Two Short Films

 Links to two short films arrived by email this week.

The first came via the NY Times with this op-ed and attached video.  The film, by Belgian professor Matthias de Groof, has apparently been getting a big reception at various festivals. It is a remix of a 1957 film, "Under the Black Mask," by a Belgian multidisciplinary artist, Paul Haesaerts, for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. From what I can gather, that film was also considered groundbreaking in its time for the way it showcased Congolese masks. But viewers today have come to understand the narration and much of the imagery as patronizing and racist.  

The idea for this new film was to take those sections of the original where the masks are looking directly at the viewer and let them speak to us. The words the masks are given to speak come from a 1950 essay by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire. They have been translated from French into a Congolese language, Lingala.

I was initially captivated, especially by the connections in the text between museums and colonialism, but then I started wondering about the project itself:

• Why would a white Belgian art professor imagine that he is the one to “fix” the errors of a white Belgian filmmaker of a previous generation?

• Why would Congolese masks choose to speak in the words of a West Indian, no matter how anti-imperialist he was in 1950?

• Why would the masks choose to speak in Lingala, a language that emerged from a Belgian colonialist pidgin?

• Why would the masks choose to speak in the voice of an Afro-Belgian spoken word artist instead of the voice of a Congolese?

And that brought me to a more basic question:

Is the imagery itself colonial?

The masks are stolen, taken from their country of origin by a notoriously violent colonial regime and brought to Belgium. They are also ripped from their original context, displayed originally as artifacts of the primitive and then as primitive art, rather than being danced in live ceremony in their communities of origin. Why would we think that the filming of them is innocent and not itself racist? Why wouldn’t the way they are lighted and the way they are shot be just as problematic as the voice-over of the 1957 film? 

The cinematography strikes me as elegiac, much like the famous and still-popular photography of ES Curtis. Those photos of Native America were explicitly made to document a people before they disappeared. But the people defied their erasure and are still here with us. Curtis's subjects were posed, not caught in their living, often with clothing and objects provided by Curtis himself. He airbrushed objects that didn't suit his intention of capturing "authenticity." They are often portrayed in soft focus and moving away from the camera, as if they are actually disappearing in real time before our very eyes.  

Curtis's photos have remained popular among people who think they value Indigenous people and culture. But they retain their racism in their very imagery. I think the same is true of this "new" film of Congolese masks.

The second film is a comedy called "The Anne Frank Gift Shop" which came via articles from the online magazine Kveller and from GQ. It shows a PR team, including an influencer, meeting with the heads of the Anne Frank Museum in order to pitch ideas for educating a younger generation about Anne Frank and about the Holocaust itself.

As both articles explain, the film's comic idea of "marketing" the Holocaust as a "brand" is intended to convey the serious idea that we must never forget. I struggled with it in several ways, some of which emerged for me from the Kveller article before I even watched the film.

• The writer describes the Anne Frank house as “sacred space.” Everything about the film's solemnity regarding that house reinforces that notion. I understand that people who read her diary and identify with her have an encounter with their emotions about her when they actually stand in the space in which she hid. But the idea that this is sacred, like Mt. Sinai, or the Temple Mount, gets to the core of what I think of as “Holocaust Judaism.” I define that as the notion that the Jewish people's greatest contribution to humanity over the last 3000+ years was dying in our millions: not Torah, not Mishnah and Gemara, not literature, not ethics… death, and only in the last century. And calling the Annex a sacred space isn’t just a single poorly-chosen phrase. It is reinforced by the author’s statement that the director was brought up to “revere” the Holocaust, which is a strikingly inappropriate thing to revere.

• Another angle on this is the discussion of the mourners’ Kaddish. In the film the comedy is broken and things become serious when a member of the PR team suggests that this prayer be recited every day at the museum and then the actors recite it around their table. The article inaptly describes the Kaddish as “eulogizing the dead.” In fact it is a ninth-century hymn praising God which serves various purposes at different times in the liturgy and - unlike the film's portrayal - can only be recited in a congregation with at least ten adult members. Long before I noticed Jewish people centering the Holocaust I noticed the people who attended synagogue only to recite the Kaddish for mourners or running in and out on Pesach, Shavuot, and Shemini Atzeret just in time for Yizkor, a memorial service included in the worship on those festivals and on Yom Kippur. I used to think of this selective attendance as a form of ancestor worship. I think it may be worse, but - like Holocaust worship -  it is certainly a variant of Judaism that valorizes death over life. And that idea of Kaddish is so common among so many Jewish people who clearly recite the words as dolorous sounds without ever questioning their meaning or why they are important to those mourning an immediate family member.

• The film also shows a preoccupation with a survey that shows that young people can’t come up with the correct number of Jewish deaths at the hands of the Nazis. The idea, of course is that anyone who can't say "six million" somehow doesn't know that a massive genocide took place. In the film Chris Perfetti’s character actually shows why the number doesn’t matter. For the purposes of a survey, like any multiple-choice question, it just allows us to clutch our hands in horror about ignorance. But this is a real survey and so is the hand clutching. There is something deeper about the importance people give to that number. We have come to refer to “the six million” as a kind of shorthand. Using that number minimizes the actual history and all the events leading up to industrialized murder. But using that particular number allows us to treat genocide as if it is our unique possession. 

• This idea that genocide belongs to us alone has been a problem for a long time. First, because it erases horrors that have been perpetrated on others. In fact that essay by Aimé Césaire used as a voice for the Congolese masks is explicitly about the sudden astonishment of Europeans at the Nazi Holocaust because mass murder was now being committed against other Europeans, instead of Black and Brown people. But second, because it pretends that we Jews can only be victims and never perpetrators of genocide. Here we are, three months after the October 7 attacks. Israel has spent this entire time murdering Gazans in their tens of thousands, uprooting them from their homes, destroying their cultural institutions, and then bombing them in the “safe spaces” they were instructed to move to. But no, according to both author and director, we are still victims. The director tells us, "I just feel like now it’s arriving in this time where we’re reminded what’s at stake.” I really wish I thought he meant this as a challenge to Israel. But the flip side of Holocaust Judaism is IDF Judaism, the worship of Israeli military might. Which is, not coincidentally, also a death cult.

The film itself rises above slapstick in the way that each character receives moments of grace along with moments of bumbling and mockery. Like any good art in can be interpreted by each of us according to what we bring to it. I suppose I could choose to believe that when the character tells us that we are condemned to repeat history if we don't learn it, she is warning us against this Israeli Holocaust against Gaza. But I don't believe that's what the filmmakers have in mind. I don't believe that at all.

Both of these films position themselves as art in favor of humanity. I just don't believe that either filmmaker has as inclusive a view of humanity as they think they do.