First Person Jewish (Visible Evidence series)

Abstract

The value of documentary as a critical practice and form has been the subject of intense discussion in the last two decades, represented most strikingly in the rich body of work made available by the University of Minnesota Press's ‘Visible Evidence’ series. The relationship between documentary cinema and artistic practice has provided renewed creative energy to the debates on nonfiction film, and Alisa Lebow enters this burgeoning discourse on nonfiction theory and practice with a book that opens documentary form to questions of Jewish identity, history, memory and creativity. First Person Jewish is a measured account of a world of first-person experimental nonfiction cinema and its engagement with Jewish selfhood. The author embarks on a journey into twentieth-century Jewish identity not via high-profile films on the holocaust and its memory but through lesser-known nonfiction films that use Jewish stereotypes to interrogate and negotiate identity. These films are uniquely placed for their formal experimentation and for pushing the boundaries and debates that plague nonfiction cinema. First Person Jewish displays a healthy wariness of ‘Jewishness’ as a prescriptive cultural form and instead moves towards a deconstruction of ‘Jewishness’ as experience, as an amorphous stereotype, as a set of humorous eccentricities and as the site of traumatic history. The book is divided neatly into four chapters, each dealing with a particular version of the autobiographical form. The range of films and filmmakers remains diverse, and we also have access to a chapter on Treyf (1998), made by Lebow herself with her codirector Cynthia Madansky.