[table of contents | journal index]
Collecting Films of the Jewish Diaspora: The Role of the Steven Spielberg
Jewish Film Archive
Marilyn Koolik
In 1898 Boleslav Mahtuzhevski, a Polish cinematographer working in Paris,
wrote a manifesto calling for the establishment of film archives. Many of
you are, undoubtedly, familiar with this article, which is probably the
earliest acknowledgment of the value of the moving image as an historical
document. In fact, the title of his essay translates as, "A New Source
of History - Setting Up a Depository of Historical Films". And "setting
up a depository of historical films" is exactly what a group of professors
of modern Jewish history at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem had in mind
when they founded a film archive in the 1960s. They recognized the legitimacy
of the moving image as a chronicle and decided that collecting film was
an imperative endeavor that should be carried out within the framework of
their academic institution. By establishing an archive they acknowledged
moving images as more than just an alternative source of history and confirmed
the medium of film as an indispensable element in their scholarship on the
social, cultural, and historical events of our century. This archive, which
is now called the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, can well be called
unique in that it was first established and is still supervised by professors
of history. The Archive is part of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary
Jewry, a graduate institute in the Faculty of Humanities, which researches
Jewish life in the twentieth century - a period corresponding exactly to
the era of cinema.
When the Hebrew University's film archive was officially opened in 1969,
the professors stated that its goals were: "to collect, preserve, catalogue,
and make accessible the moving images of the modern Jewish experience."
They specifically named it the Jewish film archive, insisting that
it not only focus on films from Israel, but that it encompass films from
the entire Jewish diaspora. The collection would be defined by national
identity, and not only by the national production. They were
not the first to reason thus. Years earlier the National Library of the
State of Israel was designated as the Jewish National Library.
In the twenty-six years of its existence the Spielberg Archive has amassed
a large and significant collection, including rare films of non-fiction
material documenting Jewish life around the world. Films produced abroad
now constitute about one-third of the collection, and their number is constantly
growing with the acquisition of new productions.
From its very inception, one of the major challenges facing the Archive
was locating film material that portrayed the Jewish experience outside
of Israel. Already in the 1970s, Dr. Geoffrey Wigoder, the Archive's then
director, organized an international filmographic research project in which
researchers in twelve countries sifted through selected film and television
archives and documented their holdings on Jewish-related material. The countries
included England, France, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Poland,
Austria, and the United States. The results of these years of filmographic
fact-finding are gathered in unpublished catalogues at the Archive. Unfortunately,
this information has long been out of date, but the comprehensive original
research did provide a good, if basic, indicator of the Jewish-related holdings
found in the major archives of these countries.
Jewish Films in the United States: A Comprehensive Survey and Descriptive
Filmography was the only published result of this internationl filmographic
project. It was financed by both the Spielberg Archive and the Division
of Cinema of the University of Southern California and released by the American
publisher G.K. Hall in 1976. The author, Stuart Fox, researched the topic
for his Master's thesis under the supervision of Prof. Irwin Blacker of
USC. The filmography describes 4,000 films which existed or were known to
have been made in the United States. Information was collected from seventy-four
sources, including archives and written documentation, and covers the period
1900-1970. This filmography is still regarded as one of the major research
tools on the history of Jews in the American cinema. This can be accredited
to Fox's own explanation of his criteria for defining a Jewish film. In
the introduction he says that he "cast the net widely" to encompass
Jewish film in its broadest possible context. An example of the scope of
this filmography can be found in the earliest entry, a 450-foot Vitagraph
release entitled The Airship, produced in 1908. It reads: "a
fantastic portrayal of the future of air travel. The exploits of a Hebrew
who crashes his plane. Sailors save him from being swallowed by a whale.
The Hebrew thanks his rescuers by dancing a
hornpipe."
The Archive's international filmography project was stopped due to a lack
of funds. However, there are plans to enter all of the existing information
into the computerized catalogue. With the staggering growth of film data
now available on the Internet and the growing use of computerized databases
by film and television archives, it may no longer be necessary to send researchers
around the world on similar fact-finding missions. Much of the sought after
information will undoubtedly be available on the electronic superhighway
and we may be able to do all our searching without having to leave the computer
terminals in our offices.
It's one thing to accumulate information about films on Jewish topics. As
in any archive, however, efforts were constantly being made to actually
obtain the material. In the early 1970s, right after the opening of the
Archive, many of the Jewish organizations and institutions around the world
that had produced films about Jewish life sent prints to the University.
