Bonni Cohen devoured Lynn H. Nicholas’ book “The Rape of Europa,” which detailed the looting and destruction of Europe’s art collections by the Nazis, as an untold history of the Holocaust.
“I was embarrassed that I knew so little about this aspect of the story, and I read it like a thriller with treasure and heroes,” Cohen recalls. “I did fairly immediately connect to it on a Jewish level.”
The San Francisco filmmaker, with Richard Berge and Nicole Newnham, has adapted the 1995 nonfiction book into a gripping and profound documentary. The two-hour film is currently playing the festival circuit, including several Jewish events, ahead of its theatrical release and eventual television broadcast.
“The Rape of Europa” screens three times beginning Mon., May 7 at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
As is well known, Hitler had fancied himself an artist as a young man, and and after he came to power he mandated that the Nazi elite become art collectors. Paintings and sculpture that didn’t meet his arbitrary standards — work by Jewish artists, for example — he rejected as “degenerate art.”
“There was an attempt on the part of Hitler and the Nazis to take what was good or valuable, in their view, then destroy everything else,” Cohen explains.
Viewed as a component of the Holocaust, this war on art had a specific and horrible aim.
“Once you kill off a people, what do you do to eradicate their presence and their identity completely, to make sure that they won’t somehow be regenerated or remembered?” Cohen says.
“The Rape of Europa” features a couple of Jewish stories, including the long fight by Maria Altmann to regain ownership from the Austrian national gallery of five Gustav Klimt paintings that had belonged to her Viennese aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer.
The young Adele was the subject of the most valuable Klimt, the “Gold Portrait,” and Cohen points out the irony in the protracted dispute.
“Hitler would have hated this painting — of a Jewish woman —and would never have wanted it for his own collection,” she says.
Although Cohen’s Jewishness drew her to “The Rape of Europa,” her view of the subject broadened substantially during production. She remembers a morning visit to Auschwitz, and the 12-mile return trip to Krakow to film the 50-foot-tall Veit Stoss alter piece in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, which the Poles had dismantled and hid from the Nazis (for a little while) in the countryside.
“My experience was tempered with what I now understood to be other suffering in Poland,” Cohen recalls.
Cohen met her co-producers in Stanford’s highly regarded graduate documentary film program. The Tarrrytown, New York, native also met her husband there. She and cinematographer and director Jon Shenk (“Lost Boys of Sudan”) have a daughter who attends Brandeis Hillel Day School in San Francisco.
The filmmakers’ biggest concern was that viewers would dismiss the loss of inanimate objects in World War II as trivial compared to the loss of life.
“It was a big struggle to not draw any parallels to equalize all the death and the suffering with the loss of cultural property,” Cohen explains. “[But] one was part of the other. I got to this level of understanding of just how evil and calculated this idea of eradication was.”
“The Rape of Europa” screens at 6:30 p.m. Mon., May 7; 12:30 p.m. Tues., May 8; and 7:45 p.m. Thurs., May 10 at the Sundance Cinemas Kabuki, 1881 Post St. Tickets: $8-$12 at www.sffs.org, (925) 866-9559, the Kabuki or the festival ticket outlet on the lobby level of One Embarcadero Center.