NEW: Video on Demand

Purchase only for Private Use! - Video on Demand -

Finding Pictures

Finding Pictures  –  The Story

„Poetry happens when short circuits of sense occur between words"
Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz, the world-renowned writer and painter and a Polish Jew, experienced the terror of German occupation in the Galician city of Drohobycz in 1941-42. He initially survived by painting murals for the children of the SS officer Felix Landau, on the nursery walls of the villa they had occupied.

Bruno Schulz was shot and killed by the SS on November 19, 1942.

Despite an intensive search after WWII, his murals were not found until February 9, 2001, when the documentary filmmaker Benjamin Geissler discovered the long lost pictures. In May 2001, representatives of Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial removed fragments of these murals from Ukraine, sparking an international controversy.

„Finding Pictures" documents the search, the discovery and sudden disappearance of the Bruno Schulz murals in piecing together the story of one of the most controversial museum acquisitions in recent years. Yad Vashem has claimed the moral right to preserve the works. Ukrainian and Polish officials say the removal was a crime. But what do the Jews from Drohobycz say?

This film enables viewers to follow the director through a meticulously composed mosaic of both known and unpublished testimonies about Bruno Schulz and his last days.

Bruno Schulz was born in 1892 in Drohobycz, a small town in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. He thought and wrote in Polish in Drohobycz and rejected all offers to move, feeling that he could not be creative elsewhere. Located in the N.E. Carpathian foothills in the east Galician oil region, economically and culturally diversified, Drohobycz was one of the most significant centers of Jewish culture in Europe preceding WWII. Most of the Jews there were murdered in the extermination camp Bel¿ec and in the woods of Bronica.

"Finding Pictures" introduces us to Holocaust survivors who knew Schulz and connects today's world to the poetic and fearful visions described in Schulz's works.

^ Top

FINDING PICTURES – Festivals, Screenings, Broadcasts
History of Public Screenings and Awards:

River Film Fest - The World of Josef K., Pisek, CZ  2009

Bruno Schulz Festival, Dublin, IE  2008

National Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, Massachusetts 2007. 

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Capturing the... truth? Changing Strategies in Documentary Cinema
Panel Session „The Filmmaker as Detective“ - Finding Pictures, Thursday, February 10, 2005.

Paideia - The European Institute for Jewish Studies in  Sweden, Stockholm
Polish-Jewish writers and double identity. The authors Bruno Schulz, J. Stykowski and Isaac B. Singer
Screening - Finding Pictures, Polska Institutet, Villagatan 2, Sunday,  February 6, 2005.

TV-Broadcast: MDR, Germany, Mittwoch, 02.02.2005, 23:35

TV-Broadcast: ARD Digital, Germany, - Gedenktag der Opfer des  Nationalsozialismus, Freitag, 28.01.2005, 23:30

Fundacja Judaica - Centrum Kultury Żydowskiej - The Judaica  Foundation - Center for Jewish Culture, Krakow, Poland. 
Jointly organized with the Italian Culture Institute in  Cracow.
Literature and  Remembrance  - Screening - Finding Pictures – Introduction by  Prof. Jerzy Jarzębski, 19.01.2005

Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, 71 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris, France,  7.11.2004

TV-Broadcast:  TVP1, Poland  5.+12.11.2004

Jewish Eye World Jewish Film Festival, Tel Aviv, Israel, 29.10.2004 – in competition

TV-Broadcast: MDR, Germany, Sunday, 29.09.2004, 23:35

Festival „Der neue Heimatfilm” #17, Freistadt, Austria  (PDF) 25.-29.8.2004
AUDIENCE AWARD - PUBLIKUMSPREIS Festival „Der neue Heimatfilm” for BILDER FINDEN

9. International Literature Festival Leukerbad, Switzerland 2.+3.7.2004

Filmkunstfest Schwerin, Deutschland 9.5.2004

Warsaw Int. Jewish Film Festival,18.4.2004 - 27.4.2004
PHOENIX AWARD for FINDING PICTURES

