THE DYBBUK Movie Review

Der Dibuk

Recently revived in a restored version that features exquisitely expressionistic images and a clear, rich, Yiddish-language soundtrack, this 1937 Polish film by director Michael Waszynski is a stately and elegantly mounted adaptation of Sh. Ansky's legendary stage play. The Dybbuk is the story of Khonen (Leon Liebgold) and Leah (Lili Liliana), a couple who cannot be married because Leah's father has decided on a more well-to-do son-in-law. Angered, frustrated, and with no alternative, Khonen attempts to use powers of the occult to Stop the wedding, resulting first in his death and then in the transfer of his spirit—a dybbuk—into Leah at the moment of her wedding. The tragedy builds further from that point, and it's told in an exceptionally graceful, darkly unsettling labyrinth of deep-shadowed, Gothic images. A major success in its initial 1937 engagement in Warsaw, The Dybbuk, according to film historian J. Hoberman in his invaluable book on Yiddish film, Shadows of Light, attracted Gentile audiences as well as the traditional Jewish audience that attended Yiddish films. Still mesmerizing as drama and now profoundly moving as an artifact of a world that would soon cease to exist, the restored version successfully toured a number of American cities in the 1980s.

NEXT STOP … Green Fields, The Light Ahead (Fishke der Krumer), Tevye the Milkman

1937 123m/B PL Abraham Morewski, Isaac Samberg, Moshe Lipman, Lili Liliana, Dina Halpern, Leon Liebgold; D:Michal Waszynski; W:S.A. Kacyzna, Marek Arenstein; C: Albert Wywerka; M:Krzysztof Komeda. VHS IHF, FCT, NCJ