Wednesday, May 22, 2013
HIDDEN FROM VIEW
Today's film was Arnon Goldfinger's
When Goldfinger's Israeli grandmother dies, the family explores her hoarded possessions. It seems that she kept everything from her past while, at the same time, never telling the family much about it.
There are many surprises including a long pre and post war relationship with a Nazi couple who she and her husband visited back and forth on many occasions both in Israel (Palestine) and Germany.
A weird partnership between Zionists and the Nazis is uncovered.
This is a detective story and we see the interviews that proceed from a fairly simple idea of what happened to a much more complex recognition that in some respects, Germans are always Germans whether Jews or not and that many painful realities are better not discussed in the present.
In fact, live in the present and do not ask about the past. But still, Grammy did keep all those fascinating letters and pictures.
The World War II period including the Holocaust are now being investigated by the third generation of Jews and Germans. Goldfinger is in this cohort.
There is a lot of obvious denial and more than a little "looking for trouble" in this film. It is pretty good. But, in the end, unsatisfying because truth is elusive and even in the face of truth many people do not want to know it.
Goldfinger's mother asks "What for?".
To those of us who are outside this ring of history it is interesting to watch and wonder how we might be reacting to similar discoveries.
God knows there are enough secrets in my own extended family that it took a cousin and I about 6 months to unravel our own perceptions about what happened here and there and why. Until we exhausted ourselves on the topic.
I enjoyed watching this and I liked Goldfinger quite a bit.
He is a kind and gentle bloodhound who keeps on working to sniff the truth out.
I will give this movie a 3 out of Netflix5.
Labels: films
