The Yellow Ticket performed in Vancouver

The Yellow Ticket Project


Saturday, September 23, 3:00 PM
Jewett Art Center Auditorium

The Yellow Ticket is a multimedia event featuring a rare 1918 silent film and an original score by renowned klezmer violinist, vocalist, and composer Alicia Svigals, performed live along with Toronto’s virtuoso new-music pianist Marilyn Lerner.
 
Alicia Svigals is the world's foremost klezmer fiddler, a founder of the Grammy Award-winning Klezmatics and a 2014 NEA MacDowell Fellow in composition. The Yellow Ticket, a very early production of the German film company UFA-Pagu, was made at the end of World War I and on the eve of the Russian revolution. It is an early Pola Negri lm that thematized anti-Semitism in tsarist Russia and offers an interesting and unusual sympathetic depiction of the Jewish community and central character. It stars an adolescent Pola Negri, who would later become the legendary femme fatale of the silent era, and tells the story of a young Jewish woman from a Polish shtetl who is constrained by anti-Semitic restrictions to lead a double life in a brothel while attempting to study medicine in Tsarist Russia. The film includes precious footage of the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw and the people who once lived there.
 
Discussion to follow.
 
Generously funded by The Treves Fund. Co-sponsored by the German and Russian departments and the Jewish Studies and Cinema and Media Studies (CAMS) programs. 
 
Photo courtesy Alicia Svigals