Movie Maker’s Short Films Examine the Larger Issues

Jay Rosenblatt is a little-known independent filmmaker whose hurrahs from critics ordinarily would cast him as an up-and-comer with a chance to make it in Hollywood.

“Profoundly disturbing and imaginative,” The Times’ Kevin Thomas observed in 1996.

“A ritualistic gravity that gathers force, so that by the end you feel the oppressive weight of the 20th century and begin to realize that many of its deepest mysteries can never be solved,” wrote the New York Times’ Stephen Holden last year.

“Proficiency and intellectual penetration ... compassion, an open-heartedness that can’t be learned or faked.... Rosenblatt is seriously gifted, a significant artist,” the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle summed up six months ago in reviewing a program of Rosenblatt’s films.

The problem, from a Hollywood perspective, is that Rosenblatt does not make movies with actors and scripts, or even traditional documentaries. Many of his films are what he calls “collage-essays”--shorts that last from one to 30 minutes, with most of the footage cobbled together from documentaries and educational films. He manipulates images so that their look fits the moods and themes he is trying to evoke; then he outfits the visuals with music, voice-overs and subtitles.

The San Francisco-based Rosenblatt will introduce a program of his films Thursday at UC Irvine. At 46, he makes his living teaching college film courses in the Bay Area and relies on grants to pursue his art--including $35,000 he received from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations. Instead of taking meetings in Hollywood, Rosenblatt is pursuing job interviews in academia. With the arrival of a daughter, Ella, eight months ago, the former Brooklyn native could use a full-time job with benefits.

Rosenblatt has won his reputation by applying the short-form film to big, profound subjects. The result, wrote the Chronicle’s LaSalle, is “precious miniatures that, like the best poetry, pack an outsized wallop.”

“The Smell of Burning Ants” is a plea for society to stop raising boys to be tough, stoic little men who suppress their feelings to avoid being branded effeminate. Rosenblatt says the film (which will not be part of the UCI screening) grew out of an almost Proustian gush of memory while he was trolling for “found” shots for another film.

Rosenblatt unsparingly recounts an episode in which he joined a mob of his fellow fifth-graders to attack and humiliate the class scapegoat. The ominous mood he creates makes it clear that, when it comes to human cruelty, the child is the father to the man--and to all the social and historical horrors that pent-up anger can produce.

“Human Remains” and “King of the Jews” also explore cruelty on an epic scale, but again from a surprising, personal standpoint.

The inspiration for “Human Remains” jumped out at Rosenblatt from celluloid he was viewing with other purposes in mind. A scene of Adolf Hitler eating a piece of bread made him flash on the idea that even the greatest evil wears the trappings of familiar, everyday humanity. His film consists of short chapters on Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco and Mao Tse-tung. Each dictator is heard (through an actor’s voice-over) giving a matter-of-fact account of his personal habits and foibles. We learn that Hitler loved eclairs, Mao never brushed his teeth and Stalin was 5 feet, 4 inches tall and never got over the death of his first wife. There is no mention of their crimes and their historical impact. They are just people, talking about personal concerns.

That footage of Hitler chomping bread “made me see him as human, and I found that even more chilling,” Rosenblatt said from his home, where his film production studio occupies the basement. “I wanted to confront people with the notion of our collective responsibility for these men coming to power. If we see them as monsters and put them on an evil pedestal, we have no responsibility.”

“King of the Jews” began as a memoir of Rosenblatt’s childhood. In his Jewish home, Jesus Christ was a fearful, unspoken name because of all the torment that had been inflicted on the Jews as supposed Christ-killers. When necessary, the Rosenblatts referred to him as “Jersey City.”

But as he became an adult and learned of Jesus’ teachings, Rosenblatt said, “I thought how things had shifted for me,” from fear to respect.

The 18-minute film is built largely on shots from celluloid passion plays and Holocaust documentaries, along with snippets from his family’s home movies. It recounts Rosenblatt’s traumatic childhood experience of Jesus, then confrontationally puts forth the findings of some Biblical scholars who believe the writers of the Gospels consciously defamed the Jews, falsely pinning Jesus’ death on them to curry favor with Roman authorities. In a final sequence, Rosenblatt depicts the crucifixion as an archetype for all Jewish suffering--appropriating the essential Christian moment as Jewish.

“I want the viewer at the end of the film to look at a Jew being crucified, not just Jesus,” Rosenblatt said. “If he’s truly seen as a Jew, Christian anti-Semitism becomes ludicrous. How can you revere the man and hate his people?”

All is not heaviness and intensity in Rosenblatt’s films. “A Pregnant Moment” is a traditional documentary in which he trained his camera on Lola, a Rhodesian Ridgeback hound, and her human masters. He followed them through the dog’s pregnancy and the aftermath of her puppies’ birth. Lola, composed, dignified and silent, goes through it all without a whimper; the people around her are emotional basket cases.

Rosenblatt was a psychotherapist, working with drug abusers and psychiatric patients, at the time of his first film course 21 years ago. He soon changed his field, but not, he said, his core motivation.

“There’s a definite therapeutic urge in many of my films. I am sort of driven to make films that do have potential to bring about some healing in the world.”

The film festival circuit has been Rosenblatt’s main venue, along with film schools and museums. But he had a breakthrough in 2000 when Film Forum, a nonprofit Manhattan venue for independent films, gave a weeklong screening to a program of his shorts.

Successes at Sundance and other festivals have led to a few nibbles, but no offers, from the movie industry. But making a Hollywood movie, or even an independent feature, is not Rosenblatt’s goal. He sees his short films as the fulfillment of his artistry rather than as stepping stones to making features.

“I would like to make a living making these kinds of films, but that’s not realistic right now. I can’t really live on the grants, either. And filmmaking is so expensive. I think I will have a day job for a while.”

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Jay Rosenblatt films, Thursday, 7:30 p.m. at the UC Irvine Film and Video Center, Humanities Instructional Building, Room 100. $3-$5. (714) 824-7418 or www.humanities .uci.edu/fvc.