Today we are celebrating the work of Aviva Kempner, an award-winning documentary filmmaker—who happens to have local family ties—who herself celebrates Jewish culture and history. Like other great documentary filmmakers, Kempner is also an historian, and, in the way that one has to be when you make work about people and moments that have been forgotten or have fallen into the shadows, she’s also one part detective, one part archeologist. Her celebrations are rigorous, they are dramatic, they teach us, they remind us, they affirm or, in some cases, enlarge the community we already have. It’s obvious you can learn a lot about Jewish history from her films: The Partisans of Vilna (1986), The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (1999), Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg (2003), and others. But those same films tell us things about America, and Europe, about baseball and about entertainment media. In Kempner’s work, Jews are part of a very big story. Because. We. Are.
If you don’t know much about documentary—even if you love to see them so much that you will go out to the movies to see them—you probably have little idea how hard it is to make them. All films are hard to make, but the writer and director of a fiction film about baseball doesn’t have to do enormous amounts of research about it, as Kempner has. They can, but they don’t have to. Kempner has thrown herself into extremely diverse fields of expertise in order to tell the stories she has—everything from the Holocaust to Native American rights, from the origins of television to voting rights. This is to say that she knows a lot. Whatever you see in her films is a very carefully crafted story, one that is deep and informative and often surprising. But there’s so much behind that, every single time.
Something else it’s often easy to forget about documentaries is that, every time you see someone talking—every time you see one of those talking heads—there is a filmmaker behind that reflection who knew what questions to ask, how to draw a subject out, how to make that person comfortable enough to talk about things that might be difficult, how the keep things on track. Kempner’s “talking heads” are never disembodied, never soulless—somehow she always manages to let the whole person come through even if the subject at issue is a relatively narrow one.
All of this is to remind us how unbelievably difficult it is to make an important, relevant, good documentary. It is not for the faint of heart, not for the weak, not for those who give up easily. And for being relentless, for caring so much, for her stamina, and for the remarkable films that resulted, Kempner has received awards from the National Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the Broadcast Film Critics Association. She has received a George Peabody Award and had been nominated for an Emmy. This is, by the way, an incomplete list. But it tells you that the Miller Reel Jewish Woman Award is moving into a very crowded neighborhood.
I want to signal what is my own crystallization of Kempner’s work. In Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, the musical refrain of the tune of the Four Questions flits in and out of the picture. It’s a tune most of us know and many of us have sung at some point in our lives. (I personally was loathe to give it up to my younger cousins, but life goes on.) At first, we hear it only when Passover itself, or some other explicitly Jewish cultural practice is seen on the screen. But then, as Kempner moves us through the story of how the first TV sitcom The Goldbergs—and its sui generis creator Gertrude Berg—articulated Jewishness, and a resolute, even gently defiant stance—ON NATIONAL RADIO—in the face of Nazi atrocities and domestic anti-Semitism, that refrain comes back. And it reminds us what this film—and almost of all of Kempner’s films are really about. Those four questions encapsulate the very notion of questioning that is so central to Jewish practice. It is also, not coincidentally in this case, central to documentary practice. Without questioning, and why we question, we’re doomed.
The Miller Reel Jewish Woman Award is funded by the Miller Foundation, which was establish by my grandparents, Avy and Roberta Miller, with the intention that subsequent generations would have the opportunity to support worthy causes. This grant that establishes the Miller Reel Woman Award for a Jewish Woman Filmmaker seems quite in keeping with their values. They had three daughters, and, like all Jewish parents, expected them to be smart and accomplished, and also to do good works. Without any bias at all, I can say that all three made their parents proud. My mother was the first person in her family to go to college, and she became a contemporary art curator in a very traditional art museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, just down the street. She’s always been aware of how difficult it is for women artists, and she and I both feel that it’s even harder for women filmmakers. So the Miller Reel Woman Award recognizes that the excellence we’re going to see tonight is very, very difficult to achieve.
That it’s a Jewish filmmaker’s award gestures back to my grandparents, who were particularly alert to the needs of Israel and the need to sustain Jewish culture. They also understood the importance of contemporary cultural production—art and more. And my grandfather, as an inventor, was always open to new ideas. So this award is our way of acknowledging the values and generosity of Avy and Bobbie, my grandparents. But that it is something we are so happy to do at the Charter Oak Cultural Center points to yet another family connection. As it happens, it was my father, Tony Keller, who, in the early and mid-nineties, set Charter Oak solidly on the course to becoming an institution wholeheartedly committed to celebrating ALL of Hartford’s cultures. This was a daring, unlikely new direction that wasn’t always popular with the dedicated preservationists whose determination had saved this beautiful structure—the first synagogue in Connecticut—from demolition. So this is the literal place where my grandparents’ cultural affections and my father’s drive to serve the whole community have come to combine.
My grandparents would have loved Aviva Kempner’s work. I mean really loved it. My grandmother might even have developed an affection for baseball. They would have loved its inclusiveness, its way of speaking intimately to Jews and convivially to everyone. They would have loved how smart it is, how clear, how emotionally direct, how arresting the images can be. The things that mattered most to my grandparents were love and education. Aviva Kempner’s films educate us, but they also are so clear about specifically Jewish ways of affection. There’s a moment in Hank Greenberg when the great ballplayer is told by a rabbi that it’s okay to play ball on Rosh Hashanah because somewhere in the Talmud there’s something about kids playing in the street on the New Year. Hank plays ball, but on Yom Kippur he goes to shul. What you only find out at the end of the story is that the rabbi declines to tell Greenberg that the kids in the street were Roman. From start to finish that story is about love, and Aviva Kempner tells it masterfully. I know she has lots more stories to tell today, so please join me in welcoming Aviva Kempner.
–Alexandra Keller
