Independent Perspective News - Holocaust Documentaries: Too Much of a Bad Thing?

The turning point may have come in 1985 with "Shoah," Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half-hour epic of death camp survivors, Nazi officials, Polish bystanders, righteous gentiles and meticulous historians hunched over aging documents. It marked — if it did not initiate — the moment when documentary filmmakers started giving their full attention to Hitler's planned extermination of the Jews.

"When I began exploring how films have grappled with the Holocaust in 1979, there were merely a few dozen titles to warrant attention," Annette Insdorf writes in her encyclopedic study "Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust." But for the book's third edition, published this year, she lists, together with the fiction films, 69 documentaries made since 1990 alone — a rate of almost one every two months. Elsewhere she estimates that there are at least six completed Holocaust documentaries that do not get distribution for every one that does. And the stream has continued at flood tide into 2003. Last month "Secret Lives," Aviva Slesin's emotionally complex film about Jewish children hidden by gentile families during the Nazi era, opened in New York. Shortly after, PBS showed Charles Guggenheim's "Berga: Soldiers of Another War," about Jewish-American soldiers captured by the Germans. "Bonhoeffer," Martin Doblmeier's intellectual, spiritually suffused account of the anti-Nazi German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is opening on June 27, two days before A & E broadcasts Liz Garbus's "Nazi Officer's Wife," the biography of a Jewish woman who survived by assuming an Aryan identity and marrying a Nazi party member.

But simply listing these new films raises a troubling question: Are too many Holocaust documentaries now being made? Has supply outstripped demand? It's a question that makes people uncomfortable. Who would want to appear callous in the face of such suffering, or, worse, anti-Semitic? Yet there are definite signs of Holocaust fatigue. Perhaps because she is a survivor, Ms. Slesin is more forthright than most. "I can't bear to see evil over and over again," she says. "Even I roll my eyes when I hear about another Holocaust documentary" — but then she quickly adds, "until I see what it's about."

Stephen Feinstein, the director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, has sat on a selection committee for a Jewish film festival when more than 15 Holocaust documentaries were submitted. With each year bringing still more films, he says, "you can't see them all." Many of the films have become formulaic, using the same German footage, the same static interviewing techniques. "Get out of the talking-head format," Mr. Feinstein advises. Raye Farr, the director of the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, says that filmmakers are too often taking the easy way out, showing an "increasing inclination to go for sentimentality." With an undertone of exasperation in her voice, she says, "Crying is not very edifying."

Why do filmmakers have such an abiding interest in the Holocaust? In part, they are simply reflecting the extraordinary phenomenon that the Holocaust has become in American life. Publishers churn out books on the subject in voluminous numbers, state governments legislate the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington greets millions of visitors each year. It would be odd if filmmakers didn't share this general fascination. And yet many of them feel a particular urgency about their work.

As the documentarian Joseph Dorman observed in a recent interview, anyone with a relative who went through the Holocaust has a "natural desire" to tell that story. Most of these films are made not for any commercial reason, and not really with an educational intent. They are works of moral witness.

Melissa Hacker's mother was a survivor of the Kindertransport, one of thousands of Jewish children from Germany and Austria who were sent to England in the months before the start of World War II. Ms. Hacker had grown up with the story, but there were many things her mother wouldn't talk about, "forbidden stuff." It was only when she set about making a documentary, "My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports" (1995), that her mother opened up to her. The film, Ms. Hacker says, "was a way of learning more about my own family."

Such personal involvement can inspire intense dedication. Ms. Slesin took three and a half years to complete her film. Ms. Hacker, a first-time documentarian when she made "My Knees Were Jumping," required seven. Funding is always a problem. Sometimes, it seems that Holocaust documentaries have a lock on all the awards: they have won five Oscars over the last eight years. But their commercial prospects are generally slim, and rare is the investor willing to back a film almost guaranteed to be a box-office loser. (Ms. Slesin likes to think of her supporters as donors rather than investors.) Most movie audiences want to be entertained; they don't want to dwell on the sealed boxcars, extermination camps and mounds of corpses that are the staples of the Holocaust narrative. There has been a tendency of late among documentary filmmakers to concentrate on the more "positive" side — gentiles who opposed Hitler or rescued victims; Jewish resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere; and of course the survivors themselves. These individuals are often presented as inspirational (although, with the millions of victims who are not here to go before the camera, there is nothing inspirational about the Holocaust). Even so, their stories don't readily win financial backing.

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