If the new book "And Every Single One Was Someone" is any indication, we tend to prefer poetic representations of the Holocaust over challenging ones. The book's 1,250 pages are filled with six million iterations of the word "Jew" and nothing else. It seems like a provocative and moving idea. But a poetic gimmick is still a gimmick. "Life is Strange", on the other hand, isn't a gimmick. Consisting of pieces of lengthy interviews with 25 Jewish survivors of World War II, the documentary is made of something not so easily clumped together: personality.
Written and directed by Isaac Hertz, "Life is Strange" is the result of the two years Hertz and producer Sam Grundwerg spent interviewing the documentary's group of survivors (without denying the group's eclecticism, it's bothersome that only seven of the 25 interviewed are women). Now aging politicians, philosophers, writers, professors, mothers, fathers, and grandparents, they talk about their respective childhoods in various countries of Europe. The film's more recognizable participants include Shimon Peres, President of Israel, and children's author, Uri Olev. But all of them, whatever their illustriousness, are fascinating.
Hertz places more emphasis on who the survivors were, than what they survived. Explicit discussion of the Holocaust does occur through interviewees such as the shrewd Judith Rubinstein, a woman from Hungary who made it out of Auschwitz. But "Life is Strange" remains dedicated to the details of the participants' Yiddish childhoods. From the kinds of cheap fish their families bought at markets to the candy-laden rituals of the first day of school, we learn about the intimacies of their days as kids.
The documentary itself is clunky. The editing hops between topics and interviews like a frog between lily pads. Hertz also layers many sequences with streams of archival photographs and videos without differentiating between who we're listening to talk and who we're watching float by us on the screen. That makes it harder to keep up with the already overwhelming number of voices at play. Most distracting is the gnatty presence of the voice of a young American boy. A pseudo-narrator, he comments on the disjunctures between the past and the present, intruding on the silences of the survivors' anecdotes that we would rather digest on our own.
But "Life is Strange" is a valuable film, and not just because the number of Holocaust survivors is ever-thinning (incidentally, one of the interviewees here, Rabbi Isidore Greengrass, died in 2009). The people of Hertz's film, though all once targets of Nazi Germany, are different in their mindsets, their accents, their senses of humor, and their religiousness. The distinctions between them prod at how important it is not to assume that people are alike, even when, in a lot of ways, they are, or are made to be.
Given the number of interviewees involved, "Life is Strange" feels a little rushed. The complete interviews are available online and each might have more impact on their own than cut up as part of a documentary. But at least Hertz comes at his material with an angle. It allows him to pull-off one risky moment when the focus of "Life is Strange" switches from the survivors to the dead. A grainy black and white shot of birds flitting up into the sky follows a panel of Rubinstein describing the crematoriums and their ominous, rising smoke. The implicit comparison between the birds and smoke is surprisingly unsentimental. It's beautiful, but not uplifting, cathartic, or finite. Watching those birds might not be so different from reading the same black word endlessly on a white page. But "Life is Strange's" version of this repetitive sorrow is flintier, and not to mention, more contextual.
