A Quiet Horror: Filming History Without Spectacle

By Abby Bertumen

In her film, A Letter Without Words, filmmaker Lisa Lewenz welcomes the audience into her family's joyous home life in Germany in the 30s through the employment of a montage of scenes from her grandmother's home movies: small children making funny faces at the camera, teenage brothers and sisters beaming at one another, relatives passing food around a picnic table. However, through the subtle incorporation of different types of footage, images showing the Nazi takeover of Germany, shot by Ella Lewenz in the 30s, Lisa Lewenz interposes historical atrocity with familial comfort and happiness.

It is an unusual filmic juxtaposition if one considers it in the context of mainstream movies of the Holocaust, like Schindler's List and Sophie's Choice, where the horror of the event is depicted in the reality of the ghettos and concentration camps. However, Lewenz's cinematic component of using family films and personal narratives taken from the pre-World War II beginnings of Nazi Germany to dictate the documentary, takes away what Lewenz calls the "spectacle" of the Holocaust, and presents a challenge to any audience member: that any and all realities such as being part of a family or circle of friends, being a student, being free, etc. can be shattered by the re-occurrence of such events. The film addresses the great personal impact events current in our lives can have, before we have the experience (sometimes horrific, as in the Holocaust) and the hindsight to call them history and deem them too awful to ever happen again. The blood runs cold when, showing scenes of a German building blanketed in Nazi flags, Lewenz, who acts as the narrator of the film, asks, "Take away the swastikas, how would one recognize the signs today?"

A Letter Without Words, whose showing was accompanied by a talk and master classes with Lewenz, was part of the annual WomenDirect film festival, showcasing the criticism and work of women in cinema. Lewenz's film was the second installment of the festival and punctuated this idea of an experimental documentary where the horror of well-known historical events were not conveyed in blatant images of grisly aftermath, but the uncertainty and creeping terror which permeated everyday lives in their midst. Examples of these were seen in the first night of WomenDirect when film critic and curator Laura U. Marks showed documentaries like Eklipsis, a film about four Cambodian refugees suffering from hysterical blindness because they were tortured by the Khmer Rouge government. The film is absent of the notorious images of skulls and mass graves. Rather it loops a montage of scenes of school children, work camps and political rallies repeatedly throughout the film, signifying the struggle in the womenâs attempt at explaining their psychological condition without re-visualizing that which traumatized them in the first place. Another example shown was an experimental film by artist Mona Hatoum, in which she addresses her separation from her parents, living in Lebanon during the civil war, through filming scenes in her bathroom.

Lewenz describes the idea of emphasizing personal experience and feelings in a historical setting as a documentary with "much more a sense of an author putting themselves in the story as a way of supporting the context." She says her work as a visual artist has always centered around the division between public and private and A Letter Without Words, her first film, ultimately addressed this issue for her as she struggled not to unduly expose her family, but to tell their story for the benefit of others.

Lewenz did not find out that she was Jewish until the age of 13. When she came to America to settle down, Lewenz's father, Wolfgang, did not want to see his children go through the pain he had suffered as a Jew, so he suppressed their heritage. So when Lewenz discovered the home movies of her grandmother, Ella Lewenz, and later letters and journals, which reflected the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, she was compelled to make a film of it.

Lewenz unearthed the films, showed them to her aunts, uncles and cousins, who hadn't seen them in years, and began interviewing them about their memories of that time, namely at family reunions.

"One of the hardest parts was getting my family to talk," she said, adding that, nevertheless, members were generous for letting her question them. Still, Lewenz had to grapple with the opinions of her family, and said she was more nervous at the family viewing than at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals. She said her family loved it, but the process in making the film was not without its conflicts, with one family member threatening to sue her and another reluctant to attach her name to such a documentary. However, Lewenz said she was careful to send transcripts of the film to each family member before it was finalized.

