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Shanghai Ghetto is rather poor cinema, but one hell
of a tale. The Manns, who may be the original gang
who couldn’t shoot straight, have made a good movie in spite
of themselves. Fortunately for viewers, every cheesy bit of
melodrama, every instance of inept filmmaking the directors
injected is countered by the incredible story of Jews who
fled Nazi Germany and sought sanctuary in the unlikeliest
of places, Shanghai.
Old ones are dying off and the rush is on to tell their stories,
in narrative or documentary. Look how many Jewish experience
movies have come out in the past five years and you’ll see
what I mean. And frankly, there can’t be too many movies about
the Holocaust and Holocaust-related topics. Something that
is the shame of the world not only shouldn’t be forgotten,
it should be studied by all and sundry. Shanghai Ghetto
is perfect for that. The movie is such a flood of information
that, instead of taking film notes, I found myself frantically
scribbling notes like I was sitting in history class.
The first segment of Shanghai Ghetto deals with the
difficult matter of getting out of Germany. Jews’ bank accounts
had been frozen by the Nazis, so travel money was hard to
come by. Even if the money wasn’t a problem though, destinations
were hard to come by. Major nations may have deplored German
treatment of Jews, but the Evian Conference—at which major
nations declined to accept the large numbers of Jewish refugees
seeking a way out of Europe—showed that the world didn’t much
want the Jews either. The one promising destination for escaping
Jews was Shanghai, a place where papers were not required
of immigrants. Hundreds of German Jews descended upon Hongkew,
the Japanese section of the International Settlement.
Life in Hongkew was difficult. The climate and the poverty
of the Chinese were brutal shocks to the Europeans, who found
jobs scarce and the housing primitive. Baghdadi Jews, in Shanghai
as British subjects, had been allowed to keep their money.
The Baghdadis provided social supports like food and dormitories
for the new immigrants. Shanghai Ghetto presents interviews
with five Shanghailanders, the name given to the Jews of Shanghai,
as well as with two academics whose specialty area is the
Jewish WWII experience, and a Chinese academic who discusses
this period in Shanghai’s history. The Shanghailanders have
tough, tear-jerking stories to tell, both of their personal
experiences and of life in Shanghai in general. One man recounts
the devastating cold of winter, and tells of Chinese families
so poor that “They had no heat… Children would freeze to death
and you’d see them in the street. They’d be picked up with
the trash.”
Life in Hongkew was also difficult because many of the Jews
couldn’t get their minds around what had happened to them.
Many were like the wife in Nowhere In Africa, who can’t
believe that the land of Goethe and Schiller
would become so barbaric toward some of its own. Professor
Kranzler particularly talks of how German the Jews felt, how
proud they were of their contributions to their country’s
arts and sciences, and how unaware they were that these contributions
were resented by the Germans who saw them as taking over German
culture. But the Jews managed to make lives for themselves
in their temporary homes. Jewish papers, cafehouses, etc.,
German and Yiddish theaters, and sports clubs sprang up in
Hongkew.
Today the Shanghailanders have periodic reunions. The filmmakers
attended the last one, in 1999, and recruited subjects for
their film. Several of the Shanghailanders visited Hongkew
with the filmmakers, returning to the neighborhoods and in
some cases, the very apartments, of their childhood. The Manns
had no official permission to film, so this part of the movie
has that guerrilla documentary feel, with poor visuals but
surprisingly decent sound.
Now about those flaws. The near complete absence of Chinese
perspective on the Jewish immigration is a major defect. Betty,
one of the Shanghailanders, comments regarding the Chinese:
“Twenty thousand of us pushing twenty thousand of them out…
they were there first…” I must presume that the commando nature
of the filming prevented the Manns from getting any interviews
whatsoever with any surviving Chinese residents of Hongkew.
Shanghai Ghetto uses the same footage and the same
stills over and over and over again. Martin Landau’s
smooth, serious baritone is a bit much, and his narration
does nothing to compensate for dreadful lines like “It looked
like Hitler was unstoppable.” Then, to cap off their missteps,
the Manns made what must be one of the cardinal sins of documentaries—the
zoom-in on a crying interviewee. The story is affecting enough
without being tricked out. Trust us to know how to feel about
what we’re hearing and seeing. A sad story that brings its
teller to the point of tears. We don’t need an extreme close-up
of the teardrops. If anything, distance and respect are indicated
at such times.
Shanghai Ghetto may be the worst documentary movie
I ever watch and rewatch. Its clumsy filmmaking provokes occasional
eye-rolls and head-shakes, but its stories are so compelling
and so necessary to be told.
—Roxanne Bogucka
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