Art in America, January 1990

Ida Applebroog and Beth B. at Feldman

Recent screenings of home movies taken by Eva Braun of Adolf Hitler at play reveal the infamous Nazi leader to have been a lover of children. One of the mysteries of human nature is how such contradictory impulses as sentimentality and sadism, respectability and perversion, can coexist within one person. How, we wonder, does the good family man become the enthusiastic participant in genocide? How many upstanding professionals have unimaginable private lives?

Belladonna, a 12-minute film by Ida Applebroog and Beth B., presented in conjunction with Applebroog’s recent exhibition, explores the question with surprising effectiveness. The film is composed simply of an interweaving of statements from three sources: one of Freud’s case histories, testimonies gathered in 1985 against Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele and transcripts from Joel Steinberg’s trial for the murder of his adopted child. Like unsettling memories which refuse to be banished, lines from each of these sources are spoken by talking heads. At the beginning, rapid intercutting makes the words almost unintelligible, but as the film proceeds, the repeated statements begin to coalesce into distinct voices and stories. Meanwhile, laced through the whole like a refrain is a child’s statement: “I am not a bad person”; these words gain poignancy at the end, when the screen goes black and a voice-over recites the cry of Freud’s beaten child as he tries to shield himself from the knowledge of his father’s brutality.

What emerges here is a picture of a chain of abuse in which victims become victimizers and disturbed individuals hold together their fragile egos by compartmentalizing their darker urges even as they act upon them. One recurring statement (probably from Steinberg) is “They made me look like a monster,” but of course the fascination with figures like this derives from the banality of evil. Far from being embodiments of some extra-human evil, killers like Mengele and Steinberg are motivated by desires and pains that are all too recognizable.

Like Applebroog’s paintings, this film offers a degree of understanding, but no comfort. Violence breeds violence, the child who suffers becomes the adult who inflicts suffering. Human cruelty here is a closed circuit which feeds off its own energy.

-ELEANOR HEARTNEY