Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust
By Annette Insdorf
From 3rd Edition
Filmmakers and film critics confronting the Holocaust face a daunting
task — finding an appropriate language for that which is mute or defies
visualization. How can we lead a camera or pen to penetrate history
and create art, as opposed to merely recording events? What are the
formal as well as moral responsibilities if we are to understand and
communicate the complexities of the Holocaust through its filmic representations?
Such questions seem increasingly pressing, for the number of postwar
films dealing with the Nazi era is steadily growing. I had seen at least
sixty such films from around the world by 1980; when I completed the
first edition of “Indelible Shadows” in 1982, another twenty had been
produced; and by 1988 there were approximately one hundred new films
- forty fiction, sixty documentary - that merited inclusion.
My
point of departure is therefore the growing body of cinematic work -
primarily fiction - that illuminates, distorts, confronts, or reduces
the Holocaust. Rather than prove a thesis, I wish to explore the degree
to which these films manifest artistic as well as moral integrity. A
number of central issues have emerged from this rapidly expanding body
of films:
1) the development of a suitable cinematic language for a unique and
staggering subject. I contrast Hollywood’s realism and melodramatic
conventions with the tense styles and dialectical montage of many European
films, as well as present notable American exceptions. This section
includes discussion of the savage satire in black comedies about the
Holocaust;
2) narrative strategies such as the Jew as child; the Jew as wealthy,
attractive, and assimilated; characters in hiding whose survival depends
on performance; families doomed by legacies of guilt;
3) responses to Nazi atrocity, from political resistance to individual
transformations of identity, to the guilt-ridden questions posed by
contemporary German films;
4) a new form - neither documentary nor fiction - that shapes documentary
material through a personal voice. Here, attention is paid to the films
made by survivors, their children, and especially to the works of Marcel
Ophuls.
A major question is how certain cinematic devices express or evade the
moral issues inherent in the subject. For example, how is Alain Resnais’s
tracking camera in NIGHT AND FOG involved in moral investigation? In
what ways does editing not only shape but embody the very content of
THE PAWNBROKER or THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE? And to what degree can montage
be manipulative? On a national scale, what change in attitude, if any,
is implied by the sudden surge in the early seventies of French films
dealing with deportation and collaboration? What about the increasing
number of German films that are finally turning their lenses onto the
Nazi era? Whether the film is a dark comedy like Ernst Lubitsch’s TO
BE OR NOT TO BE or an enlightening drama like Andrzej Munk’s PASSENGER,
these works suggest both the possibilities and limitations of non-documentary
approaches to World War II, especially the ghetto and concentration
camp experience.
The term “Holocaust” requires definition, for popular usage has particularized
it from a general idea of disaster to the brutal and massive devastation
practiced by the Nazis during World War II. I have chosen to use the
word in this latter sense, and more precisely to refer to the genocide
of European Jewry. For unlike their fellow victims of the Nazis - such
as political opponents, Gypsies, and homosexuals - Jews were stripped
not only of life and freedom, but of an entire culture that flourished
throughout Eastern Europe in the early 1930s. As chronicled in Josh
Waletzky’s superb documentary IMAGE BEFORE MY EYES (1980), Polish-Jewish
civilization was highly developed between the wars and included experimental
education (a Montessori school in Vilna), progressive politics (the
Bund, a Jewish Socialist party), and ripe artistic movements (Yiddish
writers’ groups like “Di Khalyastre”). The Nazis’ avowed intention was
not merely to annihilate the Jews, but to wipe their traces from history,
and to destroy the very notion that a Jew was a human being. Even within
the concentration camps, the Nazis developed a hierarchy among inmates;
political prisoners were enemies, but Jews were insects. Hitler declared,
“Anti-Semitism is a form of de-lousing... a matter of sanitation.” Among
the female inmates in Auschwitz, for instance, only the Jewish women’s
heads were shaved.
NEXT
PAGE
Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust
|
|
