The Films of Abraham Ravett

Documentary filmmakers often tell stories about topics where information is lost, missing, incomplete, misremembered or biased, even after extensive research. I have wrestled with this in my own work about my family’s Turkish Jewish heritage, where little is known about my paternal grandmother’s life growing up in Smyrna. Filmmakers choose to fill in the gaps using different creative means. Errol Morris in The Thin Blue Line (1988) created reenactments based on testimonies to explore who really committed the murder of police officer Robert W. Wood. Sarah Polley in Stories We Tell (2012) shot Super 8 footage to look like home movies in her film about the relationship of her parents, Michael and Diane Polley. Creative means of representation have become critical to my work, and I’m constantly experimenting with new devices to tell a story. In the spirit of this, I wanted to study the work of avant-garde documentary filmmaker, Abraham Ravett, to broaden my understanding of storytelling strategies.

Abraham Ravett was born in Poland in 1947 to Chaim and Fela Ravett, both of whom had lost spouses and children in the Holocaust. He has an extensive, wide-ranging filmography of 38 films on topics such as Ijime, the Japanese word for bullying, blues musician Furry Lewis, and the Holocaust (Ravett). I will focus on four of his biographical documentaries that explore his parents’ experience as Holocaust survivors: Half Sister (1985), about a recently discovered photograph of his half-sister who was killed in Auschwitz (Half Sister); The March (1999), about his mother’s memories of the 1945 “Death March” from Auschwitz (The March); Everything’s For You (1989) where he reflects on his relationship with his deceased father, who survived both the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz (Everything’s For You); and Lunch with Fela (2005) his response to the death of his mother (Lunch with Fela).  Some of the questions Abraham Ravett asks in his films include: How can the medium of film be used to come to terms with unreconciled feelings, loss, and trauma? How can film be used to create portraits of lost relatives? How can memory be reconstructed? How can film be used to rupture the silence of that which was unspoken in a family? How can film be used to unravel the mysteries of someone’s past?

Ravett has been characterized as an avant-garde or experimental filmmaker. According to William H. Phillips in his book Film: An Introduction, the wide range of films labeled “experimental’’ makes experimental film difficult to define (401). Films that Phillips has considered experimental have been referred to as “avant-garde,” “underground,” personal,” or “independent” (401). They “explore the possibilities of the film medium, may be ahead of their times, are out of the mainstream, rely heavily on self-expression, and remain largely or entirely free of the limitations placed on commercial movies” (Phillips 401). They may frustrate viewers’ expectations and often try to startle, shock, or perplex the viewer (Phillips 402). Abraham Ravett’s work falls into this rubric. However, according to Laura Levitt, while she too characterizes him as an experimental filmmaker in her book American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust, Abraham Ravett prefers not to be labeled as such (224).

Ravett uses a wide array of unconventional filmmaking strategies and techniques to convey meaning in his films. In The March (1999), he repeatedly asks his aging mother, Fela, over a 13-year period to remember her experience on the forced “Death March” evacuation of Auschwitz in the winter of 1945 (Skoller xliii). Unlike journalistic interviews in the standard historical documentary, Ravett’s interview style is what Jeffrey Skoller calls “a cinema of testimony” (xliv). It focuses on testimony as the belated experience in the present of a historical event (Skoller xliv). The viewer becomes a part of the process of witnessing the subject’s attempt to place their experience into language (Skoller xliv). The testimony takes place as part of an interaction with a listener, in this case Fela’s son Abraham, who becomes a crucial participant in the event, also experiencing it in the present and gradually becoming part of the belated experience of trauma caused by the war (Skoller xliv). The viewer witnesses how memory becomes a physical experience for the testifier manifested in her changing expressions and body movements (Skoller xliv). With each response, Fela’s face shows not only the emotional toll of her testimony but also the struggle to make words and say something useful (Skoller 143). At one point she says, “Don’t ask me anymore, because I start feeling bad” (The March). Each year, Fela repeats the same anecdotes, adding little that is new, and none of these add up to a whole story (Skoller 143).

Another experimental device used by Ravett in his films is self-reflexivity, where he draws attention to the filmmaking process. In The March, Ravett introduces each new section by using elements that are normally invisible, like holes punched into the film stock or footage of him turning the camera on or setting up a shot. Rather than create an illusionary complete story from fragments, Ravett emphasizes the gaps in what he can know through these cinematic elements, in the same way the restorer of old mosaics will leave blank spaces in lost sections (Skoller 141). In Lunch with Fela, he emphasizes the gaps when he edits in a voice asking some of the questions the viewer might have been thinking, such as “What were you thinking about in the scene when your mother was eating and you were staring off?” or “Is that your father sitting next to your mother?” No answers are provided in the film  (Spence & Navarro 163).

In The March, Ravett inserts epigraphic breaks between each year’s testimony, where he precedes each interview with several words written on the screen in black frames (Skoller 144). We see words like Trepches (wooden shoes), blanket, bread, sardines, and the rivers Odra and Nysa. Some are typeset, others are handwritten either by Ravett or his aging mother. Ravett uses the repetitive words to bring the viewer’s attention to certain parts of Fela’s testimony, and the viewer anticipates Fela’s performance of the words (Skoller 144). Within the larger frame with the words, Ravett often includes an image of Fela repeated in two separate frames. The top frame is usually recognizable and the second is a blurred double of the first. According to Skoller, these intangible images are traces of the limit of what can be held onto as it is fading into the past (145).

