Is this film anti-Semitic?

I received the following email earlier this week.

To Arnon Shorr:

We have seen your movie “A Modest Suggestion”. You asked us to comment on the movie. Our comments are as follows:
• I ordered the DVD because we believed in you and we wanted you to be honored with work that you created.
• The title of the movie is very deceiving.
• Had we known what it was about, we would have never purchased the movie.
• Now that we have seen the movie, we need to let you know our feelings about it.
o We believe the movie is very disturbing and anti Semitic.
o It gives very unsafe ideas to the world.
o How could any Jew possibly be associated with degrading the Jews as shown in the movie?
o How could any Jew make a movie about killing Jews?
o It appears in the movie that killing Jews was OK.
o This is very dangerous for Jews all over the world.
o As a holocaust survivor watching this movie, it was extremely upsetting.
o It has only been about 70 years since Hitler got the very same idea, Kill the Jews.
o We are very upset and concerned that all of the anti Semitics who watch this film will be encouraged to do what was shown in the film.
o The killer did not show remorse and the other three morons went along with him, making it appear that it was OK to kill Jews.
• Are these the ideas that you wanted to give to the world?
• What kind of lesson were you teaching the world?

On behalf of all of the Jews in the world, we strongly urge you to withdraw the film from circulation immediately.

In view of our comments above, we chose not to comment on the quality of the director’s and the producer’s work.

We hope you seriously consider the comments above and remove the film from circulation.

Regretfully,

A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR and HER HUSBAND



In my response, I explained the film's intended purpose. It is a satire, meant to lampoon anti-Semites by exposing the ridiculous illogic at the foundation of anti-Semitism. It's not an uplifting story of redemption and peace. It's a dark exposee: anti-Semitism often triumphs, even though it has no basis in truth. We are not removing the film from circulation. I thanked them for their candid letter, and invited further feedback.

That said, I've lost a lot of sleep these past few nights, bothered by this email. Ultimately, the meaning of a film has nothing to do with the director's intentions. It's the audience that must decide. Is "A Modest Suggestion" an anti-Semitic manifesto, or a satire on anti-Semitism? I know what I intended, but I don't think that matters nearly as much as what you see, and as such, I'm eager to read your comments here.

-Arnon Z. Shorr
Director, "A Modest Suggestion"

Too Much for Berlin?

For many filmmakers, the film festival rejection letter is very familiar. It usually includes some florid language about how many great films they've received, how few time slots they have, and how agonizing their decision was to cut your film out of the running. The cliches are carefully constructed so as not to reveal anything at all about what they actually think of the film. It leaves filmmakers with the self-destructive task of second-guessing every decision they made. Every shot, angle, cut, etc. becomes suspect.

I am not immune to this line of reasoning. In fact, I've become a bit of a pro. In the long wait between the film's submission and the festival's decision, I've watched "A Modest Suggestion" numerous times, each time taking careful note of all the tiny problems that only a director would notice and filing them away somewhere in the back of my mind. When news came this morning that the Berlin International Film Festival will not select "A Modest Suggestion" this year, that nit-picked list came to mind, a devilish reassurance that I shouldn't be disappointed by foregone conclusions.

That is how it usually goes. The optimist in me submits a film, the masochistic pessimist prepares in advance to justify rejection. But this time, things are different.

"A Modest Suggestion" is a film about anti-Semitism. The kind of anti-Semitism that swept through Germany barely a lifetime ago. In this case, could there be a reason beyond my self-assessed list-of-doom? Is the film... perhaps... too much for Berlin?

I don't want to dwell on German cultural sensitivities. Having never been to that country, I am just about the least reliable analyst of its tastes and anxieties. That said, what does it mean for a film about anti-Semitism to be "too much" for anybody?

I typically hear the phrase "that film was too much for me" or its shorter cousin, "that was too much!" in reference to violence, gore, and other forms of extreme deviance on screen. For many of us, seeing people getting ripped to shreds on screen is a difficult, unpleasant experience (even though we know it's fake!) Why is it unpleasant? I'm sure there are film theorists who have approached this question before. I've been out of college for a few years, and haven't kept up with the world of film criticism as much as I would have liked, so I'll venture a few suggestions of my own here (with apologies to anyone who has already come up with this stuff before me).

