More biased history flooding the media and skewing the hearts and minds of the populace...great for fundraising though, huh? Any mention of Gypsies, Homosexuals, Physically handicapped, or mentally handicapped? How about Gentiles, read about them in the text?
Holocaust Documentaries: Too Much of a Bad Thing?
nytimes.com
June 15, 2003
The turning point may have come in 1985 with "Shoah," Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half-hour epic of death camp survivors, Nazi officials, Polish bystanders, righteous gentiles and meticulous historians hunched over aging documents. It marked — if it did not initiate — the moment when documentary filmmakers started giving their full attention to Hitler's planned extermination of the Jews. "When I began exploring how films have grappled with the Holocaust in 1979, there were merely a few dozen titles to warrant attention," Annette Insdorf writes in her encyclopedic study "Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust." But for the book's third edition, published this year, she lists, together with the fiction films, 69 documentaries made since 1990 alone — a rate of almost one every two months. Elsewhere she estimates that there are at least six completed Holocaust documentaries that do not get distribution for every one that does. And the stream has continued at flood tide into 2003.
Last month "Secret Lives," Aviva Slesin's emotionally complex film about Jewish children hidden by gentile families during the Nazi era, opened in New York. Shortly after, PBS showed Charles Guggenheim's "Berga: Soldiers of Another War," about Jewish-American soldiers captured by the Germans. "Bonhoeffer," Martin Doblmeier's intellectual, spiritually suffused account of the anti-Nazi German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is opening on June 27, two days before A & E broadcasts Liz Garbus's "Nazi Officer's Wife," the biography of a Jewish woman who survived by assuming an Aryan identity and marrying a Nazi party member.
But simply listing these new films raises a troubling question: Are too many Holocaust documentaries now being made? Has supply outstripped demand? It's a question that makes people uncomfortable. Who would want to appear callous in the face of such suffering, or, worse, anti-Semitic? Yet there are definite signs of Holocaust
fatigue. Perhaps because she is a survivor, Ms. Slesin is more forthright than most. "I can't bear to see evil over and over again," she says. "Even I roll my eyes when I hear about another Holocaust documentary" — but then she quickly adds, "until I see what it's about."
Stephen Feinstein, the director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, has sat on a selection committee for a Jewish film festival when more than 15 Holocaust documentaries were submitted. With each year bringing still more films, he says, "you can't see them all." Many of the films have
become formulaic, using the same German footage, the same static interviewing techniques. "Get out of the talking-head format," Mr. Feinstein advises. Raye Farr, the director of the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, says that filmmakers are too often taking the easy way out,
showing an "increasing inclination to go for sentimentality." With an undertone of exasperation in her voice, she says, "Crying is not very edifying."
Why do filmmakers have such an abiding interest in the Holocaust? In part, they are simply reflecting the extraordinary phenomenon that the Holocaust has become in American life. Publishers churn out books on the subject in voluminous numbers, state governments legislate the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington greets millions of visitors each year. It would be odd if filmmakers didn't share this general fascination. And yet many of them feel a particular urgency about their work.
As the documentarian Joseph Dorman observed in a recent interview, anyone with a relative who went through the Holocaust has a "natural desire" to tell that story.
Most of these films are made not for any commercial reason, and not really with an educational intent. They are works of moral witness.
Melissa Hacker's mother was a survivor of the Kindertransport, one of thousands of Jewish children from Germany and Austria who were sent to England in the months before the start of World War II. Ms. Hacker had grown up with the story, but there were many things her mother wouldn't talk about, "forbidden stuff." It was only
when she set about making a documentary, "My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports" (1995), that her mother opened up to her. The film, Ms. Hacker says, "was a way of learning more about my own family."
Such personal involvement can inspire intense dedication. Ms. Slesin took three and a half years to complete her film. Ms. Hacker, a first-time documentarian when she made "My Knees Were Jumping," required seven. Funding is always a problem. Sometimes, it seems that Holocaust documentaries have a lock on all the awards: they
have won five Oscars over the last eight years. But their commercial prospects are generally slim, and rare is the investor willing to back a film almost guaranteed to be a box-office loser. (Ms. Slesin likes to think of her supporters as donors rather than investors.)
Most movie audiences want to be entertained; they don't want to dwell on the sealed boxcars, extermination camps and mounds of corpses that are the staples of the Holocaust narrative. There has been a tendency of late among documentary filmmakers to concentrate on the more "positive" side — gentiles who opposed Hitler or
rescued victims; Jewish resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere; and of course the survivors themselves. These individuals are often presented as inspirational (although, with the millions of victims who are not here to go before the camera, there is nothing inspirational about the Holocaust). Even so, their stories don't readily win
financial backing.
