Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Aviva Kempner

A documentary about the life and radio/television career of Gertrude Berg, creator and star of shows featuring the eponymous Molly Goldberg. Though we are not the film's target audience, there's much to like about this quirky retelling of one of broadcast entertainment's early successes.  Interweaving photographs, interviews, footage from Berg's television show, as well as unrelated movies, the film fills in a forgotten gap in the early days of radio and television serials. The film's narrative arc peaks when her co-star, Philip Loeb, is blacklisted and forced off the show, thereby explaining both the eventual demise of her show and its loss to the nation's collective cultural memory.  

Her shows captured the near-mythic story of a middle-class (recent) immigrant family living in a closely knit community of a Bronx tenement, where windows facing the airshaft served as the primary conduit for gossip, advice, and care.  By depicting Jewish traditions and showing Jewish families as patriotic Americans, she helped make East European Jews appear less threatening and more in line with mainstream values. 

In making the case for restoring Berg to the pantheon of broadcast pioneers, the documentary sometimes resorts to hyperbole, making me in retrospect suspicious of what seemed to be otherwise credible claims for her importance.   

I got the feeling that Kempner had a difficult time omitting anyone who'd agreed to be interviewed on camera. Hence the film's repetitive nature and tangents that didn't lead anywhere. Kempner probably hoped to bring her audience closer to Berg's world by using contemporaneous films to illustrate the condition of the turn-of-the-century NYC immigrant. Instead, the effect was to add a layer of unnecessary confusion, making viewers never certain if we were watching authentic or fictive images.  

For anyone interested in early broadcast history OR whose relatives grew up in the NYC boroughs. Recommend with caveats.    

Unmistaken Child, Nati Baratz

For a gentle two hours, we watch as Tenzin Zopa, a Tibetan monk, searches in the valleys of Nepal and Tibet for the reincarnation of his master, Geshe Lama Konchog. In an apt symmetry, Tenzin returns to the valleys where Lama Konchog often retreated, to the same village of his birth, from where the master had once taken the young Tenzin. So the master becomes the child, the child the master.

There is no omniscient narrator, only Tenzin at the beginning recounting his feelings of depair at the death of Geshe La. Thereafter, the viewer is an eavesdropper on the very intimate project of locating and identifying his beloved master. The film's most joyful scenes feature Tenzin playing with the child, clearing demonstrating his deep devotion to the master.

Not surprisingly the most visually "authentic" moments are in the mountain villages, accessible only by foot. Except for the occasional Nike shirt or modern gadget, these peoples live in ways that probably have not changed much in the past century. Equally "authentic" are the scenes in the Buddhist temples. Inside the monks' quarters, however, it's like a shrine to Walmart consumerism, not in the quantity of goods--though there's more than I'd expect--but in the quality of the goods: the same shoddily made stuff found at discount retailers in the west.

Though the cinematographer had great vistas, mysterious interiors, and fascinating faces as his subject, the quality of the film was little better than a home video.

Recommend.

Grove Street Cemetery: City of the Dead, City of the Living, Karyl Evans

A documentary on the oldest planned cemetary in the United States, it includes a couple of cameo performances by a perky Southern blonde.

Recommend for history buffs.