The Steve Jobs Monograph

BC Wallin (Ben) has finally done what he has threatened to do for years and that is write THE book on the film STEVE JOBS. Bringing together a group of great writers he has taken the film by Danny Boyle and pulled it apart and layed it at your feet in ways you probably never thought of.

Okay- full disclosure- I know Ben. I have known him for almost two decades ,since we met in the Tribeca screening room over Robert DeNiro's Tribeca Grill. We have seen countless movies together, watched Spike Lee and his brother talk for several hours about his old neighborhood and we've had hours of discussion about movies. Ben, whether he likes it or not, is a card-carrying friend and member of the Unseen Films family. He is also a man with knowledge of movies that will blow your mind when you sit down to talk to him. That said, there is zero bias in this review and other than the fact that I read it as soon as my copy arrived from Amazon, I have not spared any slings or arrows (I simply didn't need to use them). I reviewed the book as I would any other piece of art that appears here at Unseen Films.

Knowing him for so long means that I have been kidding him about his obsession with STEVE JOBS since he first saw the film. I had thought that  he was at the press screening of it at the New York Film Festival, but his second piece in the monograph said that wasn't the case. I know he saw it soon after the festival, and it has been downhill ever since his obsession with the film became a running way to gently pick on him for a decade.  (That was until SPEED RACER became a second obsession- but that's another film and another monograph that is coming soon to a bookstore near you). 

Ben knows everything you can know about STEVE JOBS short of personally interviewing every member of the cast and crew. I seriously think that short of putting everyone who ever had anything to do with the film into a trash compactor and making a single being, Ben knows more about the film than anyone else on earth. As a result, it isn't surprising that Ben would not only write a book on the film but also find likeminded people to go with him on this journey. 

THE STEVE JOBS MONOGRAPH is an excellent book. It's as a great look at the making of the film, the man its about, as well as the ideas the film is trying to express. It's everything you wanted to know (and possibly didn't want to know) but were afraid to ask.

And I am deadly serious about it being everything. For example, there is a long discussion about Jobs signature look and where it came from. The discussion also wanders through a long discussion of Indian fabric and Gandhi's call for people to make their own cloth. (its way more interesting than that sentence reads). There are side discussions of things that you genuinely are not expecting to appear in a film about a business giant on three dates when he presents his latest product.

The monograph also wanders a bit far afield with a chunk of the Camera section talking about the different cameras used in all his films, with a longish digression into how he shot 28 DAYS LATER. It's interesting, but it also makes you wonder if Devan Scott, who wrote that section, is working on a book on Boyle and his films since it seems to  belong in a work on all of Boyle's films and not on one just on STEVE JOBS. The section is quite good, it just seems out of place.

The one section of the book that didn't really work for me is Scout Tafoya's section on Danny Boyle. Written in the style of one of his excellent Unloved films (he looks at underappreciated films) the section frequently reads like he is a hipster film fan arguing about esoteric points that you find in a short video essay that you let wash over you but which you don't fully engage with. On the page, where you are reading actual words, we are more engaged and we want more meat than in a video essay. Tayfoya is capable of doing that and his piece has moments of that in the first half but at the same time, in the second I was feeling that his points were something he was coming up with because they sounded good at the time rather than they was fully thought out. The case in point is repeated discussion/comparrison of "niche" director Peter Greenaway to the works of Boyle. Having lived in the world of Greenaway for almost four decades I'm kind of left wondering why, of all the filmmakers out there, Tafoya would have chosen Greenaway, Partly because intodays world I doubt most people are going to have any sort of working knowledge of the Welsh director. Worse, I just don't see the connections he's trying to make. (With apologies to Mr. Tafoya I'm going to leave it there because this piece is not on his piece but on the monograph as a whole, though some of his questions about Greenaway can be answered in his various lectures about cinema being dead)

But lest you think I'm nitpicking the book, I'm not. Most of the sections soar and speak volumes beyond just STEVE JOBS. I have no notes. Sarah Jae Lieber's section on Performance is masterful. Her discussion of the performances made me say "wow" several times as I finally understood certain actor's tricks. It opened up my understanding to film Performance on a larger level. Charlie Brigden's section on Music is outstanding. Its a section that explains how film scoring is done and how songs are chosen. The long discussion of the versions of Both Sides Now reveals how picking the right version can alter how your film plays. Alexander B Joy's discussion on how the film was editted and mimiced RAGING BULL is another knock out that will make you aware of what good editing can do for a film. 

