Tuesday,
January 23 at 7pm
The Rape of
Europa
dir. Richard Berge,
Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnha, USA, 2006, BetaSP,
117
mins, color
Sponsored
by the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival and Penn Cinema Studies
 The
fate of the World's art treasures hung in the balance during
the destructiveness of the second world war. The cast
of characters includes Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, Gertrude
Stein and Marc Chagall – not to mention works by artists from
Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso. And the story told
in this superbly researched and suspenseful documentary film
based on the book by Lynn H. Nicholas, is that of the Third
Reich’s war on European culture and the Allies’ desperate and
heroic effort to rescue and preserve it.
This
astonishing and timely documentary tells the epic story of the
systematic theft, deliberate destruction and miraculous survival
of Europe’s art treasures during the Third Reich. The film begins
and ends with artist Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer--a
turn-of-the-20th-century Viennese hostess. Recently, the painting
was sold to New York’s Neue Galerie Museum, founded by Ronald
S. Lauder.
Followed by a panel discussion including Lynn
H. Nicholas, Author, Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures
in the Third Reich and WWII Lawrence M. Kaye, International
Art Lawyer Jonathan Steinberg, History, University of Pennsylvania.
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