The Holocaust In The Movies,Tova Stulman, <i>Jewish Press Staff Reporter</i>

In America, one of the most popular ways to get information about the past is from the movies. Movie- going is practically a national pastime, and for the past few generations, much of what the Western World knows about the Holocaust has come not from history books, but from motion pictures. If anyone is qualified to relate the history of Hollywood's relationship with the Holocaust, it is certainly Daniel Anker. Not only is he an Academy Award nominee and Emmy winner, but the son and grandson of refugees from Europe, and someone who lost uncles, aunts, and cousins to the horrific events in Nazi Germany.

Anker directed and co-produced the new documentary film, "Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust," released by Shadow Distribution. The film is narrated by eminent actor Gene Hackman and filled with appearances by leading filmmakers and authorities on the history of the Holocaust, such as Steven Spielberg, Sidney Lumet, Michael Berenbaum, Neil Gabler, and Thane Rosenbaum.

The first Holocaust images that were broadcast in American cinemas, concurrent to the actual events of the Holocaust, were newsreels of horrific images, which played for American viewers before the main features. It was hard for anyone, especially Americans used to freedom of religion and peaceful society, to understand what the Jews went through in the Holocaust.

It was this incapacity to comprehend, coupled with a quiet aura of anti-Semitism in America, which helped limit the number of films that could educate the public about the horrors overseas. Two films mentioned early on in the documentary, "Gentleman's Agreement" and "Crossfire," both in 1947, addressed the rise of American anti-Semitism, but barely mentioned the recent tragedy of the Holocaust.

Throughout the documentary, clips from movies that began directly addressing the Holocaust are shown. In an interview, Anker says that the biggest challenge was to make sure that his documentary didn't celebrate any one film. "It's easy to fall into that trap. You can applaud Sophie's Choice for dealing with concentration camp scenes in such a realistic mannerbut the biggest challenge was to avoid making a documentary that appeared to celebrate these films," he says.

Before every clip was considered for inclusion in this film, Anker carefully considered how it appeared in the context of the history of Holocaust in American life. "All these films were noble in their intentions, yet as Holocaust films attempting to recreate an unimaginable reality, I believe they will always be, by definition, flawed. We [the producers] wanted to show how the flaws reflected the time in which they were made."

Steven Spielberg, who directed Schindler's List, appears early in the film, commenting that the reason why Hollywood has made so few films about the Holocaust is because it is nearly impossible to imagine what surviving the camps could have been like, unless the person making the film was a survivor himself.

Anker focuses on some surreal moments as American films began featuring a more accurate portrayal of the Holocaust. On the TV show "This Is Your Life," popular with American audiences in the 1950s, a Holocaust survivor is reunited with her best friend from Auschwitz and her brother from Israel, both of whom she had not seen since before the Holocaust.

That such a serious and emotionally wrenching moment was captured in a hokey television show is slightly bizarre, to say the least.

A landmark moment in the history of the confluence of Hollywood and the Holocaust is the made-for-TV movie "Judgment at Nuremberg," which was broadcast to American audiences in 1959.

Anker's documentary notes that despite this moment in American media, which included some of the most graphic images from collected newsreels on the Holocaust, the film, in what may be described as a morbidly ironic twist, also erased the word "gas" from its script in deference to the American Gas Company, the film's sponsor.

As the decades progressed, more and more films centering on the events of the Holocaust premiered in America. Films like Sophie's Choice in 1982, and the television miniseries "War and Remembrance" in 1988, which Spielberg notes was particularly grueling to watch because of its graphic images. This brings us to the discussion of Spielberg's magnum opus, "Schindler's List," which premiered in 1993 and captured worldwide attention, not to mention the Academy Award for Best Picture.

"Schindler's List opened the flood gates," says Anker. "It changed the playing field for Holocaust films in a way - and that danger is that the self-scrutiny that Spielberg gave himself in making that film may not be as strongly felt by the filmmakers that follow," says Anker.

Much has been said and written on the Holocaust, as well as the relationship its historical events have had on Hollywood, but even so, new insights are offered in Anker's film. One of the revelations that came out of the interview with Spielberg was his comment on the famous scene from "Schindler's List," where the little girl with the red coat walks through the otherwise black and white canvas of the ghetto.

Spielberg explains how he intended for it to be a metaphor for American complicity in what happened to the Jews. The Holocaust was "a large red blood stain, and nobody did anything about it," says Spielberg.

Critics and noted Holocaust scholars are divided on the effectiveness of the ending of the film. Despite comments from Neil Gabler, who has written many books on Jews in Hollywood, on the film's all-encompassing effectiveness and power, historian Thane Rosenbaum argues that the film's happy ending misses the point of retelling a story about the Holocaust.

"What Hollywood does with the Holocaust is find a way to tell a good story, but give the audience a message of hope, something they can go home with feeling good about themselves and the world in which they live," Rosenbaum says. "And that's the paradox when Hollywood turns its lens to the Holocaust."

To make Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, Anker and his team worked for six months doing intensive research and hammering out a script. Once that was completed, they approached the directors and critics featured throughout the film for interviews. "Everybody without exception went out of their way to help us on this film," comments Anker.

"Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust" just completed a run at the IFC Center in Manhattan. It is now playing at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and will move on to Seattle starting Jan. 18.

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