First, there's the obvious: When we lead our daily lives, we typically don't see dismemberments or decapitations. I imagine most of us don't see much physical violence at all. Maybe a scuffle outside a bar now and again? The sight is disturbing because it's unusual -- it's strange, it deviates from our understanding of the world in a way that clearly doesn't bode well for those of us who like our limbs right where they are. Of course, seeing people flying in movies is lots of fun, and that certainly deviates from our understanding of the world. There's a cinema secret here: We love to see optimistic visions of an alternative to our reality, but we're uncomfortable with pessimistic visions of it.

So, why do we still see (and in some cases love) so many films with brutal death, destroyed societies, worlds ruled by robots, etc.? Many of those stories (especially those adhering to Hollywood's narrative sensibilities) always set up those worlds in opposition to what they could be. There is always some sort of hope, some sense of the cinematic world's "upward mobility". Even if there isn't a 'happy ending', we are at least presented with a word of warning, one which (if heeded) will prevent our real world from degrading to become like that of the film.

That leads me to my second thought on the question: We are repulsed by extreme deviance on screen because it is precisely not extreme deviance. Somehow, when we see a bloody dismemberment on screen, or a horrible dis-figuration, we see something real, a hint of our own fragility. Often, these moments pass quickly, moments in a battle. We are reminded not only of how fragile we are, but of how forgettable we are. Godzilla rampages, and no one really cares about the thousands of people crushed by his awkward feet. If we see them, in gory detail, getting crushed, we are forced to remember them, and forced to remember that we don't care, and that if we were there, crushed by the monster's feet, who would care about us? Deviant images come in other forms, of course (and much of it is defined as 'deviant' by culture's expectations). Sexual perversion (and in some cases, merely sexual explicitness) can make people uncomfortable because it may express things whose expression 'polite' society prohibits. We don't want to admit to being human, and therefore subject to all sorts of desires and thoughts that are beyond our control. When we see those expressed on screen, it can sometimes feel like a mockery of our self-control.

These two approaches to understanding our aversion to extreme images and scenes in movies may seem to contradict each other. We don't like them because they are alien to us and because they remind us of ourselves? But I think that is precisely what may be happening with "A Modest Suggestion" in Berlin.

In the film's first few minutes, a character poses the question, "Should we, or should we not... kill the Jews?" In a culture that has worked so hard to grapple with its own history of extreme anti-Semitism, this very question does more than just raise eyebrows. In Germany, the merest hint of anti-Semitism is dealt with in the most severe terms. Such a blatant question is truly alien to contemporary German society. This very line, though, paraphrases a critical moment in German history, calling to mind not only the Wannsee Conference, but the almost scientific developments of Germany's anti-Semitic policies that led up to the Holocaust. But the strength of the film is not just that it is a reminder of a painful past. We are all guilty of framing our understanding of the world in categorical terms. In this very note, I talk of "Germans" as if they are all cut from the same mold, a string of blond-haired, blue-eyed gingerbread men. We have to talk this way, because it is how we learn. We see a pattern repeated once or twice, and extrapolate from that an impression of the whole. What happened to Jews in Germany could happen again anywhere, even in Germany, unless we learn to be self-critical, to acknowledge the coarseness of the definitions we create.

Bigotry is human. It is an extreme expression of the flawed way in which we understand the world. All too often, I've seen mechanical, robotic attempts to overcome bigotry. Celebrities such as Mel Gibson or notable personalities like Helen Thomas are told to keep their mouths shut. "They shouldn't have said that!" I hear. If this is the way Americans react to bigotry, I can only imagine that the censorship is more severe in Germany. But it doesn't change anything. To the bigot, the thoughts remain, and there is no one around to say "no, that's not true. That's a ridiculous statement." A Modest Suggestion attempts to do just that: to undermine bigotry by revealing the fundamental illogic at its core. I had hoped that the film would be welcomed in Germany, but perhaps there is still too much anxiety. Perhaps there is still too much stock put in silencing anti-Semites, rather than in educating them, or at the very least, undermining the foundations of their bigoted opinions. I can only guess. Perhaps someone will respond to this with alternative ideas? For now, I'm left to contemplate the festival's response to "A Modest Suggestion", and to wonder, "Was it too much for Berlin?"

-Arnon Shorr

Director, "A Modest Suggestion"

30 pages in two days... again!

