Burning Child

Burning Child is Harvard history professor Joseph Koerner’s multifaceted visual treatise that serves as an exercise in personal history and genealogy of his Austrian familial roots and a meditation on urban architectural design. If that’s not enough, the film is also a 20th-century aesthetic and political history of the city of Koerner’s forefathers: Vienna, Austria. Koerner’s research on his Jewish family’s history in Vienna, which goes back to the city’s modernist heyday in the early 20th century, also manages some heady ideas about personal and public space. This is especially true in light of the Nazi Anschluss takeover of Vienna in 1938: a catastrophic event that his parents were lucky enough to escape, but sadly not his grandparents, Fanny and Leo. The key to unlocking both Vienna’s and his family’s past is the very Viennese idea of the 'home’ and 'homemaking,' a concept that one finds in Gustave Klimt, Alfred Loos, and (most surprisingly) Sigmund Freud in a city where the art museums, bars, and even the sanatoriums are designed to feel homelike. But Koerner’s aim is ultimately to find out the fate of his grandparents through archival research. And what the property ledgers tell him, at least from the late 1930s on, is that Austrian Jews were 'deregistering' and fleeing in the face of waves of Nazi 'Aryanizing' of Jewish dwellings throughout Vienna. But those Jewish families who didn’t leave were eventually 'deregistered' involuntarily, stripped of their homes, and sent to the 'East,' which usually meant the concentration camps. Although it’s not always easy to follow this ambitious film’s labyrinthine twists and turns (some of which seem more tangential than others), Koerner has undoubtedly pulled off a multidisciplinary minor miracle of a documentary that’s as emotionally affecting as it is intellectually stimulating. Highly Recommended. Aud: C, P. (M. Sandlin)