Austeria

War on a global scale but as seen on its first day and through a single window, which is to say a very local microcosm, but also a prism through which macrocosmic events, past, present and future, are diffracted. Although the significance of some scenes is hard to discern, it seems that great care and thought has gone into asking how best to construct a cinematic metaphor: what images, what music, what events, what ways of following or not following characters in space and time. A real surprise.

If Ford was Jewish, he might have made Austeria. Like How Green Was My Valley, it's a story of a fading world on the verge of extinction, and it depicts the struggle to 'consist' against unrelenting forces of change. Kawalerowicz was no sentimentalist though, and the existential fears, anxieties and sense of displacement vividly conveyed through the seemingly endless recreations of customs/ritual seem more broadly tied to the Jewish experience beyond this specific socio-historical context.