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IMAGINARY WITNESS: HOLLYWOOD AND THE HOLOCAUST Send This Review to a Friend
Filmmaker Daniel Anker has tacked a volatile subject with “Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust,” narrated by Gene Hackman and combining films clips with comments by historians and noted directors, among others. The documentary traces the timid, sometimes ingratiating approach by Hollywood moguls to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, through the early attempts to portray the holocaust on screen and on to some of the most dramatic, influential films that found ways to indicate the almost unimaginable horrors of that crime against humanity.
Always engrossing in its exploration, the film is especially interesting for the background delineated. Anxious to be taken as Americans, not Jews, some of Hollywood’s Jewish titans were reluctant to take on the Nazis. Some even fired Jews in their lucrative German business operations to appease Hitler. Apart from the Jewish issue, there was reluctance to take on fascism itself. When “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” was in production, according to this documentary, it was known at the studio as “Confessions of Nancy Drew” in order not to arouse opposition.
In this context the bravery and impact of Charlie Chaplin’s independently made “The Great Dictator” (1940) merits fresh praise in retrospect for its groundbreaking. Chaplain, playing both a Jewish barber and a dictator named Hinkle, looking exactly alike, attacked anti-Semitism head-on with comedy and emotion, as well as broadly satirizing Hitler’s schemes for conquest. Merely using the word Jew on screen was a novelty. Director Sidney Lumet recalls that “The Great Dictator” marked the first time he ever heard the word Jew used in an American movie.
(When I had the privilege of interviewing Charlie Chaplin at his home in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1972, he remarked that had he known of what would take place in the holocaust he would have filmed some of the “The Great Dictator” differently.)
According to the documentary survey, it took until well after World War II for the exploration of the holocaust to begin gathering momentum. The film is rich in clips from some of the most famous works, including Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (Spielberg is among those interviewed), “Sophie’s Choice,” with scenes reflecting the extraordinary performance by Meryl Streep, and television’s “War and Remembrance,” in which mass murder and brutality were depicted with unusual vividness.
“Imaginary Witness” provides a sweeping view of the times as reflected on the screen, and among those commenting lucidly are professor and film historian Annette Insdorf and critic and film scholar Neal Gabler. Just seeing the assortment clips is a refresher course, but the documentary makes the point that apart from any hesitancy to handle the holocaust in a medium devoted to entertainment, the horror was so profound and deep that attempts to portray it risked trivializing it. A Shadow Distribution release.
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