Ravett’s obsessive need to unravel the mysteries of his childhood is reflected in the repetitiveness of his inquiries. He revisits themes over and over again, each time inserting a slightly new element (Lebow 68). In Everything’s For You, for example, the film begins with the text, “His name was Chaim.” Then just “Chaim,” is seen again twice. Then the name is written in Hebrew letters. Next Ravett reveals, “My mother called him Henyek.” This is repeated twice, followed by “In New York they called him Herbert.” Similarly in Half Sister, he engages in a repetitive conversation with his mother Fela about the name of her dead daughter, Toncia. Ravett’s obsessive concern with details of his dead half-siblings, like name, age, diet, state of mind and circumstances of death, reflects his need to explain and understand his own traumatic childhood growing up in the shadow of his parents’ Holocaust experiences (Lebow 68). 

In Everything’s For You, Ravett surgically examines in great detail three old photographs of his father’s pre-war family, found after his father’s death, by moving them around the screen, fading them in and out, duplicating them, blowing them up, dissecting them, and pixelating them. According to Alisa Lebow, he is looking for familiar and familial signs (69). Can he recognize a family resemblance between his two half-siblings and himself (Lebow 71)?

In Everything’s For You, he brings generations of family members together who would never otherwise meet, such as his father’s pre-war family of two children and his own son and daughter (Lebow 42). His older siblings are forever children, not much older in the photographs than his own children are in the film (Lebow 71). Ravett’s children represent a normalized version of Abraham’s distorted and war-torn siblinghood (Lebow 62). In addition, Abraham’s intercutting of the footage makes it seem that his father actually knew his two children, but this was not so (Lebow 70). According to Alisa Lebow, “Ravett’s film twists time to the extent that his father and his children can coexist on a plane that life denies them” (70). Alisa Lebow summarizes:

These filmic narrativizations of the family construct another dimension, a filmic plane, in which the disparate and indeed disjointed elements of the family narrative can be reunited . . . . through his filmmaking, Ravett creates a new and more complex family and thus a new understanding of himself within it (72).

Shots of unexplained objects is another device Ravett uses to craft his films. In Lunch with Fela, he edits in framed images of some of his mother’s possessions—buttons, a hat pin, change purses, a scrap of paper with a painter’s name and number—showing details of her everyday life (Spence & Navarro 164). Similarly in Everything’s For You, he edits in some of his late father’s possessions—his social security card, watch, tailoring scissor, and twenty-dollar bills folded and nested into one another. According to Janet Walker, “To possess something that his father touched and used is to achieve a physical closeness that was not perhaps matched at the same time on an emotional level” (164).

Ravett constantly looks for different ways to touch what is lost and know his mother’s dead daughter (Levitt 53). He uses the term “circling” to characterize his process of moving in slowly toward his half-sister (Levitt 53). He gets closer and closer but can never touch her, and he brings the viewer with him (Levitt 53). He shows the image of his sister’s face repetitively, as a close up, medium shot and far shot. We see the letter that accompanied the photograph he received of his half-sister, as well as the envelope addressed to him. Then we see the envelope with the face peering through over and over again. There are shots of anonymous girls and dolls scattered throughout the film that are substitutes and reminders that Abraham will never be able to touch his lost half-sister (Levitt 63).

In addition to all the above, there are silences, cell animations, archival footage, questions Abraham voices to his dead father, and many more strategies he uses to craft his films and engage his viewers. His work is multi-layered and cannot be fully appreciated in one or even two viewings. He never tells complete stories because he doesn’t fill in the blanks by fabricating the missing pieces. He eschews convention and literalness. The study of Abraham Ravett’s work has offered me a window into alternative filmmaking and editing techniques, but not without doubts. While trauma plays a part in my work, it does not approximate the intensity that drives Abraham Ravett’s work. Could I ever achieve the same level of complexity and meaning? Do I want to completely move away from conventional filmmaking? Who is my audience? What kind of process must I engage in to make such a layered work? Is it a calculated process or a more subconscious force? Is it acceptable to borrow strategies from other filmmakers? I’m looking forward to exploring how to integrate this style of filmmaking into my own work.

Works Cited

Everything’s For You. Dir. Abraham Ravett. 1989. DVD.

Half Sister. Dir. Abraham Ravett. 1985. DVD.

Lebow, Alisa S. First Person Jewish. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print.

Levitt, Laura. American Jewish Loss After The Holocaust. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Print.

Lunch with Fela. Dir. Abraham Ravett. 2005. DVD.

Phillips, William H. Film: An Introduction, 4^th Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009. Print.

Ravett, Abraham. “Films.” The Films of Abraham Ravett. Hampshire College, 2009-2012. Web. 30 Oct. 2014.

http://faculty.hampshire.edu/aravett/pages/home.html

Renov, Michael. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Print.

Skoller, Jeffrey. Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Print.

Spence, Louise, and Vinicius Navarro. Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Print.

The March. Dir. Abraham Ravett. 1999. DVD.

Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Print.