They recognized the value of placing their material in an Israeli academic
institution, which would maintain it in a proper archival framework. Organizations
that cooperated with the Archive include: The Joint Distribution Committee,
an international Jewish organization established in 1914 to help Jewish
refugees - this organization filmed extensively in the displaced persons
camps of post-Holocaust Europe; the Anti-Defamation League, established
in 1913, which produced many films on the subject of antisemitism and provided
us with copies of their entire output; and, the International ORT- organization,
founded in Russia in 1880 to provide vocational training for Jews, which
produced films about their activities in the Jewish communities of Iran,
India, and North Africa after World War II. These rare films were similarly
donated to the Archive's collection.
One organization that should be singled out among the most important producers
of films documenting Jewish life in the diaspora is the Jewish Agency. Established
in Mandatory Palestine in 1929, the Agency functioned as the representative
body of the Jewish community to the British authorities. With the establishment
of the State of Israel in 1948, the role of the Jewish Agency evolved, so
that it is now an important link between Israel and the diaspora. The Jewish
Agency has its own film department, however, an agreement signed between
it and the Hebrew University in 1973 designated the Archive as the official
depository of all Jewish Agency films and granted it the copyrights to all
its material.
Over the years other sources for films documenting Jewish life included
donations by private filmmakers or by ordinary people with interesting home
movies, or occasional purchases of material thought to be significant.
I would like to discuss four examples of films from the Spielberg Archive's
collection which demonstrate the richness of the film material on the Jewish
diaspora. In 1939 five short, 10-minute documentaries were produced by two
Jewish filmmakers based in Warsaw. They shot footage of Jewish life in the
long established urban communities of Eastern Europe including Warsaw, Lvov,
Bialystock, Vilna, and Cracow. These films are the last moving images of
these Jewish communities which were destroyed by the Nazis soon after. It
is not uncommon for feature filmmakers to use non-fiction footage as a resource
when they need information in order to re-create a time and place. One of
these films, Jewish Life in Cracow, was sent to Steven Spielberg
when he set out to film Schindler's List.
back to table of contents
The urge to capture on film the nature of rapidly vanishing cultures has
been called "salvage ethnography." In the early years of the State
massive waves of immigration brought Jews from over seventy different countries
to the new State of Israel. The Jewish Agency, realizing that many traditions
unique to these diverse communities would soon disappear, shot a number
of films in Israel with the goal of preserving these traditions on a filmic
record. In 1951 the Agency produced a 15- minute docu-drama entitled The
Carpet, which depicted a traditional Kurdish-Jewish wedding. The film
was directed by Leopold Lahola, a Czech-Jewish filmmaker who came to Israel
for a short period in the early 1950s and directed some of the country's
most important films, both feature and documentary, during those years.
The Carpet presented us with a serious preservation problem. The
Archive's positive print was in very poor condition, suffering from vinegar
syndrome and faded color. Copies could not be located in other archives
and it became apparent that the print in our collection was unique. Israel
has only one film laboratory and they could produce a dupe negative and
a new positive, but they were unable to produce a new sound track because
of the poor condition of the original. This was sent to a laboratory in
England in the hope that the sound can be saved.
The famous British documentary filmmaker, John Grierson, was the first to
coin the phrase "documentary film" in 1932, in an unsigned review
of Robert Flaherty's Moana. Grierson describes the film as: "being
a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his
family, [and] has documentary value." The use of film in documenting
the daily life of peoples has certainly evolved from Flaherty's Nanook
of the North (1922). It was in this filmmaking tradition that the Jewish
Agency sent a crew into Morocco in 1961 to shoot the daily life of the country's
remaining Jews. The earliest record of a Jewish presence in Morocco dates
from the second century CE. The community grew enormously in the sixteenth
century, when Jewish refugees from Spain settled there, but following Israel's
declaration of independence, almost the entire Jewish community left for
France and Israel. The Jewish Agency's decision to film in Morocco was based
on the realization that the traditional life of the local community was
disappearing. The result of their efforts is an extraordinary 49-minute
anthropological documentary entitled Edge of the West.
Probably one of the most fascinating Jewish communitites is that of the
Bnai Israel of Ethiopia, "discovered" by Westerners at the end
of the last century in the country's Gondar region. The community practices
a form of Judaism that dates back to biblical times and their origins are
obscure. In 1973 two filmmakers went to Ethiopia to shoot a documentary
about the daily life of the community in the same anthropological filmmaking
tradition. In 1991, in the heat of Ethiopia's civil war, the Israeli government
reached an agreement with the Ethiopian regime whereby the Israeli army
would airlift the entire Ethiopian Jewish community to Israel. This extraordinary
undertaking was shot by two crews: one from the Israeli Army and the other
from the Jewish Agency. The footage shot by the Agency is in the Spielberg
collection. The importance of this footage for the Archive is twofold: it
is an example of how ongoing events in the Jewish diaspora are being filmed
and deposited in the collection; and, it shows how videotape has now become
the most common medium for non-fiction productions. As a film archive we
must come to terms with this development.