32nd Belgrade International Film Festival FEST, 27.2.2004 - 07.3.2004

First Broadcast by: ARTE, 23.02.04 - 22:20

Hamburg, Kino 3001, 29. Jan. – 4. Feb. 2004

Academy of Arts, Berlin, 25. Jan. 2004
And Panel with: Benjamin Geissler, Jerzy Jarzebski (Prof. Polish Literature, Bruno Schulz-Biograpfer, Kraków, Poland), Krzysztof Czyzewski (President Borderland Foundation, Sejny, Poland), Frank Golczewski (Professor for East-Europaen Studies, Hamburg), Siegfried Zielinski (Member of the Academy of Arts, Prof. at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne)

Toronto, Beth Tzedec Synagoge / Goethe Institut, Canada, Dec. 2003

Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, Nov. 2003

Filmclub L'viv University, Ukraine, Nov. 2003

Uniwersytet Maria Curie-Skldowska, Lublin, Poland, Nov. 2003

MOLODIST  Kyiv International Film Festival 2003
Ukrainian Premiere, Special Event

Leipzig, DOK Festival for Documentary and Animated Films  2003
German Premiere, Special Event

AFO 2003 International Film Festival, Czech Premiere
The AFO Grand Prix 2003 for "Finding Pictures" - Velká cena AFO 2003, Bilder Finden (Hledání obrazu) (PDF)

Locarno Film Festival 2003 Switzerland Premiere
Semaine de la Critique - 14. édition

Cracow Film Festival 2003 Polish Premiere, Opening film
KINO: Co sie wydarzylo w Drohobyczu Bilder finden (Odnalezc obrazy). Tadeusz Lubelski (Maj 2003, 5/432)

Montreal Jewish Film Festival   2003  Canadian Premiere FINDING PICTURES

New York,  World Premiere: FINDING PICTURES, November 19, 2002
Center for Jewish History , 15 West 16th Street, New York City, 10011
presented by the Center for Jewish History with the YIVO Institute for Research and the Jewish Heritage Project, in association with Goethe-Institut - New York, the Polish Cultural Institute, New York, the Institute for the Humanities at New York University, and PEN American Center.

^ Top

International Reviews / Critics – Index

New York Times –  Front Page – Artwork by Holocaust Victim Is Focus of Dispute

New York Times – Arts – World Premiere –
In Search of a Creative Light the Nazis Tried to Blot Out

TIME Magazine – Whose Art Is It Anyway?

KINO – What happened in Drohobych –  43rd Cracow Film Festival, Poland

Corriere del Ticino - 56th Locarno International Film Festival

Who Owns Bruno Schulz? – by Benjamin Paloff - Boston Review

filmfestivals.com: JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL IN WARSAW - by Alex Deleon-Pevny

Reviews / Critics in German

^ Top

The New York Times , June 20, 2001 – Front-Page

Artwork by Holocaust Victim Is Focus of Dispute

By CELESTINE BOHLEN

International Reviews / Critics – Index                              ^ Top

A bitter international scandal has erupted in a city in Ukraine, about 30 miles from the Polish border, where last month workers from Yad Vashem, Israel’s main Holocaust museum, chiseled five fragments from a newly discovered series of wall paintings. They are the last known work of Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jewish writer, artist and Holocaust victim.

With that single act, whose legality is disputed, Yad Vashem, the most august memorial to Jewish victims of Nazi slaughter, has unleashed a rumble of protests through a part of Europe that still feels battered and bruised by a vicious and violent century.

The Schulz murals, illustrations of Grimm fairy tales that decorated the nursery of a Gestapo officer’s son, have been caught in the throes of that history. According to Yad Vashem, the fragments in its possession, which depict a princess, a horse-drawn carriage and several shadowy figures, including two dwarfs, are now being restored. Plans call for them to be put on display at Yad Vashem’s new historical museum in Jerusalem, which is to open in 2004.

Schulz, an evocative writer whose stylized drawings also have a cult following, painted the murals under duress. He was working on them when he was shot to death on Nov. 19, 1942, in Nazi-occupied Drogobych (pronounced droh-HOH-bich), or Drohobycz, as it had been known between the wars, when it was part of Poland.

They were found last winter by Benjamin Geissler, a German filmmaker, in an apartment inside the villa once occupied by Franz Landau, the Gestapo officer who demanded them. Mr. Geissler, 37, had come to research a film on Schulz, a tragic figure who, it was once said, was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died as a Jew.

