Cinematic Confrontation with the Holocaust
By Nava Silvera

Many consider it impossible to document the unprecedented horrors of WWII through the medium of the visual arts and believe that any attempt to do so will distort the harsh facts. Indeed, professionals in the film industry have encountered many difficulties in finding an appropriate way to depict the horrific historical truths of the Holocaust. Films that deal with the Holocaust have created much public discourse and debate regarding questions such as: “Do people have the right to find entertainment value in genocide?” “Is the cinema capable of providing accurate detail when dealing with the subject of the Holocaust?” and "Does the medium's value as a tool that informs and educates the public excuse historical inaccuracies?" 

Filmmakers have attempted to tackle these questions in various ways. Some have tried to evade such questions by deliberately avoiding historical similitude in their films. They have attempted to present history in ways other than cinematic re-enactment of the shocking and unprecedented historical events. A well-known example of this approach is Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), in which the director interviewed Holocaust survivors of various nationalities in an effort to communicate events that, he believed, could not be presented in an accurate visual form. The result was nine-and-a-half hours of conversations with eyewitnesses with no dramatization or documentation of the events themselves. Grim testimonies were presented against a silent background and close-up footage of survivors’ faces or panoramic shots of pastoral landscapes that had once been extermination sites were the main visual focuses. Lanzmann made a deliberate and painstaking effort to elicit the survivors’ recollections and encourage viewers to reflect on the jarring juxtaposition between what was being portrayed visually and the testimony of the witnesses.

Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful

Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1998) represents a comedy artist’s attempt to confront the Holocaust in a largely unique manner. The film is told through the perspective of a child whose father has created a substitute fantasy world for him in order to shield him from the brutalities of the Holocaust and disguise their existence in a concentration camp. Benigni’s humor in the film diminishes the harsh reality of the Holocaust by creating a situation that is surreal and that omits much historical detail. The film deals less with the Nazis and the annihilation of the Jews than with the triumph of the human spirit over even the most severe adversity. Consequently, the horror of the Holocaust, and the reality that there were infinitely more victims than survivors is transformed into a heartwarming Italian fable.

The experiences of WWII had a different impact in the United States. American filmmakers, like most Americans, had no immediate experience with the persecutions, deportations, and mass-murders of the Holocaust, and thus Hollywood’s stylistic formula failed to adapt to the cruel realities of the period. Most American films that deal with the Holocaust are evasive melodramas that tend towards commercialization and pander to the mass American audiences. The films usually fail to portray the extremity of the human suffering that really occurred and instead amount to tear-jerkers with optimistic endings in which humanism and justice prevail.

 American Holocaust films have plots that audiences can digest. Topics such as severe starvation, asphyxiation in gas chambers, children dying in ghettos, humiliation, and unendurable agony are not dealt with; instead, viewers are given sad stories about the parting of lovers, deaths of friends or relatives, social corruption, and political oppression. Many of these films are based on previously published material—bestsellers or successful plays. The reason, apparently, is concern that an original production on such a difficult theme would not be commercially successful.

Despite their historical omissions, deficiencies, and commercial motivation, American Holocaust films have helped to embed the Holocaust into the collective consciousness of American society. Today, many Americans display at least a basic knowledge of the Holocaust, which is, in part, a result of the impact of such films.

One of Hollywood's first attempts to deal with the Holocaust was The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, 1959), a screen version of the successful Broadway show, produced after Anne Frank had already become a popular symbol as a victim of the Nazis. The film tells the story of Anne Frank, a young, Jewish girl, who while in-hiding from the Nazis, records her experiences in her diary, Kitty. The film is devised as a tale of young love between Frank and fellow-Jew-in-hiding, Peter Van Daan, wherein the Holocaust is adapted to a classic narrative style, resulting in a compromise between the authenticity of Frank's story and the Hollywood formula. Its presentation follows the style of a classic drama with a prologue, an epilogue, and scenes of emotion and irony interspersed in between. The film concentrates on the period in-hiding and avoids any treatment of the actual fate of those who inhabited the secret annex. It ignores the tragic and frightened tone of the original diary and does not explicitly dramatize the real events of the Holocaust and the Nazi crimes.

