The Man Without A World

Writer-director Eleanor Antin’s feeling for the genre of Yiddish silent films is more clever than uncanny, but this 1991 pastiche is an interesting and heartfelt effort nonetheless, and Antin’s own performance as a ballerina is very good. The film is attributed to one Yevgeny Antinov, an imaginary Soviet director who fled to Krakow in 1927 and was backed by American entrepreneurs for a film about shtetl life for the Jewish nostalgia market back home; the plan supposedly aborted when Antinov made the film political. The story itself concerns the ill-fated romance between a merchant’s daughter (Christine Berry) and a Yiddish poet (ex-Chicagoan Pier Marton). 98 min. (JR)

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