In striking art film, contemporary poets respond to the horrors of the Holocaust
Screening in New York and Los Angeles, genre-defying film about how poetic language can heal trauma points to how Israelis and Jews could use it to cope in Oct. 7 aftermath
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
A new performance art film challenges audiences to engage with the memory of the Holocaust through poetry. Through a creative combination of audio and visual elements, it posits that poetic language is a critical response to the greatest catastrophe to befall the Jewish people in modern times.
“I think it’s the obligation of poetry to respond to certain kinds of horror. The Holocaust is a sort of test case because it, of course, defies language; it defeats language. And yet, language has to respond. It’s our job as poets to remember what happened,” said poet and philosopher Edward Hirsch in the film, “After.”
Directed by two-time Emmy award-winner Richard Kroehling, “After” opened in New York on November 1 and will begin screening in Los Angeles on November 8.
As humanity processes the individual and collective trauma of October 7 — the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — the film is a timely reminder that there must be room for poetry amidst all the ongoing Israeli and global reportage, commentary, and historical documentation.
“Poetry is what poets do with trauma. Trauma threatens to paralyze us, to make us lose ourselves, and poetry takes the trauma and tries to heal it by surrounding it with words,” poet Alicia Suskin Ostriker explained in the film.
Contemporary poets, including Hirsch, Ostriker, Sabrina Orah Mark and Cornelius Eady, appear in “After,” defending poetry as a necessary response to unfathomable evil and catastrophic historical events. They argue that poetry’s subjective nature is especially suited to dealing with a person’s emotions and inner life — their soul if you like.
Despite the interviews with the poets, “After” is not a documentary. Instead, it is a multi-modal art film comprised mainly of distinct performance pieces combining poetry recitation, moving and still images (archival and contemporary), acting and original music. Each poem is given a different visual setting, such as an American suburban home, a snowy European forest, or a large cave. Given the subject matter, the film’s mood is somber and eerie.
“I am interested in the coming together of text and images. You see this [voiceover technique] in a lot of European films but not so much in American films…The power of cinema is when these two elements combine and transcend the unfolding of a narrative. They go deeper,” Kroehling said.
The film opens with producer and Pushcart Prize-nominee Janet R. Kirchheimer reciting her poem, “How I Knew And When.” It is about growing up as the daughter of Holocaust survivors and learning more about her family’s history as she gets older. Some of it has to do with relatives being shut out of safe havens as they tried to escape Nazi Europe. The most powerful moments of the piece are when Kirchheimer and her mother are face-to-face, and Kirchheimer very quietly echoes her mother’s words as though trying to memorize and internalize them.
The poem ends with: “Age 33. A waiter in a Jerusalem hotel tells my father he should come to live in Israel because it’s home. My father tells him, ‘Home is anywhere they let you in.'”
Mother and daughter are again face-to-face, but this time, they simultaneously and loudly state the poem’s last line with tears in their eyes.
Hungarian actor and poet Géza Röhrig is prominently featured in the film. He speaks about his life-changing experiences exploring Auschwitz after moving into a nearby apartment without knowing why. Röhrig, best known for his award-winning leading role in the acclaimed 2015 film “Son of Saul,” also recites his poem, “Auschwitz,” in Hungarian.
“I felt that if I could not become six million, I would step into the shoes of one,” Röhrig said about his turning to poetic language to express himself.
Röhrig also closes the film with excerpts from renowned Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai’s poem “Open Closed Open.” Combining recitation with acting, Rörig’s affecting performance of the powerful poem takes place on the shores of a pristine lake.
Academy Award-winner Melissa Leo teams up with Swedish actor Bo Corre for the recitation-acting of “Lost Photo” by director Kroehling. The poem is inspired by a photograph of his parents taken after the war. The writer tries to decipher the thoughts and feelings of the young man and woman as they are reunited not long after he has survived some of the worst battles of World War II and liberated a train full of inmates from a Nazi death camp.
“She worried, waited. Would he come back alive, survive the war? Be like he was before? He bears witness to the end of all reason.”
While most of the poets in the film are contemporary, they vary considerably in age.
“We knew we had to have a wide range [of poems and poets]…[We aimed to show] how far-reaching the Shoah (Holocaust) actually went and how it’s still affecting us,” Kirschheimer said.
The inclusion of slam poet Taylor Mali and his poem “The Entire Act of Sorrow” is a case in point. Of all the poems in the film, this one most directly deals with the epigenetic transmission of Holocaust trauma through the generations. The poem is about Mali losing his first wife, Rebecca Tauber, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, to suicide in 2004.
As audiences see a barefooted young woman in a white nightdress wandering along an old building’s corridors and then lying dead on the floor, Mali recites his poem about being questioned by homicide detectives and other disturbing experiences related to his wife’s death.
“After” is about how the Holocaust “rents space in people’s minds,” as Kroehling put it. After spending a decade making the film, he said he is curious how audiences will respond to it now.
“I actually think this is the right film for this moment when the world is filled with so much trauma,” Kirchheimer said.
At the same time, Kirschheimer said she would not be surprised if the poetic response to October 7 and the ensuing war took much longer than other artistic responses.
“It takes time to write poetry… Poetry is slower. It invites you to sit with it for a while,” she said.
