The Flat | B
The
late Gerda Tuchler’s Tel-Aviv apartment is laden with a long lifetime of
knick-knacks and ephemera, all the ordinary tea cups, porcelain figurines and
glassware that are the trademark of elderly ladies everywhere. One closet
contains a vast assortment of fancy opera gloves. Parts of her large surviving
clan shuffle through to sort out the housecoats and end tables, and giggle at
musty artifacts like her intact fox stoles, complete with shriveled little
paws. Most of the family is too far away or to busy living to deal with the
clutter, and only grandson Arnon Goldfinger has the interest and fortitude to
sift through the mountains of books, photo albums and letters left behind.
Among
those artifacts, is a true curiosity; a newspaper article depicting
high-ranking Nazi officer Leopold Van Mildenstien’s pre-war propaganda tour of
Palestine, accompanied by his wife and by the noted Zionists Kurt and Gerda
Tuchler. Weirdly, the trip and accompanying media coverage was intended to
encourage Jews to return to the Holy Land, advice the Tuchlers wisely took
themselves, becoming early immigrants to the future Israel. What’s even more
shocking is evidence that the couples not only stayed in touch, but also
maintained a close friendship long after the war, a fact that eluded daughter
Hannah, Arnon’s mother. In fact much of her parents past was a total mystery to
the blunt and forward-looking Hannah, who was disinclined to probe deeper until
pushed by her son. As the documentarian and his mother travel to Germany to
interview surviving family on both sides, revelations continue to mount, some
deeply tragic, some strange, but all expanding the mystery.
The
Flat is
a film about secrets and unresolved questions, some of which must extend to the
filmmaker himself. Surely some of this has been re-created or pre-arranged. Who
would just randomly bring a camera crew to the clean up of their grandparent’s
home?
As
fascinating as the subject matter is, the look of the film is oppressively
drab, while Arnon himself remains a strangely dispassionate narrator, his
journey more intellectual than emotional. While Goldfinger does not fully
connect us with his family’s plight, his film does open up the fascinating
prospect that discovering our own unexplored histories may begin with a peek
into that dusty attic we’ve been ignoring.
This article appears in Nov 14-20, 2012.