Browsing all posts by David Gutherz
Jews on Film
by David Gutherz · 01/20/11
If you missed the acclaimed premiere of Mahler on the Couch, last Wednesday–don’t worry. The 20th Annual New York Jewish Film Festival still has plenty of great, thought-provoking, tangentially-Jewish movies on the way. Start tonight at six p.m. with Lily Rivlin’s loving homage to and memorial for the short story wizard Grace Paley. Upcoming highlights include “Singing in the Dark”–one of the first American dramatization of the Holocaust–at 1:30 p.m Sunday, “Lillith,” an Israeli documentary centered on the aftermath of a teenage suicide at 3:45 and 6 o’clock Monday, and a closing night screening of “The Matchmaker,” which was nominated for 7 Israeli Academy Awards including Best Picture.
Leave a Comment Weimar Cinema in NYC
by David Gutherz · 12/22/10
“From Caligari to Hitler”–with this apocalyptic abbreviation the great cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer pithily set the tone of his groundbreaking “psychological history of german film.” Since then, most interest in Weimar cinema has followed Kracauer’s lead, focusing primarily on films that foreshadow the rise of Nazism or directors who either worked for Hitler or were persecuted by him. Kracauer’s book was written during a stay at the N.Y. Museum of Modern Art, and so it seems fitting that a new exhibit at that same institution is filling in some gaps that have resulted from this (understandable) over-emphasis on the catastrophic end of the ‘golden era’ of German film. In addition to classics like “Three Penny Opera” (airing Dec. 27 at 4:30 p.m. and the 30th at 7:30 p.m. ) and Fritz Lang’s “Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler” (Jan. 3. @ 7:30 p.m. , Jan. 8@ 7 p.m.) MoMA has collected a number of popular films from the period, mostly cabaret musicals and romantic comedies, like the “Congress Dances”, airing tomorrow at 4:30, “a musical about the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), in which European ambassadors redrew the map of the continent.” For Habitus readers eagerly awaiting our upcoming Berlin issue, these MoMA screening are a great resource.; for the rest of you–a terrific chance to experience entertainment the way those weird Weimarians did.
Bloodlands
by David Gutherz · 12/13/10
If you’re looking for some light beach-reading to fend off Seasonal Affective Disorder, then now is not the time to read Timothy Snyder’s new book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. But if you are one of those people–like me–who saves all your Shoah research for December because it makes a windy winter day in Brooklyn seem like a holiday in the Gstaat, then this text ought to be at the top of your list. As the author puts it in a recent interview on the Leonard Lopate show, “This is not a history for everybody because this is a history about how things are actually darker than we understand…The concentration camps and the Gulag were horrible, but unfortunately they’re only the introduction to the horror.” Without at all minimizing the appalling nature of concentration camps, or slighting the significance of 6 million, Snyder focuses on the 14 million people who were deliberately killed “in a relatively small place–between the Baltic and Black Seas, between Berlin and Moscow–over a relatively short period of time between 1933 and 1945.” Some of these died in more well-known places and ways, but many were exterminated through forced starvation or migration, shot in their homes or over mass graves in sites that remain forgotten.
In related news, Claude Lanzmann’s 564 minute documentary Shoah–the definitive film on the subject–has just been re-released to theaters. In New York, IFC and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas are currently carrying it. Wider distribution is expected in the new year.
City Lights
by David Gutherz · 12/03/10
Hannukah is upon us once again, which means loads of fried food, jolly singing, and over-the-top commemorations of Hasmonean heroism. This year, the prize for symbolic extravagance is split between Daniel Libeskind’s Line of Fire exhibit at the New York Jewish Museum and the 20 foot tall menorah posted at Berlin’s Brandenburg gate. Voting is still open, though, so if anyone else knows of a contender more mythically invested than these two, please do let us know.
Oh, and Happy Hannukah!
Pedro Meyer and the new Hellenism
by David Gutherz · 11/22/10
There are those who say we are entering a new Hellenistic era. America, in this scenario, is the new Greece while The Internet has replaced Alexandrian chariot paths. And so, it is fitting that recent Habitus contributor Pedro Meyer’s new exhibition at the Athens Hellenic American Union A Long and Personal Trip Throughout the USA close with a roundtable discussion entitled, “Art and the Internet.” The new exhibition features some of the best of the approximately 80,000 photos Meyer has taken over thirty years criss-crossing the United States. In addition to the photographer himself, the closing panel on the 24th will feature photographer Nadia Baram, poet Dimosthenis Agrafiotis, and Tina Schelhorn, curator of the Galerie Lichtblick, Cologne.
