This week, the Saratoga Film Forum screens the Israeli film Footnote, which could perhaps be subtitled “Ibid., therefore I am.” This wry comedic-drama pits
father-and-son professors against each other as they vie to win a prestigious
scholarship prize.
The lowly footnote is one of the most contentious stylistic
objects in academia as well as elsewhere in researchland. NASA, for example, goes to great lengths to explain
best practices for footnote usage, while the U.S.
Government Printing Office style book devotes several pages to footnotes
(and, for the record, only features one footnote). Most stylistic authorities
recommend minimizing the use of footnotes (although they are preferable to
parenthetical asides—see?).
Anyway, back to the film. Although the characters and plot
are purely fictional (“any resemblance to persons living or dead...” and all
that), writer/director Joseph
Cedar was inspired by the very real department of Talmudic Studies at the
real Hebrew University:
The Talmud department at the Hebrew
University is a remarkable place. It is the smallest department in the
university, but it is famous worldwide for its uncompromising methods, and its
unforgiving attitude toward the notion of “mistake.”
Once I started hearing stories from
within this department, about mythological rivalries between scholars,
stubbornness on an epic scale, eccentric professors who live with an academic
mission that is bigger than life itself, even if its topic is radically
esoteric, I fell in love with them all, and they became the centre of this
story.
As for the origin of the title, says Cedar:
One Talmud researcher, who is known
to be very sparse and dry in his writing, once explained to me his use of a
footnote like this: “it is a piece of information, sometimes an anecdote, that
is not necessarily verifiable, sometimes even outrageous, or silly, often only
remotely relevant to the main text, but at the same time it is just too
irresistible and juicy to leave out entirely...”
I heartily concur!*
And as befits the academic milieu, the actors did their, um,
homework. Stage comedian Shlomo Bar Aba, who plays Eliezer (the father),
returns to films after a 20-year hiatus, and spent six months preparing his
character. Lior Ashkenazi, who plays Uriel (the son), took actual Talmud classes
at the Hebrew University and spent six months letting his beard grow.
* I once co-authored a book that boasted no
fewer than 160 footnotes, many of them jokes. When the printed book was converted to a Kindle e-book, the footnotes were converted to end notes (since the idea
of a “page” is a fluid concept in an e-book), which is far less effective. This
is my attempt at adding a footnote to a blog post. Meh. Score 1 for print!
