JEWISH LUCK - 1925 Silent Film Featuring Live Performance of the WORLD PREMIERE of Lori Goldston’s New Score.
At the 14th Street Y (344 E 14th Street between 1St & 2nd Avenues in Manhattan).Included in YNY Full Festival Passes (separate registration required - Full Festival pass holders will be emailed a code to register for this event at no additional cost). Not available by livestream.
FOR TICKETS CLICK HERE (14th St. Y Ticketing Page).A panel featuring film critic
Jim Hoberman & and Yiddish theater actor
Yelena Shmulenson will be held before and after the film, moderated by YNY film co-curator
Eve Sicular.
This showing of Jewish Luck, the famed 1925 Soviet Yiddish silent film by Alexy Granovsky will feature the WORLD PREMIERE of a specially-commissioned new score by
Lori Goldston, performed live by Goldston (cello) with multi-instrumentalist
Ilya Shneyveys.
Jewish Luck, one of the most important Soviet Yiddish films, is based on Sholem Aleichem's series of ironically comic stories featuring the character Menakhem Mendl – a daydreaming entrepreneur who specializes in doomed strike-it-rich schemes. Lead actor Solomon (Shloyme) Mikhoels and director Alexey Granovsky were both key members of the sensationally modernist Moscow-based GOSET Soviet Yiddish Theater company, but unlike their legendary onstage creations together, this screen feature strives for ethnographic detail without experimental performance technique.
Likewise, production design here by Natan Altman, an avant garde painter, is esthetically faithful to traditional shtetl folk culture -- inspired by Jewish fieldwork studies of Sh. An-sky's expeditions into the late-Tsarist Pale of Settlement. Filmed on locations of quintessential shtetl Berditshev and cosmopolitan Odessa, Jewish Luck shared cinematographer Eduard Tisse with Sergei Eisenstein, whose epic Battleship Potemkin also staged scenes on the famous Odesa Steps during the same summer of 1925. Soviet Jewish author Isaac Babel wrote idiomatically sardonic intertitles for this silent Yiddish film, and its original live accompaniment was composed by GOSET musical director /conductor Lev (Leyb) Pulver, a conservatory-trained violinist who was raised playing weddings in a family of klezmorim.
"Bucolic in spite of itself, Jewish Luck is affectionate but unsentimental....Startlingly fresh and superbly controlled.... Briskly paced, skillfully alternating sight gags and character farce, Jewish Luck is dynamic rather than elegiac."-- J. Hoberman, The Crooked Road of Jewish Luck [Art Forum]
Presented by YNY in partnership with the 14th St. Y. This event is sponsored by a Humanities New York Action Grant. Promotional support provided by Cojeco and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
