If you think Jeremy "Jes" Benstock's short film about The Orders of
Love is good, you should see his follow up film which is about to make
its American debut at the New York Jewish Film Festival next week!
It is quite the natural follow up to "The Orders of Love" movie ---
just as Bert's Movements of the Soul grew out of regular Family
Constellations. Jeremy is really good at "empathic satire," and now he
takes on the Holocaust itself!
You can view it here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/filmnetwork/A11445923
It is a ten minute short film called "The Holocaust Tourist: Whatever
Happened to `Never Again'?" And it is all about the "Disneyfication"
of Auschwitz, that is, the transformation of the actual death camp
site into a Disney-style heritage-theme park, complete with the
Judeo-istic kitschy trappings of bus tourism and essential creature
comforts that we in the West have come to expect from any vacation
spot or shopping mall we would visit.
Here is a review of the film
http://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/reviews.php?film_id=11989
with an excerpt:
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"I didn't want to make a film about the holocaust," says Benstock at
the outset, "but if you're a film-maker and Jewish, it comes with the
job description."
It is the nature of `holocaust tourism' that interests -- or perhaps
that should be 'unsettles' -- Benstock. Is it right that tourist shops
have sprung up to cash in on visitors to Auschwitz? The town of Krakow
is a bustling hub of tourism. Holidaymakers eat in Jewish-themed bars
and restaurants before making a `pilgrimage' to the death camp. But is
pilgrimage the right word, or is this just another stop off on the
tourist trail "blazed by Hollywood"?
--------------------------------------
Here is a 3-minute interview of Jes about his recent work.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/filmnetwork/A12183699
There is one incredible scene where Jes had come to Auschwitz for the
60th anniversary celebration of the camp's liberation in 2005. He
wanted to film the holocaust survivors leaving the camp for what would
be their last time. The scene was at night and it was snowing, and
after the ceremony, everyone else but the camp survivors had arranged
transportation out of the camp, but somehow, no one arranged for the
camp survivors to leave. So there they were stranded once again at the
Auschwitz camp, stuck in the snow!
"Never Again!" had become "Once Again!" Or maybe an astoundingly
absurdist moment of "déjà vu all over again." For the very people who
fought half a century ago to have the camp preserved. They get to be
forgotten again!
The two signal events that turned Auschwitz into a "heritage theme
park" were the fall of communism in 1989 and the filming of
"Schindler's List" there in 1992. Spielberg's movie is as much a part
of the history of the camp now as any Nazi brick oven used there.
Jeremy films a tour guide at the camp pointing out where Steven
Spielberg had filmed the scenes and even had replicas of the gate
constructed as part of the movie set. "Arbeit macht frei" indeed.
Other scenes of hilarious and painful irony include the Jewish-themed
restaurants that serve roast pork; even an Auschwitz Hot Dog Stand!
Then an interview with an old Jewish woodcarver lamenting the
inaccuracies and downright fraudulence of the cheap Jewish-peasant
figurines made to sell to the tourists.
It's clear that this commercial exploitation is just a phenomenon of
our modern electronic and technological age. Strangely enough, it
feels like a natural and socially acceptable form of "holocaust
denial" that occurs precisely by making a pilgrimage to the very site
of the holocaust. Yet the tourists are not denying that the event
happened; rather, the event was so horrible and gruesome that, out of
social etiquette alone, we must deny its cruel reality, lest we either
faint, throw up on each other, or else make continual primal screams
of empathic agony. It's really quite a necessary numbing down of our
visceral reactions to the events.
From the FC perspective, Jeremy's movie really raised an unsettling
question for me. I began to recall all the constellations where I had
been selected to lie on the floor (sometimes for hours in a drawn-out
epic "cast-of-thousands" Heinz Stark Constellation!!!) as a
representative of some group of holocaust victims. Or else to
represent the mass murderers, (which seems to come more naturally to
me, by the way.)
In the last two years, I have lain on the floor to represent:
--> Jews and Nazis in the holocaust
--> Russian prisoners in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905
--> slaughtered members of a Syrian clan connected with the Armenian
genocide of 1917
-->Brazilian peasants massacred by rich landowners
-->dead American soldiers killed by German soldiers in WW II.
My question became: might we be "re-packaging history" even in
constellations, in the same spirit of "necessary numbing denial" that
Jes shows us so clearly happening at Auschwitz?
On the other hand, I thought, how else could it be? Since we are only
representatives, doing our best to reflect the horrors and unspeakable
cruelty that happened to people we are not related to, we can only
represent them and their traumas to the limits of our own "mirror
neurons."
On a positive note, I think that all the crass commercialism, all the
Walt Disneyfication of history, even of Auschwitz, is simply a part of
our unfolding Greater Field of all us human beings and actually may be
orchestrated by all of our dead ancestors to awaken us to what
actually transpired in the past and still lives in the Greater
Epigenetic Field of us all.
So, maybe we are not re-packaging history; so much as we are newly
packaging our inner soul reactions to that history, delivering and
opening those packages in constellations.
After all, constellations do not represent actual literal historical
events; but the underlying emotional and epigenetic inheritance of the
effects of those historical events.
I think this commercialization and reduction to kitschiness is simply
the price we have to pay now in order to inaugurate and continue the
process of bringing the perpetrator and victim energies into balance.
Thomas
PS Here is the website of the Jewish Museum in New York, where
"Holocaust Tourist" is opening in week or so.
http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/site/pages/page.php?id=291&live_stats=NYJFF2007
"Jes Benstock takes viewers on a whistle-stop tour of kitsch Judaica
in Krakow and tour buses in Auschwitz."
What is greatly ironic --- and I'm sure planned that way --- is that
"The Holocaust Tourist" opens for the full length "gripping
documentary" called: "Nuremberg: The Nazis facing their Crimes," a
serious treatment of the trials of 1946.
You know, Alison & Max, you had scheduled a workshop together in New
York City at the Anthroposophical center on 15th St. on January 21
about the healing the Holocaust. I'm sorry to hear it's being
canceled. Too bad you couldn't have coordinated with Jes because 50
blocks north up at Lincoln Center, his Holocaust Tourist film is
making its première run. From January 10 through Jan 25.
