FILM REVIEW: "Spell Your Name" is powerful , visually beautiful , but unfocused (10/29/06)

FILM REVIEW: "Spell Your Name" is powerful , visually beautiful , but unfocused

by Larissa Babij
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

KYIV -A slow, aged voice spells out her last name, letter by letter. Then another begins. Questions like "Where were you born?" join the ensemble. "Ukraine." The screen fills with a gray, icy river.

Later we see a snowy yard surrounded by nondescript Soviet apartment blocks typical in today's Kyiv. Well-bundled, colorfully masked characters prance around in a circle. This is the winter celebration of Koliada, complete with traditional caricatures.

The camera zooms in on "the Jew" in a wig with stringy black hair; he puts out his hands in a gesture for barter. Then he removes his mask, revealing a big nose and a grin. "Is he a real Jew?" I wonder, realizing the continual presence of centuries-old racial stereotypes.

These images introduce the impressionistic documentary "Spell Your Name," directed by Sergey Bukovsky and co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Victor Pinchuk. Talking about the history of Ukrainian-Jewish relations always invites controversy, but the film focuses on more positive examples, albeit in the tragic context of World War II.

At the heart of the film are interviews with Holocaust survivors and their rescuers recorded between 1994 and 1998, selected by Mr. Bukovsky from 500 he viewed at the archives of the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California.

With the political sensitivity of the subject matter, the director made diplomatic choices, leaving a final product that feels somewhat restrained. We did see moments of quiet anguish and introspective tears, but no hysterics or expressions of anger toward particular groups. When Jews talked of Ukrainians and Ukrainians of Jews, each expressed sympathy for their fellow human beings and disgust at war.

Mr. Bukovsky tried to elicit historic attitudes of Jews and Ukrainians toward one another with anecdotes and recollections of what life was like leading up to and during the war. People's stories illustrated the genuine complexity of the relationships between neighbors. One survivor recalled hiding in the chimney of a Ukrainian family's home. One day when they left for church, she snuck out to eat some food left on the stove. The mistress of the house returned early and panicked at the sight of an intruder. But when she saw the hungry girl, she closed the door to hide the child and kindly fed her. Another Ukrainian woman overheard her parents arguing over the risks of sheltering their Jewish neighbors; in the end, they reluctantly took in several entire families.

The interview fragments are separated by poetic interludes of empty landscapes, snowy and silent. These could be the villages of those interviewed, but we never know. They serve as quiet pauses to let the viewer reflect on what has been revealed, slowing the pace of the film.

Glimpses of an elderly couple who live in a former synagogue converted to apartments are interspersed throughout the film. These survivors invite the documentarians into their home but refuse to speak about the past. Mr. Bukovsky renders them in gray-white stop-action; they appear like ghosts.

In one scene, the camera pans out from an interview subject, showing her as a talking image on the screen of the director's laptop on a clattering train. This extra distance from the subject highlights the layers of interpretation that lie between the survivors' actual experiences and what is portrayed to the audience of "Spell Your Name." The film does not result from a personal relationship between the documentarian and his subjects, but from a close examination of objects in an archive, even if it is a visual archive that talks and cries.

Emphasis is placed on the process of making the film. Clips of interviews often flow into scenes showing the technical side. We watch three journalism students in headphones transcribing the interviews, and we also catch some of the discussions that arise from the sensitive work.

Asked whether she would like to be a Jew, one young woman replies, "Then or now?" Now. Pausing to think, she says "no," quietly but decisively. Such moments are too brief and infrequent in the film; in this truncated form they are easily misconstrued. The attempt to include a window into contemporary Ukrainian-Jewish relations is brave, and could have been elaborated and examined more closely.

Who are the subjects of the film - the survivors or the transcribers? Neither of the overlapping, intertwining narratives is developed enough to give a clear answer. Films, books and museums devoted to the Holocaust have become familiar. So Mr. Bukovsky widens his frame to look beyond the survivors, encompassing their archivists and even challenging the audience to consider its own role as witnesses to various layers of testimony.

Despite the arresting beauty of the camerawork and its variety of narrative threads weaving in and around one another, the 90-minute film seemed to drag. Near the end, Mr. Bukovsky and his crew toured Babyn Yar, the mass grave of over 150,000 Jews, Ukrainians, Gypsies and members of many other ethnic groups murdered by the Nazis. With a local expert as a virtual guide over a cellphone, they filmed the park and adjacent metro station. The scene was a necessary inclusion, since last September marked the 65th anniversary of the tragedy, but it was only loosely integrated into the film.

I found myself searching for connections and meanings in the disparate strands of information presented rather than questioning the personal and political issues that surround remembering the Holocaust. Trying to capture the essence of relations between Jews and Ukrainians either historically or today is a bold proposition, and Mr. Bukovsky would have been more successful had he not tried to address so many issues in one film. Rigorously following one narrative thread - the survivors' stories, the impact of these stories on their young transcribers, the archiving work of the Shoah Foundation - with probing questions through all its emotional ramifications, including pain and prejudice, would bolster the film's impact.

Larissa Babij, a native of Manchester, Conn., is a graduate of Barnard College of Columbia University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in architecture. She is currently pursuing a master's degree in cultural studies at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy.

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