Thursday, July 15, 2010

Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust

Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust (2004) 

This is a fascinating documentary that follows Hollywood's attempts to deal with the Holocaust in the sixty years following the end of WWII. Mostly it deals with the reluctance to face it fully.

Essentially the heads of most film studios were Jewish but they did not want to be identified as such. The USA wished to quickly rebuild post war Germany as a democratic nation. And Hollywood usually wants to audiences to leave theatres feeling good. So the Holocaust was downplayed after the war. I think that the film fails to mention that Nazi Germany was seen as a counter balance to the dreaded communistic Russia. This may account for the early "kid gloves" treatment of Nazi atrocities by Hollywood and the US government.

Gershon Iskowitz, an Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor who painted concentration camp scenes (secretly as an inmate and later from memory), referred to most Hollywood Holocaust films as 'Oylem Goylem'. Yiddish for 'world of mindless lumps of clay'. He would say that if a film showed the reality of the Holocaust then most people could not watch even a single minute of it.

Still this is an intriguing film and helps explain why even informed people like Conrad Black have so many misconceptions about Holocaust Jewry.

"A meticulously argued piece of work that illuminates not just the Holocaust, but the modern imagination's attempt to process it."
Newark Star-Ledger

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