A Letter Without Words
WORK IN PROGRESS
Lisa Lewenz was in 1981 a very young artist, interested in films and multimedia, and in all new directions the art was evolving. It happened to her in that year to discover, totally by chance, a pile of boxes containing dozens of old unknown short films, reels of 16 mm black&white and color footage. They were in the attic of her parents' house and were stored in a closet that seemingly had stayed unopened for almost thirty years.
(Well, I know that it sounds like soap opera, but that was the way it happened, nothing to do against)
The films were made by Ella Arnhold Lewenz, Lisa's paternal grandmother: Ella had passed away in 1954, nine months before Lisa's birth.
Lisa knew virtually nothing about that grandmother. When it came to the family's history the secret was the rule (a replica from Rapaport's Family Secret comes here to my mind, that be discreet, the last words of the father on his death bed). Lisa had been raised as a Christian, within the Episcopalian Church and she learned about her Jewish roots at thirteen: her father, an immigrant from Germany, was a Jew converted to Christianity, who never had mentioned anything about his earlier life. For him the Jewish origin had been just that, a close episode.
And now the past was erupting, like a volcano: these dozens of short amateurish movies were covering a period from the twenties to the fifties - a first-hand account coming from that unknown Jewish grandmother so unexpectedly discovered - life in the Weimar Republic, advent of Nazism, Antisemitic policies, harsher and harsher, struggle of Jewish families to escape from Germany, immigration to U.S., visits back to Germany after 1945, to discover a country in ruins, everything was there, in this pile of footage. Lisa had just bumped on a treasure nobody had been aware of.
And not only that: these films also were for Lisa the way of coming to terms with her Jewish identity together with her German identity; two intertwined universes she had ignored so far.
Lisa Lewenz in Berlin
filming in the same places Ella Lewenz had filmed long time ago
(http://archive.itvs.org/lwow/images.html)
Well, in that moment, these dozens of short movies were not arranged in any order, they were just small disparate pieces of a chaotic, gigantic puzzle. And Lisa started an ambitious project to put the pieces together. It took almost twenty years. The result was A Letter Without Words, a 62 minutes documentary.
Her father was by that time very sick and he wasn't able anymore of explaining too much. Lisa started to look for her father's siblings and she got this way precious information. Letters written by the grandmother were discovered, also a diary that was covering events beginning 1910. Lisa went also to Germany to visit the places where her grandmother had filmed. At a certain moment she worked with a German lip-reader to capture what Ella was saying in her silent films.
Together with the German lip-reader
deciphering the voice of Ella Lewenz
(http://archive.itvs.org/lwow/images.html)
So, this was the genesis of A Letter Without Words, the film of Lisa and Ella Lewenz. I would say, and I'm not exaggerating in any way: it's one of the most amazing documentaries I've ever seen!
It is the chronicle of a very long period of time, the first short films of Ella Lewenz are from the years of WWI, the last ones from the first years after WWII. Most of them cover the period of Nazism (also some of them are catching glimpses of life in the Germany of the twenties: an anniversary of German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn for instance, gathering famous personalities of the epoch, notably Einstein).
It is a history told with candor by Grandmother Ella, just as she witnessed the events, it's no lecturing, just that, her candid eye. Another movie comes to my mind, Mikhail Romm's Ordinary Fascism. Romm used there original footage from the archives of the Third Reich (only he did it on purpose, to get his point).
Here in A Letter Without Words, it is just that: fragments of reality observed by Ella Lewenz and told as she understood them first place. Anything that happened, she was encountering it with some kind of surprise, of distrust, something like no, that also! it cannot be like that! It's an amazing chronicle of day-to-day life in the Nazi regime, breathing of authenticity. To paraphrase Mikhail Romm, this is really Обыкновенный Нацизм !
So this was Ella Lewenz, the woman who for all her life has looked at everything through her camera and left us such a formidable chronicle. But, behind the story in this movie lies a meta-story: the long and difficult effort granddaughter Lisa took, to reconstruct the identity of Ella, to discover her own Jewish and German identity. Like the short films from Ella, this process of reconstruction and appropriation was composed by disparate fragments fighting to come together: each new short film reconditioned, each new piece of information gathered, was just that, a new disparate fragment, slowly and painfully integrated in the whole. And here lies another merit of this movie, A Letter Without Words: its composition, a juxtaposition of disparate fragments of that meta-story, fragments that slowly integrate and give sense to the whole. I saw some comments criticizing the fragmented structure of the movie; I think that, by the contrary, this is one of the reasons that make A Letter Without Words a remarkable cinematic construction. Like Ella in her short movies, granddaughter Lisa plays in full honesty: each time in the movie she gives us the candid account of her findings, just that, no more.
In a phone conversation I had with director Lisa Lewenz she told me that after making this movie she started feeling like a Berliner: the city of her grandmother, slowly and painfully discovered, appropriated, made her own city.