The set is an accurate duplication of the original secret annex; however the German soldiers marching in the night and the sound of gunfire, air raids, and sirens create a sense of artificial suspense and impending doom that recalls the effects of Alfred Hitchcock movies. Shots of birds flying in the background, symbolizing unattainable freedom, further exaggerate the lack of realism supplied by Hollywood cliche.

 The problem of blurred boundaries between imagined events and factual history and the powerful influence of American cinema are revealed, perhaps most clearly, through the docudrama Holocaust—The Story of the Weiss Family (NBC, 1978). The creators of Holocaust sought to present an unimaginable truth and managed to set a precedent in cinematic depiction. Through the telling of the personal story of a fictional Jewish family, the Weisses, the series presents the main events and basic history of the Holocaust briefly and simply. It is unique because it is one of the first films that focused on the Final Solution as an enormous and meticulously orchestrated effort specifically aimed at the annihilation of the Jews. No previous American film was as unequivocal in representing the core of Nazism—the war against the Jews. The series dealt with several main issues in the postwar discourse: resistance versus passivity, the role of the Church, the role of groups that aided the Nazis, and the response of German citizens to Nazism.

The docudrama attracted much interest and invited millions of viewers to “experience” the Holocaust through cinematic depiction. In the course of the year in which it was broadcast, it was sold to some 50 countries, including West Germany, where it attracted a record audience and made a tremendous impact on German society. After 30 years of near-silence, a raging public dialogue about the Holocaust, including denunciations of former Nazis, erupted in Germany.

Critics of the series were disturbed by its excessive melodrama, its kitschy style, and problems of authenticity and inaccuracy. For example, inmates in Auschwitz did not keep their suitcases and had neither family photographs nor pages of musical notation, as shown in the film. When the series was broadcast in the US in April 1978, Professor Elie Wiesel, currently a Vice Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, criticized it vehemently. In an article in The New York Times, he expressed concern that future generations would have misconceptions about the historical events of the Holocaust resulting from misleading cinematic representation. Despite criticism, the main facts presented in Holocaust are very often correct and portray an approximation of the event itself, even though total accuracy is not always preserved at the level of details.

Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993)

The film Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) rekindled public interest in the cinematic representation of the Holocaust. The movie focuses on the persona of German businessman and Nazi Party member, Oskar Schindler, who saved the lives of more than 1,000 Jews. Shot in black and white, with the exception of a few color flashes, the film is highly stylized and provides an impressive re-enactment of the period. The depictions of the Jewish characters are more collective and somewhat stereotyped, as opposed to the careful portrayals of Schindler and Amon Goeth, Plaszow camp commander. The Jews who survive the war receive most of the film's attention, while those who perish are ignored, for the most part. The violence in crucial scenes of arrests and deportations is accompanied by scenes of sympathy and good-heartedness; thus the film succumbs to Hollywood’s perennial, albeit relative, optimism.

The film, although a gamble and an economic risk, was vastly successful and won seven Academy Awards. However, critics usually treat it as controversial. They acknowledge the exemplary cinematic work and style but accuse Spielberg of evading a real confrontation with the horrors of the Holocaust by presenting a much more palatable picture that ultimately redefines the Holocaust and reinforces the values of popular culture.

Cinema, as a mass medium, shapes conventional ways of thinking and creates a collective memory. It also can serve as an important tool to disseminate knowledge and offer a different understanding and perspective of history than that provided by the written word. When attempting to represent a topic like the Holocaust, though, cinematic confrontation is often bound by limitations and may ultimately do a disservice because of the Holocaust's controversial nature. In many cases, however, Holocaust films do manage to convey basic historical facts, even if they are not faithful to the entire truth, and disseminate knowledge of the Holocaust to a wider audience. Hopefully, this audience will not only express sympathy for the victims but will leave the theater strengthened in its abhorrence of inhumanity.