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Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Between Two Worlds: The Dybbuk




I’ve just finished watching the 1937 Yiddish film, The Dybbuk – based on the 1914 play by Russian playwright S. Ansky.  I freely admit that this film will not be everyone’s idea of an entertaining motion picture.  It’s in Yiddish, but it has subtitles (mostly…).  My wife refuses to watch anything with subtitles. 

She also refuses to watch scary movies with me.  And The Dybbuk is a horror movie… of sorts. It’s an exorcism movie - like The Exorcist, or The Last Exorcism or any number of other movies about demon possession.  Except that the Dybbuk (pronounced dee-book in the film) isn’t a demon.   The Dybbuk is the restless spirit of one recently dead that possess the body of a loved one.

It’s a strange sort of movie, difficult to classify.  It has elements of the horror and fantasy genres, as well as musicals, and German expressionism.  One critic of the original play writing to the author said, “"I have the impression that as a collector of folklore, you went around to all the rubbish heaps. There you collected fragments of folklore and pieced them together like a tailor who takes bits of clothing and rags, and makes of them a patchwork quilt."[i]

The Judaism pictured in this film was very different from the (admittedly limited) experiences I’ve had with Judaism.  It was very much a folk version of the religion with numerous superstitious elements intermingled.  There was discussion of Gematria and the Kabbalah.  There was communication with “the sacred dead,” and there was even a discourse about the transmigration of souls – reincarnation – with the wicked coming back in the bodies of animals and plants – not elements usually included in discussions about the Jewish faith.

The film is about 2 hours long, it’s in Yiddish, mostly subtitled and filled with a strange and exotic expression of faith – but if you don’t mind working at it (and watching it will be a bit of work), I think you’ll find that it is an engaging and powerful film.   It’s not all special effects like modern horror films – but by the standards of 1937 it pulls off a couple of neat tricks.  The visuals are stark – especially in some of the wedding sequences when it starts to look a lot like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  The sound quality isn’t great, but some of the music is wonderful.  

(In this scene Leah, the soon-to-be-bride is dancing with Death.)




[i] http://www.jhom.com/personalities/ansky/dybbuk.htm

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