different from Fassbinder s stubborn but efficient subordinate. On Hitler s
orders,
he directed the most barbarous film in and execution of
history, shooting the agony
the tortured bear the
Hitler,20
plotters against July 1944. Even Goebbels could not
sight of Hinkel s film.
24. L.
Cavani,
L Express (March 1974), Telerama (April 1974).
25. B.
Bettelheim,
 Surviving in The New Yorker (August 1976).
26. T. Des Survivor
Pres, The (New York 1976).
27. J.
Dawson,  Bergman in R. Roud (ed.), Cinema, a Critical
Dictionary (New
York
1980).
28.  Est mise en du récit par
abyme tout miroir interne réfléchissant l ensemble
récit [Paris
réduplication simple, répétée ou spécieuse (L. Dallenbach, Le spéculaire
1977], be translated
52). The author premises that the concept may by  mirror
reflection or  focal
repetition .
29. J. Le
Goff,  Les mentalités, une histoire ambigue in J. Le Goff and P. Nora,
 Nouveaux
objets in Faire de l histoire, vol. III (Paris 1974), 76-94.
30. P.
Brunette,  The Red Poster in Film
Quarterly (Winter 1977-78), 48f.
31. In
fact, there was such an expert in racial anthropology, G. A. Montandon.
See Cl.
Lévy and P. Tillard, La grande rafle du Vel d Hiv (Paris 1967). See also the
various Juive
publications of the Centre de Documentation Contemporaine
(CDJC).
32. O. Rank The
double, a
Psychoanalytical study, H. Tucker (ed.) (New York
1979),33.
33. P.
Mayer,  Mr. Klein and the Other in Film
Quarterly (Winter 1980-81), 39f.
If Brunette was
only interested in the aesthetic options of The Red Poster, Mayer
reads  Klein  La race
according to Lacanian analytical models. J.L. Rivière, qua in
Cahiers du
cinéma, No. 274 (March 1977).
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527
R.M. Friedman
is a Lecturer in the
Department of
Television and Film at the
University of
Tel-Aviv. He is the author
of L Image et
son nazi
Juif: le Juif dans le cin6ma (Paris
1983), and several articles on the image of
the Jew in film. He is
currently working on
a book about the Israeli cinema.
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unauthorized distribution.