Waltham wonder

Visiting the Cinematheque at Brandeis

It took me a year to get coaxed to the burbs (Waltham) for an inspection of the Edie and Lew Wasserman Cinematheque at Brandeis University, which opened in March 1998. Tour complete, and I can report it's a most desirous place to settle in for a 35mm arthouse evening, with comfy raked seats, Dolby Sound that really delivers, and a huge portable screen that, instead of being locked into the proscenium, cleverly juts out toward the audience.

The Cinematheque is architecturally state of the art, so the real problem is locating it in the maze of the Brandeis campus. It's tucked into a classroom building, and that building, the Sachar International Center, is tucked away itself, in a mini-woods at the back end of a hard-to-find parking lot. Get to campus early for your virgin Cinematheque visit.

But there should be other visits.

In the months ahead, the Cinematheque will become the site of a regular program of 35mm offerings, many of Jewish content and picked by the good people of the National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis's world-renowned archive. A fine place to start would be with the smartly curated Jewish Film Festival that'll be playing at the Cinematheque from April 15 to 25.

The fest starts (April 15 at 7:30 p.m.) with The Island on Bird Street (1997), a harrowing Danish/Polish production based on Uri Orlev's autobiographical novel about a young boy (Jordan Kiziuk) abandoned in the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto after his uncle has been murdered by the Nazis and his father arrested. No Mickey Mouse Holocaust Life Is Beautiful in this hellhole bereft of Jewish populace, where the distraught, shaken lad clings to hope by fondling his pet mouse and reading aloud passages from Robinson Crusoe.

Making its American premiere, the talented Israeli Michal Bat-Adam's Love at Second Sight (April 17 at 7:30 p.m.) is the story of a young Tel Aviv photographer (the amazingly comely Michal Zuaratz) who falls in love with a random face in her street photos and decides this is the man she will marry and whose children she will have. It's an interesting premise of obsession, though the movie never gets very deep, as the girl races about the city chasing down clues to the mystery man's identity. Somehow it all connects with her lost family, including a beloved grandfather who's now dead and has been replaced by a surrogate one. (Unusually for an Israeli film, the two aging actors don't overact.)

I didn't manage to preview what sounds like an essential for cinema archeologists: a newly restored 35mm version of the 1937 The Singing Blacksmith, a Yiddish-American film by the great cult B-movie director Edgar G. Ulmer, maker of The Black Cat and Detour. The promotion for this showing (April 18 at 2 p.m.) announces ". . . a lost Yiddish classic starring legendary cantor Moishe Oysher as a lusty Jewish blacksmith. A nostalgic delight for all!"

I did look at the other Yiddish treat in the series (April 22 at 7:30 p.m.), A Letter to Mother (A Brivele der Mamen), which was made in Poland by Joseph Green in 1939, on the harsh eve of the Nazi invasion. Critic J. Hoberman has called this Ukraine-set picture "the most artful and shameless of Yiddish weepies," as poor Dobrish Berdichevski (Lucy German) suffers and suffers and then definitely suffers some more, loosing spouse and three kinder, one by one.

The consummate scene of melodrama comes after Dobrish's husband, humiliated by his underemployment, abandons his family for a steamship ticket to New York. ("A man who couldn't skin a cat here -- in America he's a Rothschild.") It's Passover night, and the poor family stare at the empty chair where father should be. The littlest son breaks down sobbing when asking his missing papa the "Why is this night different from all other nights?" questions.

The family harmonize on "Had Gad-ya" as forlornly as if it were a black slave song. Cut to a New York park bench thousands of miles away, where the father, poorer than ever, hums the Passover song too. Sob!

Finally, a 1998 Finnish documentary, David: Stories of Honor and Shame (April 18 at 4:30 p.m.), offers the little-known history of the Nazi invasion of Finland and traces what happened to Finland's tiny population of Jews. Some were rounded up and sent away by Finnish secret police even before the Nazis had ordered them to. Some (and this is most unusual) were drafted into the German army, to help fight the Russians. How strange: conscripted Jews were allowed to form an outdoors synagogue and even to go home on leave for Jewish holidays. Several were offered the Iron Cross!

But in the end Finland was like every other country. After 1942, all Jews, including the soldiers, were told to report to railroad stations for deportation. Only a very few ever returned.

A somber film, David: Stories of Honor and Shame concludes on the most anti-Benigni, anti-Miramax of moments. A young Finnish man describes how all his relatives were wiped out by the Nazis. How do you feel now, the interviewer inquires. The young man shivers. (Oh no, life isn't beautiful!) "I feel . . . just terrible," he says, inconsolable. The end.