Number Our Days

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Movie
German title Number Our Days
Original title Number Our Days
Country of production United States
Publishing year 1976
length 28 minutes
Rod
Director Lynne Littman
script Lynne Littman,
Barbara Myerhoff
production Loring d'Usseau ,
Lynne Littman,
Barbara Myerhoff
camera Neil Reichline
cut Lewis Teague

Number Our Days is an American documentary - short film by Lynne Littman from 1976. It documents the research of anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff in Jewish senior center in Venice , a coastal district of Los Angeles . The film is considered to be a groundbreaking contribution to visual anthropology . It received an Oscar for best documentary short film .

content

The film follows a group of people over 80 who meet daily at the Aliyah Senior Citizens' Center in Venice. It documents their everyday life, especially their religious and secular rituals. Using scenes from everyday life together, the film shows the community's joy in its traditions rooted in Eastern European Judaism , but also its fear of attack. The congregation moved the joint celebration of Shabbat to Friday afternoon so that everyone can safely go home in the light. In individual interviews, some of the community members talk about old age, death, loneliness, family and friendships and their stories of refugees and migrants from Europe. Barbara Myerhoff can be heard as a commentator and analyzes what is happening in interviews with Lynne Littman in her office.

background

After her doctoral thesis on the rituals of the Huicholes in Mexico , Barbara Myerhoff decided to study her own culture, also because around this time indigenous groups began to publicly criticize anthropology's exotic approach to their cultures. Myerhoff rejected her plan to start a research project on Chicano culture in California , because there, too, she had been asked to study her own culture instead. So she developed one of the first anthropological research projects on the Jewish population of major US cities. She found a group of volunteers who accompanied her for two years at the Venice Jewish Seniors' Center near her institute at the University of Southern California . This resulted in the film Number Our Days and a book of the same name. In the tradition of director Jean Rouch, Myerhoff saw her project as a reciprocal experience: The old people of the community center were not just objects of study for her, but came to mutual knowledge with her. Myerhoff, who grew up in a secular Jewish environment and - to the horror of the members of the community center - spoke neither Hebrew nor Yiddish , also came closer to her own family history through her work. Myerhoff later reflected on her approach in two essays, “Life Not Death in Venice”: Its Second Life (1987) and Surviving Stories. Reflections on Number Our Days (1988).

The title of the film is borrowed from Psalm 90 . Barbara Myerhoff and Lynne Littman dedicated the film to their grandmothers.

The Academy Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took Number Our Days 2007 in his archive.

Awards and reception

Number Our Days was named Best Best Documentary Short Film at the 1977 Academy Awards .

The film was also noticed in the professional world and received mostly positive reviews. The folklorist Eleanor wax called him an excellent film whose strength it is to dispel stereotypes about old people and to create role models for their own old age. The anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell praised the film editing , which gives the film an excellent structure. By documenting individual cases, the film succeeds in arriving at generally valid statements. The folklorist Larry Danielson criticized the fact that, in his opinion, the film exploited emotional moments in a gimmicky manner and thus harmed the quality of the documentation. After all, Myerhoff reveals her emotional participation in what is happening. Overall, the film is still a valuable ethnographic and folkloric study. Myerhoff's importance for anthropology lies both in her further development of visual anthropology and in her critical examination of her relationship as a researcher to the population group she researched.

Book and theater adaptation

Barbara Myerhoff received several awards for her book, which appeared under the same title two years after the film. A play based on the film and book by Suzanne Grossmann premiered in 1981 under the direction of John Hirsch at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

literature

  • Barbara Myerhoff: Number our Days . Dutton, New York 1978.
  • Barbara Myerhoff: “Life Not Death in Venice”: Its Second Life . In: Harvey E. Goldberg (Ed.): Judaism Viewed from Within and from Without. Anthropological Studies . State University of New York Press, New York 1987, ISBN 978-0-88706-356-5 , pp. 143-169 .
  • Barbara Myerhoff: Surviving Stories. Reflections on Number Our Days . In: Jack Kugelmass (Ed.): Between Two Worlds. Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry . Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1988, ISBN 978-0-8014-9408-6 , pp. 227-304 .
  • Gelya Frank: The Ethnographic Films of Barbara G. Myerhoff. Anthropology, Feminism and the Politics of Jewish Identity . In: Ruth Behar, Deborah A. Gordon (Eds.): Women Writing Culture . University of California Press, Berkeley / Los Angeles 1995, ISBN 978-0-520-20208-5 , pp. 208-232 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nancy Lutkehaus, Jenny Cool: Paradigms Lost and Found: The 'Crisis of Representation' and Visual Anthropology . In: Jane M. Gaines, Michael Renov (Eds.): Collecting Visible Evidence . University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1999, ISBN 978-0-8166-3136-0 , pp. 118 .
  2. ↑ a b c Misha Klein: Anthropology . In: Nadia Valman, Laurence Roth (Eds.): The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures . Routledge, London / New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-415-47378-1 , pp. 20-21 .
  3. ↑ a b Riv-Ellen Prell: Barbara Myerhoff. In: Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women's Archive, March 20, 2009, accessed March 15, 2017 .
  4. ^ A b c Ruth Behar: Folklore and the Search for Home (American Folklore Society Presidential Invited Plenary Address, October 2008) . In: The Journal of American Folklore . tape 122 , no. 485 , 2009, pp. 256 .
  5. ^ Shirley L. Patterson: Number Our Days by Barbara Myerhoff . In: Social Work . tape 25 , no. 5 , November 1980, pp. 425-426 .
  6. ^ A b c Eleanor Wachs: Number Our Days by Barbara Myerhoff and Lynne Littman . In: The Journal of American Folklore . tape 94 , no. 371 , 1981, pp. 138-139 .
  7. ↑ Barbara Myerhoff: Surviving Stories. Reflections on Number Our Days . In: Jack Kugelmass (Ed.): Between Two Worlds. Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry . Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1988, ISBN 978-0-8014-9408-6 , pp. 227-304 .
  8. ^ Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, Isaac Jack Lévy: Memories of Time past: Fieldwork among the Sephardim . In: The Journal of American Folklore . tape 114 , no. 451 , 2001, p. 52 .
  9. ↑ Ps 90.12  KJV
  10. ↑ Preserved Projects of the Academy Film Archive , accessed March 14, 2017.
  11. ↑ Riv-Ellen Prell: Raananah, a World of Our Own by Marlene Booth; Number Our Days by Lynne Littman . In: American Anthropologist, New Series . tape 85 , no. 4 , December 1983, pp. 1007-1008 .
  12. ^ Larry Danielson, Folklore and Film: Lyrical Gerontology . In: Western Folklore . tape 40 , no. 2 , April 1981, pp. 206-210 .
  13. ↑ The Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1982, p. 184 , accessed April 6, 2017.