סיפור הגולם Tale of the Golem

In 2016, bironic requested Helene Wecker's novel The Golem and the Jinni for Festivids and shortly after, ghost_lingering messaged me saying that she was inspired by the request, but needed help figuring out an appropriate vidsong. I instantly sent her twelve suggestions and told her there were more where that came from. I also started thinking about how I might make my own The Golem and the Jinni vid. But as it happened, neither ghost_lingering nor I managed a vid that year. Or any of the subsequent years that bironic requested the fandom.

Last year bironic agreed to make me a vid of my choice after winning a charity raffle, ultimately resulting in an amazing Haim vid. But one of my suggestions when we were bandying ideas around was that we could collaboratively try to figure out how to make that The Golem and the Jinni vid. We eventually agreed to put that idea off until later but to try to come back to it.

And then this year it finally happened, I matched on bironic for Festivids and The Golem and the Jinni was our only fandom match. And I almost instantly regretted offering it, in spite of desperately wanting to figure out how to vid it. Because I had no idea what a vid would look like. I had no idea how to start.

But, you know, you start wherever you can start and then you figure out the rest. bironic's request emphasized the moody atmospheric turn of the century New York of the novel, and, look, I can do that. I grabbed my stack of films about the early 20th century Jewish Lower East Side- Hester Street, Ragtime, Uncle Moses, American Matchmaker, and more, and started seeing what i could do with that. It got me a little of the way to what I needed. I started researching and found a bunch more movies featuring the time period, Jewish or not- The Godfather Part II, Once Upon a Time in America, The Immigrant, Yentl, Winter's Tale, and those continued to fill in the shape of a vid about coming to America at the turn of the century and navigating New York City. But that wasn't enough. I needed to tell a story, ideally one that was consonant with the book. I didn't know what to do. Sometimes when you vid, you start with a vision in your head of what the vid looks like, and you're just working to translation that vision in your head into an actual vid, but this time I didn't have enough to go on.

I grabbed some Golem movies and lucked into most of a solution. I threw some shots from the 1920 Golem film onto the timeline and because of its squarish aspect ratio it didn't fill the screen. But I liked how it looked, and I realized that by being more intentional about the split-screening I could solve a lot of my problems, because the limited source and the leaps I was asking of my viewer meant that the Kuleshov effect alone was going to struggle to be as narratively clear as I wanted. Multiple shots on the screen at the same kind create a kind of implicature that can substitute for one of the most important techniques of the fannish vidder: Relying on shared understanding with the viewers of what clips mean. It was such an incredible lightbulb moment for me.

At the same time, I started thinking about if there were any texts I wanted to use in the vid, either spoken or sung or displayed. I knew almost immediately that John Zorn's instrumental "Shabbos Noir" was the right song to create the mood I wanted, but I also know that instrumental vids can be a hard sell narratively. [Of course, "Shabbos Noir" was also one of the songs I shared with bironic as a suggestion for the Golem vid we might make together, so anonymity was nearly entirely out the window from square one. Not that I think a klez-jazz vid in Hebrew to a book about a Golem was likely to be made by anyone but me.]

As I thought about the texts, the two main things I focused on were the text of the novel, and Jewish scriptural texts. I wanted the vid to be anchored in both, because I wanted to tell a profoundly Jewish story the way Wecker does. I keyed in on a few key scenes from the book that speak to who Chava is- most critically, the scene where Rotfeld requests certain personality traits from his Golem wife-to-be:

"Give her curiosity and intelligence. I can't stand a silly woman. Oh, and make her proper. Not...lascivious. A gentleman's wife."

These do in fact seem to be some of Chava's principal traits, and it is a fascinating bind it puts her in. Is she curious and intelligent because she chose to be, or because her creator made her that way? Chava's resistance against those strictures, and her self-discovery of what it means to live both within and without them, is what makes the novel so moving. And so I also looked at several scriptural texts that explore similar questions, qua the Psalmist's relationship with his Creator. In particular, Psalm 139 is notable not just because it is about God's knoweldge of our inner selves and how we live with it, but because it's the only place in scripture that the word Golem appears.

Your eyes saw my unformed limbs;
they were all recorded in Your book;
in due time they were formed,
to the very last one of them.

Golem means 'unformed bodily materials', this is where the misleading translation bironic got comes from that renders my vid's title as "The story of the cocoon". In modern Hebrew, Golem means cocoon, because it is an unformed body whence comes a new life form. The idea of Golem as an animated construct comes from a Midrashic explanation of the creation of humans that breaks up the process described in Genesis into a more discrete process, where Golem is one of the sub-steps from dust to man. A Golem is an intermediate step in creation. Sorry, none of this is really directly relevant to my vid process, except that it sort of is. Wecker doesn't really go deep into the mechanics of what a Golem is and how they are made in her book, but nonetheless the book is solidly grounded in this mythos and I wanted to reflect on it and draw it out more explicitly in some ways.