Despite some bumps this is a great book and is highly recommended and will make you look forward to Ben's next monograph.

BC Wallin on Karaoke (2022) which is playing Tribeca 2022

 

It’s a familiar feeling, the streetlights passing overhead as you head home at the end of the weekend. In childhood, they signify the return to school, in adulthood, going back to work. Part of the late night drive of malaise that slyly asks, “Did you do enough?” And the streetlights flit by, your freedom fleeting behind you. Karaoke, a small Israeli film that mostly takes place within the confines of a single apartment building in the suburbs of Holon, south of Tel Aviv, opens with the image of these streetlights. The film centers itself around Meir (Sasson Gabay) and Tova (Rita Shukrun), a middle-aged couple married 46 years, who have seen the streetlights in their lives, who feel the flitting, fleeting years slipping away into routine, repetition, and emptiness.

Routine is a rut that can be inescapable without some jolt to notice it. That jolt comes to Meir and Tova in the form of Itsik (Lior Ashkenazi), a Barry Manilow-looking rich bachelor who moves into their building’s penthouse, drives a Maserati, and throws karaoke parties for the young and desperate. Itsik has taken the path that diverged in a yellowed wood — he is something aspirational for his middle-aged neighbors. Wealthy, free, uninhibited. One can’t quite imagine Itsik having a quiet, awkward, impersonal dinner with family out of routine. He lives big.

There are some enjoyable highs to be had as the film enters certain euphoric moments — Meir seeks to escape his quiet inwardness, Tova to break the shackles her marriage imposes. Itsik’s apartment is lit with the neon blues and reds of otherworldly escape, and the scenes where he inspires the couple to step beyond their boundaries are where writer-director Moshe Rosenthal’s work expresses something like true emotion. But that’s only partly there.

Karaoke is all about malaise, the boredom of going on the same vacation every year for 46 years, of having the one pair of shoes for the rare good times. In exploring these feelings of boredom, the movie becomes a snoozer itself, plodding forward without a real sense of direction. Watching it reminded me of another middle-aged study of malaise from a few years ago, The Land of Steady Habits. While describing it to friends, I said it was a movie about miserable people being miserable in Connecticut. My wife reminded me about it when I told her about this movie: “they’re not in Connecticut.” They’re not quite as miserable, either. Just bored with a life that repeats itself. I found myself feeling the same.

Nightcap 12/5/21- BC Wallin's Newsletter and random thoughts

 

Buster says hello

A few random notes

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Good friend and sometimes  Unseen Films contributor B C Wallin is putting out a newsletter on film called “I’d read your articles if you’d send them to me!”. The idea is that he will send you the pieces on films that is writing to you directly so you don’t have to go chasing them down.   I don’t normally like to sign up for those sort of things, but I love Ben’s writing and I keep missing when he posts new pieces so it was a no brainer. Do yourself a favor and sign up because Ben id writing some truly great things. Details here. 

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I’ve been watching film Twitter melt down over the last week as Ansel El--- has stepped into the spot light for West Side Story.  The reason they are melting down was that last year, before the film was originally supposed to come out he was caught trying to pick up under aged girls for sex. The people on Twitter forget that the film was shot long before the charges surfaced so he wasn’t cast in spite of the charges.  Many are calling for a boycott of the film  because of his casting.

