Rothschild's Violin

Even though its characters think aloud about "the image of the Jew accepting his role as a victim," Edgardo Cozarinsky's quietly moving and lyrically chilling feature Russian film/opera is anything but dry and academic. It begins as a fictionalized account of Dmitri Shostakovich's struggle to find a way to perform an adaptation of Chekhov's "Rothschild's Fiddle" by a Jewish student of his who was killed in the war. But it becomes something much more: a meditation on musical memory in WW2 Russia that takes the music seriously enough to devote a quarter of the film to a fantasy performance of "the Jewish opera" itself. The film is polemical and gorgeous at once. We're told that when Shostakovich performs the piece in 1968, it gets branded "Zionist propaganda"; then we're left visually adrift, our eyes glued to a young boy playing a blue violin on a Leningrad street corner in total silence. At the Coolidge Corner, November 8 at 7 p.m.; and at the Warwick Cinema in Marblehead, November 12 at 7 p.m.

A Letter Without Words
Human Remains
Rothschild's Violin
Amos Gutman, Filmmaker
Treyf
Florentene
Who's the Caboose?
Pop
Train of Life