WEB EXCLUSIVE: Rabbi’s Son, Divided Soul

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

The evidence is there, plainly written on his face. You can see it in the hollow cheeks, the sunken eyes with their unnatural glitter. They tend to confirm the stories about drug addiction.

Of course, it could be the torment of a divided soul and a divided mind, because Jerry Jofen clearly was a man split within himself, torn between the bohemian life of the '60s underground and the pious Judaism of a distinguished family line.

The evidence is clear, plainly written by Jofen himself in his films. You can see it in the pairing of two of his rarely seen movies, on display on Aug. 6 at Anthology Film Archives.

Jofen (or Joffen, as the mood took him) was the son of Rabbi Avraham Joffen, an

important exponent of Musar, the system of ethical behavior and self-examination created by Rabbi Israel Salanter. Avraham was the son of the famed Alter of Novardok, who had been a pupil of Salanter. He had been in charge of the network of famed Musar yeshivot emanating from that town in what was then Lithuania. The Joffen family barely escaped the Nazis, managing to get from Poland to Shanghai and, from there, to New York on one of the last boats out in 1941. They settled in Brooklyn, where Avraham brought Musar to the New World. Jerry was about 16.

Somewhere along the way from Poland to Brooklyn, a part of Jerry got lost. He suffered a crisis of faith that led him in the '50s to the Beats and to the arts and to drugs. By the early '60s, he was swimming in the artistic maelstrom whose famous members included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Smith, Taylor Mead and other prominent members of what was now being called "underground" film. A lot of activity took place in Jofen's loft on West 20th Street.

"His house was always open to everybody," says Jonas Mekas, the artistic director of Anthology Film Archives and among the most important of the experimental filmmakers then and now. "There was always wine, and he was always entertaining."

Film historian P. Adams Sitney recalled the scene vividly in his notes for a 1997 Anthology retrospective of Jofen's work: "A cluttered, wildly messy series of large rooms one flight up from the street … It delivered the shock of another world. The railroad corridor led to an immense studio, heaped with monumental canvases, thick with overpainting and collage … [The bedrooms were] always filled with people, more women than men. Most of them seemed dangerous or desperate in my nineteen-year-old eyes. I came to imagine it alternately as a harem or shooting gallery ...
According to other witnesses, it was both."

The two shorter films on the Anthology program on Aug. 6 are a reflection of those times in Joffen's life. "Jerry," a three-minute portrait of Jofen by his friend David Brooks is a like a pencil sketch of a man always in motion. One sees the haunted face and frenzied movement, and it is impossible not to suspect Jofen is struggling with inner demons fueled by dangerous substances, probably stronger than wine. "How Can You Tell the Dancer From the Dance," is an even more hectic work, made by Jofen between 1968 and 1975, a collage of street lights, musicians on bandstands, mysterious dancers in color and black-and-white. It is frenetic, densely layered and reminiscent of Jofen's collages, the works for which he is most famous. Jofen was one of the first collage artists to use staples rather than glue in his work, and at least part of the reason for that choice was that the polished metallic surface of the staples caught and reflected the light, much like the street lights that are a recurring visual element of "Dancer."

There isn't much left of Jofen's film work, although Anthology has preserved what remains. Mekas explains, "When he had to move out he didn't care what was there, he abandoned everything. It all ended up in the street. What survives is what was saved by his family and friends."

At some point in the 1970s, Jofen appears to have returned to his religious roots. Mekas, for one, was not surprised.

"I think he was always religious," he says. "He wanted to fuse it with the modern movements and his own preoccupations. He wanted to be a painter and a filmmaker, he had a clash in his mind and he was trying to fuse and modernize."

Perhaps that explains the chasm that sets "Dancer" apart from "Rituals and Demonstrations," made only two years later. This 1977 film, which the filmmaker signs as "Zalmen Joffen," is a black-and-white, 45-minute study of the Orthodox communities of Brooklyn, a series of small privileged moments ranging from a weekday morning Torah service to a farbrengen with Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a small boy's first haircut on Lag B'Omer, brief glimpses of yeshiva students debating with a giddy intensity, a scribe preparing for the work of repairing a sefer Torah, and linking them all, footage of a massive demonstration for Soviet Jews.

Where "Dancer" gets its rather artificial energy from the relentless use of double exposures and camera movement that borders on hysteria, "Rituals" has a serenity and poise that allow the moments themselves to communicate their own intensity. It is a remarkably self-possessed film that gets its power from the observation of tiny, private gestures, from the amused gaze of the Lubavitcher rebbe as a roomful of his chasids sing a niggun to the beaming pride of a father at his son's bris. In short, it is the work of a filmmaker who has come home.

It is impossible to know if Jerry Jofen found some inner reconciliation between the two halves of his life. For much of the last two decades before his death in 1993, he was a quadriplegic due to Parkinson's disease, so he had a long time to think about such things. Whatever the answer, the work still exists, even if that wasn't Jofen's intention.

Anthology Film Archives (Second Avenue and Second Street) will present a program of Jerry Jofen's films on Thursday, Aug. 6 at 8 p.m. For information, call (212) 505-5181 or go to http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org to see examples of Jofen's collages and other works, go to www.jerryjofen.com.