Imaginary Witness Hollywood the Holocaust
Guzzo
8,611 Posts
Just heard about this documentary on NPR yesterday. Deals with Hollywoods lack of covering stories from the holocaust in the years since its happened. I thought I'd post this up as something that may provoke thought and communication. As a jew who feels that Jewish people have not been portrayed as all that proud in the media I think this documentary is waaaaay overdue.
I haven't had a chance to see this and I don't know if it is as good as I'm hoping it is. If anyone seen it please lay down opinions and thoughts and if you cold let me know where I could grab a copy it would be much appreciated.
here is a brief review I found on the documentary
http://www.reeltalkreviews.com/browse/viewitem.asp?type=review&id=1128
Our Remembrance of Things Past
by Donald Levit
Through Lumi??re and his lightweight cin??matographe, the factual film is older, in ways more limited, than its plot-driven fiction brother. Since by loose definition it records what has happened, selecting, manipulating, recreating, employing archival footage or non-cinematic stills, narration and/or interviews, pure documentary may be hard put to find a thread whose end is not already in the past, not quite our present, and therefore known before it begins.
Regarding the current major movie subject of the Holocaust, a few critics have observed that non-fiction has now done what it can and must yield to fictionalized, if ???fact-based,??? renderings. Of his landmark Holocaust and Wallenberg: A Hero???s Story, novelist-TV writer Gerald Green pointed out the need ???for understandable terms [i.e., story] to personalize history??? for a mass global audience whose idea of past and present is in large part formed by the big or small screen. The worldwide impact of, and debate over, that first mini-series and of Schindler???s List has brought about a succession of fiction accounts, even comedic ones, of this essential fact of modern history.
Documentaries on the subject pour out, occasionally good but often pedestrian. The outstanding ones have tended to adhere to story???s need for beginning, middle and end, for an ???audience surrogate??? and for a backbone of continuity through development, e.g., Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust and The Nazi Officer???s Wife. Unique in its slant but none the less rewarding, is director/co-producer Daniel Anker???s Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust.
As the title would indicate, this is not another consideration of primary events themselves but, rather, of reactions on the part of American moviemakers and their community to such events and, hence, of the way in which this country, and its world audience, conceives of and ???remembers??? the inconceivable. What actually happened is static, frozen, while memory and opinion form, expand and change; hence, ???story.??? ???Hollywood, for better or worse, is the means by which most people come to terms with the Holocaust.???
Anker???s film can well serve as a centerpiece for the Fourteenth Annual (2005) NY Jewish Film Festival, presented (January 12-27) by The Jewish Museum and The Film Society of Lincoln Center, a multi-nation potpourri of features and shorts, premi??res and oldies. NYJFF is ???about modern Jewish identity,??? itself forged in the crucible of 1933-45 which today informs the Middle East but also spills out to engulf policy everywhere.
To Gene Hackman???s solid, non-hysterical narration, the film traces films??? early avoidance of controversy. The gathering storm was swept under various carpets because of isolationism, conservatism, New World fascism and fear of offending the lucrative market of 1930s Germany. Telling filmclips illustrate Hollywood???s Jewish executives??? refusal even to use the word ???Jew.??? The Production Code reigned (see Regulation 10, Article 2), newsreels distorted the true situation into a sort of college boys??? pranks, Chaplin???s privately financed The Great Dictator was reviled, and a handful of courageously outspoken films was ignored in favor of lesser, propagandistic efforts emphasizing teamwork, American pluck and war in the Pacific.
Although some directors worked as Signal Corps documentarians and Eisenhower invited a dozen Hollywood moguls to enter Dachau even before the medics, their filmed records were deemed too graphic for a public unwilling ???to feel awful about themselves.??? For years, sanitized versions of what happened would emphasize, not Anne Frank???s death, but her belief in man???s goodness, or pound home Americans??? saving post-War presence as in the Playhouse 90-based Judgment at Nuremberg. Of particular note here is a clip from a sticky feel-good Holocaust-survivor This Is Your Life episode.
Many dozens of films are mentioned or briefly shown, with unobtrusive interviews with those who made, lived or wrote about them. The balanced, well-integrated list is too long even to begin mentioning, as it builds to a consideration of previously silent survivors??? decisions to speak out, of the effects of repression of memory (a wrenching scene from The Pawnbroker), and of recent and more honest portrayals where actual graphic horror is rendered bearable and yet still effective in being ???peripheral??? to the human dilemma of the living.
