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

Independent filmmakers speak of "endless hours" of fund-raising, "a tremendous amount of scrambling." Even established institutions have trouble. Major archives exist for the express purpose of capturing the survivors on film. Yale's Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies has a collection of more than 4,000 testimonies. The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg in 1994 following the success of "Schindler's List," is by far the largest. It houses more than 50,000 testimonies. Both the Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Foundation have produced films using their collections, but they, too, have had to struggle to raise money. Douglas Greenberg, the president and C.E.O. of the Shoah Foundation, describes "banging with a tin cup" for outside support. "Steven doesn't pay all the bills," Mr. Greenberg says.

There is one grand exception to this rule of penury. Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, speaks with the confidence and ebullience of a man who knows he sits astride a well-oiled machine. The center has its own movie division, Moriah Films, and it turns out a film about once every two years (not all of them about the Holocaust). Two, "Genocide" and "The Long Way Home," have won Oscars. Unlike everyone else involved in making Holocaust documentaries, Rabbi Hier says raising money has been "very easy," and since 1989 Moriah Films has collected about $15 million. The minimum gift the center accepts is $100,000 spread over five years, and Hollywood celebrities like Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Douglas have volunteered their services as narrators for the films. The scrambling documentarians clustered on the East Coast can only stare across the continent with envy at this odd coupling of Hollywood star power and the awesome atrocity of the Holocaust.

But rich or poor, every Holocaust documentarian is working the same territory, and some critics complain that the basic plot line of the Holocaust has become too familiar by now to permit genuinely original work. We all know it: first the arrival of the Nazis, then the initial terror, then the rounding up into ghettos, then the shipment to the camps, then the gassing and death or, alternatively, the humiliation, degradation, starvation, torture, gassing and death. And at this point, it seems, just about all that documentarians can do with the history is to fill in the gaps. The recently shown "Berga" is an example. It tells of 350 G.I.'s captured during the Battle of the Bulge who were Jewish or looked Jewish, and who were shipped off to a concentration camp to be slave laborers.

No one is suggesting that documentarians stop making Holocaust films. As Ms. Farr puts it, "There'll always be more to discover and understand." But Mr. Dorman, for one, believes it is time to pay more attention to the perpetrators. Film, he says, has proved "an ideal medium" for allowing the victims to tell their stories, but where, he wonders, are the far more complex stories of the criminals? Books have been written about them — Christopher R. Browning's "Ordinary Men" (1992), for example, has become an instant classic — yet filmmakers have exhibited a greater reluctance than historians to examine this aspect of the Holocaust. Perhaps they are fearful of humanizing the inhuman. Audiences, after all, feel a natural tendency to identify with the person on the screen.

Even the archivists shy away. Mr. Greenberg argues that the perpetrators "have had their say," and sees the Shoah Foundation's work as "redressing the balance." (Among its collections are 1,000 interviews with rescuers.) Besides, Mr. Greenberg says, "perpetrators aren't lining up to be interviewed." He's surely right. And yet one of the most gripping — and disturbing — moments in the foundation's own film "The Last Days" is an interview with a former Nazi doctor who participated in the human experiments at Auschwitz.

One way out of their box is for documentarians to cease being documentarians. Among the most astute commentators on the Holocaust is Lawrence L. Langer, the author of "Holocaust Testimonies" (1991) and several other works. He believes that the standard narrative has scarcely been exhausted, but that the individual experiences of the victims can most accurately be captured through fiction films. Mr. Feinstein seconds this view, saying that fiction films will "take over" because there's only so much you can show in a documentary.

However, Mr. Langer is not optimistic. It requires great courage and imagination to make honest fiction films about the Holocaust, he says.

Mr. Langer praises the "raw reality" of Tim Blake Nelson's "Grey Zone," a dramatization of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish slaves forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz. It's an unrelenting film of ubiquitous terror and arbitrary death, with no consoling message. It opened and closed in New York City last year in a matter of days.

Perhaps the most fruitful avenue for documentarians at the present time is to follow the lead of the historians and broaden their canvas. Many scholars are now reaching beyond the standard Holocaust narrative to ask questions that require wider comparative and contextual analyses. Samantha Power, for instance, writes about "the age of genocide" in her book " `A Problem From Hell.' " Institutions devoted to the Holocaust have also enlarged their perspective. The Holocaust Museum in Washington has run exhibits and programs on Sudan, Bosnia and Rwanda. Mr. Greenberg says the Shoah Foundation is looking to expand its range because "the pace of genocides has increased." He is confident that filmmakers are already moving in the same direction. "We will have documentaries about Rwanda in reasonably short order," he predicts.

The Holocaust will no doubt remain the defining atrocity of our time — for several reasons, good and bad — and a springboard for any discussion of mass extermination. But now it coexists with the slaughter of the Armenians, the malignity of the gulag, the autogenocide in Cambodia, the ethnic cleansings in the Balkans and the sanguinary tribal wars across Africa. For filmmakers interested in examining man's inhumanity to man or bringing it to public attention or simply bearing witness, there is no shortage of material.

< Previous page