This film by Yolande Zauberman (a French filmmaker with Polish-Jewish roots) does not fit in any category, almost too long for a short film and too short for a feature length film. But nevertheless it left one of the strongest impression, a film of this year´s Berlinale had on me. What we see, is mostly archive footage (most likely from Zauberman´s family). Her relatives (or ancestors) are often gathering for family celebrations. There is a lot of footage, where people are dancing and celebrating. Once we hear a Yiddish song. From time to time one sees a little girl in a black and white excerpt. And always, when I look into an unfamiliar photo album, I can not always identify the people or put them in a relation to (like in this case) Zauberman´s family. It is Zauberman´s voice-over narration who helps me a bit to find my orientation in these strange but touching images. She tells about her family story, from the traditional ones heard from her family from long before she was born until the more recent ones, her marriage etc. While the images are recorded intimate family memories, her voice-over narrations puts this family in relation to a specific historical context: The persecution of Jews before and during the Nazi-regime, the German invasion to Poland, the Holocaust.
The footage is poorly preserved and the chemical decomposition causes some images almost disappear. What if these images were the last traces of human existences, taken out of time by this chemical-mechanical process of photography which will be finally erased by time itself? Zauberman´s voice seems to be fighting against the disappearance of these images. Who is this little girl in the black and white footage?
In its relationship between image and sound, between visual traces of a bygone time and Zauberman´s narration, Les Juifs Riches has the intensity of some essay films by Marguerite Duras, especially her Aurelia Steiner-films and Les Mains Negatives. But the film is as well a very wise essay on the relationship between the private life of people who are at the same time victims of the upheavals of history. I think it was André Bazin who compared the photography with the embalming of the Dead. Les Juifs Riches evokes in me a very likely feeling I had once when I visited years ago the Jewish Museum in Berlin. They offer a collection of digitalized private films by Jewish citizens in Berlin, years before the Holocaust. What these films present is hardly to distinguish from what other families recorded during that time, like Sunday trips, swimming or family parties. But one can´t ignore our awareness of history and the knowledge of that these films are the very last traces, these mostly erased human existences have left. That is almost impossible to put in words. This impression came back when I watched Zauberman´s film.
Les Juifs Riches is as well an elegy between the fleeting traces of human existences and the monstrosity of the Holocaust. Usually while writing on films seen at film festivals, one has nothing but some memories and in case of luck some scribbled notes. In my memory, Yolande Zauberman´s film lives now a life of its own. It is unforgettable, in retrospect heartbreaking, and in its cinematic intelligence a very intense film experience- the shortest masterpiece I have seen for a long time
Rüdiger Tomczak
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