It's been said that the Jews of the twentieth century have had more history
than other peoples have had in their entire existence. This brief historical
period saw tremendous movements of the Jewish people around the globe -
either because of the destruction of the Holocaust or because of emigrations
from those countries where antisemitism was rampant. The filmic record of
this history is extensive and can be found in collections all over the world.
Claude Lanzmann once described his 9-hour documentary Shoah as a
"screen of memory." Perhaps, the same expression can be used to
describe the non-fiction films of any nation - a "screen of memory,"
in which we can see the texture of our lives, the pattern of our traditions,
the routine of our customs, and fragments from our history - very often
of a world which is no longer. The foremost role of the Spielberg Archive
is to be that "screen of memory" for the entire Jewish people.
L'idée du film comme "une nouvelle source de l'histoire"
et, par conséquent, la volonté "de créer un musée
ou un dépôt cinématographique" avancée par
Boleslav Matuszewski en 1898 a été reprise telle quelle par
un groupe de professeurs d'histoire moderne juive à l'Université
Hébraïque de Jérusalem lorsqu'ils fondèrent leur
archive dans les années 60. Ces historiens confirmèrent alors
le statut du film comme source indispensable de leur recherche sur les faits
sociaux, culturels et historiques de notre siècle et continuent aujourd'hui
encore à appliquer ces orientations générales à
l'archive devenue le Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive.
L'archive fait partie d'un Institut universitaire rattaché à
la Faculté des Sciences Humaines qui consacre ses recherches à
la vie juive du XXème siècle - période qui correspond
exactement à l'ère du cinéma. Son objectif est, dès
ses débuts, de 'rassembler, préserver, cataloguer et rendre
accessibles les images en mouvement de l'expérience juive moderne'.
La dénomination Archives Juives du Film souligne qu'il s'agit
non pas de préserver seulement des films d'Israël mais bien
de toute la diaspora juive.
La collection est donc définie par le caractère d'identité
nationale et non pas par celui de production nationale.
En 26 années d'existence, l'Archive a réuni une importante
collection, dont près d'un tiers provient de l'étranger.
Des recherches filmographiques ont été entreprises dans le
but de localiser des films (en particulier en Grande Bretagne, France, Scandinavie,
Hollande, Belgique, Allemagne, Pologne, Autriche et aux Etats-Unis). Ces
recherches ont été partiellement interrompues par manque de
fonds mais l'objectif fondamental - celui de localiser et rassembler les
documents de la diaspora juive - subsiste.
Claude Lanzman avait dit de son film Shoah, qu'il s'agissait d'une "projection
de mémoire". Le but premier du Steven Spielberg Jewish Film
Archive est de devenir la "projection de mémoire" du peuple
juif dans son ensemble.
Films de la Diáspora judía: el rol de los Archivos Steven
Spielberg
La idea del film como "nueva fuente de la historia" y la voluntad
de "crear un museo o un depósito cinematográfico fué
expresada por Boleslav Matuszewski en 1898 y aplicada al pie de la letra
por un grupo de profesores de historia moderna judía de la Universidad
hebraica de Jerusalén con la creación de su archivo en los
años 60. Estos historiadores consideraban al film como un elemento
indispensable de su investigación sobre los hechos sociales, culturales
e históricos de nuestro siglo. Los mismos principios siguen siendo
aplicados por el hoy llamado Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive.
El Archivo pertenece a un Instituto universitario de la Facultad de Humanidades
y dedica sus investigaciones a la vida judía del siglo XX, período
que corresponde precisamente a la era del cine. Su objetivo original es
'coleccionar, preservar, catalogar y permitir el acceso a las imágenes
de la experiencia judía moderna'.
La denominación de archivos judíos del cine indica que no
se trata sólo de preservar películas de Israel, sino de toda
la diáspora judía. Luego, la colección queda definida
por su carácter de identidad nacional y no por el de producción
nacional.
Numerosas investigaciones filmográficas del archivo tuvieron por
objeto la ubicación de películas en el extranjero. Dichas
investigaciones fueron interrumpidas por insuficiencia de fondos pero el
objetivo principal subsiste. Parafraseando a Claude Lanzman, quién
había dicho de su film Shoah que se trataba de una 'proyección
de memoria', el objetivo primordial del Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive
es el de transformarse en la 'proyección de memoria' de todo el pueblo
judío.