Discerning between the annals and chronicles of yesteryear on one hand, and modern records of history on the other, the historian Hayden White posited a more reflexive potential for contemporary practitioners of the former to acknowledge and appreciate the stealthy role of narrative organization in structuring moral reality. Narrative history, for White, imputes an unwieldy coherence to events which may not have that unambiguous a shared space; even if they did, their would-be observers might not necessarily be privy to it. This historiographic issue informs the documentary practice generally, and in particular the first feature of filmmaking duo Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann: though assigned a definite article and afforded a certain ambit, The Klezmer Project meticulously subverts its structural expectations in service of a hybridized docu-fiction register, working best both as ethnomusicology and as meditation on its intrinsically whimsical and rewarding process.
There are several things going on in The Klezmer Project at the narrative level, and inasmuch as they all come together, the film does not take pains to force-fit its tonal and thematic parallels. Koch and Schachmann, playing lightly fictionalized versions of themselves, are a wedding videographer and klezmer clarinettist, respectively. He is smitten by her at first sight (during a wedding no less), only to accede to her request to hand over his footage of her band while pretending to be fascinated by klezmer music — an Ashkenazi Jewish tradition. The two Argentines travel to Eastern Europe, where Schachmann seeks out the ethnomusicologist Bob Cohen for an interview and Koch fibs about his documentarian background, enlisting the help of a director friend (Lukas Valenta Rinner) and an Austrian television crew to go make one. As it turns out, his undertaking of a narrative history of klezmer fails, owing to all sorts of contingencies but also to the simple fact that klezmer proper no longer quite exists. Instead, much of our protagonists’ meandering journey — and by extension, The Klezmer Project — takes us through the Bessarabia region comprising modern-day Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova, where remnants of Ashkenazi Jewish culture surface in local folk melodies, traditions, and households, without much focus or fanfare.
This playfully indirect approach to its subject matter has, however, more serious undertones. As Koch and Schachmann discover, the erasure of Jewish history during the 20th century was due not just to the Holocaust, but also to the political victory of Zionism’s territorial project over the secular socialist ideology of Bundism, which had made Hebrew the national language of Israel and consigned centuries of Yiddish-speaking practice to oblivion. Musical practice, similarly, suffered losses to its identity, and with it the diasporic richness of Jewish customs. In this vein, the filmmakers utilize klezmer as a structuring absence around which their exploration of localized tradition takes shape; they also note klezmer’s diffuse but lingering contemporary influence around the world, beyond the strictures of state-led policy.
The Klezmer Project also incorporates a third, folkloric narrative in Yiddish voiceover, centered around Yankel, a gravedigger’s assistant, and Taibele, a rabbi’s daughter, as they face excommunication from their community over support for the heretical philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. As Yankel leaves his village and makes his way to the city in search of Taibele, by way of deceiving a merchant about his fame, the temptation to transpose this folktale onto Leandro and Paloma’s intrepid account is bolstered by the directors’ editorial juxtapositions, which force the viewer to reckon with the universalizing tendency of the film’s narrative layers, whether complementary or contrapuntal. Yet in layering both sentimental folktale and fictionalized love story over their film, Koch and Schachmann effectively veer into a more fluid narrative space, underscoring the romantic joie de vivre in their documentarian pursuit. Beyond its accidental function as a time capsule — in which such tragic contingencies of history, such as COVID, the Russian-Ukraine war, and the specter of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, are captured — The Klezmer Project expresses an openness to discovery through its film form which, despite being borne out of over a year of editing, identifies as its project the ongoing process of constructing counter-narratives. Just as a language is “a dialect with an army behind,” a quote from Max Weinreich used as the film’s epigraph, the narrativizing projects of nations are themselves in need of forceful resistance.
DIRECTOR: Leandro Koch & Paloma Schachmann; CAST: ddd; DISTRIBUTOR: Greenwich Entertainment; IN THEATERS: February 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 57 min.
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