Yiddish Cinema: The Drama of Troubled Communication (Suny Series, Horizons of Cinema)

In this book, Jonah Corne and Monika Vrečar offer a conceptually innovative reexamination of Yiddish cinema, a crucial yet little-known diasporic phenomenon that enjoyed its "golden age" in the mid- to late 1930s. Yiddish cinema, they argue, exhibits a distinctive fascination with media forms, technologies, and institutions, and with relationality writ large. What stands behind this communication obsession, as it might be understood, is the films' engagement both with Judaic ideals and with a series of Jewish sociohistorical predicaments of troubled communication (immigration, displacement, the breakdown of tradition, and so on) that the films seek to reflect. Accordingly, the authors create a resonant conversation between Yiddish cinema, populated by an endless procession of disconnected characters ardently striving to rejoin the world of communication, and the brilliant yet underappreciated ideas of pioneering Czech-Jewish media theorist Vilém Flusser (1920–1991), who escaped Nazi persecution and built the first part of his intellectual career in Brazil. Indeed, the authors claim that the popular art of Yiddish cinema articulates in dramatic terms a version of the central Flusserian hypothesis that "the structure of communication is the infrastructure of human reality" and, by doing so, embodies a remarkable Jewish media theory "from below." Films discussed include The Wandering Jew (1933), The Dybbuk (1937), Where is My Child? (1937), A Little Letter to Mother (1938), Kol Nidre (1939), Motel the Operator (1939), Tevye (1939), The Living Orphan (1939), and Long Is the Road (1948). Contents List of Illustrations Introduction: “The structure of communication is the infrastructure of human reality” 1 Powers of Music: A Little Letter to Mother (1938) The Gesture of Listening to Music Authority and the “Passive” Father Transformative Absence Epistolarity and Mame-loshn Musical Reconnection An Almost Happy Ending 2 Discourse and Dialogue: The Living Orphan (1939) Discourse and Dialogue Discontents of the Stage Couple Newspaper Boy, Messenger Boy Communicative Revolutions The Mother in Charge 3 The Mass Media Family: Kol Nidre (1939) The Mass Media Family Disruptions and Promises of Radio The Scandal of the Speaking Body and the Text of Muteness Returning to Tradition 4 The Battle of the Books: Tevye (1939) The Battle of the Books The Battle of the “Fathers” Excommunication and the Family Organism Sovereign Performatives and Insurrectionary Speech Textual Homeland and the Consolations of Exile 5 Motherhood, Migration, and the Asylum: Where Is My Child? (1937) Migration and Motherhood Crisis of Disconnection Performative Abuse Return of the Repressed Letter Carrier and Whistleblower Lulling a Photograph (Ex)Communication in the Asylum Illicit Relationality Rescue and Reconfiguration 6 “Silence which is communication”: Motel the Operator (1939) “Silence which is communication” and Turning Marx and the Talmud Broken Strike The Abandoned Mother and Phantasmatic Communication Responsibility to the Other: Levinas and Buber Makeshift Identity and Parental Rights The Silent Sheliekh and the Two Fathers 7 Groundlessness I (The Nation against the Jew): The Wandering Jew (1933) Groundlessness Censorship, Art, and Jewishness Antisemitism, Totalitarianism, and the Abandonment of Responsibility Nazi Communication: Rallies and Radio Unplugged: Nazi Exclusionary Measures and Book Burning The Jewish Time Bias 8 Groundlessness II (Among the DPs): Long Is the Road (1948) Displacement, Objectification, Cohabitation Subjectifying Tactics Dissolution of Ground Leaping into the Abyss Bureaucratic Apparatus in and beyond the Camps Shelter in the Other A Call to All to Find the One Regrounding 9 Mediating the Mystical: The Dybbuk (1937) Mediating the Mystical Those Who Are to Hear and Those Who Are Not to Hear Memory and Forgetting Silence and Music The Wind Struggles of the Zaddik Dialogue and Unio Mystica Coda Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index Jonah Corne is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film, and Media at the University of Manitoba. Monika Vrečar is an independent scholar who holds a PhD in Philosophy and Theory of Visual Culture from the University of Primorska, Slovenia. "Offers a bold new reading of Yiddish cinema by exploring the early diasporic cinema's fascination with media and communication"-- Provided by publisher