My True Story: Memoir, Documentary, and The Flat

Personal documentary films are the analogue to literary memoirs: they're interesting and successful because of the material they convey and not necessarily because of any great artfulness or style or originality; in fact, style may be a disadvantage in both personal documentary and memoir: we want the text of the film to be essentially transparent so that we can peer right through it to the essential facts about the life of the author or director. Memoirs have been a ridiculously popular literary form; they demand less of the writer, in my opinion, and they at times create a false expectation: very few writers have more than one memoir "in them," but the success of one pushes writers to return again and again to the same well, until it runs dry. There are many different types of documentary film, some in which the life of the filmmaker plays no role at all - but there have been a # of these memoir films in the past few years (one about a Long Island family in which filmmaker's dad turns out to be a pedophile; one about another LI, I think, family in which the mother had led a long and secret fantasy life about her therapist - to recall two), and last night we saw an Israeli film, The Flat, which is a really good film and a good example of this subgenre: the filmmaker, Aron Goldfinger, begins to document the family's task of stripping down the apartment left by the death of his 98-year-old grandmother. It's not clear why he thought that would make an interesting film; probably he's one of those guys that film everything, hoping to find nuggets? Or maybe he suspected what they would find: a stack of virulent Nazi newsletters from the 1930s, and following strands he learns that his cultured, peaceful, German-Jewish grandparents who'd been in Israel since about 1940 were close friends with a high-ranking Nazi official, whom they'd actually accompanied on a tour of then-Palestine (oddly, Nazis and Zionists in the 30s share a hope that Jews would resettle there) - this friendship continuing for years after the war. What's amazing in the film is the extent of the denial: nobody in Goldfinger's family wants to accept this fact, they all "knew nothing" about the grandparents/parents; G. finds the daughter of the Nazi, von Mildenstein, and meets with her in Germany where she, too, denies everything: her father was never a Nazi, he was defamed, etc. It's amazing and appalling that these people could carry on what they considered a friendship, and it's even harder to fathom how a man like von Mildenstein, who after the war worked for Coca-Cola!, could reconcile the horrors of his life with his supposed friendship with these people - self-hating Jews, no doubt, and collaborators, whether they knew it or not.