In written statements, representatives of Yad Vashem defended the removal of the fragments. They said they had approval from local authorities in Drogobych, a point that the authorities vehemently dispute.

But the crux of Yad Vashem’s argument refers to a higher claim to property left by Jewish Holocaust victims, particularly in Poland, where the prewar Jewish community of 3.5 million has now dwindled to several thousand.

„Most of the Holocaust survivors live in Israel, but the remnants of the vibrant Jewish life, and of the suffering of the victims and the survivors

are scattered throughout Europe,’’ wrote Lisa Davidson, an assistant spokeswoman for the museum.

„Therefore we have the moral right to those remnants.’’ This argument has been fiercely disputed in Poland, where Schulz is seen first and foremost as a Polish writer. His luminous, sensuous style, in books like „The Street of Crocodiles‘‘ (originally titled „Cinnamon Shops’’) and „The Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,’’ has earned him a faithful following inside and outside Poland.

When Jerzy Ficowski, a Warsaw based author and editor who is Poland‘s leading expert on Schulz, heard that Yad Vashem had taken the fragments, he dismissed it as an absurd impossibility.

„Alas, after a few days I had to retract my denials because Yad Vashem itself acknowledged what it considers to be an act of justice, and what I consider a crime,’’ he said through a Polish translator.

Ms. Davidson of Yad Vashem said that Drogobych officials had told the museum’s representatives that the disposition of the wall paintings was up to the Kaluzhni family, owners of the apartment where they had been found. She also said that the same officials said that the city had final authority over the murals.

But Nikola Mykhac, head of the city’s cultural affairs department, said in a telephone interview that no one from the city administration had given written or oral permission for removal or export of the fragments.

„There was no talk of taking away these effects,’’ he said. „We cannot even imagine how they could have removed them from a technical point of view.’’ Mr. Mykhac said he only helped arrange an initial viewing of the wall paintings by the Yad Vashem representatives.

Once the removal, which took place from May 19 to May 21, was discovered, the event become frontpage news in Poland. Polish officials

issued a statement condemning the action, which they said bordered on vandalism, and cultural commentators delved into the tricky question of whether Schulz was a Jewish author writing in Polish or a Polish author of Jewish origin.

Ukraine’s claim to Schulz, which is based purely on geography, is more accidental. But still, Drogobych, once a bustling multicultural center in Galicia, an Austro-Hungarian province, was where Schulz spent his first and final years. (He went to university in Vienna, where his family fled just before World War I.) „This town and land became a self-sufficient microcosm, ‘‘ he wrote in „The Republic of Dreams,’’ an essay.

„This was his small homeland, the only world where he could breathe and work, as he himself has said,’’ Mr. Ficowski said. „He rejected all offers to move elsewhere, to Warsaw or wherever, because he was not able to create anywhere but Drogobycz.

Thus his artwork was not only chopped up, and a part of it taken away; it was also wrenched from its most important context.’’

Perhaps the most bitter reaction has come from Drogobych’s tiny Jewish community, made up of fewer than 400 Jews.

Dora Katznelson, 80, vice president of the Reform Jewish congregation in Drogobych, was so infuriated that she sent a letter to the Israeli government, which was later published in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

„Not just Jews and Poles,’’ Ms. Katznelson wrote, „but also Ukrainians who read every day in Ukrainian newspapers about the barbarous theft of Schulz’s paintings, cry in wonder, Yad Vashem? It’s impossible.‘‘

Born in Bialystok, in Poland, Ms. Katznelson has spent 40 years in Drogobych and said she had once seen firsthand the city administration ‘s indifference to the legacy of the Jewish community. She was present in 1992 when a top city official declined to accept a monument to Schulz sent by Israel on the 50^th anniversary of his death, arguing that residents would criticize him for raising a monument to „a stranger,’’ even though Schulz was a native son.

Anti-Semitism, which has deep roots in the region, has periodically erupted into violence, most virulently during the Nazi occupation. The years under Soviet rule were marked by another kind of repression.

In Israel some have suggested that this history of intolerance was reason enough to remove the wall fragments to Yad Vashem. „Who cares about them in Drogobych?’’ scoffed Yehuda Bauer, a former official at Yad Vashem who was quoted in Gazeta Wyborcza on June 1.