If you don’t want to go, don’t go, but don’t blame Spielberg or the studio for his casting, and don’t expect the studio to pony up to remove him from the film digitally just to please you

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I apologize to everyone for not having run a review of FLEE. It’s not that I hate the film, as I have mentioned several times I like the film but I am not as over the moon as everyone else.  No one needs me droning on that it didn’t float my boat as high as everyone else

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This week I was having a discussion with someone about my festival coverage. They were wondering why I was not going to cover all the films at an upcoming fest they were repping. The answer is that while I will try to cover as many films as a festival as I can there are only a few fests where I will try to see everything. Slamdance, Tribeca, NYFF, Fantasia, DOC NYC, Japan Cuts, NYAFF, Blood in The Snow, Cabane Sang, New York International Children’s Film Fest and one or two more are the fests where I will make an effort to see as much as I can. Those are festivals that mean something to me personally. They are the fests that delight me every year. Most of them have taken up residence in my soul before I was doing Unseen so they are family. They are the festivals I know what is coming and I can block out my time to cover them “completely”. Everything else I cover as best I can- and based on what I want to see. It’s a trade off of time.

BC Wallin talks about the best film experiences of the year and ends up saying so much more

To put it shortly, 2020 has been a year of looking back more than looking forward. The field of movies that came out this year has been limited, and at times, anxiety at the state of the world made it feel more comfortable to stick to familiar films, while at other times, fewer new movies to catch allowed for opportunities to start catching up on the past. Here’s a messy sort of list, for a messy sort of year.

Best trailer for a movie that didn’t end up coming out this year

In the Heights

I will not be living in Washington Heights anymore when this film eventually comes out simultaneously in theaters and on HBO MAX. I’m not living in Washington Heights anymore right now — I moved out during the pandemic. The community has a texture and movement and, if we’re being honest, some really loud motorcycles that rip down the streets, but I’m past that, I guess.

I love earnest, open-hearted musicals, and I was excited for In the Heights. The trailer had it going on, and good. The hopefulness, the dreams, the fantasy. I was excited to see people dancing on the wall, in the pool, through the fire hydrant blasts. I was looking forward to a (hopefully) meaningful story about race and class and ambition. I’m still thinking about that trailer. There were much, much bigger tragedies. And the movie will come out, so a tragedy it is not. A minor bummer, I guess. I hope the movie’s worth it.

Best French serial from the early 20th century

Les vampires

The truth is, I’d like to have judged between this and another Louis Feuillaude serial, Judex, but I only saw the movie adaptation from the ‘60s (pretty good, and it had giant bird head costumes). I picked up Kino Lorber’s Les vampires set in April, figuring it would last me until things got back to normal. You know. I wish there was a way to get this series in front of a large group of people, so we could be talking about this on Twitter, or something. It’s insanely engaging, it’s got Mazamette, and it has a surprising number of rotating big bosses (pour one out for Irma Vep, who never got to take her deserved spot on top). Watch it.

Weirdest double feature

Impractical Jokers: The Movie & Parasite

I actually had the opportunity to pull this off in a movie theater (sorry, I still miss AMC A-List). An immature quartet of friends, a contrived plot featuring Paula Abdul, and the feeling that you’re sitting in a theater watching a high production value episode of TV. Followed immediately by an IMAX screening of an allegorical class-struggle masterpiece of cinema. So, you know, balance. I think the weirdest/worst part about a pairing like this is that I genuinely didn’t glean anything new from this pairing. It’s like eating roasted marshmallows and turkey bacon together; they just don’t mesh.

Most disappointing movie commentary

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Criterion Collection finally offered a disc of my favorite all-time movie (at time of writing and for the five years prior). I was asked why I was getting excited for a movie I already owned digitally. “Because,” I said, “there are bonus features” (the quote may not be exact, but the sentiment is). The supplements promised a “New audio commentary featuring [Wes] Anderson, filmmaker Roman Coppola, critic Kent Jones, and actor Jeff Goldblum.” The Grand Budapest Hotel is a technically fascinating film (read Matt Zoller Seitz’s book!) that you could break down in intense depth, going through the 4:3 cinematography, the incredible production design, the Alexandre Desplat score evocative of folk Eastern European music, the colors, the acting, the humor, the small gestures by Edward Norton, and the rest of it. The men spent their time mostly just reminiscing about things unrelated to the story and occasionally bringing up the filming locations. The worst kind of commentary is the one that really teaches you nothing.

Worst movie

The Birth of a Nation

I’m glad I finally watched this oft-cited movie so I could make my own judgement. The Birth of a Nation sucks. On a story, historical, and moral level, it’s just repugnant. I have to be fair and admit that the first half was able to grip me with the battle stuff, the intensity and such. But then, the KKK arrived. There isn’t much new to say about this horrid movie that’s been hotly debated for about a century. I don’t want to dwell.

