When Barbra Streisand erupted onto the scene in 1963, it felt like a cultural hurricane had swept in, scattering the old mode of musical stardom into abstraction. There was something electric in how unrehearsed she was, an exposed wire able to rewrite expectations with improvised deftness. In reality, her overnight success had been well-honed, built as a lifeline to sustain a young, misunderstood performer. For her, singing was the means, but acting—participating in moviemaking—was the ends. Her earth-shattering arrival onto the cultural scene was a well-executed escape plan. Streisand’s singular stage presence was a path away from a lonely upbringing in Brooklyn and towards something new and distinctly creative. As she admitted in her recently released memoir My Name Is Barbra: “I became a movie star, even though I didn’t fit the conventional image…who knows? Maybe I did will my vision into reality.”
It was this entrancing self-possession that prompted a reckoning. Like Ethel Merman and Judy Garland before her, Streisand reimagined the musical star, guided it into its next iteration, held in the singers’ imperfect warble. We now reflect on these cultural shifts with a stark kind of religious certainty—like the events before and after had rendered them inevitable. Streisand’s success is framed as such. But her eventual shift to directing movies was cast in an infamously bad light, with each project treated as the embodiment of an unchecked ego, none more so than her directorial debut Yentl. Yentl is an act of faith, a plea for her audiences to remain faithful despite the changing tides. It was a first-time director embracing a grand, emotionally demanding story—complicating her frictionless progression through Hollywood with the 15-year struggle to get Yentl made.
Following Yentl (Streisand) in the wake of her father’s (Nehemiah Persoff) passing, Yentl watches as she undergoes a dramatic reinvention, cutting her hair and adopting the moniker of Anshel to pursue student-hood disguised as a man. Streisand, unsurprisingly, was interested in the obstacles which restrict Yentl, undermining her will to learn. Perhaps more surprisingly, her pursuit of the story was also guided by her relationship to faith in the wake of her own father’s early death, only a few months after her first birthday.
Musicals are an exercise in framing and perspective, and Streisand uses the genre here to embolden the story’s themes and ideas through music’s elusive potency. Depending on the movie musical, songs will be embedded into the production, with singing acting as a mode of communication that goes unremarked upon (think Les Misérables or West Side Story) or music will be explained in the context of the setting (think Singin’ in the Rain or Cabaret). Yentl bypasses such containers, enacting something pricklier and more intimate in its structure.
The film’s detractors dismiss its musical framework as proof of Streisand’s self-interest: Yentl not only holds the story together, but serves as the lone musical voice. Even though the Tony-winning Mandy Patinkin is the co-lead, every number is relegated to Yentl’s mind, confined to the inner corners of her identity.
But such a filter offers Yentl clarity; the film begins and ends with the protagonist, offering it a leanness not often associated with the genre. As such, the protagonist’s most meaningful relationship is with the audience, who is granted more insight into her character than anyone within the story. While she sequesters herself in dark corners, the heft of her belief takes on a discernible shape, increasingly defined against each dark night. Through such framing, the audience becomes co-conspirators in this act of religious rebellion.
In the midst of haphazardly arguing her way into an exclusive Yeshiva, Rabbi Zalman (David de Keyser) corrects Yentl in her unmitigated pursuit of learning. “Wisdom is the means; living is the end,” he warns. This line is the summation of Streisand’s work. All of her characters are idealists, challenged by the rigors of the world, forced to reassemble themselves with feeling under the shadow of lived experience. Fanny in Funny Girl and Katie in The Way We Were are both women whose idea of a “perfect man” is painfully misguided, ultimately sacrificed to their professional ambitions. Conversely, Rose in The Mirror Has Two Faces rebels against the rules and strictures that bind her life. Streisand is always concerned with how fragile ideas—the religious frameworks of our lives—crumble under the weight of reality. Yentl is proof of this, arguing that living (as the character of Yentl eventually does) is a succession of faithful leaps.
Music is a familiar tool to express the complex requirements of life. It twists around the singer and listener, cementing this moment across converging timelines. People from across history are written in the margins of a single song, sharing the same emotional message. Streisand’s musical performances within Yentl are reminiscent of how she first presented herself to the world. Take, for example, her now-iconic performance on the Jack Paar show from 1961.
Paar casually introduces her, cigarette in hand (it was the ‘60s after all): “She’s never been—to the best of my knowledge—on network television before. She has the most charming manner and the most charming voice…” The audio is charged with static, and the image is fuzzy, but as Barbra steps across a bare stage, her charisma takes shape. Her poise (shoulders set, hands clasped gracefully, knowing smile) would carry her across her career, translating seamlessly to a project like Yentl, which required her to hold sway against simple backdrops, utilizing only her voice to will the audience onwards.
Streisand’s control of her craft could have been used to isolate her listeners, leaving them adrift in the negative space around her spotlight. Instead, with Yentl she draws us in. Through slow, unbroken close-ups, Streisand offers herself up to onlookers, vulnerably inviting them into the process of making music. As we observe Yentl’s struggle to live authentically, to contort her values around the shape of the world, we are also witnessing a similar reconfiguration in Streisand’s journey from singer to actor to, now, director. Fifteen years after first hearing Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Yentl: The Yeshiva Boy,” two decades on from her introduction to popular culture with her first album, Streisand compromised her screen career to make something ambitious and ill-defined. As the film turns 40, our continued willingness to observe such a creative metamorphosis enables it to transition from an act of faith to a reality—to make the leap successfully.
In “Where Is It Written?”, Yentl’s first number, Streisand sings, “And tell me please, why have a mind if not to question why?” Her plea is multi-faceted, malleable enough to apply to the genre itself. Musicals are a collection of intangible parts, each with the potential to dysregulate, throwing the machine into disarray. Streisand understands this intimately, and as such she encourages her viewers to actively engage with the whole. We are drawn into the knottiness of music-making and held accountable for the end result. Lucky for us, Yentl remains a masterpiece of faith-oriented cinema, expanding the movie musical’s scope with earnest aplomb.
London-based film writer Anna McKibbin loves digging into classic film stars and movie musicals. Find her on Twitter to see what she is currently obsessed with.