Le jazzman du goulag
France,
1999, 58 min
Shown in 2000
CREDITS
- dir
-
Pierre-Henry Salfati
- prod
-
Hélène Le Coeur
- scr
-
Natalia Sazonova, Pierre-Henry Salfati
- editor
-
Laure Alice Hervé
- source
-
Idéale Audience, 6, rue de l’Agent Bailly, 75009 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-53-20-14-01.
- gga award
-
Certificate of Merit, Biography
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Screened with Harlem Wednesday.
OTHER
Bandleader and trumpet player, Eddie Rosner was once dubbed “the white Armstrong” by no less an authority than Louis Armstrong himself. Rosner’s extraordinary career is brought to light for the first time in this remarkable documentary. Born Adolf in Berlin in 1910 to a family of Polish Jews, Rosner was a child prodigy who discovered jazz when he was only 15. Already famous in 1930 for his hot style, he cut records which were denounced as “degenerate music” three years later when the Nazis came to power. Taking the name Jack, he wound up in Poland, where he formed an ensemble, Jack’s Band, whose subsequent Paris concerts were recorded by Columbia Records. After touring Europe extensively, he returned to Poland in 1939, but after the German occupation of Warsaw he and his wife (the daughter of famed Yiddish Art Theatre actress-director Ida Kaminska) fled East. Within a short time, his second band had become the first state jazz orchestra in the USSR, and Jack took the name Eddie. Having won Stalin’s favor, Rosner and his band toured throughout the Soviet Union, even as WWII raged, and performed before packed stadiums. But at war’s end, the new wave of “anti-cosmopolitanism” that swept the Soviet Union led to the 1946 arrest of Rosner and his wife on trumped-up charges, and they were sentenced to ten years of exile in the most far-flung camps of the Gulag Archipelago, all the way to Magadan, the most remote and, in Solzhenitsyn’s account, one of the most brutal camps. But fate had even more amazing twists in store for him.
—Peter Scarlet
FACTOID #123
San Francisco native Mervyn LeRoy, director of the Hollywood classics Little Caesar and Goldiggers of 1933, was honored with the Festival’s first tribute October 22, 1965.
