FESTIVAL SCREENINGS
WORLD PREMIERE Jerusalem International Jewish Film Festival 2008
Set in a Galician shtetl before World War I, this musical comedy is rich with itinerant performers and star-crossed lovers. Negotiating the romantic rapids are a lonely jester, a circus performer, and Esther, the shoemaker's daughter, whose poor father tries to marry her into a prominent family. The intrigue climaxes with a Purim shpil (Purim play) and its parade of costumes, buffoonery, and music.
Directors Joseph Green (Yiddle with His Fiddle, Mamele, and A Letter to Mother, previously restored by NCJF) and Jan Nowina-Przybylski filmed on location on a farm near Warsaw and in Kazimierz. The film’s lively circus and vaudeville music and set pieces offer a taste of Warsaw’s then-thriving Yiddish revues and cabarets. Green, who had emigrated from Poland to America in 1924, returned to Poland with the American Yiddish theater stars (and then-married couple) Miriam Kressyn and Hymie Jacobson for the production. Many of the film’s Polish-Jewish crew and actors perished during the Holocaust. The film premiered in Warsaw in September 1937 and opened in New York City three months later at the Cameo Theater.
Another important historical note: In 1941, the Nazis appropriated a segment from the Purim play scene of The Jester for use in their notorious antisemitic propaganda film Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew).
NCJF’s 35mm restoration of The Jester involved an expensive and labor-intensive process accomplished, under NCJF’s direction, by Cinema Arts, Inc, NCJF’s primary lab for over thirty years. Restoration was achieved using two original 1937 nitrate prints of the film, one of which contained six color toned scenes. The color toned sections—four in sepia and two in blue—total 27 minutes of the film, or one third of The Jester’s running time. Color toning—employed for creating mood and enhancing narrative—was often utilized for silent films, it was, however, extremely rare for sound films especially for independent productions. Because there are no subtitles on the original prints, it was possible for NCJF to create a completely new subtitle track. A new English translation was commissioned and a separate subtitle track was prepared, allowing for newly preserved materials to be archived in their original form.
Joseph Green, the producer/director and owner of the film donated The Jester with all rights to The National Center for Jewish Film in 1989. In recent years, only inferior and incomplete copies of the film have been available in poor quality video.
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
– Hankus Netsky, Director, Klezmer Conservatory Band
The National Center For Jewish Film
Brandeis University, Lown 102, MS053, Waltham MA 02454
P: (781) 899 7044, F: (781) 736 2070
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