Year: 2006
Director: Peter Forgacs
Writer: Peter Forgacs
Cinematographer: Peter Forgacs, Marci Tenczer
Cast: Lisl Goldarbeiter, Marci Tenczer
Running Time: 70 min.
Forgacs has made a career out of molding his narratives from archival amateur footage. He is known for the award winning series Private Hungary, which documents ordinary lives disrupted by extraordinary times. His film El Perro Negro examined the Spanish Civil War by using home movies from both sides of the conflict; it won the best documentary award at last year’s Tribeca Film Film Festival.
Miss Universe 1929, ostensibly a film about the Holocaust and Austrian resident Lisl Goldarbeiter, is truly a love story. Most of the found footage is from the camera of Lisl’s cousin, Marci Tenczer, who lensed mile after obsessive mile of the beautiful Lisl, whom he secretly adored.
Without telling Lisl, Merci entered her in the Miss Austria 1929 contest. She won and was soon on her way to Texas where she would compete in, and win, the first Miss Universe pageant. She became a huge celebrity, was wined and dined by Hollywood and the Glitterati — and all the while Merci was there with his camera rolling.
Just as fascism began goose-stepping across the Continent, Lisl married a Viennese playboy, the heir to a manufacturing fortune. The marriage failed after her husband refused to help Lisl’s Jewish family escape Hitler’s gas chambers. Merci was there to help pick up the pieces. In 1949, Merci and Lisl married and remained together until her death in 1996.
Miss Universe 1929 uses the usual documentary tools of interviews and news footage – including one of the earliest sound newsreels ever made – but what sets this film apart and makes it so rich and ultimately rewarding are those home movies, those fragile, flickering 16mm images captured through the eye of the besotted Merci. Still in love at age 95, Merci sits surrounded by a sea of Lisl memorabilia and shares his films and memories with Forgacs, and us.
