The Dybbuk (1937)

S. An-sky’s play, filmed in Poland in Yiddish. A young man dies studying Kabbalah for forbidden ends; his soul returns and takes possession of the woman he was promised to before either of them was born.

⭐⭐ THE MOST KABBALISTIC FILM EVER MADE, AND IT WAS MADE BY THE PEOPLE IT IS ABOUT, TWO YEARS BEFORE THAT WORLD ENDED. An-sky was an ethnographer who collected the material in the shtetls of Volhynia and Podolia before the First World War, so the film is not a foreigner’s idea of Hasidic life — it is a record with a plot laid over it. ⚠ The doctrine in it is real and specific: ibbur and dybbuk, a soul attaching to a living body; a vow made between two fathers binding children not yet born; a rabbinical court that summons the dead to testify. ⭐ It is public domain, it is subtitled, and it is the single strongest argument in this wing that this tradition’s images were already moving before anyone painted them.