New York Jewish Film Festival 2021: Shorts Q&A Series
Part 1: Discussion with Harvey Wang, director of “The Cantor’s Last Cantata” (2020)
Presented virtually by the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center, the 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival offers a selection of films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience. This year’s program of shorts features works by directors Harvey Wang, Miriam Luc-Berman & Panda Shi Berman, Dhimitër Ismailaj-Valona, Emily Cheeger, and Arkadij Khaet & Mickey Paatzsch. The Jewish Museum caught up with each filmmaker for a brief Q&A.
The Cantor’s Last Cantata
Harvey Wang, 2020, USA, 12m
The Jewish Museum: The Cantor’s Last Cantata centers around a local Brooklyn synagogue’s production of Brooklyn Baseball Cantata, a humorous, largely forgotten work from the 1940s, inspired by the rivalry between the New York Yankees and the then-Brooklyn Dodgers. How did you find out about this production?
Harvey Wang: I belonged to Temple Beth Emeth v’Ohr Progressive Shaari Zedek, a Reform synagogue in Flatbush, Brooklyn. In 2017, our synagogue merged with Progressive Temple Beth Ahavath Sholom, the last Reform temple in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and we became Beth Shalom v’Emeth, or B’ShERT. The spiritual leader of that synagogue was Cantor Suzanne Bernstein, and she was the one who introduced me to the Brooklyn Baseball Cantata. She had a long, interesting history with the operetta. She first learned about it in the late 1970s from a boyfriend whose father sang in the chorus of the original 1948 Robert Merrill recording. In 1986, Suzanne was hired by the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue as their cantor. Living in Brooklyn for the first time, she decided to organize a one-night-only congregation performance of the Brooklyn Baseball Cantata. Thirty years later, about to retire, Suzanne found herself at the center of another temple merger, with very different members and cultures. She decided to bookend her career, and help bring these two congregations together, by performing the Brooklyn Baseball Cantata one more time. It seemed to me to be a great subject for a film.
JM: In 1990, you published the photo book, Harvey Wang’s New York, a volume of portraits depicting people with disappearing professions — a Hungarian pillow-stuffer on the Lower East Side, a rope-weaver, who supplied materials for tugboats, a mannequin-maker. Despite its playful attitude, your film also has a sense of nostalgia for a disappearing New York, not least because of its focus on the Brooklyn Dodgers. I’m curious if you could discuss this aspect of the film.
HW: Much of my photography and film work has been about disappearance — of trades, neighborhoods, and ways of life. Harvey Wang’s New York dealt with professions that were the last of their kinds in the city; Holding On (1997) featured stories of dreamers, visionaries, and eccentrics across the United States; Flophouse: Life on the Bowery (2000) was about the residents of the last flophouses on the Bowery, moments before the Bowery was gentrified. My first feature film, The Last New Yorker (2007), was about the friendship between two older New Yorkers, whose city was beginning to disappear in front of them. My book and film From Darkroom to Daylight is also about the end of the analog era in photography. So, nostalgia has been an interest of mine in much of my work. With The Cantor’s Last Cantata, there is another personal nostalgic aspect concerning certain synagogue traditions that have nothing to do with the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. As a child growing up in Queens, I remember vividly the annual congregation productions at the Rosedale Jewish Center. I remember how happy my mother was to be part of the chorus of plays like Fiorello and The Pajama Game. Watching Cantor Bernstein direct the choir to perform was intensely nostalgic for me, reminding me of the strong sense of community that is engendered by these productions.
JM: This film is a documentary, but it does have the feeling of an improvised comedy. When completing research for this project, were you looking beyond the genre of documentary film?
HW: Film subjects tend to come into my life organically. This story had a natural documentary structure — a rehearsal period culminating in the big show before a packed house. But I had a sense that this story was like an onion, with its many layers. There was the story of a cantor at the end of her career. The story of the Brooklyn Baseball Cantata, a largely forgotten 1940s operetta, composed by George Kleinsinger (best known for Tubby the Tuba), and the librettist Meyer Sieglebaum (also known as Michael Stratton). There is the story of the congregants and their relationship with the Cantor. And there is the story of the Brooklyn of memory and the legendary Dodgers. Certainly, the members of the choir offer great performances, but in the end, the film is a celebration of people and community coming together.
JM: Your film captures the great enthusiasm and energy that people have for performing, which is made especially evident by Brooklyn Baseball Cantata’s amusingly rag-tag, intergenerational cast. Is there something about this state of being amateur — and I mean that affectionately — that is especially compelling to you?
HW: I’ve always been drawn to subjects that are out of the spotlight and easily overlooked. One of the most poignant things for me about the film is the way these average folks come together, to learn, encourage and support each other to sing and perform with such joy. In these masked, socially distanced times, seeing the congregants rehearse and perform together has particular significance. One of my dreams for this film was for it to be accepted and shown at the New York Jewish Film Festival, and have the performers all travel in from Brooklyn in their Sabbath best, to see themselves on the big screen at Lincoln Center. It would have been awesome for them to come together in this public way, to celebrate and kvell.
Harvey Wang is the director of The Cantor’s Last Cantata. This year’s program of shorts is available Jan. 20 at noon ET to Jan. 23 at noon ET: Get Tickets
— Madeline Weisburg, Curatorial Assistant, the Jewish Museum
