The Jump Artist

The Jump Artist is based on the true, and largely unknown, story of renowned photographer Philippe Halsman, a man Adolph Hitler knew by name, who Sigmund Freud wrote about in 1930, and who put Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Life magazine.
The story begins in September 1928, when Halsman and his father were hiking in the Tyrolean Alps. While Halsman went ahead on the trail, his father was attacked and murdered. The Jewish 22 year old from Latvia found himself alone in hostile territory; Nazism was on the rise and Innsbruck's foremost forensic pathologist, Karl Meixner, saw to it that Halsman would be tried for killing his father. It was a miscarriage of justice that foreshadowed the many horrors to come in Austria, and though the events are now lost in the shadow of the Holocaust, they were then known across Europe as 'The Austrian Dreyfus Affair.' Many intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, came to Halsman's aid in a public battle that pitted reason against irrational prejudice.
Delving deeply into the suffering and trauma that Halsman experienced, this eventual renewal through the art of photography and love, The Jump Artist tells the tale of a man who transforms himself from a victim of rampant anti-Semitism into a purveyor of the marvelous.