MORJzIS DICKSTEIN
113
they made for themselves in New York. His minimal approach is careful–
ly designed to bring home the personal reali ty of the refugees to an
Austrian audience. As Humer has written, "the ftlm consciously concen–
trates on the statements of the interviewees and does not attempt to
'illustrate' or interpret what has been told.... A single face can tell the
story of an entire life since it has been shaped by the graven traces of past
experience." Yet this is not a Holocaust film or a simple story of persecu–
tion and victimization: "It seemed important to me to show that in this
group of survivors - in spite of all their experiences - we are not meet–
ing anxiety-ridden, traumatized persons, but human beings who managed,
with much readiness for self-improvement, to lead a full, successful, and
satisfYing life."
Keeping his distance, Humer passes up the kind of cruel, invasive
intensity that LanzmaIUl achieved with his barber in Tel Aviv or the mor–
dant irony he extracted from reuniting a survivor with present-day Polish
peasants. But his subjects' stories are full of unexpected observations, feel–
ings still fresh after more than half a century. Gertrud M. Kurth, a
marvelously articulate woman in her nineties, remembers her shock at how
she was hated in the country she grew up in: "I must have done something
dirty." Frank Grad, who became a law professor at Columbia, observes how
"emigration robbed us of our self-confidence. We were never the same
people we were before." Others remember how little they wanted to be
seen as German refugees, how much "you wanted to assimilate,
to
become
an American as quickly as possible." They recall their survivor guilt, or
their terrible unease whenever they return to Vienna.
In
the most
restrained fashion imaginable, in a country still armored in denial, Humer
has crafted a vital piece of social history in starkly personal terms.
Where
Emigration,
N.
Y
is spare and riveting, Emir Kusturica's
Undergro~lnd
is excessive in every way.
In
loud, circus-like fashion, it traces
the violent break-up of Yugoslavia back to the armed struggles under the
Nazi occupation and the stifling normalcy of the Tito era. Instead of peel–
ing back history to the fates of its characters, it inflates individuals into
mythic types.
It
draws a cartoonish Brechtian sketch of two drunken par–
tisans and the woman they both love. One of them, Marko, is a poet who
becomes an
apparatchik
in the postwar regime, living off the glory and mar–
tyrdom of the Resistance, which he freely fictionalizes. Meanwhile, he
keeps his friend Blacky - a burly working-class hero - underground, in a
cocoon of unreality where the war seems never to have ended. Both men
are ripe for the carnage that will break out again more than four decades
later. When Blacky finally emerges from his underground den, he
encounters a film crew shooting a propaganda movie about his legendary
exploits and heroic "death" - more evidence that the war goes on.
