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SAVING FACES: Capt. James Rorimer and troops retrieve stolen works stored in Neuschwanstein Castle.
Courtesy Richard Berge/Actual Films |
Jacques Altman tells his story quietly
for the camera. As a young Parisian Jew in 1942, he
was about to be deported to a death camp in Poland when
the Nazis instead transferred him to a new slave-labor
camp at one of the city’s train stations. There
he had to sort plunder arriving by the truckload from
apartments vacated by fleeing or captured Jews—a
job he carried out under the weight of grief over the
death of his parents and five brothers. Panned shots
of old still photos taken at the station illustrate
his narrative: mountains of dishes, paintings, toys,
books.
“One day I recognized my family’s
things,” Altman, now in his late 80s, recalls.
“I saw photos, I saw our furniture. I was in shock.
There were suitcases, too, so I grabbed a suitcase and
filled it with photos. . . . When I was deported to Birkenau we had to leave everything behind. It was
all destroyed. I lost all my family memories.”
Altman’s experiences and those of other survivors
are told in The Rape of Europa, a documentary
made by a group of Stanford film graduates—producers
Richard Berge, ’84, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham
(all MA ’94) and director of photography Jon Shenk,
MA ’95. Soon to be released in theaters and film
festivals and shown on PBS in 2007, the film trains
a new and harsh searchlight on the Hitler regime’s
looting of personal treasures and the cultural patrimony
of nations.
The documentary, five years in the making, takes its
name and basic outline from an award-winning 1994 book
by Lynn H. Nicholas. Her revelations of the Nazis’
large-scale theft of European art, and efforts by the
Allies to preserve it, gripped the four filmmakers.
The book “was filled with one amazing story after
another, and it was so intrinsically visual,”
Newnham says.
The four had worked together on other projects since
graduation (some more intimately than others—Cohen
and Shenk are married) and came together to produce
this project at Actual Films, Cohen and Shenk’s
San Francisco-based company. Mindful of the advanced
ages of the eyewitnesses, they got to work quickly with
interviewing and raising money. The film cost more than
$1 million to make, and was funded by the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts,
and Agon Arts & Entertainment, among others. “We
hope it has a long life,” Cohen says.
Almost from the start, they got lucky with opportunities
to bring Nicholas’s chronicle to life. One backer
alerted them to an impending Christie’s auction
of Picasso’s Buste de femme à la chemise, a recently re-emerged painting that had been torn from
a German museum wall in 1937 as part of an effort to
cleanse the country of what Hitler deemed “degenerate”
modern art. The crew scurried to New York to film the
portrait’s sale for more than $6 million—an
event that serves as The Rape of Europa’s
opening sequence.
Another episode that coincided with filming was the
legal battle between the Austrian government and Maria
Altmann over Gustav Klimt’s portrait of her aunt,
Adele Bloch-Bauer. That painting, appropriated when
the Nazis commandeered the Bloch-Bauer home while occupying
Austria, was one of hundreds of thousands of artworks,
including furniture, sculpture and religious objects,
that Hitler’s people stole from private collections
and state museums from France to Russia. Hanging in
the Austrian National Gallery in Vienna since the war,
the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, along
with four other Klimt paintings, was awarded to Altmann
and her family in January 2006. (The portrait made headlines
again in June when the heirs sold it to cosmetics mogul
Ronald Lauder, reportedly for $135 million, the most
ever paid for a painting.)
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MONUMENTS MAN: Lindsay examines a portrait from the school of Botticelli.
Courtesy Richard Berge/Actual Films |
After the verdict, the production team visited Maria
Altmann in Los Angeles, where the paintings were on
temporary display at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art. For the first time, Maria could see the five works
where she lives—a scene made to order for the
film’s ending.
Luck played a part, but the project took determined
digging via the web, letters, visits to archives and
museums, and the help of onsite research assistants
who combed the historical, official and artistic records
of Poland, France, Italy, Germany, Russia and Washington,
D.C. “They’ve uncovered footage and photos
that no one’s seen for a long time,” says
author Nicholas, who helped with contacts, potential
backers and script critique. “Also, many of the
case histories in the film are not even in the book;
the film team really did their work.”
Archival shots include men packing and trucking away
crates filled with some of the Louvre’s more than
400,000 priceless works of art. They convoyed these
treasures from the museum’s eight miles of galleries
to castles in the French countryside in anticipation
of Luftwaffe bombing raids. Another segment takes the
viewer through a wild descent on subterranean railroad
tracks to the salt mine at Alt Aussee, Austria, where
Hitler stored endless racks of art with the plan of
moving them to his hometown, Linz, where he envisioned
an imperial city.
There’s also the briefing of American bombardiers
prior to the aerial bombing of Florence. With all the
bravado of Gregory Peck in Twelve O’Clock
High, an officer tells his men to avoid hitting
the city’s architectural treasures—monuments
the German army later blew up or ransacked for their
Michelangelos, Botticellis and Raphaels. “I received
the footage without sound from a pilot who responded
to a posting on a veterans’ website,” says
Berge, “and, amazingly, our researcher in D.C.
was able to find it with the sound.”
Some companion film features one of the so-called Monuments
Men—American artists, historians and curators
recruited to the front lines to salvage and protect
monuments and art. It shows Capt. Deane Keller, a Yale
professor, discovering the great Italian paintings stolen
by the Nazis and left in a jail in the Italian Alps.
He transported them back by train to an ecstatic mob
in Florence.
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BIRTHDAY TOKEN: Heinrich Himmler
nabbed a gift for Hitler’s 50th.
Courtesy Richard Berge/Actual Films |
The production team shot on location throughout Europe
and the former Soviet Union, and interviewed in person
a number of surviving Monuments Men, including Kenneth
Lindsay, professor emeritus at Binghamton University
in New York. As a 25-year-old art history graduate and
unranked soldier, he helped locate, sort, identify,
catalogue and return thousands of looted artworks from
his checkpoint in Wiesbaden, Germany.
“These Stanford graduates have made one of the
greatest antiwar films ever produced,” Lindsay
says. “They use art as a vehicle to convey the
greed, ethnic bias and sheer cruelty of the Axis.”
Author Nicholas hopes The Rape of Europa will
become a staple among educational films about World
War II. “These days, for many, the war has been
boiled down to Normandy and Pearl Harbor,” she
says, “but this film puts the entire history in
context and humanizes it by giving it a personal face.
It’s about much more than the fate of artwork.”
Indeed, the film touches on the theme of fate itself.
It explores Hitler’s artistic leanings and his
failure to be admitted to the prestigious Academy of
Fine Arts in Vienna, then introduces Oskar Kokoschka,
who was accepted at the academy and became a well-known
modern painter. Kokoschka used to joke that if Hitler
had been admitted and he had been rejected, he would
have run the world quite differently—leaving the
viewer longing for an alternative history in which a
young man named Adolf fulfills his dreams of glory by
making art, not stealing it.
Looking back on the project, Cohen says, “For
five years we had the privilege of contemplating the
profound necessity of art and culture to the existence
of humanity. It was an epic production that took longer
than the war itself.”
Berge observes, “Although I look forward to the
next project, whatever it may be, I can’t help
thinking that no future film will be able to match our
rich experience with this one.”
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