Andre Aciman on Stefan Zweig
by David Gutherz · 11/15/10
Conjure up an image of a cosmopolitan. Chances are, your stock caricature involves a mustachioed, bespectacled type,
his endless stream of octolingual, intellectual chit-chat interrupted only by the occasional cigarette or espresso shot. By all accounts, Stefan Zweig pretty much fit this bill. As Andre Aciman put it in a recent portrait for Slate, “He appears everywhere, knows everyone, and is translated into more languages than any of his contemporaries. Just about everything he put his mind to is stamped with the telltale ease, polish, and effortless grace of people whose success, literary and otherwise, seemed given from the day they were born or picked up a pen.”
There is another, darker side to cosmopolitanism, however. For the cosmopolitan is also frequently an exile. Think of James Joyce–who Zweig helped to translate Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man–writing the Irish soul in Paris. Worse still, because they must rely so much on the kindness of strangers, cosmopolitans can become canaries in the geo-political mine. What we call “culture criticism” is really the ululations of these desperate animals whose habitat (the world-as-community) is being destroyed. Stefan Zweig is also exemplary in this regard. “Everything, or almost everything that represents my work in the world…” he wrote in the magisterial World of Yesterday, ”has been destroyed.”
Andre Aciman has probed the depths of this pain and felt the fleeting pleasures that prepare for it. He is, therefore, perfectly suited to play biographer and critic to this eminent biographer and critic. Read the Slate piece, then go see him discuss Zweig’s Journey Into the Past with NY Review of books regular and Zweig-specialist Joan Acocella on November 29th at the Barnes and Noble 150 Lexington Ave.
The “Real Budapest”
by David Gutherz · 10/25/10
These are frightening times in Hungary. As dedicated blog readers may remember, last month we posted an interview with Agnes Heller in which she had some harsh words for her countrymen. “Anti-semitism is stronger than ever,” she warned. Since that time, things have only gotten worse. As Speigel Online reports: “Neo-fascist thugs attacked Roma families, killing six people in a series of murders. The right-wing populists of the Fidesz Party won a two-thirds majority in the parliament, while the anti-Semitic Jobbik party captured 16.7 percent of the vote, making it the third-largest party in Hungary, next to the Socialists. Unknown vandals defiled the Holocaust Memorial with bloody pigs’ feet.” And now, another Habitus contributor Gyorgy Konrad weighs in. “When I see the political victors in this country,” he told Spiegel, “I get a foretaste of a culture war.”
“When I hear the word culture,” replied Hanns Johst, “I reach for my revolver.”
Portrait of The Author as a Philo-Semite
by David Gutherz · 10/13/10
Compared to all the buzz around the contentious Nobel peace prize pick, this years winner for the prize in literature–the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa–would seem to be uncontroversial choice. Except in Israel–that eternal enemy of non-controversy–where some have suggested that giving the nod to Llosa, who has been openly critical of the Israeli government, was an intentionally anti-zionist–or even anti-semitic–gesture. In a terrific profile for Tablet, however, Latin American Jewish scholar and longtime Habitus friend Ilan Stavans sets the record straight. The Llosa Ilan knows is neither benign or an anti-semite, but “essentially a Judeophile” whose criticism of Israel stems not from some knee-jerk anti-zionism but a deep-seated conviction that “minorities…to retain their mission, must be bridges.”
Monica Ruzansky at the Aperture Gallery
by David Gutherz · 10/04/10
Let me guess: you’ve already finished reading and re-reading our new Mexico City issue and are hungry for more! Well, if you live in Nueva York, you’re in luck. Just head over to the Aperture Gallery on 547 W. 27th Street and check out Mexico City contributor Monica Ruzansky’s beautiful contribution to the “Mexico + Afuera” exhibit. “I loved Monica Ruzansky’s furtive and romantic snapshots of Mexico City nightscapes,” writes Maria Lokke of the New Yorker, “taken by the light of her car headlights over the course of two years…Driving at night, the theatrical focus of the lights transformed the city into a stage, the resulting images becoming ‘fragments of stories to which we are tempted to imagine a beginning and an end.’”
Monica’s photos–along with those of Chuy Benitez, Dulce Pinzón, and the acclaimed Modernist photographer Paul Strand–will be on display until October 21st.
New, New Orleans
by David Gutherz · 09/29/10
Rebuilding Creatively
Ever since Katrina, New Orleans has had a hard time getting positive press. Doom, disaster, and decline is all we seem to hear. According to Roberta Brandes Gratz, however, that’s because we don’t know how to listen. The truth, as she lays it out in recent NY Times piece, is that New Orleans is in the midst of a truly populist revival, in which small communities–often in flagrant contradiction of their own elected officials–have re-built and re-born. And the reverberations of this process, says Gratz–who has written several books on urban revival– could go far beyond the Big Easy. It could–and should–reshape the way we view the very life of cities. It all reminds at least this blogger of the advice of Rebbe Nachman: “If you believe you can damage, you must believe that you can repair.”