Today, our seventh shoot day, we wrapped another grueling pair of days. They were challenges, but they were planned challenges, and we beat the odds.

Some background: The general rule of thumb, I am told, is that Hollywood movies aim to cover two to three pages of a script in their average shoot day. Television shows, which have a cumulative running time that far exceeds a typical film's two hours, tend to shoot faster, covering six, sometimes eight script pages a day.

Sheer financial necessity often forces independent productions to cover more ground in less time. Actors, crew, equipment and facilities often charge by the week or by the day, making each additional production day an instantly expensive proposition. "A Modest Suggestion", for example, which is scripted just short of one hundred pages, was scheduled for ten shoot days, roughly ten pages per day. This turned out to be merely an average -- some days would require much more of our cast and crew.

We had set ourselves up with an additional challenge: we had scheduled a lengthy, difficult scene for our first and second shoot days. On top of that, our second day included an additional scene at a different location (which means the cast and crew showed up in one place, shot for a while, then re-located en-mass to our studio). We had roughly thirty pages to cover.

The first days of a shoot are notoriously unstable. Talented people in numerous disciplines are thrown together, often for the first time, in an attempt to create meticulously detailed puzzle pieces, the individual shots that will eventually combine to form a motion picture. Everyone has their own way of doing their job, and their own expectations of how everyone else should do theirs. It can be a challenge on any production, and it usually means the going is slow, sometimes flawed, and often frustrating.

We had our fair share of frustrations on our first day. For me, a lot of it involved learning the rhythms of such a large, compartmentalized crew. I also had to learn how to communicate my careful planning to the crew and production team -- my storyboards and shot lists have made production move very smoothly, but on day one, I still hadn't figured out how to express my meticulous plans to the people around me who needed to understand them. By lunch, we had fallen behind schedule significantly, and I was instructed that I'd have to speed things up.

I tweaked the shot list frantically during our lunch break. When we were called back on the set, I felt the tension mount as the lights went up, the camera rolled in to position, and the microphones swung over the actors' heads. The shot list was organized a bit better, and the cast and crew seemed to have a better sense of each others' patterns and needs. Perhaps lunch had helped them all relax in to the job? Somehow, we got very close to completing our shots that day. We had fallen behind, and we pushed an hour in to overtime, but we got close.

That night, I sat down with our first assistant director to review what remained of our scene. There was a lot left to cover, and we'd only have half a day to cover it, since there was that other location shoot in the morning. We shuffled, tweaked, and shifted shots around, trying to figure out the most efficient order in which to get what we needed. We came up with a new shot list and called it a night.

The next day, on the set, as actors pulled in, and as the crew started rigging their gear, I frantically hacked at the shot list, changing and shuffling our shooting order again and again, continuing to streamline the day's plan.

On set, the team seemed better prepared for the day. By know, they had gone through a busy day together, and had learned a lot about each other. The first day was like oil in the joints, making day 2 flow very smoothly. Needless to say, we caught ourselves up and finished shooting that big scene by the time we wrapped our second day. In those two days, we had covered roughly thirty pages.

It's easy to credit the shot list for something like this. Shot lists require discipline and organization, but not much art. Here's roughly how it works:

A movie or scene is composed of all sorts of shots -- individual camera angles that combine to convey a narrative. Think of the typical movie conversation between two characters. You start out seeing both of them talking. Then, you see one of them, saying something. Then, you cut to the other one, responding. Cut back to the first, with a retort, and back to the second, with a reaction. You might think that movies are shot like that, too: first, the wide shot of both actors, then a shot of one, saying one thing, then a shot of the other, saying the next thing, then back to the first actor, and so on. If we worked that way, we'd still be shooting that first day's scene. You see, every time you move the camera, you've got to worry about the lights, the set, continuity, etc. Everything has to be re-set, moved, turned around, or fixed up. It takes a while. Instead of working this way, most filmmakers will try to group the shots they get together. If, in our example, we get all of the first character's lines and reactions, then reset our camera just once for the other character's lines and reactions, we've only had to re-set things once, but we've got the same amount of footage.

