Jesters and Gestures: Performing Yiddish Culture from Silent Cinema to Avant-Garde Film

November 12, 2009 - November 24, 2009

Little Mother, November 15
The National Center for Jewish Film

This alternative journey into the world of Yiddish cinema showcases spectacular performances from the silent era through the thirties, the golden age of Yiddish film, to contemporary experimental works. Folk performances, such as those of the Purim-shpiler in The Jester or the wedding rhymester in The Dybbuk, appear alongside violin and vaudeville in Little Mother, circus and cabaret in The Jester, and wild skits in Jolly Paupers, featuring the unforgettable comic duo Dzigan and Shumacher.

Jesters and Gestures also explores the performance of tradition in the form of customs and rituals, from songs and dances to exorcism (The Dybbuk), as well as what might be called the performance of gender and ethnicity. In Little Mother the legendary Molly Picon presents a comical spectacle of maternity. In the silent East and West, a flux of Jewish stereotypes (the irreverent American flapper, the shy yeshiva student, the assimilated “West Jude”) continually transforms as part of the grand show called acculturation.

Passing to the other side of the World War II watershed, we present the self-reflective reenactment of Yiddish cinema in The Man Without a World and West and East, alongside the performance of memory in Everything’s for You and Urban Peasants. From Austria and Poland to Israel and the United States, these films celebrate Eastern European Jewish culture in its variety. Oscillating between tradition and modernity, continuity and change, Yiddish cinema and its reverberations offer an abundance of dance, music, humor, irony, and self-awareness.

Zehavit Stern
Guest Curator

Thursday, November 12, 2009
6:30 p.m. The Dybbuk
Michał Waszyński (Poland, 1937). Introduced by Zehavit Stern. Jewish mysticism is fused with cinematic Expressionism in this haunting tale based on S. An-ski’s famed folkloric play. “The most ambitious Yiddish movie of its day.”—J. Hoberman (123 mins)

Thursday, November 12, 2009
9:00 p.m. The Man Without a World
Eleanor Antin (U.S., 1991). Introduced by Jeffrey Skoller. Performance artist and experimental filmmaker Eleanor Antin conjures a lost world of Yiddish literature, cinema, and theater and reengages the debate on popular art, politics, and modernism. (98 mins)

Saturday, November 14, 2009
6:30 p.m. The Jester
Joseph Green, Jan Nowina-Przybylski (Poland, 1937). Introduced by Zehavit Stern. This musical comedy set in a Galician shtetl is “a wistful romance that’s interspersed with songs but rooted in the wisecracks and banter of oral Yiddish culture.”—J. Hoberman (88 mins)

Sunday, November 15, 2009
3:00 p.m. Little Mother
Joseph Green (Poland, 1938). Introduced by Zehavit Stern. The inimitable Molly Picon plays mama to her siblings, her father, and the rest of the tenement in Joseph Green’s film, which transposes Meyer Schwartz’s play from the Lower East Side to Lodz. (95 mins)

Sunday, November 15, 2009
5:00 p.m. East and West
Sidney M. Goldin, Ivan Abramson (Austria, 1923). Introduced by Zehavit Stern. Judith Rosenberg on piano. A thoroughly modern Molly Picon steals the show in Sidney Goldin and Ivan Abramson’s good-natured comedy of worldly American Jews encountering shtetl life. (85 mins)

Monday, November 16, 2009
7:30 p.m. West and East: A Film-Translation
Performance by the Sala-Manca Group. Live music by Yarden Erez. This performance is both an homage to Goldin and Abramson’s East and West and a study in cultural and linguistic translation. (c. 60 mins)

Tuesday, November 17, 2009
7:30 p.m. Everything’s for You
Abraham Ravett (U.S., 1989). Abraham Ravett in person. Abraham Ravett examines the loss of his father, who had been a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. With Ravett shorts The March and Non-Aryan. (95 mins)

Sunday, November 22, 2009
3:00 p.m. Jolly Paupers
Leon Jeannot, Zygmund Turkow (Poland, 1937). Introduced by Zehavit Stern. The famed Warsaw cabaret duo Dzigan and Shumacher play two schlemiels in a poor shtetl who suddenly strike oil. “The closest the screen came to a Yiddish cabaret sensibility: irreverent, mordant, and consciously theatrical.”—J. Hoberman. With short I Want to Be a Boarder. (77 mins)

Tuesday, November 24, 2009
7:30 p.m. Urban Peasants
Ken Jacobs (U.S., 1975). Introduced by Jeffrey Skoller. Ken Jacobs constructs a picture of Brooklyn in the thirties and forties from fragments of home movies. With Ernie Gehr short Untitled (Part One) 1981. (88 mins)

Series curated by Zehavit Stern, Ph.D. candidate in Jewish studies. The contemporary portions of the program are cocurated by Jeffrey Skoller, filmmaker and associate professor of film studies at UC Berkeley. Presented in conjunction with the seventh annual Eli Katz Memorial Yiddish Conference, Sex and the Shtetl: Gender Roles, Erotic Practices and Marital Structures in Yiddish Literature and Ashkenazic Culture, organized by the Joint Program in Jewish Studies at UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), with thanks to Naomi Seidman, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at GTU. Sala-Manca’s performance and Abraham Ravett’s appearance are made possible by the support of the Eli Katz Memorial Yiddish Conference. Ravett’s visit is also supported by the Film Studies Program. We thank Lisa Rivo and Juliet Burch at the National Center for Jewish Film, which has provided restored prints for this series.