For a little while, I considered vidding a sung version of Psalm 139, I think it is a really interesting text to think about Chava through, and I auditioned a bunch of versions on Youtube. But I really wanted to use "Shabbos Noir" so I shifted to using written text. The split screening dovetailed nicely with this, since I was setting up my screen as multiple zones with different designated purposes, it was easy to pull some space at the bottom for featuring texts. I could have used English texts. I have a muted track on my timeline with the English texts. But I decided against it. Not because of authenticity- many of the texts I used were originally English texts! My goal was deliberate obscurantism. Kabbalah is about the closely guarded secrets of Creation, there is something in Wecker's story that is deliberately mysterious and I wanted to capture that feeling. Not everyone should be able to just watch my vid and completely understand it. The texts are bonus thematic developments that those in the know will recognize and deepen their understanding of the vid, not something necessary to the easy access to the vid's basic meaning. ghost_lingering at some point argued that I should move my texts into the video window and get rid of the black space at the bottom, because my setup was requiring the eye to be in too many places at once. I told her that was kind of the point.

So I found the Hebrew translation of the novel and the translation of the passage about Chava's attributes was one of the texts I used. Also immediate were Tehillim 139, as I mentioned, and Mishlei 31, which is the most central Jewish text on the virtues of femininity.

She rises while it is still night,
And supplies provisions for her household,

Her clothing is linen and purple.

She girds herself with strength,
And performs her tasks with vigor.



Yes, there's definitely some good Chava stuff in Mishlei 31. Later, as I assembled the coming to America section of the vid, I found myself wanting more text, and the obvious thought was Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus", the definitive poem of the American (and particular American Jewish) immigration experience, firstly, but secondly a poem about another woman-construct. The parallels between Lady Liberty and Chava are apparent.

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles....

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

So much good resonance there. Fortunately, "The New Colossus" was translated into many languages, including Hebrew, by Karen Alkalay-Gut for the New Colossus Translation Project.

The last piece of text I added was another quote from the novel, this one about the ambiguous dangers of Chava.

"She’ll protect you without thinking,
and she’ll harm others to do it."


I didn't have a visual language to tell this story precisely, how Chava is constantly holding back an impulse to protect, even if it hurts others. But I hint at it allusively in the ending, with some shots suggesting Chava running to Central Park, to the Angel of the Waters, to save Ahmed from his own self-destruction. I don't know if people recognized the Angel of the Waters specifically enough to get that suggestion, nobody's mentioned it. Also some people seemed to think the lamp at the end represents Ahmed, when in reality it sort of represents Ahmed but mostly actually represents Schaalman, trapped in the vessel as Chava's victory.

There's an interesting motif throughout the novel of not just creation, but creation and destruction. Chava was brought into being by the Kabbalah of Rabbi Schaalman, and almost brought out of existence by the Kabbalah of R' Meyer, as invoked again by Rabbi Schaalman. And this idea recurs, most memorably to me in Chava sewing her clothing and then unsewing and resewing it to fill her quiet sleepless nights with activity. It's such a fascinating image, and of course it recurs again when Ahmed tries to take his life in the Angel of the Waters and is restored to life by Chava. That sense of creation and destruction, action and inversion, is the powerful cycle of life in imitation of Creation that animates the story and makes it feel so authentically Jewish. (Other images and narrative motifs make it feel equally Arab, I should say, but those were not my focus in this vid.)

As these conceptual ideas took shape, I needed more source to fill it out. For more New York City imagery I found the shows The Gilded Age and especially The Alienist, which do not feature Jews dancing but do capture some of the sense of that turn of the century New York City. I also used several Library of Congress archival films from the early 20th century New York. For more of Chava and her life, I started wandering youtube ASMR videos of people making dough and sewing and walking. Because of the visual structure of split screens I'd built, I had a natural way to fit that source in with my filmic source. It was really neat the way you could set a video of a woman walking down a street alone next to videos of people walking the bustling streets of the Lower East Side and create a suggestion of relation, that Chava's loneliness is set against the crowds and their uncontrolled desires.

ghost_lingering noted that there were some problems with the clarity of that source compared to some of very old, dirty sources, which I ultimately addressed by using some filters in Resolve to dirty up all the source and make it all more similar. In general as I made the clips black and white I was very grateful for the power of DVR's color correction tools. This is probably the vid where I have most drastically altered all of my source to appear in the vid, which is a really satisfying thing to do as a fan creator.


סיפור הגולם (6 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Chava (The Golem and the Jinni)
Additional Tags: Fanvids
Summary:

.גלמי  ראו עיניך ועל־ספרך כלם יכתבו ימים יצרו ולא אחד בהם

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