Photograph by Dario Lehner, Berlin.
The shooting pit, castration tables and gas chambers. These are the images that stayed with Jerry Tartaglia ’72 after visiting the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in Oranienburg, Germany, in 2007.
Sachsenhausen, established in 1938, was a Nazi labor camp where gay men, among other “degenerates” such as Jews, politicals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, immigrants, anti-socials and gypsies were sentenced for their respective “crimes.”
Homosexuals at Sachsenhausen, marked with a large pink triangle on their uniforms, were brutally assaulted, worked to death, starved and executed.
For Tartaglia, an award-winning filmmaker and lecturer in English at Albright, the images left an indelible mark. “I…saw the images of horror that anti-gay bigotry, ignorance and power can produce…I shot video and in my responses as a gay American to these images, the ideas began to gel.”
Restoring Jack Smith
Influencing the likes of filmmakers Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs and John Waters, among others, the late Jack Smith was one of the most accomplished and influential underground artists in the 60s, 70s and 80s, says Jerry Tartaglia ’72.
Smith, who died in 1989, was known mostly for his work in film and performance. “Jack had a major influence on the New York art scene,” Tartaglia says, “but he never got the recognition he deserved.”
In 1994, Tartaglia was asked by the custodians of Smith’s estate to help preserve and disseminate his films. Since that time, Tartaglia has worked to ensure that Smith receive his due recognition.
Most recently, Tartaglia presented two of Smith’s previously unavailable 16mm and Super8 films that he restored at the 58th Berlinale in Berlin, Germany. Sinbad of Baghdad was an edited-in-camera reel that documents a film performance by Smith that was shot in the 70s on the Sahara at Coney Island in NYC, and Jack Smith Performances 1975-1985, was an archive of 16mm unedited film that was abandoned in Smith’s apartment at the time of his death.
Sean Kirk ’08 helped create a digital reconstruction of the soundtrack with music from Smith’s personal record collection. The presentation took place in the “Forum Expanded” programs at the FilmHaus, Potsdamer Strasse.
While at the festival, Tartaglia booked other screenings of Smith’s films in Spain and Italy. To date, he has restored Smith’s three feature films,Flaming Creatures, Normal Love and No President, as well as 10 shorts.
His ideas were for Is What Was, an experimental film that juxtaposes images of the atrocities that gay men suffered at the hands of Nazis with Weimar music recordings of songs that talk about freedom of expression and sexuality such as “Küss mich, mein lieber Kohn” (Kiss me, Mr. Kohn) by Blume, sung by Luigi Bernauer, 1928. At the centerpiece of the film are vernacular photographs of Nazi soldiers in friendly, “chummy” and often overtly sexual ways, and still images of present-day Berlin and Sachsenhausen taken by Sean Kirk ’08. Kirk, an art/business/ photography major, teamed up with Tartaglia to work on the film as an Albright Creative Research Experience (ACRE) project.
According to Tartaglia, whose primary concern when making a film is the content, “The film raises questions about our ability to perceive the truth in the evidence of history and raises questions about the importance of our differences from one another rather than our similarities.” In making the film, he asked himself one question that has guided him throughout his work. “How can you uncover the past for people who don’t want to know about yesterday?”
Tartaglia and Kirk walk along the “running
track” where prisoners at Sachsenhausen were used to test leather shoes. They were made to run until they died
For Kirk, working alongside Tartaglia and seeing his filmmaking style was an experience he will never forget. “Being that he is an established artist and I’m very much interested in art in all of its forms, it was beneficial to me both artistically and intellectually to learn from him directly about making a film, and to also see his style of work.”
Working on the film has also had a profound effect on Tyler Arcaro ’09, a French and business major with an interest in digital media, who assisted with the video editing and scanning of the 60 vernacular photos. In the photos, Arcaro says, “The Nazis just look like close friends, like warm and caring people to an extent. But when you think about the history, the terror that was provoked by them, it’s really ironic to see.”
According to Hitler’s Death Camps by Konnilyn G. Feig (1978), the war against gay men began in 1933 when Hitler embarked on a campaign for the production of children. Nazis executed nearly a half a million homosexuals between 1934 and 1945. At Sachsenhausen, gay men were brutally assaulted, sexually abused and served for the medical experimentation programs. These experiments caused illness, mutilation and even death. No scientific knowledge was gained from them.
Vernacular photograph of Nazi soldiers used in the film Is What Was.
Today, a wall memorial at Sachsenhausen honors those who perished at the hands of the Nazis. It reads, “Deathblow, deadly silence of the homosexual victims of National Socialism.”
Kirk and Tartaglia saw the memorial when they traveled to Berlin, Germany, in February to shoot more footage for the film and to market the film at the 58th Berlinale - The Berlin International Film Festival, where Tartaglia was also a guest speaker (see sidebar).
Both aspects of the trip were successful. Is What Was, which Tartaglia says will be finished in July and will be approximately 25 minutes in length, will premier in November at the Mix Festival in New York City.
Although the film takes a look at the past, it also uncovers significant truths about today. “The sad truth,” says Tartaglia, “is that the danger of anti-gay violence is still with us. It begins with gay people as the root of a joke, moves to harassment and culminates in violence. But we see [in the film] that this is what was.” Now, all three are hard at work as they put the final touches on the film. “The aesthetic decisions begin now,” says Arcaro.