ROLL MAGAZINE.COM: December 2007: Cinema: Daniel Ankar's Imaginary Witness: Hollywood & the Holocaust, full page

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 it s incept ion, 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 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, offers a startling timeline of denial. It began in early 20th-century America. Eager to generate box-office hits by appealing to American (read: WASP) values, Jewish studio executives and actors agreed to obscure their religious background in the industry, and steer clear of broaching the subject in films, save for parading the occasional Eastern European stereotype. This sentiment would metastasize by the late 30s and early 40s, when studio heads had a great stake in distributing hit films to Germany. Why offend this booming market with potshots at the fledgling brownshirts? The result was a hands-off policy regarding Jewishthemed screenplays, much less any delving into the storm brewing overseas. A 1938 Warner Brothers film called Confessions of a Nazi Spy was a lone voice in the cinematic wilderness.

If there was any mention of the high-pitched, goose-stepping martinet with the Chaplin mustache, now the Fatherland’s Chancellor, it was made within the safety of Warner Brothers cartoons. (Yep, that’s Daffy Duck giving a ridiculous “Seig Heil.”) That is, until Chaplin himself stood up, foreseeing the dire ramifications of 1938’s Kristallnacht for German Jews. He wrote, produced, directed and starred in a vehicle—half-satire, half-drama—that sought to warn the world of Hitler. The Great Dictator, now a classic, was decried when it first was screened in 1940 and even mistaken by dunderheads as pro-Nazi.

Imaginary Witness explains, but does not excuse, why honest, unsparing, award-laden Holocaust classics like Schindler’s List (1993) and The Pianist (2002)—notably, both filmed decades after Hitler’s reign had ended—remain the exception to American cinema. Directors Sidney Lumet, Steven Spielberg and Vincent Sherman, as well as actor Rod Steiger (who starred in Lumet’s wrenching 1965 film The Pawnbroker) bear witness to a shameful chapter in show business history that failed to properly chronicle the years of deathcamp extermination.

Anker completed preliminary interviews in 2004, but spent the ensuing three years chasing down the rights for film clips that appear, representing 26 theatrical and television movies in total. “We’re still in the process of raising money to cover those costs,” Anker wrote, “which are extensive.”

Anker shows that even rare moments of studio courage in the mid- 40s were also partial cop-outs. Films like Gentleman’s Agreement and Crossfire (both 1947) tackled anti-Semitism head-on, at a time when American hotels could still turn away dogs and Hebrews. But these films limned bigotry in an American cultural vacuum; there was no mention that the blood of millions of Jews had just stained European soil.

Curiously, the real truth-teller in the documentation of the Holocaust was the lowly medium of television. Anker explains how the unprecedented success of the ABC-TV mini-series Roots encouraged NBC executives to greenlight a nine-hour mini-series in 1978 called Holocaust. Running four consecutive nights in 1978, and starring Michael Moriarty, Tovah Feldshuh, James Woods and Meryl Streep, Holocaust was eventually seen by half of America, the film contends.

While Holocaust scholar and voice of conscience Elie Weisel dismissed the film as more soap opera than historical document, the TV film sent shock waves across the world. The mini-series was even televised in Germany. 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.

One might be tempted to spare Hollywood yet another trip to the woodshed, if it were not for one salient episode explained in Anker’s film: when the camps were liberated, General Eisenhower invited Hollywood directors to document the proceedings that the world might know of the depth of man’s cruelty. The directors dutifully went and the resulting newsreels depicting skeletal survivors and mountains of corpses were screened in moviehouses across America. But the shocking footage was soon withdrawn and Hollywood’s collective promise to further memorialize the Nazi exterminations never materialized.

IMAGINARY WITNESS: HOLLYWOOD AND THE HOLOCAUST shows at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck. Dec 7-13. Visit www.upstatefilms.org for show times. Special screening on Sunday December 9 at 1pm, followed by appearance by director Dan Anker and/or co-producer Susan Kim. Event co-sponsored by Temple Beth-El. $30 admission includes a kosher box lunch. Call (845) 454-0570 for reservations.