That's the basic principle of shot-listing, as I see it. If the camera is pointed somewhere, you might as well get every possible shot you'll need from that angle before you move the camera somewhere else. Since the scenes in "A Modest Suggestion" are very long, and involve four or five characters moving a lot through the set, the shot-listing was complicated, and often required combining moments from the beginning of a scene with moments that take place ten minutes later, at the scene's conclusion. Jumping back and forth across these scenes is not easy, and that's one of the places we got lucky.

Our actors have been absolutely incredible. Their careful preparations gave them such a keen understanding of their characters and of their scenes that they could almost instantly glide in to and out of each moment. They may try to be modest about it, but their preparations paid off. The shot list was arranged in such a way that we didn't have to reset the cameras, but that would have been meaningless if it had taken us ten minutes to remind the actors of how their characters should behave and interact every time we jumped across a scene. Because of their preparation, the shot list worked.

The crew was also fantastic, especially once I learned how to communicate my shot list to them. There are still a few kinks to iron out, but at this point, it doesn't take two minutes for me to explain a shot before the camera is moved, the lights adjusted, and the sound team brainstorms the best microphone placement. Once we're up for a shot, we're up for everything else that needs to be shot from that position -- that sequence of shots is called a setup. The shot list makes it possible to get through setups quickly, but the crew is the bridge from one setup to the next. The shot list reduces the number of times we have to reset the camera, but when we do, the crew makes that process flow like water.

Now that we are a week in to the production, it happened again. We just wrapped another 30-page pair of shoot days. This time around, our shot list was more carefully refined -- I had been working on it with the 1st Assistant Director since late last week. The actors were even better prepared, having worked together in character for what adds up to roughly half the movie. And the crew, of course, had become a family -- a very functional family!

So, with two shoot days to go, I am already looking back at what we've accomplished with a great deal of pride. 30 pages in two days is an enormous accomplishment, and we've done it twice. Don't let anyone tell you it's impossible! But don't try it without careful preparation, or without a brilliant, hard-working, dedicated team at your side.

-Arnon Shorr

Director

SketchUp and Storyboarding

I've been using SketchUp as a tool for storyboarding on this project. It's my first attempt at storyboarding anything without actually drawing each frame by hand. Initially, I considered keeping the entire process digital, exporting individual images from my 3D model of the set for each shot in the film, creating a digital sequence that would serve as a sort of animatic. That process was a bit of a flop. If there was a button I could press that would basically snap a photo of my view in SketchUp and save it as a sequentially-numbered image file (perhaps with the option of adding some notes?) that might have worked out better, but as things go, it's such a tedious process to align each shot, and to save each individual file.

Instead of this, I devised a hybrid method that combines my tried-and-true pencil-and-paper method with the promise of digital previsualization.

First, I sat down with the script and devised a general visual approach to each act of the narrative. This "lens plot" (inspired by Sidney Lumet's approach, described in his wonderful book, "Making Movies") served as a guideline for what shots I would or would not include in a given scene.

Second, I took that "lens plot" and used SketchUp to create most of the shots that I would use -- in this instance, medium shots, wide shots, shots with very few angles. I made about ten or twelve image files, and printed them all, nine images to a page. I cut these out and arranged them in stacks.

Third, I storyboarded. Instead of drawing a shot by hand, I grabbed a picture from a pile and taped it on to my storyboarding page. I wrote in notes, drew in arrows for camera movements, and folded the little papers to form tighter shots.

Aside from the obvious benefit to my writing hand, this process had an aesthetic impact, and will have a logistical impact as well.

By having before me a limited array of shots, I was 'forced' to tell the story from a limited number of vantage points. Rather than confining me, this limitation allowed me to approach the scene more fluidly -- every available shot is part of a broader scheme, so, in a way, any shot I choose would be "correct". I didn't have to worry so much about whether a shot would fit in the scene's context. I only had to focus on the way each shot related to its immediate context, and to the character and the moment.

The logistical impact may be obvious -- by limiting my choices of camera angles, I'm also limiting the number of setups that will be necessary on the set. This will give us more time to focus on performances, and the nuances of camera position, lighting, sound, etc.

Now that the first act is storyboarded, I've got to think about how to approach the 2nd and 3rd acts. They involve more movement, both in terms of the characters and in terms of the camera. Will this approach work for these more fluid scenes? I'm not entirely sure yet, but I'll find out soon...

-Arnon Shorr

Director, "A Modest Suggestion"