Hartford Jewish Film Festival: Jewish film archivist talks about
restoration of "Hungry Hearts"
By Judie Jacobson
WALTHAM - The 1922 silent film "Hungry Hearts" will close the Hartford Jewish Film Festival on Tuesday, March 23 at 7 p.m. Restored by the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University in 2006, the film is a Hollywood adaptation of the short stories of Anzia Yezierska about an immigrant family living on New York's Lower East Side. The film will be accompanied by an original score composed by students at the University of Hartford's Hartt school, performed live by students at the school.
Recently, the Ledger spoke with Sharon Pucker Rivo, co-founder and executive director of the National Center for Jewish Film about "Hungry Heart" and the restoration of Jewish films. Recipient of "Distinguished Humanist Award" by Ohio State University in 2005 and "Zvi Cohen Leadership and Legacy Award" from The Vilna Shul in 2007, Rivo is a member of the Brandeis University faculty, where she teaches courses on Jewish film and the Holocaust. She lectures worldwide - most recently at the Austrian Film Archive in Vienna and the Imperial War Museum in London.
Q: First, tell us about the National Center for Jewish Film.
A: The National Center for Jewish Film is the largest film archive of Jewish film in the world outside of Israel. We have over 12,000 cans of film and we are also the largest distributor of contemporary Jewish film - we distribute almost 350 titles. We wear a number of hats here, but the heart and soul of this place is really the archives, a combination of the older titles that we have restored - we collect and we preserve film materials, everything from "The Dybbuk" to the Yiddish film "Yiddle With His Fiddle" and other feature films that were made both in Poland, the U.S. and in Russia before World War II. We also are the largest archive of Jewish home movies, of films about the DP camps; early footage of Palestine, etc. We specialize in home movies that were taken before the war in Europe. We solicit home movies all the time.
It's eclectic, but the common thread is Jewish. We don't care who made it, we care about what the image that they captured was. We've been doing this for 32 years. We were established in 1976 with a collection of films in Yiddish that had been made here in America and in Poland. We began with the acquisition of a private collection and we immediately got money from the National Endowment of the Arts. We have received federal funding from the very beginning for the preservation of these materials and then we began to collect It's grown over the years; Brandeis offered us space. We actually became an independent nonprofit in 1979.
Besides "Hungry Hearts," we're the distributor of the film "Camera Obscura," which is also appearing at the Hartford Jewish Film Festival. It's a beautiful period piece about a Jewish woman in Argentina. It's a very interesting film. It did not get picked up by a distributor and we saw it at the Jerusalem film festival and picked it up.
Q: Tell us about the early Jewish films - and about "Hungry Heart."
A: Among our collection are a number of silent films, some made in Hollywood some made independently, some made in Europe. We went out specifically to collect these films. There are still a lot of films missing that we continue to look for. For example, there was a very important film called "Abie's Irish Rose" -There are some remakes of it but the original is lost. In "Hungry Hearts" we know we are missing five or seven minutes of its 80 minutes. We found it in an original nitrate print. The film had no head titles on it. We basically recreated the opening head titles from scripts that existed. We also know that we're missing part of a reel. At the time, they used to do live music. We subsequently had a track commissioned and it's on the DVD, but many of the film festivals like to commission their own music for it. That's what Hartford is doing, which is fabulous, It also gets young people involved. We have five or six silent films - a Russian film, a Yiddish film, a couple of Hollywood films - that have already been restored and they're playing all over the world. We play them everywhere - major facilities around the world, both Jewish film festivals and regular venues that do music and film. This film in particular is extremely important because it's based on the short stories of a very interesting early American Jewish woman writer, Anzia Yezierska. The film is very much a woman's point of view about the immigrant experience.
Q: What project is the center working on now?
A: We're working on a restoration right now of an early silent German film and we're also working on the Yiddish "King Lear." We just finished a 1935 Yiddish feature film called "Bar Mitzvah." It's fantastic. Very, very low budget. But it got a standing ovation when it was screened recently at the Jewish film festival in New York. It's got the only known performance on film of a very famous Yiddish actor named Boris Tomashefsky - whose grandson is (the conductor and pianist) Michael Tilson Thomas.
"Hungry Hearts" will be presented at the Mandell JCC, 335 Bloomfield Ave., West Hartford on Tuesday, March 23, 7 p.m. For more information and a complete schedule of festival films visit www.hjff.org. For tickets call the box office at (860) 231-6316 or email tickets@mandelljcc.org.
For information on the National Center for Jewish Film visit www.jewishfilm.org.