During the opening montage of Daniel
Anker's documentary Imaginary Witness: Hollywood And The Holocaust, film producer Martin Starger
acknowledges that it's all but impossible to make a movie about genocide
without being accused of exploiting it for commercial gain, or even cheapening
it. But then he asks the key question: "Should you not do it?" After all, Hollywood shares
some small blame for what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany, if only for the
way the studios avoided the subject before and during the war. Germany was a
major customer for Hollywood films in the '30s, and though Warner Bros. did
produce some anti-fascist films that called Hitler out by name, the
preponderance of newsreels, cartoons, comedies, and features framed the
conflict in Europe as an issue of property rights, not racial cleansing.
Imaginary Witness traces how American TV producers
and filmmakers went from ignoring the Holocaust to detailing it graphically in
dramas like War And Remembrance and Schindler's List. In between, writers and directors mainly felt
comfortable dealing with the survivors, perhaps because they could be turned
into characters with easily communicated backstories. (Just insert a shot of a
number tattoo, and the audience fills in the gaps.) Then when NBC helped codify
the Holocaust meta-narrative with a four-part 1978 miniseries, the network drew
criticism from prominent survivors like Elie Wiesel for simplifying the event,
and making money off it. More than a decade later, Steven Spielberg caught
flack for making the hero of his Schindler's List a repentant Nazi, and the Jews only
supporting players.
Anker should be commended for
bringing up the debate over whether "Holocaust movies" are inherently suspect,
or if it's worse to avoid the topic altogether. But Imaginary Witness merely mentions the controversies; it doesn't
really engage them. Why not ask Steven Spielberg about his reported distaste
for Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful? Or talk to noted Spielberg-hater Jean-Luc Godard
about Schindler's List? Putting "Hollywood" in the title holds Anker back from mentioning
seminal foreign documentaries like Night And Fog and Shoah, or from bringing up the lurid
subgenre of independently produced Holocaust sexploitation films. Imaginary
Witness works fine
as an illustrated history, but the material could've supported something more
probing and provocative. Anker shows clips of a gutsy Charlie Chaplin in The
Great Dictator,
imitating Hitler and kicking a helium-filled globe around, but nothing in Imaginary
Witness is nearly
as bold.