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Re: Holocaust Documentaries -
Too Much Of A Bad Thing?
Comment
By Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
6-15-3
| To the editor, Yes there have been many Holocaust documentaries [Holocaust Documentaries: Too Much of a Bad Thing?-NY Times 6/15/03.] Unfortunately, the most important part of the story for Americans is always left out. My father fought in the Battle of the Bulge. What would he have thought to know that GW Bush, the grandson of Prescott Bush - the Wall St banker who helped finance the Holocaust - would someday end up as President of the United States. What would he have thought if he had known that America's leading billionaires, the Rockefeller family, were half owners of IG Farben [today known as Bayer], the German chemical, munitions and pharmaceutical company which built Auschwitz and forty other slave labor-death camps? Perhaps he took note, as many GI's must have noticed, that the Nazis were overrunning Europe in planes, tanks and military vehicles built in large part by the German subsidiaries of Ford, Alcoa and GM, and run on fuel provided by Rockefeller's Standard Oil. These are not "conspiracy theories." The Federal Register dated November 7th, 1942 page 9097 published the court order seizing Prescott Bush's bank as a Nazi front under the Trading with the Enemy Act. I got my copy for free directly from the Federal government archive [You can see a copy of the same document at http://www.mbpolitics.com/bush2000/Vesting.htm ]. The NY Times itself has run articles implicating Chase Bank, Rockefeller, Ford, and other famous corporations as major supporters of Hitler. Unfortunately, the story doesn't end in 1945. After bringing thousands of former Nazi officials to the US and planting them in our government, research institutions and universities, Reagan's future CIA director, William Casey, started the Manhattan Institute (MI) - the think tank which was behind all of Rudy Giuliani's eugenics-based police state ideology cleverly presented as "quality of life." Casey was also the genius behind Iran Contra and arming the Mujahadin led by bin Laden, among other brilliant concepts we are still experiencing the blowback from. GW Bush has claimed that MI is second only to the Bible in its influence on him. These Wall Street billionaires masquerading as social scientists are publicly acknowledged as inventing his so-called, "compassionate conservatism." The most influential "scholar" financed by MI is Dr. Charles Murray, author of the Bell Curve, a book the NY Times and other major media have described as a textbook of classic eugenics. The Bell Curve quotes studies paid for by openly pro-Nazi groups like the Pioneer Fund in support of it's ideas about Blacks being genetically inferior. Murray's ideas are publicly acknowledged by MI as being the direct basis for both Bush and Giuliani's welfare, education and homeless policies. When the NY Times and other major media outlets kept showing my signs and paintings about Giuliani's police state and comparing him to Hitler they were acknowledging - in a politically safe way - the very real basis for this comparison. During his eight years as mayor Giuliani ran the NYPD like a Gestapo, in his case targeting Blacks rather than Jews. In his second term he repeatedly sprayed an organophosphate nerve gas invented by IG Farben on eight million unsuspecting New Yorkers to "fight" a virus "discovered" in Uganda in 1937 by Rockefeller University scientists who were experimenting on the native population. That same university had been experimenting with West Nile Virus in NYC since the 1950's, long before the outbreak of a so-called epidemic in 1999. Now in a kind of sick, secret joke, Bush has appointed Giuliani - who once celebrated Martin Luther King Day by dining with Austria's neo-Nazi leader Jorg Haider - to head the US contingent to the Anti-Semitism convention in Vienna, Austria [See: US Embassy/US Department of State press releases http://www.usembassy.ro/WF/300/03-06-04/eur313.htm 06/04/2003 Giuliani to Head Delegation to Anti-Semitism Conference.] I guess the real Hitler was unavailable. Exactly as in the 1940's, our leading military-industrial corporations have made billions building up a dictator - Saddam-Hitler-fill in the blank - then made billions more invading and destroying the same weapons they provided to him. Americans are told they are doing their duty to die in such endeavors and are making the world safe for democracy. I would disagree. Since 9/11 our government has made more progress establishing a Nazi-like police state in the US than they did in the past fifty years. In Europe they see this plainly while here we are still waving flags and imagining that Bush and Giuliani are heroes. The real message of the Holocaust is still not understood. It can and is happening here. Look not to 1943 to see the similarities between Nazi Germany and the US. Look to 1933 and we will see history repeating itself. Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics) Street artist information, Federal Court rulings and many articles on the Bush-Giuliani-Manhattan Institute-CIA Nazi-connection (1998-2002) http://baltech.org/lederman/ 1994-1998) http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net ----------------------------- Holocaust Documentaries: Too Much of a Bad Thing? By Barry Gewen NY Times 6-15-03 he turning point may have come in 1985 with "Shoah," Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half-hour epic of death camp survivors, Nazi officials, Polish bystanders, righteous gentiles and meticulous historians hunched over aging documents. It marked - if it did not initiate - the moment when documentary filmmakers started giving their full attention to Hitler's planned extermination of the Jews. "When I began exploring how films have grappled with the Holocaust in 1979, there were merely a few dozen titles to warrant attention," Annette Insdorf writes in her encyclopedic study "Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust." But for the book's third edition, published this year, she lists, together with the fiction films, 69 documentaries made since 1990 alone - a rate of almost one every two months. Elsewhere she estimates that there are at least six completed Holocaust documentaries that do not get distribution for every one that does. And the stream has continued at flood tide into 2003. Last month "Secret Lives," Aviva Slesin's emotionally complex film about Jewish children hidden by gentile families during the Nazi era, opened in New York. Shortly after, PBS showed Charles Guggenheim's "Berga: Soldiers of Another War," about Jewish-American soldiers captured by the Germans. "Bonhoeffer," Martin Doblmeier's intellectual, spiritually suffused account of the anti-Nazi German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is opening on June 27, two days before A & E broadcasts Liz Garbus's "Nazi Officer's Wife," the biography of a Jewish woman who survived by assuming an Aryan identity and marrying a Nazi party member. But simply listing these new films raises a troubling question: Are too many Holocaust documentaries now being made? Has supply outstripped demand? It's a question that makes people uncomfortable. Who would want to appear callous in the face of such suffering, or, worse, anti-Semitic? Yet there are definite signs of Holocaust fatigue. Perhaps because she is a survivor, Ms. Slesin is more forthright than most. "I can't bear to see evil over and over again," she says. "Even I roll my eyes when I hear about another Holocaust documentary" - but then she quickly adds, "until I see what it's about." Stephen Feinstein, the director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, has sat on a selection committee for a Jewish film festival when more than 15 Holocaust documentaries were submitted. With each year bringing still more films, he says, "you can't see them all." Many of the films have become formulaic, using the same German footage, the same static interviewing techniques. "Get out of the talking-head format," Mr. Feinstein advises. Raye Farr, the director of the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, says that filmmakers are too often taking the easy way out, showing an "increasing inclination to go for sentimentality." With an undertone of exasperation in her voice, she says, "Crying is not very edifying." Why do filmmakers have such an abiding interest in the Holocaust? In part, they are simply reflecting the extraordinary phenomenon that the Holocaust has become in American life. Publishers churn out books on the subject in voluminous numbers, state governments legislate the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington greets millions of visitors each year. It would be odd if filmmakers didn't share this general fascination. And yet many of them feel a particular urgency about their work. As the documentarian Joseph Dorman observed in a recent interview, anyone with a relative who went through the Holocaust has a "natural desire" to tell that story. Most of these films are made not for any commercial reason, and not really with an educational intent. They are works of moral witness. Melissa Hacker's mother was a survivor of the Kindertransport, one of thousands of Jewish children from Germany and Austria who were sent to England in the months before the start of World War II. Ms. Hacker had grown up with the story, but there were many things her mother wouldn't talk about, "forbidden stuff." It was only when she set about making a documentary, "My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports" (1995), that her mother opened up to her. The film, Ms. Hacker says, "was a way of learning more about my own family." Such personal involvement can inspire intense dedication. Ms. Slesin took three and a half years to complete her film. Ms. Hacker, a first-time documentarian when she made "My Knees Were Jumping," required seven. Funding is always a problem. Sometimes, it seems that Holocaust documentaries have a lock on all the awards: they have won five Oscars over the last eight years. But their commercial prospects are generally slim, and rare is the investor willing to back a film almost guaranteed to be a box-office loser. (Ms. Slesin likes to think of her supporters as donors rather than investors.) Most movie audiences want to be entertained; they don't want to dwell on the sealed boxcars, extermination camps and mounds of corpses that are the staples of the Holocaust narrative. There has been a tendency of late among documentary filmmakers to concentrate on the more "positive" side - gentiles who opposed Hitler or rescued victims; Jewish resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere; and of course the survivors themselves. These individuals are often presented as inspirational (although, with the millions of victims who are not here to go before the camera, there is nothing inspirational about the Holocaust). Even so, their stories don't readily win financial backing. Independent filmmakers speak of "endless hours" of fund-raising, "a tremendous amount of scrambling." Even established institutions have trouble. Major archives exist for the express purpose of capturing the survivors on film. Yale's Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies has a collection of more than 4,000 testimonies. The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg in 1994 following the success of "Schindler's List," is by far the largest. It houses more than 50,000 testimonies. Both the Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Foundation have produced films using their collections, but they, too, have had to struggle to raise money. Douglas Greenberg, the president and C.E.O. of the Shoah Foundation, describes "banging with a tin cup" for outside support. "Steven doesn't pay all the bills," Mr. Greenberg says. There is one grand exception to this rule of penury. Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, speaks with the confidence and ebullience of a man who knows he sits astride a well-oiled machine. The center has its own movie division, Moriah Films, and it turns out a film about once every two years (not all of them about the Holocaust). Two, "Genocide" and "The Long Way Home," have won Oscars. Unlike everyone else involved in making Holocaust documentaries, Rabbi Hier says raising money has been "very easy," and since 1989 Moriah Films has collected about $15 million. The minimum gift the center accepts is $100,000 spread over five years, and Hollywood celebrities like Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Douglas have volunteered their services as narrators for the films. The scrambling documentarians clustered on the East Coast can only stare across the continent with envy at this odd coupling of Hollywood star power and the awesome atrocity of the Holocaust. But rich or poor, every Holocaust documentarian is working the same territory, and some critics complain that the basic plot line of the Holocaust has become too familiar by now to permit genuinely original work. We all know it: first the arrival of the Nazis, then the initial terror, then the rounding up into ghettos, then the shipment to the camps, then the gassing and death or, alternatively, the humiliation, degradation, starvation, torture, gassing and death. And at this point, it seems, just about all that documentarians can do with the history is to fill in the gaps. The recently shown "Berga" is an example. It tells of 350 G.I.'s captured during the Battle of the Bulge who were Jewish or looked Jewish, and who were shipped off to a concentration camp to be slave laborers. No one is suggesting that documentarians stop making Holocaust films. As Ms. Farr puts it, "There'll always be more to discover and understand." But Mr. Dorman, for one, believes it is time to pay more attention to the perpetrators. Film, he says, has proved "an ideal medium" for allowing the victims to tell their stories, but where, he wonders, are the far more complex stories of the criminals? Books have been written about them - Christopher R. Browning's "Ordinary Men" (1992), for example, has become an instant classic - yet filmmakers have exhibited a greater reluctance than historians to examine this aspect of the Holocaust. Perhaps they are fearful of humanizing the inhuman. Audiences, after all, feel a natural tendency to identify with the person on the screen. Even the archivists shy away. Mr. Greenberg argues that the perpetrators "have had their say," and sees the Shoah Foundation's work as "redressing the balance." (Among its collections are 1,000 interviews with rescuers.) Besides, Mr. Greenberg says, "perpetrators aren't lining up to be interviewed." He's surely right. And yet one of the most gripping - and disturbing - moments in the foundation's own film "The Last Days" is an interview with a former Nazi doctor who participated in the human experiments at Auschwitz. One way out of their box is for documentarians to cease being documentarians. Among the most astute commentators on the Holocaust is Lawrence L. Langer, the author of "Holocaust Testimonies" (1991) and several other works. He believes that the standard narrative has scarcely been exhausted, but that the individual experiences of the victims can most accurately be captured through fiction films. Mr. Feinstein seconds this view, saying that fiction films will "take over" because there's only so much you can show in a documentary. However, Mr. Langer is not optimistic. It requires great courage and imagination to make honest fiction films about the Holocaust, he says. Mr. Langer praises the "raw reality" of Tim Blake Nelson's "Grey Zone," a dramatization of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish slaves forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz. It's an unrelenting film of ubiquitous terror and arbitrary death, with no consoling message. It opened and closed in New York City last year in a matter of days. Perhaps the most fruitful avenue for documentarians at the present time is to follow the lead of the historians and broaden their canvas. Many scholars are now reaching beyond the standard Holocaust narrative to ask questions that require wider comparative and contextual analyses. Samantha Power, for instance, writes about "the age of genocide" in her book " `A Problem From Hell.' " Institutions devoted to the Holocaust have also enlarged their perspective. The Holocaust Museum in Washington has run exhibits and programs on Sudan, Bosnia and Rwanda. Mr. Greenberg says the Shoah Foundation is looking to expand its range because "the pace of genocides has increased." He is confident that filmmakers are already moving in the same direction. "We will have documentaries about Rwanda in reasonably short order," he predicts. The Holocaust will no doubt remain the defining atrocity of our time - for several reasons, good and bad - and a springboard for any discussion of mass extermination. But now it coexists with the slaughter of the Armenians, the malignity of the gulag, the autogenocide in Cambodia, the ethnic cleansings in the Balkans and the sanguinary tribal wars across Africa. For filmmakers interested in examining man's inhumanity to man or bringing it to public attention or simply bearing witness, there is no shortage of material. Barry Gewen is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. |
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