The National Center for Jewish
Film's 21st Annual Film Festival, May 2–13, 2018
The Prince and the Dybbuk (2017), dir.
Piotr Rosolowski and Elwira Niewiera
The Dybbuk (1937), dir. Michał
Waszyński
May 6, 2:00 and
4:00, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
These two films—the
first a documentary related to the second, which is based on Yiddish theater—screen
back to back and should be seen together if possible.
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| Waszyński, 1930 |
The Prince and the Dybbuk (2017) and The Dybbuk (1937) are
chock-full of complexities that might take more than one viewing of each to
fully appreciate. Shot in black-and-white, The
Dybbuk surely ranks among film classics, partly for its Yiddish theater
legacy. It also embodies a dimension related to the personal life of its
director, “Prince” Michał Waszyński (1904–1965), that
would not be known were it not for the The
Prince
and the Dybbuk
interpreting the material.
Waszyński, an aristocratic and admired
filmmaker from his young adulthood until his death, hid his shtetl and yeshiva
beginnings in Kovel, Ukraine, not only from the world but also from himself, as
those early memories bore too much pain. The haunting images we’re shown from
both his past life in Kovel and his post–World War II life in Italy involve his
repressed homosexuality that may have prompted his early flight to Warsaw and then Berlin, as
well as his conversion to Catholicism and his name change from Moshe Waks to Michał
Waszyński.
Later, memories of the Holocaust and
murder of his family and friends increasingly break through Waszyński’s efforts
to forget, leading to intolerable psychic pain, made worse by his inability to
share his story with others, not even with his adopted family in Rome, the
Dickmanns. However, one does wonder if just after the war he might have revealed
his past to the older, humanitarian Italian countess, Dolores Tarantini, who
helped him, married him, and promptly died, leaving him her fortune and palace
in Rome.
The Prince and the Dybbuk uses traditional documentary techniques
to piece together Waszyński’s life, but it also takes off creatively for many
of its segments, integrating archival film footage of shtetl life, which
complement voice-over memories from Waszyński’s diary. A particularly painful scene
shows the Kovel synagogue today, first from the outside and then within, where
the central cavity under the square dome has become a clothing factory. A Kovel
survivor tells us how the Germans locked the town’s Jews, including the Waks
family, in the synagogue. There, waiting to be killed, they wrote last messages
on the walls. Archival stills show us individual faces—faces that could easily be
your own family members’ faces no matter what your religious background. These
captive faces are trying to make sense of being imminently killed. Voice-overs simultaneously
speak the lines we assume were written on the synagogue walls. It’s a difficult
moment in the film—incomprehensible pending murder—and yet, its reality is exactly
what Waszyński couldn’t erase from his memory.
The documentary links Waszyński’s obsession
with his film The Dybbuk to his own life, and integrates a
mystical cemetery scene from the film. Waszyński’s diary toward the end of his
life reveals how he’s tormented by a dybbuk who has possessed him. The film
interprets this spirit as a yeshiva student Waszyński might have loved, forcing
his flight from Kovel, his change of identity, and his inconsolable grief over the
Nazi genocide.
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| Lili Liliana and Leon Liebgold in The Dybbuk, 1937 |
One of the documentary’s most
shocking scenes is of the Battle of Monte Cassino, which Anders’ Polish army
fought with the Allies. Waszyński was the troop’s filmmaker and recorded the cataclysmic
bombing, its towering clouds of smoke, and the ancient monastery’s destruction.
The army went on to liberate Rome, where Waszyński’s life and career came to
settle.
Even without the insights and
enrichments of Rosolowski and Niewiera’s documentary, Waszyński’s The Dybbuk stands alone as a film
classic. Besides capturing with beauty and perfection a lost culture—Eastern
Europe’s shtetl life and yeshiva study—it also preserves traditional Yiddish
theater and folklore or mythology. The film is based on S. Ansky’s 1914 play of
the same name. Its structure resembles Greek drama, and its story is a parable.
The sets, action, acting, and cultural atmosphere filled with religious music
all contribute to an outcome of extraordinary film art that shares an aesthetic
with Orson Welles.
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| Etching by Ephraim Moses Lillien (1874–1925). In Jewish mythology, a dybbuk is the evil spirit of a dead person that possesses another person. In The Dybbuk, a young shtetl woman is possessed by the spirit of the man she was to marry but her father rejected. |
