User:PMP26/The Wild One (film, 2023)

The Wild One  is a French film directed by Tessa Louise-Salomé  and release in 2023, about the life, work and influence of Jack Garfein (1930-2019).

In 2022, the movie has won the Best Cinematography Award in a documentary feature at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Narrated by Willem Dafoe, the documentary features interviews with Jack Garfein, Irène Jacob, Peter Bogdanovich, Foster Hirsch and several other artists. Its structure mixes between the narration of Garfein’s youth in the concentration camps and his later career in the 50s Hollywood where he became a key Actors Studio figure and director of two films, The Strange One (1957) and Something Wild (1961), before disappearing from the public eye.

Synopsis
Holocaust survivor, director and key figure of the Actors Studio, Jack Garfein's life is told through archives of his life, of his films, and of interviews of him and his entourage.

After surviving eleven concentration camps, Jack Garfein immigrated to the USA as an orphaned teenager in 1946. He achieved precocious success—evolving into a Broadway prodigy, Hollywood’s new promising director, the protégé of Lee Strasberg, friend and collaborator of Elia Kazan, and later on Marilyn Monroe, he developed his own technique of acting “as a survival mechanism” that was rooted in his experience of having “learned to act” to survive the concentration camps—later creating with Paul Newman the Hollywood branch of the Actors Studio, becoming there a mentor to many actors.

Garfein’s career, however, was marked by an equally precipitous fall. His two films incurred the wrath of censors and led to his premature exile from Hollywood when he refused to cave to the studios’ demands.

The Strange One’s depiction of a fatal hazing incident and its subsequent coverup, and Something Wild’s focus on the brutal rape and psychological breakdown of a teenage girl, echoed his traumas as a Holocaust survivor in a postwar landscape.

Garfein produced works that resonated with an avant-garde lucidity in their political subtext and commentary on conservative 1950s America, confronting and exposing issues of racial segregation, sexual violence, and military fascism.

Distribution

 * Narrator : Willem Dafoe
 * Jack Garfein
 * Blanche Baker, daughter of Jack Garfein and Carroll Baker
 * Peter Bogdanovich
 * Patricia Bosworth
 * Dick Guttman
 * Geoffrey Horne
 * Foster Hirsch
 * Irène Jacob
 * Kate Rennebohm
 * Bobby Soto