Trained as a modern European cultural and intellectual historian, Lisa Lieberman abandoned a perfectly respectable academic career for the life of a vicarious adventurer through dangerous times and places. She was in Paris during the German Occupation with Jean-Paul Sartre, hanging around long enough to observe the postwar purges of French collaborators with Simone de Beauvoir before taking off with some prominent members of the French Resistance who opposed the dirty war being waged by their government in Algeria. Most recently, she’s been keeping her head down in Budapest as the Soviets move in to crush the 1956 Revolution. She blogs about old movies at Deathless Prose. Email:: [email protected]
by Lisa Lieberman I've read countless analyses of Roman Polanski's neo-noir masterpiece, but I'd never considered the subliminal effect of the film's title until I read an offhand remark of Yunte Huang's in his book about Charlie Chan. “Chinatown serves as the symbol for the crime-ridden, dark side of the city of Angles,” he writes.…
Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, who died this week, excelled at playing passionate characters whose humanity was at war with their idealism. Here I will discuss three memorable films from different phases of his career.
Frigid women. Manipulative wives. Bad mothers. Dumb blondes. Alcoholism. Failing marriages. Furtive sex. Before Mad Men revived these retro conventions and somehow made them hip, they were just tawdry.
by Lisa Lieberman Walden Lodge Hollywood, California, Summer 1941 I believe that the person you are when you're eight years old is the person you really are. I was creeping up on Geoffrey as he sat meditating on the lawn—not that I could be invisible, my girl's body draped in my mother's mink coat—but Geoffrey…
by Lisa Lieberman He had told me that he shredded street posters himself to uncover the ones hidden beneath the newer strata. He pulled the strips down layer by layer and photographed them meticulously, stage by stage, down to the last scraps of paper that remained on the billboard or stone wall. Patrick Modiano, “Afterimage”…
by Lisa Lieberman “Get ready for a torrid tropical holiday!” That's how the announcer on the trailer for Weekend in Havana (1941) introduced this film. Torrid: full of passionate or highly charged emotions arising from sexual love. Now there's an adjective to get your heart rate up! The list of synonyms in my thesaurus includes…
by Lisa Lieberman I recently attended a retrospective on the work of East German filmmaker Siegfried Kühn sponsored by the DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst. DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft), a production company founded by the Soviets immediately following World War II in their zone of occupation, was responsible for most of the films produced…
by Lisa Lieberman Hadn't there been something youthfully heartless in my enjoyment of the spectacle of Berlin in the early thirties, with its poverty, its political hatred and its despair? Christopher Isherwood The Weimar Republic is everybody's favorite example of liberalism gone wrong. Just a few days ago, The New Republic posted a reprint of…
by Lisa Lieberman My favorite line from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), spoken by the late, great Eli Wallach, captures the essence of the Spaghetti Western. Here's Tuco, the Mexican bandit played by Wallach, taking a bubble bath in some half-destroyed hotel room, when a one-armed bad guy barges in, holding a…
by Lisa Lieberman As a break from the seriously depressing topics I’ve been writing about lately, and in honor of Bastille Day, I offer this tribute to French gangster films. First off, you need the fedora. The gangster accessory de rigueur, it was already iconic by the time Paul Muni popularized the look in Scarface…
by Lisa Lieberman I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness that I should merely be innocent. Imre Kertész, Fatelessness Something akin to survivor's guilt is at the core of Imre Kertész's novel, Fatelessness (1975), a fictionalized account of the year he spent while still a teenager interned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Published during the so-called…
by Holly A. Case Demonstration in Budapest in support of CEU, April 9, 2017 On Tuesday of last week, the Hungarian parliament passed a law that seeks to drive the Central European University, founded in 1991, out of the Hungary. Many articles and op-eds have been written condemning the law, and declarations of support have…
by Lisa Lieberman “Trauma's never overcome,” Melvin Jules Bukiet asserted in The American Scholar. Redemptive works of literary fiction—or “Brooklyn Books of Wonder” (most of the authors he excoriated in the essay, including Alice Sebold, Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers, hailed from the borough)—provide mock encounters with enormity. Wooly mysticism…
by Lisa Lieberman I used to teach a course on French colonialism, from the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century through the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). On the first day of class, we read Jean de Brunhoff's classic children's book, The Story of Babar. De Brunhoff's story can be viewed as “an allegory…
by Lisa Lieberman In the memoir he was writing at the time he died, my friend Avresh described returning to the Czechoslovakian town of Sevlush, his birthplace, in the winter of 1946. He'd left some fifteen years earlier to attend a Jewish gymnasium in a larger city, stayed on to study engineering at the university…
by Lisa Lieberman The opening credits sequence of The 400 Blows (1959) takes us for a drive along the empty streets of Paris on a gray morning in early winter. Bare trees, a glimpse of the weak sun as we make our way toward the Eiffel Tower: a lonely feeling settles over us and never…