Marc Levin and the Protocols.

Marc Levin waits outside a UCLA theater for a screening of his latest film to end so he can join the audience for a Q&A. A few people approach and introduce themselves, myself included, and find him cordial and welcoming. His hair may be gray, but Levin eagerly converses with everyone around him with a youthful enthusiasm. Only a few people trickle out of the theater at the end; most wait to hear Levin speak.

The seed for Protocols of Zion was Levin's encounter, post-9/11, with a New York City cab driver who, like many, was thoroughly convinced that no Jews had died in the attack on the World Trade Center. Levin talked the cabbie into having coffee with him and discovered that the cab driver, defending his beliefs, referred to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. First published in Russia over a century ago, the Protocols, claiming to document a Jewish master plan to take over and rule the world, were used as propaganda to stir up anti-Semitism. With a jolt, Levin realized that this largely forgotten, discredited and dismissed document was back - the world was changing again. As a child, he'd grown up pretty much isolated from anti-Semitism, as opposed to his parent's generation, marked as it was by the Holocaust.

Levin's interest in film was sparked in the 60s by the French New Wave and films such as The Battle of Algiers. "As a kid in the 60s, I was kind of in the middle of it all," Levin says. He realized early on that film was more than entertainment - it was a way to explore thought, culture and what people believed. It was a "way to change the world." Following a few film classes at Wesleyan University, Levin literally fell into an apprentice film job at a studio in NYC where Woodstock and Gimme Shelter were being edited. Walking in to an interview, ready to take on any kind of entry level job, Levin was handed a few film canisters and told to deliver them to the lab. He'd been mistaken for a messenger, so that's what he did for a few days before the man delegating the errands asked him, "Who are you?"

Levin's projects have grown very organically from his interests and his desire to explore human nature, and each one seems to raise new questions, spark new ideas for further projects. Protocols evolved naturally, beginning with that cab ride, on through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and all along the way, Levin was driven by a desire "to simply make sense of it all."

He's one of those rare filmmakers who shifts freely between fiction and documentary films. That said, he notes that this is "a golden age when documentaries have been redefined," citing last summer in NYC when ten documentaries were playing simultaneously in major theaters. Even with the internet, cable news and 500 channels, "there is an opening in the market place for kind of a synthesis of ideas. Almost an op-ed."

Levin is currently developing a narrative feature, Jihad in Jersey, which grew out of his work on Protocols. There was something about the energy of the young people in Patterson, New Jersey that caught his interest, in particularly, young Arab Americans, passionate about their beliefs, living in a suburb, yet minutes from New York City. Levin recalls talking with them outside an Arab American restaurant, then being taken to someone's house where an older relative was peeking through the curtains at him because she'd had never seen a Jewish person before. With this film, Levin aims to delve "deeper into one person's soul." In Jihad in Jersey, the protagonist will be a "non-believer" in a world of "true believers."

The day following the Q&A, I interviewed Levin at Le Meridian Hotel in Los Angeles. I was interested in learning how the film had become something much more personal for Levin, to the extent that he claims that he doesn't think he could "expose himself like this again." At an "assembly" screening of Protocols (that is, in the early stages of editing), editor Ken Eluto maintained that the film sorely needed some emotional balancing to counter the often vitriolic responses Levin was presenting and suggested using some original footage shot during research of Levin's father, Al Levin. Marc Levin points out that he's regarded in France as the "anti-Michael Moore" - nothing against Michael Moore; he's simply seen as a distinctly different kind of documentary filmmaker. But Eluto pushed him to get more involved in front of the camera on this one, to be more open in his responses to people, rather than take the traditional role of stepping back and observing.

One audience member at the Q&A questioned the validity of the sometimes "sensational, Jerry Springer-esque quality" of the people interviewed for the documentary and whether including them is really an effective method of evoking rational discussion. Levin responds that he doesn't think the extreme attitudes displayed in the film are rooted in mere ignorance, but are worthy of deeper exploration on varying psychological levels. For example, the concept that some kind of ignorance and fear becomes "flipped from the inside out."

As far as how the project affected Levin, he believes that, on one hand, it reinforced an "abiding mistrust of organized religion" that he's had for some time. "Sometimes I wonder if more have been saved by God or slaughtered in the name of God. The toll is millions - not just Jews, but Catholics fighting Protestants, Sunnis against Shiites, Hindus against Siks." It's a tad ironic, then, that the experience of making Protocols has changed how he personally regards his own Jewish identity; he says he's become more familiar with and deeply connected to Judaism. "And yet amongst all races and religions, there are also so many unknown courageous heroes and martyrs who struggle for the age-old ideals of peace, justice and love," Levin adds.

Levin regards Protocols of Zion as only half a film; the discussion it encourages would be the other half. He maintains that the film itself does not have a set conclusion. "I've come to embrace the cabalistic epigram that 'the questions are the quest,'" he explains. "It's effective for me," Levin concludes. "This is why I thought it was valid. Not complete. Not perfect. But valid."

Posted by dwhudson at October 21, 2005 6:12 AM