Daniel
Ankar's Imaginary Witness: Hollywood & the Holocaust
by Jay Blotcher
Those
readers who view cinema as comfort food, relying on films
that flash back reassuring fantasies and happily-ever-afters,
should turn the page now. The lesson for today is how American
film has dramatized the Holocaust. Or more to the point, how
it hasn’t. And why not. The subject is unyieldingly
and passionately examined in a new documentary called Imaginary
Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, which plays for a week
at Upstate Films.
It’s
always a dicey Proposition to demand social responsibility
from american mainstream cinema. After all, Hollywood is known
as The Dream Factory, not The Reality Factory. Reality check?
While indie films about the American invasion of Iraq abound,
there’s a mere handful of mainstream narrative films
examining the moral dilemma of our “war on terror:”
Rendition; In the Valley of Elah; Lions for Lambs. And neither
are cleaning up at the box office. Studio heads take note
of such market trends; expect fewer such films as the war
grinds on.
Since
its inception, the film community has disappointed us with
sporadic and whitewashed treatments of the most pressing injustices
visited upon mankind: war, racism, genocide. But Daniel Anker,
a veteran documentarian, felt it was time to tally the Hollywood
scorecard on Holocaust films. Offering perspectives that are
political, cultural, financial and aesthetic, Anker examines
the myriad reasons why American studios and directors failed
to properly dramatize this blot on modern history.
In
an e-mail interview with Roll magazine, Daniel Anker explained
the bumps—and revelations—that he encountered
in the path to completing Imaginary....
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