Different Man Different Movie Award

The Wizard of Oz

The same man can’t walk through the same river twice, or something like that. The first time I rewatched The Wizard of Oz this year (you could say all watching is rewatching, but this movie has been part of my family canon for a long time), I was preparing to spend indoor time with friends, laughing, enjoying, and expelling non-deadly particles into the air. I was building a Dungeons & Dragons mini-campaign inspired by the podcast The Film Reroll and a Washington Post article’s revisionist take on the politics of Oz. I rewatched it recently with my sister (we share a bubble). My movie nights have had more… repetitive crowds this year than usual. My Dungeons & Dragons games are run over Zoom. Maybe I should’ve realized something was up with the year when Dorothy’s house didn’t hit the Wicked Witch of the East in our game. Oops.

Best use of Kol Nidre

The Jazz Singer

Kol Nidre is the moving, soulful song chanted at the opening to Yom Kippur, where Jews try to start the Day of Atonement on the right foot, by cleansing themselves of all vows, promises, and ties that bind them to the possibility of breaking their word. The cantorial music sung today can be traced to a 19th century composer named Max Bruch, and I’ve thought for a while that it would make a powerful moment in film. Then I watched one of the most famous talking pictures of all time and saw it had been hiding there all along. I’m always looking for more Jewish representation in film, and coming across this tale of being torn between two worlds was quite meaningful (yes, I know this movie has significant moral problems). If there’s a better use of Kol Nidre, I’ll happily reconsider.

Best pleasant surprise

Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe

The TV show Phineas and Ferb is a masterpiece of the artform. But it works really well in its 11-minute intervals. The show excels in deconstructing the same formulaic structure, over and over, to continuously find new meaning. Expanding beyond the time limitation can be dangerous, and other longer-than-40-minute attempts by the show were plagued by dry spots. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised by how good the Disney+ Phineas and Ferb movie was, telling the story (sort of ripping off Toy Story 2) mostly from the perspective of Candace, as if fans of the show were kids when they came to it and are now old enough to relate to the struggles of aging and feeling stuck in a rut. Worth a watch.

My most significant trend of favorite movies

The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Magnificent Ambersons, Chimes at Midnight, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the parts of An American Pickle I did like, and literally anything about Orson Welles.

Living in a world that is wholly different from the one you knew only a year ago will certainly target the nostalgia in any person who cared for the feelings of safety and security, though, admittedly, I’ve been reckoning with these feelings for most of my moviegoing career. It might be the collective Jewish memory I’ve inherited that has me thinking about movies that are about the death of an era, the disappearance of a lost age, but I keep finding myself coming back to these types of movies. They’re the ones that target that feeling that something was lost, something tragically irretrievable, and we can never fully get past that loss. I’ve always had a soft spot for these movies; maybe this was the right year to reaffirm the meaningfulness of the past while we stare into an unknown future.

The best anxious comfort movies

Steve Jobs, A Serious Man, Uncut Gems, Eagle Eye, but oddly enough, not Synecdoche, New York.

I call these comfort movies because they’re the ones I came back to this year, knowing full well what I was in for. My wife asked me why I would purposely watch something that I know would make me feel anxious. Why purposely submit yourself to clenching your teeth, tightening your muscles, enduring emotional discomfort? I have two explanations: the practical and the emotional. 2020 was the year of pulling out my phone during movies, stopping in the middle, going to bed, or changing gears and just playing some video games. The thriller, the anxious movie, has its viewer holding on — there’s a clinging sort of notion that’s needed to watch them. Anxious movies grip you, and if they’re what it takes to stop getting distracted during a time when I haven’t been to a movie theater in months and everything in the news makes me anxious, I’ll take them.

This leads to the other point: these selections of anxiety offer familiar discomfort — I know what tzuros will befall Larry Gopnik, what arguments the contentious Steve Jobs will get into. The virus that has defined this year is invisible, flies through the air, and can be carried by people who don’t even know they have it. You can give it to your loved ones. You can survive it and still have long-lasting consequences. Find comfort returning to something you can control (or, you know, just return to the comfort movies that won’t make you feel relieved to be back in our world. This is not a great method of coping).

