Daniel
Ankar's Imaginary Witness: Hollywood & the Holocaust
by Jay Blotcher
...Viewed
by former Nazi collaborators and their still-uncomprehending
adult children, Holocaust convinced the German legislature
to extend the statute of limitations for war crime reparations.
(Inexplicably missing is the acclaimed 1980 TV film Playing
for Time, scripted by Arthur Miller and starring Vanessa Redgrave
as imprisoned concert pianist Fania Fenelon.)
Anker
is thorough; in addition to the logical choices, he also spotlights
lesser-known films like The Mortal Storm, None Shall Escape
and Singing in the Dark. Even offbeat cult films like Colin
Higgins’ Harold and Maude and Mel Brooks’ gleefully
irreverent (but no less instructive) The Producers are showcased.
The only film that Anker was unable to secure was the Jerry
Lewis myth-making film The Day the Clown Cried. Still unreleased,
its lachrymose plot about a concentration camp prisoner forced
to don clown make-up and lead children to the ovens, remains
the stuff of legend. (Pages from the grotesque script can
be found on the Internet.)
Since
Anker turns his interrogation lamp on stateside films alone,
“Hollywood films and the Holocaust was a big enough
subject for us to try to tackle, so we didn’t feel that
we should broaden the scope,”
Anker
wrote, “which would have changed the story we wanted
to tell.” Thus, the viewer loses out on a crucial comparison
with more penetrating European works. Missing from the discussion
are films that set a standard for the genre, including Marcel
Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), Claude Lanzmann’s
exhaustive Shoah (1985), the superior and overlooked Kapo
(1959) by Gillo Pontecorvo and the hauntingly lyrical Fateless
(2005) by Hungarian Lajos Koltai. However, this also means
that overheated tripe like Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s
Black Book (2006) are ignored....CONTINUE...
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