Cast: Gene Hackman, Norma Barzman, Jack Benny
Director: Daniel Anker
Screenplay: N/A

Synopsis: The history of Hollywood’s handling of the Nazis and its later depiction of the Holocaust they perpetrated [1].

Review:

“Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust” weaves a tapestry of Hollywood history over the decades by methodically analyzing Hollywood’s response to the rising of Nazi Germany to contemporary Hollywood movies today. An interesting note is the business early Hollywood had with Germany, peaking in the 1920’s to 1930’s, which largely ignored the rising tide of xenophobia in Germany post WW I. One particular scene that comes to mind is the video of the book burning sessions in Germany at the time as Hitler was coming to power. This scene was powerful with the simple voice over narration almost mocking the significance of the burning books akin to that of college pranksters. The pivotal movie that changed Hollywood forever was Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (1940) because it openly mocked the rise and current reign of Hitler in Nazi Germany which was a bold statement. A few years later, with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and with America’s involvement on two theatres of war in World War II, Hollywood would never go back to the softball oversight of Nazi atrocities, but instead would face another problem. The problem Hollywood faced was that of the fine line between educating the public on the Nazi atrocities of the Jews without exploiting the holocaust of entertainment business reasons.

Through the following decades up to the present, there would be hits and misses with how the Holocaust movies were received. Based on the documentary, the arguably most exploitive series of the Holocaust was War and Remembrance (1988) which had brutally explicit images of Nazi atrocities committed against Jews. The movie that captured the essence of the events without crossing the line was “Schindler’s List” because Spielberg chose to film in black and white as well as limiting the camera rigs for simple, straight forward shots. Even this movie, a Hollywood crowning achievement, was not without controversy when people still complained about how the movie’s ending was to uplifting especially with the Nazi Industrialist represented as a hero at the end. In the end, if you want accuracy of events, the proper format is documentary, and if you want to make drama for entertainment, then you will have to restructure certain events for that purpose.

One film out of the list that I decided to watch with my wife was “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” (2008). Set during World War II, a story seen through the innocent eyes of Bruno, the eight-year-old son of the commandant at a concentration camp, whose forbidden friendship with a Jewish boy on the other side of the camp fence has startling and unexpected consequences.4 After some research, again, I have come to the same conclusion that in order to have an effective drama about any event, the structure has to be there first. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times summed it up as “the Holocaust trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked for a tragedy about a Nazi family.” I told my wife that the message of the movie is a powerful one that people don’t want to admit to themselves and therefore would warrant this type of response. One could argue that any movie about the Holocaust is trivialized and exploitative, but then you could generalize even this statement and say that any movie about anything trivializes the thing. In all honesty, a movie is meant to entertain as a business as much as it is art. If dramatic storytelling needs to take artistic liberties in order to create an interesting and compelling story with a message so be it. My contention is that if people want to get a history of any event, watch documentaries, because watching a movie will simply leave them unsatisfied because the events will always seem much worse from their memories than any visual or auditory form. My mentor of movie critiques, Roger Ebert, agrees declaring that the film is not attempting to be a forensic reconstruction of Germany during the war, but is “about a value system that survives like a virus.”

Another message that I got from the film is a difficult message that most people don’t want to admit, that evil is more of a construction of external stimuli than an inherent trait. In other words, a child is taught to hate, one is not born thinking that way. I believe that when people strip away any humanity, including the flaws, as with Hitler, one creates this caricature where Hitler is simply evil personified. I believe this does a disservice to the events that happened because if we do not understand how and why he developed this belief structure that led to his megalomaniac rule, then we are doomed to repeat the same at some point. The way history books always explain away Hitler as simply “evil” is an injustice. He was forged in the fires of post WW I Germany, after their humiliating defeat, and grew up under the heavy sanctions instituted under the treaty of Versailles. If we understand the events, we can begin to see how sanctions against a country cause blowback in the form of hatred towards those “oppressors” because the sanctions hurt the civilians more than the corrupt government we wish to punish. One can only hope that history is taught more accurately, without the important controversial pieces stripped away, so that we can learn from the past.

References:

  1. “Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust.” IMDb: The Internet Movie Database. IMDb.com-Amazon.com, 1990-2014. Tues. 2 April 2014. < http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379158/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1>.
  2. “Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust.” Rotten Tomatoes.com, 2014. Tues. 2 April 2014. < http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/imaginary_witness>.
  3. “Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2014. Tues. 2 April 2014. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_Witness>.
  4. “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” IMDb: The Internet Movie Database. IMDb.com-Amazon.com, 1990-2014. Tues. 2 April 2014. < http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0914798/?ref_=nv_sr_1>.
  5. “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” Rotten Tomatoes.com, 2014. Tues. 2 April 2014. < http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/boy_in_the_striped_pajamas/>.
  6. “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2014. Tues. 2 April 2014. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_in_the_Striped_Pyjamas_%28film%29>.