A history, not only of a particular subject and its treatment, but of American policy and image of itself, Imaginary Witness organizes a huge amount of material in making its case about Hollywood???s -- and America???s -- head-in-the-sand bottom-line concerns. Not a pleading movie, it is nevertheless a dash of cold water for both the industry and the public.
Comments
What do you mean?
I really feel that Jews are often portrayed as non-heroic people in Hollywood. I can't think of too many films in which the hero was a proud semite. Quite often we are the jokey sidekick or the scared hebrew version of the jigaboo stereotype. The only recent film I can think of that remotely touched upon a Jewish person being tall and proud was a parady spoof of blaxploitation films called "the Hebrew Hammer".
I look towards films like Schindlers list which showed a non-Jew saving these people, and although its based on a true story it does very little to change the image I beleive we suffer due to the media. John Singleton's Higher Learning is probably one of the worst offenders of this stereotype having its one lone Jewish character cowering scared when the neo-nazi pulls out a gun while Omar Epps goes out and confronts the supremicist.
They can't have their cake and eat it too. Jews control hollywood and the media, it would look worse than it already does if they were constantly hyping themselves.
"moder soul, bitches!"
interesting theory, but I don't think its true, the media can make anything they want seem good, the power of television and film is invaluable in shaping opinion so I don't see why they couldn't make us look a little better than they do. Besides the dominant race in the world is caucasion and there is plenty of white heroic portrayals coming out of Hollywood every week
so its kinda like howard the duck?
woah, how'd i get roped in? i'm a redneck, not a...... jew.
krav maga. gangsta.
the character based on a young guzzo gets his neck and head caught in a plastic six pack holder because of a lazy chronic masturbator from orange county's carelessness and ambivalence towards nature
It's possible to be both...
my bad, I had heard different, besides with a name like Ari how am I not gonna assume?
woah, how'd i get roped in? i'm a lunatic, not a...... litterbug.
Why do you think that Jews are portrayed in a negative way?
http://www.kahane.org/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=Unedited;action=display;num=1112338291
honestly I don't know. It bothers me a whole lot, sucks too cause many people in America take what they see on TV and the movies as truth.
Growing up I had no one Jewish/ Semetic to Identify or look up to except maybe the Iron Sheik (
This documentary is supposed to go into some of the reasons that the mostly Jewish ran hollywood studios refused to address the attrocities of the holocaust and I'm really dying to see what they say
what about Goldberg?
ahhh I forgot goldberg. In Jewish Day school were taught that there were 2 good Jewish athletes Dolph Schayes and Sandy Koufax...Thought that was some pretty weak shit...us Hebrews need to step game up and raise the childrens confidence
Day:[/b] Don't front like you ain't loving the Iron Sheik
This is a good book to read if one was interested in learning more about the the need for young Jewish kids to find alpha-male role models and having the inate desire to shake off their "shmendrick" shroud on their identity of being Jewish. Not saying that the gangsters of Brownsville were positive role models, but nonetheless it deals with the struggle.
There's another book called "The Jews of South Philly" which I can't find the image of but it's also interesting.
thats exactly the kind of folks I wanted to know about growing up. Folks like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Seigel meant more to me because they did not seem to fit the image of jewish schmuck. They had backbone and toughness and although Lansky was much more an accountant than a tough guy he still took the rebel position which is damn near unheard of as a portrayal for Jews. Too many Steppin Fetchitts not enough Melvin Van Peebles
AI:[/b] I'ma look that book up
"I geev you thee camel clutch furry goozo!"
Here is an interesting paradox. There were many Jews in control at Hollywood studios after WWII but the holucost was left out of Hollywood movies.... BUT![/b] Everybody knows about the holucost. Everyone knows 6 million Jews dieded in Nazi death camps. If you know one thing about WWII this is what you know.
How did that happen when it never entered popular culture? The word holucost used to have a meaning outside of the plight of Europes Jews. Today, if call something else a holucost you'll get a PC beat down. Perhaps leaving it out of popular culture is what made this peice of history so sacred and lasting.
Or is that what the article above (which I didn't read) says?
Here is a more interesting subject I think: (hijack time). Jews succeded in Hollywood by never casting any Jewish roles and keeping Jewish culture out of Hollywood. African Americans, on the other hand, have most often tried to make Black films, for a Black audience. Do the numbers, there is more money pleasing WASPS.
Dan