Independent filmmakers speak of "endless hours" of fund-raising, "a tremendous amount of scrambling." Even established institutions have trouble. Major archives exist for the express purpose of capturing the survivors on film. Yale's Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies has a collection of more than 4,000 testimonies. The
Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg in 1994 following the success of "Schindler's List," is by far the largest. It houses more than 50,000 testimonies. Both the Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Foundation have produced films using their collections, but they, too, have had to struggle to raise
money. Douglas Greenberg, the president and C.E.O. of the Shoah Foundation, describes "banging with a tin cup" for outside support. "Steven doesn't pay all the bills," Mr. Greenberg says.
There is one grand exception to this rule of penury. Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, speaks with the confidence and ebullience of a man who knows he sits astride a well-oiled machine. The center has its own movie division, Moriah Films, and it turns out a film about once every two
years (not all of them about the Holocaust). Two, "Genocide" and "The Long Way Home," have won Oscars. Unlike everyone else involved in making Holocaust documentaries, Rabbi Hier says raising money has been "very easy," and since 1989 Moriah Films has collected about $15 million. The minimum gift the center accepts is
$100,000 spread over five years, and Hollywood celebrities like Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Douglas have volunteered their services as narrators for the films. The scrambling documentarians clustered on the East Coast can only stare across the continent with envy at this odd coupling of Hollywood star power and the
awesome atrocity of the Holocaust.
But rich or poor, every Holocaust documentarian is working the same territory, and some critics complain that the basic plot line of the Holocaust has become too familiar by now to permit genuinely original work. We all know it: first the arrival of the Nazis, then the initial terror, then the rounding up into ghettos, then the shipment to the
camps, then the gassing and death or, alternatively, the humiliation, degradation, starvation, torture, gassing and death. And at this point, it seems, just about all that documentarians can do with the history is to fill in the gaps. The recently shown "Berga" is an example. It tells of 350 G.I.'s captured during the Battle of the Bulge who
were Jewish or looked Jewish, and who were shipped off to a concentration camp to be slave laborers.
No one is suggesting that documentarians stop making Holocaust films. As Ms. Farr puts it, "There'll always be more to discover and understand." But Mr. Dorman, for one, believes it is time to pay more attention to the perpetrators. Film, he says, has proved "an ideal medium" for allowing the victims to tell their stories, but where, he
wonders, are the far more complex stories of the criminals? Books have been written about them — Christopher R. Browning's "Ordinary Men" (1992), for example, has become an instant classic — yet filmmakers have exhibited a greater reluctance than historians to examine this aspect of the Holocaust. Perhaps they are fearful of
humanizing the inhuman. Audiences, after all, feel a natural tendency to identify with the person on the screen.
Even the archivists shy away. Mr. Greenberg argues that the perpetrators "have had their say," and sees the Shoah Foundation's work as "redressing the balance."(Among its collections are 1,000 interviews with rescuers.) Besides, Mr. Greenberg says, "perpetrators aren't lining up to be interviewed." He's surely right. And yet one
of the most gripping — and disturbing — moments in the foundation's own film "The Last Days" is an interview with a former Nazi doctor who participated in the human experiments at Auschwitz.
One way out of their box is for documentarians to cease being documentarians. Among the most astute commentators on the Holocaust is Lawrence L. Langer, the author of "Holocaust Testimonies" (1991) and several other works. He believes that the standard narrative has scarcely been exhausted, but that the individual
experiences of the victims can most accurately be captured through fiction films. Mr. Feinstein seconds this view, saying that fiction films will "take over" because there's only so much you can show in a documentary. However, Mr. Langer is not optimistic. It requires great courage and imagination to make honest fiction films about the
Holocaust, he says.
Mr. Langer praises the "raw reality" of Tim Blake Nelson's "Grey Zone," a dramatization of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish slaves forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz. It's an unrelenting film of ubiquitous terror and arbitrary death, with no consoling message. It opened and closed in New York City last year
in a matter of days.
Perhaps the most fruitful avenue for documentarians at the present time is to follow the lead of the historians and broaden their canvas. Many scholars are now reaching beyond the standard Holocaust narrative to ask questions that require wider comparative and contextual analyses. Samantha Power, for instance, writes about "the age of
genocide" in her book " `A Problem From Hell.' " Institutions devoted to the Holocaust have also enlarged their perspective. The Holocaust Museum in Washington has run exhibits and programs on Sudan, Bosnia and Rwanda. Mr. Greenberg says the Shoah Foundation is looking to expand its range because "the pace of genocides has
increased." He is confident that filmmakers are already moving in the same direction. "We will have documentaries about Rwanda in reasonably short order," he predicts.
The Holocaust will no doubt remain the defining atrocity of our time — for several reasons, good and bad — and a springboard for any discussion of mass extermination.
But now it coexists with the slaughter of the Armenians, the malignity of the gulag, the autogenocide in Cambodia, the ethnic cleansings in the Balkans and the sanguinary tribal wars across Africa. For filmmakers interested in examining man's inhumanity to man or bringing it to public attention or simply bearing witness, there is no shortage of material.
Barry Gewen is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. |