BC Wallin on AN IMPOSSIBLE PROJECT (2020) at DOC NYC 2020

 Dream big or face reality. Hold onto the past or watch it be torn away from you. That’s the narrative of An Impossible Project, a documentary torn between reality and the story it tries to tell. Directed by Jens Meurer, the film is, more than anything, a love letter to analog, to the technological world of buttons, rotors, and greasy machines, more so than the digital realm of touchscreens, memory, and CDs. It’s about the physical way we interact with an older form of technology and the emotional connection that’s thereby created. “My theory,” says Dr. Florian “Doc” Kaps, “is that the biggest difference between digital and analog is the fact that digital always just tickles two of your senses. It’s always I can see, I can hear it. But it’s always behind the glass screen. I cannot really touch you, I cannot smell it, I cannot lick it… it’s nothing real.” Analog, by extension, is as real as technology gets.

The two subjects of the story are Doc and the Impossible Project, the latter a group of analog enthusiasts who bought the last surviving Polaroid factory in 2008 as the company was about to shut it down. The Impossible Project hoped to revitalize the industry of instant photography. The problems standing in their way were many — as the team’s name implies — including the facts that they didn’t have Polaroid’s instant photograph chemical formula, Doc was running the group without knowing how to run a business, and investors weren’t exactly rushing to pay into an expensive, failing industry with a small niche of enthusiasts.

Meurer’s film reads as an elegy for the analog, a deeply nostalgic look at something that doesn’t belong in the modern world. He peppers in images of Polaroids taken across many many years, a testament to the legacy of the photographic medium. He doesn’t hide his disdain for smartphones, for digital media in the narration; An Impossible Project even begins with an anti-digital disclaimer.

The argument for analog is not always an easy one to make, nor is the film able to convey it in a significantly compelling manner. Remember how long it took to dial rotary phones? Remember how annoying a key jam is on a typewriter? How expensive a pack of just a handful of Polaroid (or Fujifilm) film was? Doc is called “Doc Quixote” and his impossible dream just seems like a lot of work. The best version of the argument is one offered by an Impossible Project employee: the work is not about proving that analog is better than digital; it’s about giving people a choice, and making sure that choice doesn’t disappear.

Reality is always just around the corner in An Impossible Project, and for that reason, the narrative feels disjointed. (Spoiler alert) Doc gets fired from his own company, and while he continues exploring possibilities of revitalizing analog technology, he never really gets terribly far. He has meetings, talks, even a lavish dinner in an abandoned Grand Hotel, but there’s this nagging feeling that he’s looking for miracles that never fully materialize. Meurer is fascinated by Doc’s story, but still keeps hopping back to check in on the Impossible Project, run by the former intern/son of the main investor who usurped Doc to become CEO.

The documentary meanders a bit and is dry in places. When its subjects get passionate, you can feel that passion.There’s just that question of whether their analog dreams are yours too.

BC Wallin on the New York Jewish Film Festival Shorts

MAMAN

Of the eight short films screened during Film at Lincoln Center’s 2020 New York Jewish Film Festival, half were created using pieces of the past. Reckoning with the past has been at the very heart of Judaism since its Biblical origins. The forming of the nation of Israel in the Torah’s story of Exodus is anchored by the Jewish patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Talmudic discussions point to enactments and decisions throughout the Jewish people’s history where there was a fear of losing the tradition (mesorah, in Hebrew). Popularized in Fiddler on the Roof, the Jewish concept of tradition is at the very root of Jewish peoplehood (“3,000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax — you’re goddamn right I’m living in the f***ing past” - cinematic Judaism’s favorite convert, Walter Sobchak).

