FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
KLEZMER ON FISH STREET
Klezmer on Fish Street is an incompetent documentary, which alleges there is
(according to the film’s press notes) "a resurgence of interest in Jewish
culture" in today’s Poland. The notion behind this grand statement is a thriving
so-called Holocaust tourist trade, including a Schindler’s List tour of the
Nazi death camps and the now-extinct Jewish neighborhoods of Poland’s major
cities. There is also supposed strong Polish interest in klezmer, a
distinctly Russian-Polish music identified with the Jewish culture of this
part of the world; allegedly, many non-Jewish Polish musicians are playing this
music to SRO concert engagements throughout the country.
Unfortunately, what is depicted on screen completely contradicts such
notions. Open air performances of klezmer music by a group of young Americans
visiting Poland is received by Polish pedestrians with gazes that range from studied
indifference to outright contempt. An evening street celebration following
the Jewish Sabbath brings out both the local police (who seem to come with
built-in sneers) and insults from local Poles suggesting the celebrants should go
to Israel. Few vestiges of pre-1939 Jewish culture are preserved and spray
painted swastikas turn up on more than one occasion. As for the Holocaust
tourist trade, it seems to thrive on cheap souvenirs depicting traditional Jewish
art and a few restaurants which may or may not even be kosher (the film doesn’t
even bother to ask who is cooking and how the food
is being prepared).
Klezmer on Fish Street is actually a hodgepodge of vague and unfinished
thoughts, bizarre comments, and some of the most amateurish production values in
a supposedly professional production. In one hilarious moment, an Israeli
tourist is being interviewed when a man walks in front of him and stops in the
center of the camera’s focus. The screen is filled with a huge close-up of the
intruder’s ear while the Israeli tourist babbles on from behind the man’s
head.
Elsewhere in the film are whooshes of wind blowing heavily into a microphone,
soundtrack levels rising and falling willy-nilly, poorly-blocked close-ups which
make the interview subjects look comic, nighttime footage so dark that
you cannot tell who is speaking, and selections of Yiddish songs presented
without English subtitles.
Then there is an inane
historian who claims klezmer music is the "soundtrack for the Jewish
experience" (that will come as news to the millions of Jewish people of Sephardic
heritage) and who worries about the gentile takeover of klezmer with this deathless
concern: "The issue is not that a white boy can play the blues, but can a goy
play the Jews?" Oy vey!
The cruelest blow of them all, however, is the fact this movie has a
theatrical distributor and is playing in commercial engagements. In view of the
scores of gifted documentary filmmakers whose professional quality features do not
get distribution, this is the biggest insult of them all. Phil Hall
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