Offering an unusual take on the Holocaust, “Nathan-ism” is a low-budget portrait of garrulous, elderly New York outsider artist Nathan Hilu, a proud but impoverished Jewish veteran who compulsively, maniacally documents his WWII military experience in naïve drawings with a black Sharpie and colored crayons. Unfortunately, his self-proclaimed autobiographical art does not always match up with his lived history. After a festival run in 2023, this not particularly satisfying documentary from debuting director Elan Golod is receiving a limited theatrical release through Outsider Pictures and Chapter Two Films.
Hilu, the son of Syrian-Jewish immigrants, joined the U.S. army at 18. An assignment to guard high-ranking Nazi prisoners — including Hermann Göring, Julius Streicher and Albert Speer — during the Nuremberg trials apparently made such a profound impact on him that he spends the next 70 years obsessively creating a visual narrative about that time. But as Golod starts to research Hilu’s assertions, it seems that the artist’s memories could be colored by more than his markers.
Rarely shown without paper and a black marker, Hilu has filled uncounted sheets with naive drawings depicting the Nuremberg prisoners and the guards. These works also include autobiographical statements in comic book-style lettering which spill across the page in a manic stream of consciousness. He says that Speer told him, “Keep your eyes open, Nathan. Write everything down.“
Hilu recounts that the prisoners, whom it was his duty to observe through barred windows to prevent them from committing suicide, ate good American food while the Germans outside were starving. He tells tales of escorting Göring to a Christmas Eve church service and leading another Nazi toward the gallows. But he makes (and draws) more far-fetched claims, including that he was present on duty the night Frau Göring came to visit her husband and the couple shared a long kiss. Hilu believes that she must have passed him the cyanide capsule that allowed him to escape the courtroom justice and he draws the scene over and over, showing the pill passing from her lips to his.
Golod assembles a cast of talking head experts to give Hilu’s claims and art some context. Lawyer Eli Rosenbaum, founder of the U.S. Justice Department’s War Crimes Accountability Team, listens to Hilu with affable skepticism and provides background on Nuremberg. Laura Kruger, a curator at the Hebrew Union College Museum, holds crates and boxes of Hilu’s sketches and gave him several museum shows. An equal volume of Hilu material is housed in the Library of Congress as part of their veterans’ project. Journalist and art critic Jeannie Rosenfeld discusses the power of his images, which apart from those based on his war service, primarily show Jewish subject matter, from biblical illustrations to religious celebrations in his New York community.
What’s missing, however, is a clear picture of where the apparently vulnerable Hilu lives, how he has supported himself and what has happened to his family. Instead, the film’s 79-minute running time is padded with newsreel footage from the Nuremberg trials and other stock footage.
On a tech level, the cinematography looks just a few steps better than home movies, but the animation of some of Hilu’s images by Héloïse Dorsan-Rachet and Hectah Arias adds a creative homespun touch. Meanwhile, there is very little sync sound footage with Hilu, perhaps because he freezes up while being questioned on camera, as Golod learns from Gustavo Stecher, whose 2003 film and book project with Hilu came to naught. However, some of what we hear in Hilu’s recorded voiceovers contains unexpected resonance for these times, especially as he observes of the Hitler era, “Humanity likes to follow somebody,” and notes that leaders like to have their asses kissed.
