“After: Poetry Destroys Silence” is a dramatic hybrid documentary about contemporary art and the Holocaust. In this unique artistic film, the words of contemporary poets and poets who survived the Holocaust meet and address the importance and responsibility of art in response to the Holocaust. The film uses actors to stage artistic representations of poetry to create new and contemporary explorations of the Holocaust.
Hey Alma sat down with Richard Kroehling, the director/editor of “After,” and one of its poets/producer, Janet Kirchheimer. We asked them what makes poetry special and how it can help us find new meaning in the Holocaust. They also shared the importance of creating new art regarding the Holocaust when so many historical and contemporary accounts already exist. Plus, they explained what makes the blend of art styles in “After” so unique.
The following interview is lightly edited for clarity and length.
Hey Alma: “After” is a really unique blend of documentary, performance, history and art. Can you explain what the film is in your own words?
Richard: Like you said, it’s unique. At its core, the thing that’s most interesting to me is the artists dealing with some of the difficult, catastrophic, dark moments in human history. What’s the role of art, other than to face these issues and to try to create something out of it, instead of being paralyzed and destroyed by it?
There have been thousands of books and journalistic explorations of [the Holocaust]. “After” could offer a broader statement about the nature of the world and… how we can [commit atrocities against] each other through cinema, art making and poetry.
Janet: I’m the daughter of Holocaust survivors. My father was 16 years old when he was arrested on Kristallnacht and sent to Dachau. My mother was 6 years old when her parents got her out of Germany to an orphanage in Amsterdam. There were 104 girls in the orphanage, and four survived.
One of the starting points for both of us is this amazing quote from Aharon Appelfeld, a child [Holocaust] survivor. He wrote that, “After the death of the last witnesses, the remembrance of the Holocaust can’t be, must not be entrusted to historians alone. Now comes the hour of artistic creation.” And we took that very seriously.
Richard: “After” also has three wonderful actors that brought performance into the film. They played different characters throughout the film, including themselves. One is an Academy Award nominee, Melissa Leo. And another, Géza Röhrig, won an Academy Award in 2016, starring in “Son of Saul.”
The most fascinating part about this film is how it marries words from poets who are survivors and contemporary poets. Why create contemporary art and poetry about the Holocaust when there are so many first-hand accounts and dramatizations already?
Richard: The earlier genre of Holocaust films were basically past tense journalism, talking about something that happened to me or to other people back then. “After” is in the present tense. The poets might be talking about things that happened, but poetry, like all art, is something that is unfolding concurrently, in the subjective world.
Janet: The Shoah didn’t end in 1945. The aftereffects are still with us all. For me, when I write, I’m inviting the reader to come with me as I’m trying to discover… what’s deeper in every single word. Every piece of punctuation matters in a poem. There’s nothing extraneous. It is all exactly what the poet wants. And all those words… make [poetry] experiential.
Does poetry let us get deeper than other mediums? Is there something special about using poetry to explore any topic, let alone the Holocaust?
Janet: As a poet, obviously, I’m going to say yes. But I think a lot of writing about the Shoah — academic writing, history, fiction — are incredibly important. But I think poetry gets under your skin. There are some things that you can’t forget in poetry.
Richard: I think all art forms have their own great thing. I’ve always been in love with text and image. I did a lot of crime TV in my life for a living to pay the mortgage. Crime TV is really great because you learn storytelling. You’re not force feeding an audience with obvious stuff, [you’re letting them figure out the story themselves].
Janet: And poetry does that as well. It lets the reader, or the viewer in the film, figure out what they think the poem is about. It’s said that there is no poem without a reader.
Richard: If it’s too explicative, it’s not very poetic. That’s the kind of film that we tried to make with “After.”
How do you keep the intent of the original poetry while creating a new, contemporary visual film around it?
Janet: [First,] Richard and I worked to find the right poems. We had a lot of poems that were amazing, but they just didn’t fit. It was kind of a puzzle. The poems have to lift up, something has to happen, and you have to feel something. We’re always trying to deconstruct things. But poetry tries to just take things from all over and put them together.
Richard: Some of the… poems are much more experimental. Although, I hate that word because it is a misnomer when it comes to poetry. Poetry is not an experiment. It’s actually a new use of language. That’s the whole reason for poetry, to try to find new meanings with new language.
Janet: The amazing thing is that each viewer is going to see something else in the poem. There are poems that I write where I don’t see what I’m doing until someone else points it out. I’ll pick a word and know why I picked that. But sometimes it’s not conscious, and I think that each viewer will find something in each poem that will mean something to them.
Why is creating modern memories of the Holocaust through contemporary art important?
Janet: Because we keep killing each other. For me, part of making “After” was to honor my family, of which 95 percent I never got to meet. It was to do something that talks about memory in a new and different way, because the survivors are leaving us every day. Even in modern poems, their voices resonate in the film.
Richard: I have a friend, John Horgan, who wrote a book called “The End of War.” There’s such a mystery about why we live this way. It’s such an absurdity, because we know we don’t have an answer, and we know we don’t like to live this way. Yet the world keeps turning, and atrocities keep hurting, and these kinds of situations keep arising.
A lot of the film is trying to ask a question that is just so unanswerable. How does this happen? How do we face the absurdity and keep living? I’ve heard every line of poetry in this film three or four hundred times. I can always come up with what I think they mean, but I certainly don’t know what they mean.
Janet: And that’s what poets try to do. I can’t save the entire world, but if I can affect one person in some way with my poetry and the journey that I’ve had as a daughter of Holocaust survivors… [I hope] it never happens to anyone in this world again.
There’s that Jewish saying from Pirkei Avot: “You don’t have to finish the job, but you can’t step away from it either.”
“After” premiers in New York City on Nov. 1.
