Max Rifkind-Baron | Talent Night at Auschwitz, Bunk Five / 2018

defying performance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Max Rifkind-Baron (screenwriter and director) Talent Night at Auschwitz, Bunk Five / 2018 [17 minutes]

 

The brilliant short film by Max Rifkind-Baron takes you down hallways of horror and terror, self-revelation, and problematic parental relationships that are almost impossible to separate out from the dramatic / operatic cinema the young director presents.

    Beginning with a scene from Micah’s (Max Bartos) imaginary talent night performance at Auschwitz, the Grand Duchess Menorah, wearing a crown of spoons, singing on talent night with other performers—including the Magician Queer (Malin Barr), the Juggler (Dam Urdang), and Heim the Human Domino (Res Mishina)—the clearly transgender performer sings what she herself describes as “a savage show,” with a bevy of clever lyrics (so quickly rendered that they’re hard to follow in the student-produced film where the sound is somewhat muted) that also demand a limited knowledge of Yiddish theatrical rhymes: “Kiss the Menorah / I’m Hard to Ignora,” as well recognizing the gay paeans of escape, “Let me go, let me be, let me free!”—a double whammy of outsiderness.

   We shift immediately with the fall of the magical red curtain to a motel room where the boy, Micah, in the musical (Bartos) holed up with his father, Robert (David Winning), a man who appears to be utterly ignoring his son (possibly transitioning into a transgender woman) who is desperately trying to explain to him that while the musical pretends to be a talent show, it’s only a façade that expresses so much more than just the Holocaust, but “is about accepting you for what you are as an individual, love and bravery, sacrifice, and overcoming obstacles.”

      The father appears to be attempting to ignore what his son is trying to tell him, making a phone call in the very midst of Micah’s excited explanations of his would-be performance.

      Another of these hurdles seems to be the missing mother, who herself is a “survivor” (someone who survived the German Concentration camps), who even Robert has to admit would perhaps not be able to appreciate Micah’s imaginary show.

      In the motel room with walls of war-time sandbags and just possibly a Carolos Almarez painting on its wall, dinner arrives, served up by the hotel owner, evidently a lesbian who is highly attentive to Micah and his father, permitting Micah to even show her a magical card trick. He admits that he’s just a beginner, and that when his mother returns, a true magician, she will teach him more of the art.

      But it is a sad proposition since it appears the mother has left both her husband and the boy behind, after what we can’t quite determine what appears to have been yet another tragic occurrence on the beach she once loved, where perhaps it appears that Micah was molested by a figure rising up out of the sand to piss, the father singing, in the mini-opera of guilt and horror, of his own cowardliness in not protecting his son. A highly muted voice at film’s end suggests that “it was the worse mass killing on record,” the director’s camera revealing an ancient hand-gun from another era in the sand.

      What we are to make of this is vague at best. Was Micah involved, the perpetrator, the victim?

In a sense all of these figures are victims attempting to escape their own endlessly punishing pasts.

At least Micah does it with the style, humor, and a grace that his parents cannot even recognize as a salvation.

 

Los Angeles, December 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).