anna pinkas
installation view
video documentation
2007
16mm film, projector, music, hand drawn stills
The imagery is borrowed from Yidl with his fiddle (1928), a classic in the genre of the once-vibrant Yiddish film genre. The film, while produced in America was entirely shot in Eastern Europe, in Shtetls (small Jewish towns and enclaves in pre-WWII), and with the predominant use of inhabitants of these remote towns as extras interacting with the main actors. To the contemporary viewer, the narrative film becomes a rare and poignant witness to a now vanished world. The Shtetl dwellers become entangled between fiction and reality whose only remnant are the frames of the film on which they were capture. The impulse to re-configure part of the original footage through drawing reveals a desire-perhaps bound to fail-to appropriate a past that, while part of my familyheritage, has been rendered intangible by the passage of time and the violence and suddenty surrounding its disappearance. The song that I sing, is as well part of the original movie. It is yet another broken attempt to reach out to a past that would help me complete, or at least better understand the fragmented identity of a secular, European Jew living in America.