Daniel
Ankar's Imaginary Witness: Hollywood & the Holocaust
by Jay Blotcher
Witness.
Anker was startled to realize how the film colony’s
self-censorship regarding the death camps and The Final Question
slowed American reaction to the crisis.
“I
think the extent to which Hollywood has affected not only
how we see history, but the history itself, was quite a surprise,”
he wrote. “In almost every decade it is Hollywood that
shaped the national dialogue (if there was one) about the
persecution of the Jews in World War II. And even affected,
to some extent, how the Holocaust is perceived in European
countries.”
Anker,
an Academy Award nominee and multiple Emmy winner, has produced
documentaries about subjects as diverse as New York City’s
pugnacious Mayor LaGuardia, Vladimir Horowitz in Moscow and
the ongoing battle over abortion. However, “I had never
made a film about film,” he wrote. “So I took
a very different approach, but one that was really fruitful—which
is the use of fiction film to tell a nonfiction story.”
In fact, Anker modeled his storytelling technique on The Celluloid
Closet (1996), a documentary which examined the stereotyping
and erasing of another untouchable—the homosexual —in
American cinema.
“Most
films about films use clips as ‘b-roll’ or sometimes
only show moments from a trailer,” Anker wrote. “The
Celluloid Closet told the story through the film clips, which
is a very interesting approach, and served us well as a model.”
Hollywood’s
complicity in silencing the Holocaust in American theaters
began decades before World War II, Imaginary Witness tells
us. Neal Gabler, author of an acclaimed history of Jews in
Hollywood, titled An Empire of their Own...CONTINUE...
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