Exurberant French itinerant photographer Jean-Baptiste (Patrick Dell’Isola) visits Argentina in Camera Obscura. (National Center for Jewish Film. Used with permission)
This year's Boston Jewish Film Festival closed yesterday, showing Camera Obscura in the afternoon and wrapping up with a showing of Within the Whirlwind in the evening. We had the pleasure of watching the former movie, adding to the list of films we enjoyed in this iteration of the festival.
There are lots of set tables in Camera Obscura, and many carefully disheveled, unmade tables too. There are lingering shots of shoes, and moments when the camera pauses over flowers skillfully arranged in the garden or over a bowl of cut flowers on the dining room table. There's a pastoral landscape, and photographs throughout, portraits taken at every age. Camera Obscura is the still life of a woman at three stages in her development: a girl in childhood, a teenager about to be married off, and a disquieted middle-aged mother, revived (better: vivified) with the coming of a photographer, just returned from World War I.
It's a static film, more a Kodak carousel than a motion picture. Camera Obscura borrows from the post-modern trend of integrating photographs into literature as a way of advancing the narrative. Looking at the photographs, we get the sense that this more a personal story of trying to make sense of family mysteries than it is an historical allegory for the immigration and integration of Jews into Argentina during from the late 1890s to the age of modernism (this is playing at the Boston Jewish Film Festival, after all).
The problem with this narrative device is the same as its benefits. We don't move along with the characters, but describe their stillness and try to piece together the motions that surrounded what we have now. This is less a problem in literature than it is on film. While literature is a genre of introspection and interiority, very few films have actually been able to capture interiority from the outside. Unfortunately, Camera Obscura this isn't one of them. Its answers are predictable, and the occasional cinematographic flourish hardly makes up for the lack of effective development.
Overall, this year's Boston Jewish Film Festival has been a success. There were a number of excellent narrative features, including Eli and Ben and Hello Goodbye, as well as a strong documentary program. Killing Kastner is an important documentary as well as a good one, bringing a woman together with her father's assassin and gently questioning curation of the Holocaust. Sons of Sakhnin United, tracing the story of Arab-Israeli soccer team B'nei Sakhnin, is so kinetic early on that it can survive its eventual flame-out in an ending that's at once climax and anti-climax. This screening of Camera Obscura, a not-quite valedictory address for the festival, at least reminds us how important the local film festivals are. There's no other venue for this movie, nor a likely audience.
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