Write on Human Rights: Take One

The reviews are in! Reviews? What reviews?

Some background...

Two week ago, Facets challenged its Facebook fans to review films screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which ran last week at the Cinematheque. The best reviews would be published here at Facets Features, and the writer of the best piece would join us as a Facets Features scribe for 6 months (or maybe more).

Our awesome little contest drew many entries, and after insano review and debate, we're ready to present the best. First up is Joe Alderman's take on Look Into My Eyes.



Naftaly Gliksberg's Look Into My Eyes provokes, questions, reveals, and astonishes. Gliksberg, a Jew living in Israel but hailing from Poland, is a former rabbi turned cinematographer/documentarian. His techniques are at times amusing but also blunt and brutally effective.

Setting out to define—or to find out if it still exists, and in what capacity—modern anti-Semitism, Gliksberg travels from Poland, Israel, France, and Germany to the United States in search of relevant subjects to endure his probing.

Beginning with a sobering scene of Polish-Catholic, Christian rite, Gliksberg shows us an annual celebration/reenactment of the Passion in the woods of rural Poland. He asks the attendees about their family histories with this event, what it means, and how they feel about Jews. This seems innocent enough—even when he asks one man what he thinks about Jews being responsible for the death of Christ (he admits that nowhere in Christianity is this claimed as fact). He asks another person how they would feel if he told them he himself was Jewish; no one seems bothered. Then, curiously, the stereotypes begin and a man tells Gliksberg that Jews always wash their hands after doing business—that that is just “how they are.”

When Gliksberg travels to Germany, he meets a young family whose past with neo-Nazi, right-wing politics still seems to haunt them. He even asks them if he can have their once-prized swastika emblazoned flag, but they deny him, saying it is too monetarily valuable even if they don't find meaning in it. More astonishing, however, are two characters he encounters in Germany, and then America—both heads of major right-wing organizations that preach hatred toward Jews and white purity, among other things. The German man denies the Holocaust ever happened, saying that hundreds of thousands of personal accounts were all lies, part of a “massive global conspiracy.”

Having freshly seen the wonderful reprisal of Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis, the subject matter of Gliksberg's film aroused my interest about ideas of German identity and its relationship with Jewish culture and people: what ideas are encapsulated within German identity? Is there one specific ideal? Have these attitudes been affected by World War II, or have they changed since then? It seems that well before the war, Germany had plenty of woes about class, social order, and work. Exactly how Jews were involved with this and scapegoated remains somewhat of a mystery and grave human tragedy.

Overall, the film is interesting and provocative, but falls short on several levels. It seems obvious that forms of discrimination and hate are present in the modern world, and something about this documentary never quite makes it over this hurdle. That is to question what the filmmakers' thesis really is. Or is there one? Some scenes and interviews seem completely shocking in their subjects' ignorance and ethical shortcomings, but are they? Don't we already know that groups and people like this exist?

In the end, the montage of several extraordinarily effective sequences do not amount to any serious epiphanies or conclusions about the history of Jewish oppression, or what modern anti-Semitism amounts to—just that it exists. If this is Gliksberg's goal, he has succeeded, but his staunch (maybe even timid) objectivity ultimately disappoints.