One of the interesting aesthetics of the film is the visual/narrative dichotomy of the home movies and the letters and journal entries, as well as remembrances of the family members. In the visual, the two dominant images are that of the family picnic in the backyard and the scenes of Berlin draped in swastikas. As Lewenz effectively employs throughout the entire film, a narrative contrast is applied to these images to provoke thought in the viewer. During scenes of the picnic and other happy family gatherings, letters from Ella reveal the sadness and concern she has for her family in the face of the growing strength of the Nazis. As Lisa's father approaches the movie camera with a huge smile on his face, the audience hears Ellaâs words to him to stay in America: "I see no future for you here in Germany."

Against Ella's footage of Nazi flags (notably the only known color footage of such images), posters and anti-Semitic signs, Lewenz's cinematography and narrative styling is particularly poignant as she overlays images of present-day Berlin with the Berlin under Nazi control. Her precision in such an overlay causes the audience to realize that Berlin looks shockingly the same as it does now, a subtextual flow into present-day reality which again reminds the viewer of the reality, not the spectacle, of such an event and the possibility of its re-birth. Lewenz said that part of what the film deals with is the conflict viewers have in judging such events and those in their midst because they are judging from hindsight; whereas Ella Lewenz, Wolfgang and the rest of her family had to deal with its manifestations in everyday reality. In deference to this, Lewenz displays such footage without narrative or, if she does speak, chooses to question hindsight in phrases like, "Now itâs so easy to recognize their destiny," punctuating the importance of not passing judgement on her family or other Jews for not somehow "knowing" the danger.

Nevertheless, the film documents the shock and defiance with the terrible way in which Lewenz's family was treated as Jews. Lewenz presents a letter one of her relatives, Gerard Arnhold, wrote shortly after Jews were barred from the local pool. Since Lewenz's family was fairly wealthy, they contributed financially to areas in the community, including the very pool they were prohibited to swim in. One can detect the hurt and disbelief in the voice of the letter as Arnhold attempts to understand the situation gracefully: Yet in her discussion of the film, Lewenz notes his act of defiance in not closing with "Heil Hitler" before his name.

Lewenz hails her cinematic partnership with her grandmother because, she said, "I felt very clearly that she knew what was going on." Ella's very act of filming was rebellious because, by the mid to late 30s, the Nazis had outlawed it. Not only did Ella continue filming, she began using the new technology of color film when it emerged. Her unique color footage of and, sometimes prolonged pause on, the flags and posters of Hitler show her growing awareness of the terrible change. It is an aspect of the film that Lewenz said was particularly hard for her German audiences to see because it was difficult for them to accept that a city so rich in culture, a producer of music and intellect, could produce "such barbarism." Also, the color aspect of the images, unlike most "stock" footage of the Holocaust, reveals the proximity of the event to our own time and reality, she said. This broke the clichŽ that the Holocaust was an event in the distant past, she added.

The sentiments of Lewenz's relatives also bring a startling reality to thesituation, the attempt of one to comprehend such horrific events. Lewenz's aunt, Gerda, said she believed people were 50 percent good, and 50 percent bad, with all having the ability to go either way. Her uncle, H.G. Maron, said that the German mentality of obedience was so ingrained that he would have done the same thing as the German soldiers. This statement was a part of the film that Lewenz said she was so nervous about that she checked with her uncle several times before finalization, to be sure he did not mind its inclusion. However, she said she saw the historical significance.

"He was saying he was brought up in this generation where we were these little sheep that follow."

According to Lewenz, A Letter Without Words aims in constructing a narrative that embodies the "duplicity of experience" where the audience is challenged in their role as historical consumers judging an event, and with it, its people; while those living through the event are challenged in the course of their lives because they do not have the benefit of historical context. "Who would be outrageous enough to envision the Holocaust?" Lewenz asked of the people back then, which addresses the issues of the reality and proximity of historical events central to her use of home movies in her documentary.

"This is the breath of life, this is the day-to-day existence, without spectacle."

Abby Bertumen is just HAPA to be here.