Golem: The Petrified Garden

Daniel is an art dealer with bases in New York, Tel Aviv, and Paris. He inherits an art collection in Birobidzhan, the Soviet Jewish republic in the far reaches of Siberia. Daniel embarks on a trip to find the collection – including a gigantic statue of the golem, which he is to assemble by whatever means necessary. As he travels, he glimpses the painful aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The theme of the Golem courses through Golem: The Petrified Garden in numerous ways. This includes the film’s production history, its internal devices, and combinations thereof. A few brief examples will suffice:
Several props, names, and dialogue lines refer to or evoke the Golem. Most obviously, of course, there is the giant statue that Daniel attempts to assemble. Daniel’s own name alludes to the Biblical prophet who interprets a dream about a gigantic statue that breaks apart, a clear antecedent to the statue in this film. Also, late in the film, a colleague compares Daniel himself to the Golem:
“What did the Russians do to you? You’ve been clay in their hands? Du bist der Golem!”
Further, the film seems to implicitly compare the Soviet Union itself with the Golem. In many versions of the legend, a Rabbi creates the Golem to defend the Jews from persecution. However, the Golem becomes a raging monster. The Jews struggle to stop it, and ultimately reduce it to dust. Similarly, at least according to one version of Soviet history, the lower classes of Czarist Russia created the Soviet Union to defend themselves from exploitation. However, like the golem, the Soviet Union grew out of control and destroyed many of the people it had been designed to protect. Again like the Golem, the Soviet Union had a formless quality. Though rooted in Russia, it grew into an international force. It expanded beyond Russian borders to incorporate or dominate neighbouring countries. The Soviet Union also supported client states elsewhere across the world, and covert agents within capitalist and non-aligned states. All this obscured its boundaries.
The film’s allusion to the Book of Daniel offers special generic resonance. Daniel is an apocalypse – a book depicting the end of history, akin to Revelations in the Christian scriptures. The Soviet collapse can be seen as an apocalyptic event within modern history, ending a historical era. In a piece of apocalyptic historiography presented in 1989, historian and diplomat Francis Fukuyama even grandly suggested:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-War history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution, and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Golem: The Petrified Garden does mark this historical moment, and in drawing on the Book of Daniel, suggests the momentous and cataclysmic character of the times.