Still, Ms. Katznelson is convinced  that Drogobych is the right place for a memorial to Schulz. „These were the last paintings of a great Polish Jewish artist, and as his last creation, it should stay here,’’ she said in an interview.

Even when they were thought to be lost, the murals have been an integral part of Schulz’s story. It was well known that he had been commanded by Landau to decorate the walls of his son’s nursery in a villa that had itself been taken from a Jewish family.

For 60 years the murals – not frescoes, since they were not painted in fresh plaster but in a compound made from cheese Ñ went undetected in the Villa Landau, as the building came to be known. It had been divided into five apartments after Drohobych became part of the Soviet Ukraine after World War II.

It was only last February, when Benjamin Geissler and his father, Christian Geissler, arrived to research their film, that a close inspection was finally made of the tiny pantry off the kitchen in the apartment of Nikolai Kaluzhni, a former Communist Party clerk, and his wife, Nadezhda.

There, behind the onions and garlic and beneath a coat of rose-colored paint, the Geisslers found the faint outline of Schulz’s sketches. Later Polish and Ukrainian experts came to the apartment, cleaned some parts of the walls and confirmed that the work was Schulz’s.

Afterward, Benjamin Geissler began a campaign to raise money to turn the Villa Landau into a museum to Schulz and to resettle the current tenants. Anticipating the danger of looters, he also wrote to the Ukrainian Culture Ministry, asking for guards at the site.

He received no response. Later, when he went to Jerusalem to interview survivors of the Drogobych ghetto, officials at Yad Vashem gave him no indication of their plans, he said.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Geissler said, he received a letter from Mr. Kaluzhni, dated May 17, saying that a group from Israel was ready to pay $3,000 for the murals, which, according to the city, had become his property through the process of privatization.

In the letter Mr. Kaluzhni said he had refused the offer. What happened next is unclear, but two days later, the crew from Yad Vashem, led by a Ukrainian immigrant to Israel, arrived.

All together, five fragments – the three large sketches, each roughly one-and-a-half square feet, and two smaller patches – were removed after gauze was taped on the wall to protect the surface. The crew applied gauze to another fragment but left it behind. How the fragments were taken out of the country is not clear: under laws from the Soviet era, export of cultural property created before World War II requires approval from the  Ukrainian Ministry of Culture.

According to diplomats from both countries, the Ukrainian and the Polish governments have filed formal inquiries with the Israeli government.

But so far, they said, they have received no response.

Presumably, much more of the original murals remains in the apartment, but it is uncertain how or when the work will be uncovered.

„The picture is destroyed,’’ Mr. Geissler said in a telephone interview from Hamburg, „and nobody will know the whole picture. For me, it is very tragic to see Bruno Schulz only as a Jewish victim or only as a Polish writer. He is simply Bruno Schulz, and this is a violent postmortem attack against him.

International Reviews / Critics – Index                              ^ Top

The New York Times , November 18, 2002 – Arts

In Search of a Creative Light the Nazis Tried to Blot Out

By CELESTINE BOHLEN

International Reviews / Critics – Index                              ^ Top

So much about the life of Bruno Schulz, the elusive Jewish writer and artist from Poland, was lost or destroyed in the years after a Gestapo officer shot him dead in the street in 1942 that it is something of a miracle that even fragments have survived at all.

Schulz wrote several thousand letters, of which only about 150 are preserved. Most of his artwork disappeared after it was consigned by Schulz to an unidentified friend for safekeeping. The manuscript of his unfinished novel, "Messiah," has never surfaced, despite several intriguing leads followed by Jerzy Ficowski, a Polish poet and the leading authority on Schulz.

Even the fragments of a legendary wall painting, done by Schulz under Nazi duress and discovered in February 2001, have been dispersed. In May 2001 a crew from Israel chiseled five patches off the wall of a pantry in the Ukrainian city of Drohobych and took them to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

The deed was done without public debate or scrutiny, but a furious international debate erupted soon after over where the pieces of Schulz's shattered legacy would best be honored. The Ukrainian government eventually filed a protest, and in Drohobych, or Drohobycz as it was known between the wars, local officials who approved the illegal removal of the works were thrown out at the last elections.

Since then more patches have been found and transferred to a Ukrainian museum.

