A Monument to the World Before the Holocaust

In a Heartbreaking New Work, Peter Forgacs Uses Old Home Movies To Recreate Jewish Life

from the archives of the yivo institute for jewish research

Stolen Moments: Letters to Afar is comprised largely of dramaticallty edited footage of Polish home movies taken during the 1920s and 30s.

Peter Forgcss beautiful and heartbreaking video installation Letters to Afar at the Museum of the City of New York consists of several video projections accompanied by music and narration. The audio comes from speakers that hang from the ceiling inside transparent hoods. The large, darkened room is filled with hushed ambient sound music and lists of names and bits of narrative but the hoods focus the sound in places, and this mind-bending hasidic tale is the first thing you hear when you enter the room. As youre trying to make sense of it, a boys face appears on a monitor. He looks about 10 years old. Dressed in hasidic garb, he is goofing around and grinning at the camera in stark sunlight. You see him in split-screen: sometimes in action playing with his hat, shaking hands with a man in a suit (the filmmaker, perhaps?), and sometimes in freeze-frame, in close-up, stilled long enough for you to study and memorize his features. The boy was filmed in 1935, in Kazimierz a Jewish neighborhood of Krakw, Poland.

Using dramatically edited footage of interwar Poland, Forgcs creates an immersive monument to a vanished world. Monument is not the right word actually, since it implies something grand, static, and permanent. Forgcss installation, though massive it consists of six hours of footage playing on multiple screens is an intimate and deeply moving experience.

The films in the installation, from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, are fascinating in themselves. Throughout the 1930s, well-to-do Jewish American immigrants who could afford home movie equipment traveled back to their hometowns, filming the daily life of their relatives and communities in d and Krakw, Warsaw and Vilna, as well as in smaller places such as Nowogrdek and Oszmiana, Kolbuszowa and Kurw. A few were made as purely personal family records. Others were marketing or fundraising tools. The footage of d and Warsaw, taken by the travel agent Gustave Eisner, is heavy on monuments and landmarks, promoting travel to Poland. Several other films were made by landsmanschaften New York-based hometown aid societies that raised money to help specific towns and villages in the old country. Stylistically, most of these are very much home movies, full of touchingly familiar tropes: abrupt shifts of the camera; people posing awkwardly, accustomed to still photography holding smiles, then remembering to wave; others shying away. There is a sense of visceral repeatability that we dont expect from historical footage perhaps because most history documentaries focus on public figures and important events, using films made by professionals, for public consumption that imply a certain distance. Watching these, I kept thinking, I know these people; these could be my relatives. Some scenes of Warsaw are shot on color film dont miss them, theyre the definition of uncanny.

Talking about Letters to Afar, Peter Forgcs has likened his process to forensics, and compares these films to a record of a crime scene just before a crime. We dont know much about the hasidic kid in Krakw just that he was enjoying being filmed, and what his street looked like. But we know, with a nearly 90% certainty, that he didnt live to be an adult. Forgcs chooses to concentrate entirely on peacetime, and not to include any references to Shoah. The installations impact depends on our awareness of the tragedy yet to come.

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A Monument to the World Before the Holocaust