Forum Film Festival – Fordham Now

Wiesel and Turturro Discuss Real World Horror as Art

Tom Stoelker — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:14:48 +0000

Can a film ever be made that captures the horror of the Holocaust? Can a work of art make an impact that changes the way people behave toward one another?

These were just a few of the questions addressed by author Elie Wiesel and actor John Turturro after the screening ofThe Truce, a 1998 film based on author Primo Levi’s autobiographical book, The Reawakening.

Elie Wiesel addresses the Law School’s film festival, as John Turturro looks on.
Photo by Bruce Gilbert

The Oct. 21 screening and conversation were part of the 2012 Forum Film Festival sponsored by Forum on Law, Culture & Society at Fordham Law, moderated by Thane Rosenbaum, the John Whelan Distinguished Lecturer in Law and Forum director.

The film follows a group of Italian refugees, including Levi, from Auschwitz after their release by the Russian army. Their train journey back to Italy wanders through Europe, detouring past destroyed train tracks and deep into post-war chaos. The roundabout journey allows for the reawaking of the senses and a return to humanity for the former prisoners, as the palette shifts slowly from wintry grays to lush summertime greens.

Wiesel, 1986 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, characterized the movie as disconcerting because of its heavy-handed, hopeful approach. It’s not the first time the author dismissed attempts to capture the Holocaust on film: Rosenbaum reminded the audience of Wiesel’s 1983 essay that opposed the trivialization of the Holocaust inherent to television and film.

“The universality of the Holocaust lies in its uniqueness,” Wiesel wrote at the time. “Those who seek to universalize it are dejudifying it in the process. If everybody was a victim, then no one was.”

After the screening, Wiesel echoed his 30-year-old essay.

“They were trying to tell the truth, as impossible as that it is,” Wiesel said of the Holocaust movie genre. “Was it was the same? Of course not.”

Any remake of a book, regardless of its theme, loses something in the cinematic translation, said Turturro in agreement.

“The nature of film is a compression of time,” he said. “ I’ve done a lot of adaptations of books and it can be depressing, because the things you love best about a book—the little details—get lost.”

Rosenbaum said, even in the best-intentioned films, the director’s vision often trumps that of the author’s. He cited a scene in The Truce when the refugee train is routed back to Munich. There, a captured SS officer kneels before Turturro (as Primo Levi), a scene that didn’t happen in the book. Turturro explained that the film director Francesco Rosi felt the film needed a redemption scene, a notion Turturro said he disagreed with.

Wiesel said that over-sentimentalizing the Holocaust was the primary reason he would never sell the screen rights to his books (although he did once consider selling to director Francois Truffaut.)

But he said he couldn’t possibly approach any aspect of the Holocaust from an artist’s perspective.

Watching The Truce was particularly personal for him. To a dead-silent audience Wiesel described the last conversation that he had with Levi a week before his 1987 suicide. Wiesel said he had told Levi that he would clear his schedule so that they could spend a week together.

“You and I will go away alone,” Wiesel told Levi.

“Elie, it’s too late,” Levi responded.

Film Festival Takes On a Classic

Fordham News — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:18:47 +0000

By Jenny Hirsch

The 2011 Forum Film Festival concluded on Oct. 20 with a screening and panel discussion of M (1931), the first sound film by legendary director Fritz Lang.

The theme of the evening was how society should deal with the criminally insane—people like Hans Beckert, the film’s protagonist, who is remorseful about the child murders he commits but is compelled by his mental illness to carry them out.

The plot comes to a climax when the Berlin police begin cracking down on the underworld in an effort to apprehend Beckert, played by Peter Lorre. In response, the city’s criminals catch the child murderer themselves and subject him to a mock trial to determine his fate.

Beckert’s “defense lawyer” in the proceedings announces that the sick should be given to a doctor. At the timeM was produced, this was a new way of thinking and called into question how criminals were prosecuted.

“The defense was reasonable,” said panelist Sarah Williams Goldhagen, author and architecture critic. “What society needs to do with someone like that is isolate him so he can no longer murder—but not murder him because that’s antithetical to modernity.

“Peter Lorre is a character of modernity because he is someone who is described as having a psychological complexity and a pathology that happens with modernity,” Goldhagen said.

Panelists argued that the criminals have a window into the soul of Beckert because they are beholden to their own compulsions, such as the compulsion to steal.

They also learn about suffering. For example, a prostitute in the criminal court cries out to let the mothers of the murdered children decide Beckert’s fate. In doing so, the character suggests the concept of victims’ rights.

“This is the elevation of victims’ rights outside of the state’s interests,” said panelist Henry Bean, a screenwriter and director. “The woman criminal is saying, ‘You have to think of the victims’ rights.’ This seems to be the first time in film where this idea emerges.”

Panelists also discussed Lang’s use of architecture in M. Though most of the interior shots featured 19th-century architectural elements, the exterior shots showed modern Berlin as it looked in the 1920s and 1930s.

“Where they catch Beckert is the only modern building in the whole film,” Goldhagen said. “That suggests that if social institutions catch up to where modernity and technology are, then society will improve.”

Former Chair of Federal Reserve Highlights Fordham Law Film Festival

Janet Sassi — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:53:12 +0000

Paul Volcker, former chair of the Federal Reserve, will join New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin on Friday, Oct. 14, to launch the 2011 Fordham Law Film Festival.

Volcker and Sorkin will participate in a post-screening discussion of the HBO film Too Big To Fail, a portrayal of the major players in the 2008 economic crisis and subsequent TARP bailout. The movie, which stars William Hurt, Cynthia Nixon and Paul Giamatti, is based on Sorkin’s bestselling book of the same name.

The event will be held in the HBO Theatre in midtown Manhattan and is open to the public.

The series, which is sponsored by the Forum on Law, Culture and Society, consists of six movies that deal with legal themes and ranges from contemporary blockbusters to classics, documentaries and independent movies.

The five remaining films in the series will be shown from Oct. 15 through Oct. 20 on the Fordham Lincoln Center campus in the law school’s McNally Amphitheatre.

Among those appearing are director Oliver Stone, who will discuss his film Wall Street with the movie’s producer Edward R. Pressman; and writer Avery Corman, whose novel Kramer vs. Kramer (Random House, 1977), was made into the first Hollywood movie to spotlight child custody battles.

For a full schedule of showings and guests and to buy tickets, visit the Forum’s website.