The motif of death was even more strongly evident in a third Yiddish film shot in Kazimierz during the late 1930s—Der dibuk, based on the 1914 play of the same name by S. An-Ski. As the press in Polish and Yiddish pointed out, only in a location like Kazimierz could such a fantastic story come to life: the town, in the words of Literarishe bleter, offered “a magnificent background for An-ski’s dramatic legend, in which Jewish folklore and dreams of romantic melancholy were woven together as if in a mystical tapestry.” ⁷¹ Film used almost exactly the same language, echoing, probably, the words of the film’s director, Michał Waszyński. ⁷²

The film shows clear, sharp images of the town’s ruins—a decrepit barn, the dilapidated castle, the old cemetery—using an expressionist technique to present them in either very bright or very dark light. The film’s location shots effectively transformed a vivid symbol into a morbid one, reshaping the myth of Polish-Jewish coexistence into an inexplicable and inevitable one of predestined death. These shots were supplemented by studio-constructed images of a dark and oppressive small town.

Death is clearly the Leitmotif of Der dibuk: it appears in the death of Nissan, father of the ill-fated young talmudic scholar Khonon; in the death of Khonon himself; in the graveyard scenes; in the terrifying Totentanz, featuring a figure wearing a death mask; in the dead Khonon’s possession of the love of his life, Leah; and finally in Leah’s own death. Waszyński even transformed one of the most prominent motifs of the Yiddish cinema, the wedding—usually a symbol of continuity and hope—into its opposite. ⁷³ In Der dibuk, the wedding symbolizes death, hopelessness, a predetermined, inescapable, cruel fate. ⁷⁴

As Omer Bartov pointed out, in this film the Jew is the victim of a destructive other and cannot be understood by rational means. ⁷⁵ The hardship is displayed by choosing an expressionist style for the film. Death as a main motif presented in Der dibuk shows the despair to present any solution but disappearance. The play on which Der dibuk was based was subtitled “tsvishn tsvey veltn” (Between Two Worlds). Michał Waszyński, the director—a filmmaker from the third space who until the late 1930s was known mainly as a director of exotic melodramas and light comedies—was himself now caught between two worlds. ⁷⁵ The gradual exclusion of the Jews from Polish life in the late 1930s, coupled with an intensified process of “ethnification” and delegitimization of the Jewish voice in the public sphere, made him gradually less able to offer an optimistic view of his situation. As a person of the third space, he now found himself personally under attack precisely for being what he was. ⁷⁷

71. M. Filmicus, “Oyf di landshaft: Oyfnames tsum ‘Dibuk’ film,” Literarishe bleter no. 29 (1937): 469.↩
72. Z ‘Dybukiem’ do Kazimierza,” Film, July 1, 1937, 11.↩
73. Nugit Altshuler Oprichter, “Hatunot baKolno’a haAlilati haYidi uvaKolno’a haAlilati haYisra’eli ad shenat 1977” (MA thesis, University of Haifa, 2009), 71–73.↩
74. Blumenfeld, L’homme qui voulait être prince, 79–98; Ira Konigsberg, “The Only ‘I’ in the World: Religion, Psychoanalysis, and ‘The Dybbuk,’” Cinema Journal 36 (1997): 22–42; Daria Mazur, “Sfera pogranicza doczesności i transcendencji w Dybuku Michała Waszyńskiego,” in Kino polskie wczoraj i dziś: kino polskie wobec umierania i śmierci, ed. Piotr Zwierzchowski and Daria Mazur (Bydgoszcz: Wydawn. Akademii Bydgoskiej im. Kazimierza Wielkiego, 2005), 22–36; Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 30.↩
75. Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema, 29.↩
76. See Blumenfeld, L’homme qui voulait être prince.↩
77. See, for example, “Przeciw filmom żargonowym pod sztandarem polskim,” Dziennik Poznański no. 26 (1939): 9. ↩