(Lisa Lewenz)
Lisa Lewenz was in 1981 a very young artist, interested in films and multimedia, and in all new directions the art was evolving. It happened to her in that year to discover, totally by chance, a pile of boxes containing dozens of old unknown short films, reels of 16 mm black&white and color footage. They were in the attic of her parents' house and were stored in a closet that seemingly had stayed unopened for almost thirty years.
(Well, I know that it sounds like soap opera, but that was the way it happened, nothing to do against)
The films were made by Ella Arnhold Lewenz, Lisa's paternal grandmother: Ella had passed away in 1954, nine months before Lisa's birth.
Lisa knew virtually nothing about that grandmother. When it came to the family's history the secret was the rule (a replica from Rapaport's Family Secret comes here to my mind, that be discreet, the last words of the father on his death bed). Lisa had been raised as a Christian, within the Episcopalian Church and she learned about her Jewish roots at thirteen: her father, an immigrant from Germany, was a Jew converted to Christianity, who never had mentioned anything about his earlier life. For him the Jewish origin had been just that, a close episode.
And now the past was erupting, like a volcano: these dozens of short amateurish movies were covering a period from the twenties to the fifties - a first-hand account coming from that unknown Jewish grandmother so unexpectedly discovered - life in the Weimar Republic, advent of Nazism, Antisemitic policies, harsher and harsher, struggle of Jewish families to escape from Germany, immigration to U.S., visits back to Germany after 1945, to discover a country in ruins, everything was there, in this pile of footage. Lisa had just bumped on a treasure nobody had been aware of.
And not only that: these films also were for Lisa the way of coming to terms with her Jewish identity together with her German identity; two intertwined universes she had ignored so far.
Lisa Lewenz in Berlinfilming in the same places Ella Lewenz had filmed long time ago
(http://archive.itvs.org/lwow/images.html)
Well, in that moment, these dozens of short movies were not arranged in any order, they were just small disparate pieces of a chaotic, gigantic puzzle. And Lisa started an ambitious project to put the pieces together. It took almost twenty years. The result was A Letter Without Words, a 62 minutes documentary.
Her father was by that time very sick and he wasn't able anymore of explaining too much. Lisa started to look for her father's siblings and she got this way precious information. Letters written by the grandmother were discovered, also a diary that was covering events beginning 1910. Lisa went also to Germany to visit the places where her grandmother had filmed. At a certain moment she worked with a German lip-reader to capture what Ella was saying in her silent films.
Together with the German lip-readerdeciphering the voice of Ella Lewenz
(http://archive.itvs.org/lwow/images.html)
So, this was the genesis of A Letter Without Words, the film of Lisa and Ella Lewenz. I would say, and I'm not exaggerating in any way: it's one of the most amazing documentaries I've ever seen!
It is the chronicle of a very long period of time, the first short films of Ella Lewenz are from the years of WWI, the last ones from the first years after WWII. Most of them cover the period of Nazism (also some of them are catching glimpses of life in the Germany of the twenties: an anniversary of German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn for instance, gathering famous personalities of the epoch, notably Einstein).
It is a history told with candor by Grandmother Ella, just as she witnessed the events, it's no lecturing, just that, her candid eye. Another movie comes to my mind, Mikhail Romm's Ordinary Fascism. Romm used there original footage from the archives of the Third Reich (only he did it on purpose, to get his point).
Here in A Letter Without Words, it is just that: fragments of reality observed by Ella Lewenz and told as she understood them first place. Anything that happened, she was encountering it with some kind of surprise, of distrust, something like no, that also! it cannot be like that! It's an amazing chronicle of day-to-day life in the Nazi regime, breathing of authenticity. To paraphrase Mikhail Romm, this is really Обыкновенный Нацизм !
So this was Ella Lewenz, the woman who for all her life has looked at everything through her camera and left us such a formidable chronicle. But, behind the story in this movie lies a meta-story: the long and difficult effort granddaughter Lisa took, to reconstruct the identity of Ella, to discover her own Jewish and German identity. Like the short films from Ella, this process of reconstruction and appropriation was composed by disparate fragments fighting to come together: each new short film reconditioned, each new piece of information gathered, was just that, a new disparate fragment, slowly and painfully integrated in the whole. And here lies another merit of this movie, A Letter Without Words: its composition, a juxtaposition of disparate fragments of that meta-story, fragments that slowly integrate and give sense to the whole. I saw some comments criticizing the fragmented structure of the movie; I think that, by the contrary, this is one of the reasons that make A Letter Without Words a remarkable cinematic construction. Like Ella in her short movies, granddaughter Lisa plays in full honesty: each time in the movie she gives us the candid account of her findings, just that, no more.
In a phone conversation I had with director Lisa Lewenz she told me that after making this movie she started feeling like a Berliner: the city of her grandmother, slowly and painfully discovered, appropriated, made her own city.
(Lisa Lewenz)
posted by Pierre Radulescu at 4:55 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home