In New York the debate picks up again tomorrow at the Center for Jewish History, where a documentary by the German filmmaker who discovered the wall paintings is being presented on the 60th anniversary of Schulz's murder, along with two recently translated books, one by Mr. Ficowski.

The opening scene of the film, "Finding Pictures," sets the theme. "We are looking for the pictures, the lost pictures of Bruno Schulz," says Christian Geissler in an interview with one of the few Jewish survivors of the slaughter at Drohobych. Benjamin Geissler, Christian Geissler's son, wrote and directed the film.

The film cuts from the search to the discovery, from the past to the present, from the story of Felix Landau, the Nazi officer who put Schulz to work painting murals and other pictures for him, to a transcontinental dialogue about the hasty removal of the wall fragments, which became known as filming was under way.

The documentary also includes one more find in the continuing pursuit of Schulz's legacy: a wooden box with an inlaid picture of a young girl riding a horse, which in the film is declared by a visibly moved Mr. Ficowski definitely to be the work of Schulz. It was found by Benjamin Geissler in the possession of Landau's son, now living in Vienna, and was given by Mr. Geissler to Schulz's nephew, now living in Cologne.

Filmed in six countries with interviews done in various languages of the Jewish diaspora, the film is a montage without a narrating voice, punctuated with readings from Schulz's published works.

"In the film, I have put together fragments and associations in the style of Schulz — in his phrase, `the crosstalk of birds' — which means that the viewers have to make up their opinion of what they see," said Mr. Geissler, who has come to New York from Hamburg for the world premiere of "Finding Pictures."

The filmmaker argues that the drawings found in what had once been the nursery of the Landau children are not simply renderings of Grimm fairy tales, as many believed. He points out that the face of a red-coated coachman resembles that of Schulz himself and that the face of the queen — one of the fragments taken to Israel — is remarkably similar to that of Landau's mistress.

Furthermore, he argues, the faint remains of a painting of a forest, found above the door of the pantry-nursery, could well be a haunted reference to Bronica, the site of a mass grave dug for Jews and by Jews outside Drohobych.

"The double sense of the picture is that he tells the real story of what is going on, but as a fairy tale," Mr. Geissler said. "He knew then that every day of those days could be the last day of his life. When you are an artist, you want to leave a message."

The forsaken city of Drohobych itself is one of the characters of the film. Once a thriving town in the Austro-Hungarian region of Galicia, Drohobych changed names and countries after World War II and turned into a drab, dismal outpost of the Soviet empire.

Schulz's attachment to Drohobych was well known and, Mr. Ficowski says, was a source of anguish for his literary friends in Warsaw, who as it happened had arranged for his escape on Nov. 19, 1942 — a day known as Black Thursday, when Schulz and 264 other Jews were killed in the streets during a murderous outburst by the Nazi occupiers.

In his book "Regions of the Great Heresy" (W. W. Norton), a biographical sketch now updated with an account of the recovery and, in his view, loss of the Drohobych wall paintings, Mr. Ficowski recounts Schulz's poignant and ultimately tragic attachment to his hometown.

"Only Drohobycz and its environs inspired Schulz to recreate the charm of myths encountered in childhood," Mr. Ficowski wrote in the book, which is being presented in tomorrow's event at the center. He added: "For Schulz, drawing upon his imagination was at the same time a process of drawing upon memory — not what he termed `biographical' memory, whose lack he felt in himself — but an emotional `memory of climates.' "

In the other new book, "Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories" (Penguin), a collection of 13 tales from the Holocaust by the Polish-American writer Henryk Grynberg, Schulz's death is recalled by one of the few survivors of the Nazi slaughter: another testimony to a life that, remarkably after 60 years, continues to be freshly remembered.

As the tale of the Drohobych wall paintings proves, even the process of putting together the fragments of that memory is still painful, but the resulting debate has added new life to Schulz's reputation. "What is important now," Mr. Geissler said, "is that people speak of Schulz."

International Reviews / Critics – Index                              ^ Top

KINO 5/2003 - Poland

Tel.: +49 - 40 - 551 66 82

info(at)benjamingeissler.de

Distribution in 35 mm - English / German Version:

Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin

info(at)kinemathek.de

^ Top