"The Paper Bridge" (Holocaust: Affect and Absence Series)

April 05, 2017
07:30 PM - 09:30 PM
Dryden Theatre, George Eastman Museum, 900 East Avenue, Rochester, NY 14607

The Paper Bridge

(Die papierene Brücke, Ruth Beckermann, Austria 1987, 95 min., 16mm, German w/subtitles)

“I don’t know exactly why I traveled east this winter,” filmmaker Ruth Beckermann says of her documentary journey through Eastern Europe. “I think I was just curious to know whether there was still any resemblance to the stories I grew up with.” Beckermann’s parents met in Vienna after the Holocaust; her father was a war refugee from Romania and her mother was a native of Vienna who settled in Palestine in 1938. Tracing the migratory paths of her family before World War II, Beckermann returns to the European Jewish communities which inspired her childhood stories—the small towns around Theresienstadt and the remaining Jewish communities of Vienna and Bukovina, Romania.

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About the "Holocaust: Affect and Absence" Film Series

All depictions of the Holocaust grapple with a central question: how does one represent the unrepresentable? The continuous stream of new films about the Holocaust, more than seventy years after the end of World War II, attests to both the difficulties and the importance of this problem. The films selected for this series span these decades and challenge us to think about how much is said through silence and fraught emotional connections between the films and their audiences. This program of documentaries ranges from some of the first filmic reflections of the atrocities in the camps in Billy Wilder’s Death Mills (1945) and Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956), to a search for the lost East European Jewish communities of Ruth Beckermann’s family members before WWII in her film Paper Bridge (1987), to Chantal Akerman’s moving final film about her relationship to her mother and their relationship to her mother’s past in No Home Movie (2015). The films all reflect on questions of responsibility, violence, and humanity in ways that resonate in the present day, thus creating compelling albeit complicated relationships between past and present.

This series is a collaboration between the George Eastman Museum, the JCC Ames Amzalak Rochester Jewish Film Festival, and the University of Rochester. It is made possible in part by the University of Rochester’s German Program, Film and Media Studies Program, and Center for Jewish Studies.

$6 members
$8 nonmembers
$4 students with ID

Links:
Event page (GEM)
Series poster (PDF)

Category: Film Screenings