No, rabbi, I was not looking at an R-rated movie.
I don’t pollute my mind with such forbidden images.
It’s based on a book by Lynn H. Nicholas who is a very handsome woman.
Frankly, I don’t care much about art, but I do care greatly about women, and it makes my heart swell that such a fine looking woman was able to get her book made into a movie.
Maybe there is some justice in this world.
What’s extra exciting is that while Lynn is a brunette in the black and white photo above, in this movie she’s a blonde! Truly a woman of many layers.
Joan Allen does the narration. I enjoy her voice. It reminds me of my dead mommy.
Here’s my favorite remark in the film: "All of this accumulated beauty had been stolen by the most murderous thieves that ever existed on the surface of the earth. How they could retain the nicety of appreciation of great art and be exterminating millions of people nearby in concentration camps, I couldn’t understand then and I can’t understand it today." (Dr. Leonard Malamut of the 11th Armored Division)
What a fool! There’s no correlation between art appreciation and moral decency. Dennis Prager says there’s not.
It’s easy to cry over your prayers at shul and then go home and screw someone. I hear.
Bernard Taper dreamed about Raphael’s "Portrait of a Young Man,” the most prized painting looted by the Nazis that has never been found. He spent two years searching for the Raphael in ravaged post-World War II Germany — and for many other works he did recover — as an art-intelligence officer with the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the U.S. military.
…"The Nazis were not just the most systematic mass murderers in history, they were the greatest thieves,” says historian Jonathan Petropoulos in the potent new documentary "The Rape of Europa,” which screens at the San Francisco International Film Festival next Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and plays at the Krakow and Jerusalem film festivals next month. Taper is one of several of the so-called Monument Men who appear in the film. They describe the vast hordes of art, furniture and religious objects the Nazis stashed in castles, salt mines and bunkers in Germany and Austria, and the noble efforts to recover, protect and return them to the countries from which they were stolen.
Jointly written, produced and directed by three San Francisco filmmakers — Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham — "The Rape of Europa” is based on the 1995 book of the same name by Lynn Nicholas. Seven years in the making, the documentary delves into the Nazis’ obsession with art, and the fervor for not only wiping out entire races but also their cultural patrimony as well. And it tells the story of the people who tried to salvage the remnants of European culture and those still working to repair the damage: the Monument Men on the front lines in Italy who sought to protect historic buildings and artworks from Allied bombing (sometimes unsuccessfully); the working people at the Louvre in Paris and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, who struggled to save their cultural heritage; and the Italian conservators still piecing together the shattered frescoes from the Camposanto in Pisa, destroyed by Allied shells.
…Taper thinks the work the Monument Men did was not only important in terms of equity, but also as ritual and symbol. "It was a symbol that there were higher values than victory, higher values than patriotism,” he says. "It was a rare kind of behavior, which was a disinterested doing of good.”
In "The Rape of Europa,” an Army doctor named Leonard Malamut, who was on hand when American soldiers discovered Hitler’s vast horde of loot a quarter mile down a salt mine in the Austrian Alps, says: "All this accumulated beauty had been stolen by the most murderous thieves that ever existed on the face of the Earth. How they could retain the nicety of appreciation of great art and be exterminating millions of people nearby in concentration camps, I couldn’t understand then and I can’t understand it today.”
Taper may not understand, but he can fathom it. "Human beings are complicated,” he says. "I’ve read enough Shakespeare to know.”
Still, "amid all the sickening evidence of man’s depravity and destructiveness,” he wrote, it was good to "help preserve some of the things mankind had done that one could not only bear to contemplate but even take joy in.”
