Family Secrets: Alan Berliner's <i>Nobody's Business</i> and the (American) Jewish Autobiographical Film

Abstract

In loving memory: Max H. Renov (1921-2005) Jews have always cared about family. Think of the pages of Torah devoted to the recitation of ancestral names. Numbers (or in Hebrew, Shmot, names), the second of the Five Books of Moses, begins with the listing of the clans and their elders. Such colorful names-from the tribe of Reuben, Elizur son of Shedeur; from Ephraim, Elishama son of Ammihud; from Dan, Ahiezer son of Ammishaddai-a roll call of the heads of the ancestral houses of Israel, all of whom were to participate in the taking of the census in the wilderness of Sinai. As a people, we have been reciting the names of those ancestors and many others on an annual cycle for thousands of years. We have clung tenaciously to the continuity of our lineage since Abraham, over all the centuries and throughout our exile in many lands. It is as if the key to Jewish self-understanding has always been em bedded in an understanding of our ancestry, our familial past. We are who we are because of who they were. For the Jewish people (and here the contrast to Christianity comes to mind), the goal has always been more continuity than conversion, more transmission of values than epiphanous transformation. It is within this context of ancestry that I write here of a recent and, for me, fascinating tendency in the world of American Jewish documentary filmmaking, a field which has flourished in recent years, namely, the trend toward of a special sort, that is, personal filmmaking that takes as its focus the family. A measure of credit for this flowering of Jewish documentary filmmaking must be given to the Foundation for Jewish Culture and its Lynn and Jules Kroll Fund for Jewish Documentary Film, which for more than a decade has supported the completion of original documentary films that explore the Jewish experience in all its complexity. The Foundation for Jewish Culture has lent its prestige as well as its dollars to the support of the contemporary documentary community while the growing number of Jewish film festivals across the country and the world has provided new exhibition outlets for the work. Through frequent participation on the FJC's grants panels, I have seen for myself that a considerable number of the films receiving support have been autobiographical or family-centered including Judith Helfand's A Healthy Baby Girl (US, 1997), Treyf (Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky, US, 1998), Abraham Ravett's The March (US, 1999), Divan (Pearl Gluck, US/HU/IL/UA, 2003), King of the Jews (Jay Rosenblatt, US, 2000), Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky's Hiding and Seeking (US, 2004), and My Architect (Nathaniel Kahn, US, 2003). It is this subspecies of film-the Jewish autobiographical film-that I hope to explore in what follows. Like all autobiographical works-in painting, film or literature-these films are journeys toward self-understanding and indeed self-construction. Why self-construction? Literary theorist Jerome Bruner's formulation is a simple one: autobiography is life construction through 'text' construction.1 But the building blocks of a filmic life construction are not just words (rich with connotation) or brushstrokes but images of social reality stamped with the authenticity that photographically based images bear. Through the autobiographical films of which I speak, the maker offers up a selective version of herself and in so doing remakes herself through the editing of sound and image, through the use of voice-over and musical accompaniment but-and here is what may begin to mark the Jewishness of these recent films-almost always in relation to significant others, familial others-fathers and mothers mostly, sometimes grandparents and siblings. Elsewhere I have called such work domestic ethnography in that it follows the path of the ethnographic research of the cultural anthropologist, the participant observation through which (and as the result of lengthy fieldwork) the otherness of foreign cultures-their folkways, rituals, and kinship structures-becomes explicable, translated into a more familiar or domesticated frame of reference. …