With their uses of old footage and materials, a number of these shorts, in differing measures, recall, preserve, or resurrect the past. Ron Blau’s “Life Is All There Is” presents visions of the past through 8mm home footage, with the kind of intimate, lively visions that help wipe away the historical distance. Seeing the same faces over and again helps reinforce a connection in a World War II-era story that borders on the fairly mundane. 8mm footage from 20 years later in Rotem Dimand’s “Silhouette of the Braids” has a mother and daughter watching home movies together as the mother retells stories of her life that demonstrate the boundaries between photographs, memories, and reality, with their hazy boundaries and rarely perfect tellings. It’s a moving story, to be certain.

Another jump of 20 years takes us to Nili Tal’s 1981 documentary short “Gurit Kadman,” a story about preservation of folk dance and music, a reflection on the ways that Jewish culture has incorporated the cultures of surrounding locations and peoples. Kadman, the film’s subject, is the preservationist herself, learning and teaching the dances and songs of new immigrants to Israel and creating a festival to celebrate that. Think the first 30 or so of Cold War, before the whole romance thing becomes the main story. A wonderful, personal selection.

GURDIT KADMAN

Monica Manganelli’s “Butterflies in Berlin: Diary of a Soul Split in Two” is the most nuanced in its recycled usage of footage, combining modern animation with archival images and footage to create a uniquely textured world. Its non-fictional story of a transgender Jewish woman in Weimar-era Berlin is one that does not get shared often in mainstream accounts of WWII, and along with the creative vision make it worth a view, though it’s hampered by wonky character animations and voice acting.

Other shorts, while not explicitly using images created in the past, were inspired by some part of Jewish history or another. Pearl Gluck’s moving “Write Me” uses voiceover of modern poem “After Auschwitz” as a means to convey a visual story of how those with tattoos reckon with their past and move into the future. It’s all pulled together devastatingly by Lynn Cohen’s performance as an elderly woman with numbers on her arm. A more bizarre form of voiceover comes in the way of Danielle Durchslag’s “Eleanor of Illinois,” where audio of Katherine Hepburn and a performance Judy Kuhn combine into a haunting image of a Jewish mother.

For more of the bizarre, there’s Oran Zegman’s “Marriage Material,” a musical about women changing themselves to meet the needs of the men they’re being set up with. Satire about society’s expectations of heteronormative relationships or a statement on the shidduch crisis (a lot more nuanced than this, but basically it’s the difficulty of pairing up religious Jewish men and women successfully)? It’s probably just the first, and an interesting way to spend 25 minutes, for sure.

The highlight of NYJFF’s shorts is Hila Cohen’s “Maman,” a tender, slow story that gives you the bare minimum of what you need in terms of story and exposition and still feels lived-in and genuine. It’s a story about youth and old age, the promise of the type of people we believe in to make the past worth holding onto.

SILHOUETTE OF THE BRAIDS

BC Wallin on THE RABBI GOES WEST (2019) DOC NYC 2019

Rabbi Chaim Bruk goes from door to door, offering to put up mezuzahs for the Jews living in the community of Bozeman, Montana. “I’m God’s salesman,” the Chabad rabbi proudly states. Rabbi Chaim, as the members of his community and the surrounding Montana areas refer to him, moved to Bozeman with the mission of opening up a Chabad center offering prayer services, holiday events, and scotch and sushi, when the occarion calls for it. He also aimed to put up 2,000 mezuzahs on Jewish doorposts.

The old joke goes something like, “If a Jew washed up on a deserted island, he’d build three shuls (synagogues): the one he attends, the one he doesn’t, and the one he’d never go to.” Jewish history is rife with disagreements, conflicting traditions, and schisms, as the matter of interepreting Jewish laws and scripture came into conflict with the modern problems and personal discomforts, among other reasons. Without unpacking all the branches and sects and differing viewpoints, suffice it to say that Rabbi Chaim was not the first rabbi to Montana, and his efforts are not beloved by all.

The Rabbi Goes West, as described in the project’s Kickstarter, is “a documentary about religious diversity,” giving voices to Conservative, Reform, and retired rabbis of Montana who take issue with Rabbi Chaim’s style. Co-directors Gerald Peary and Amy Geller give each rabbi their platform to speak about their concerns, arguments, and rebuttals. As is often found in Talmudic discourse, there’s no conclusion definitively determined.

