Die Fälscher

By Michael Richardson, Director of the Screen Cultures Program and Chair of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Ithaca College., March 11, 2022

The Pleasures of Shared Cinephilia

THE SALTMEN OF TIBET (1997)

Having seen so many wonderful and thought-provoking films at FLEFF over the last 25 years, it is hard to choose just one memorable experience.

The very first FLEFF film that I watched was part of the 1999 festival: Ulrike Koch’s THE SALTMEN OF TIBET (1997), an account of the arduous annual trip made by Tibetan nomads to collect salt for three months from Lake Tsentso in central Tibet.

The film’s dreamy, almost languid pace, the desolate beauty of the film’s landscape, and the haunting voice of a Tibetan singer, whose recounting of the Epic of King Gesar is interwoven with scenes of the Saltmen’s highly ritualistic efforts come together to depict a world of past and present, sacred and profane.

Yet as strongly as that film’s images remain present in my mind, my most memorable FLEFF experience came nearly ten years later, when I was asked to contribute to a talkback for Stefan Ruzowitzky’s DIE FÄLSCHER/THE COUNTERFEITERS (2007) as part of the 2008 festival.

The film, a fictionalized account of a Jewish counterfeiter interned in Sachsenhausen and forced to forge foreign currency for the Nazis, is an exploration of the moral and psychic costs of survival for those inhabitants of what Primo Levi has called the Grey Zone, a space and place that complicates our perception of victims and perpetrators.

Emboldened by my then recent tenure and promotion and armed with copious notes, I was ready to hold forth on the film, delivering the sort of professorial lecture that I thought appropriate to my new rank.

Michael Richardson, Director of the Screen Cultures Program and Chair of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Ithaca College.

But as I offered my initial thoughts and began fielding questions and hearing other interpretations, I quickly realized that, though there were no shortage of scholars and professors present, I was not in a classroom nor was I at an academic conference. Rather I was at a festival that privileged discussion and debate, whose audience came to both listen and speak, teach and learn.

So certain of my reading of the film at the outset, I came away from our conversation wanting to re-watch the film, to see everything that the comments of others had showed me I missed.

Cinephiles know the pleasure of the experience of watching a film in a theater.

We are drawn into worlds of ideas, images, and sounds that, at their best, provoke us, challenge us to rethink our preconceptions, inspire us, and linger with us long after the film ends. But, as we sit in the dark and watch images flicker on the screen in front of us, this can also be a lonely pleasure.

How wonderful and rare it is then to be able to share our experiences, not merely in the silent moments of communal viewing, but through the sort of dialogue and exchange that FLEFF privileges.

Through FLEFF, I have found a community of artists, scholars, and critics, a space whose intellectual and creative energies continue to challenge and invigorate me.