Art Seminar: Film Appreciation

This Winter we will explore a brief but poignant cultural movement in the history of Cinema; from the industrial development of cinema in the early 1900s until the start of WWII in Eastern Europe, thriving communities of Yiddish speaking filmmakers began transitioning their regional theater traditions onto the silver screen. We will look at pre-Hollywood silent era films, pre-war European independent films, and war-time Hollywood films featuring the stars and technicians who fled (mostly) from Poland before the invasion. Our line-up will explore horror and ghost-stories, folk tales and legends, song-and-dance, and plenty of melodrama. The Jewishness often associated with Hollywood is one of assimilation; while all of the first studio founders were immigrants of Jewish descent, it was their American-ness that helped make them the moguls they were. What we find in the Yiddish diasporic Cinema of the 30s-40s is a community depicted with a cultural specificity the mainstream at the time often rejected. What was captured was so true to the Yiddish experience because all of the performers and filmmakers had once grown up in a 'shtetl' and were raised within the religion and culture.