Peary and Geller certainly found engaging personalities, a collection of varyingly entertaining rabbis who all have strong opinions they don’t mind being blunt about. Rabbi Chaim won’t attend Jewish coalition events that don’t keep to Jewish traditions — “99% Kosher is 100% not Kosher” — while Conservative Rabbi Ed Stafman doesn’t want his congregants having their mezuzahs put up by Rabbi Chaim.

Tensions flare and every side sets clear cases in the arguments of Judaism’s definition and each rabbi’s role, but while the documentary seems to ratchet up drama, there’s never really a breaking point. While there is a significant episode involving a series of anti-Semitic cyberterrorism and the communal responses that came after, The Rabbi Goes West is a story told in the past tense, offering reflections and post-scripts when its very nature begs the question of what’s going to happen next. For better or worse, the documentary leaves its viewers hoping for more.

BC Wallin on KOSHER BEACH (2019) DOC NYC 2019

In Orthodox Jewish circles, the concept of “tzniut” — often translated as modesty — is a contentious one, as much about what may be shown as it is about what may be seen. This translates into the clothing that may be worn, the places to be avoided, and whether to use a filtered internet connection or any at all. As in many other cultures, the clothing is a defining characteristic, where holding onto it may symbolize greater devotion and avoiding can be interpreted as rebellion.

Writer-director-cinematographer-producer Karin Kainer, in her third documentary, turns her camera to a walled-off beach in Tel Aviv, Israel, where the days are men-only and women-only, and Orthodox women — the focus of Kosher Beach’s narrative — have the chance to unwind without concern of being seen by the men of their Chareidi community (referred to by many as ultra-Orthodox Jews). As one woman explains, the Torah teaches “and you shall greatly protect your souls,” which is taken to mean that exercise and recreation are important to living good, Jewish lives. I once heard a rabbi say that if “Kosher entertainment” were not arranged for Jewish communities, they might find other, less savory things to do with their time.

There are three cultural conflicts that infuse Kosher Beach with its story: between the women and their community, the women and their daughters, and the daughters and the Tel Aviv culture, a stand-in for a secular modernity in seeming conflict with a religiously Orthodox life. The lifeguards tend to be on the more Chiloni (secular) side of the Israeli-Jewish spectrum, but they get along well with the women of their beach, who bring them frozen grapes and watermelon, and who make Sundays a holy day for one of the lifeguards with their presence.

It’s a tough thing to exist in a world and to feel out of pace with it. The Chareidi man tends to dress in the same style as European Jews did over a century ago. Clothes, for some, can feel limiting, especially for women who face the expectation that they should cover themselves up so that the men of their community would not see them. A daughter of one beach-goer asks, why don’t they just look away?

Kainer’s documentary shows the beach with a tender eye, highlighting the relationships and moments of happiness that make this place where women have a place to swim and dance in their shvimkleid (modest bathing suits). One lifeguard remarks, “this is a sanctuary.” The camera turns a sympathetic eye to the teenage girls who come to the beach first in their tank tops and shorts, then slim and slimmer bikinis (One woman says, “She should be with non-religious…she’s naked!”). They’re among other women, other Orthodox Jews, trying to stay in the fold and also feel free, but they still face judgement. The adult women are faced with the danger of their beach being closed down — “Who will save our daughters?” one rabbi exhorts.

In Kosher Beach, there is no clear resolution to a problem that’s not really just about a beach and that’s not really just about being able to choose one’s own clothing. Terms like Chareidi and modern Orthodox and Chiloni tend to be limiting to those using them to classify others and to those being classified. They set boundaries of expectation that don’t necessarily allow for an irreligious man to put on a tallit and tefillin (religious articles) and pray or for a strict follower of Judaic law to be able to spend a day at the beach.

In the end, it’s not the teenagers who commit the greatest rebellion of the film, and it’s not the rabbis we see reciting Tehillim (Psalms) as a missile lands within a short distance of the shoreline and nobody is harmed. “On the one hand,” one girl expresses, “I want nothing to do with these annoying ultra-Orthodox. On the other hand, I do want to be…I don’t know what I want to be.” While the figures and characters may create restrictions and expectations for each other, Kainer gives them the room to explore the ambiguity of not always knowing what to want.