Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust

Hollywood's Slow Awakening to Holocaust's Horrors
By ANITA GATES
Published in the nytimes.com

Hollywood did not come through for General Eisenhower. Shortly after V-E day in 1945, Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of Allied forces in Europe in World War II and future president of the United States, flew a dozen Hollywood moguls to Germany to see Nazi atrocities for themselves. "They saw the ovens," says the film director Vincent Sherman in "Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust." "They saw the piles of dead, which had not been buried." The idea, says Neal Gabler, the cultural historian, was that "they should bear witness" through their films.

But, as this documentary points out, it was only in 1964, almost two decades later, that a major American film even tried to recreate the horrors of the camps. That was "The Pawnbroker," Sidney Lumet's drama about a Holocaust survivor (Rod Steiger) trying to repress the memories of his time as a prisoner of the Nazis. And the scenes, at least those shown in "Imaginary Witness," are surprisingly mild.

"Imaginary Witness," which has its television premiere tonight on AMC, is a devastating, impressively reflective 90-minute documentary. It examines Hollywood's early films about the rising Nazi threat (like "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" and Charlie Chaplin's pointed comedy "The Great Dictator"), the first postwar films on the subject (including "The Diary of Anne Frank," which stops short of showing Anne at Bergen-Belsen, and "Judgment at Nuremberg"), the increasingly graphic feature films and mini-series (including NBC's "Holocaust" in 1978), recent films (like Steven Spielberg's 1993 "Schindler's List") and, finally, whether these things should be depicted on film at all. The very acts of hiring actors and building sets for films about the Holocaust is, as the writer Thane Rosenbaum says, "in many ways, a desecration." Yet, as Mr. Gabler concludes, "Hollywood is the means by which most people, for better or worse, come to terms with the Holocaust."

For almost anyone born after World War II, scenes from the earlier films are likely to be of particular interest. In "The Mortal Storm" (1940), which featured Robert Young as a Nazi, the word Jew is never spoken; characters refer simply to "non-Aryans" instead. But perhaps the most horrifying prewar example shown in "Imaginary Witness" is a newsreel about a book-burning, which treats the event as something of a fraternity prank.

"It's a big night for the younger Hitler set," the newsreel narrator begins in the same cheerful, slightly amused tone that newsreels used for stories about beauty pageants and adorable family pets. "The college boys are making Berlin safe for Nazis by burning up books that might lead Germans astray!"

Scenes from the 1988 ABC mini-series "War and Remembrance" are the most graphic shown in "Imaginary Witness," and they are painfully powerful, although to describe them here would seem deeply disrespectful. And one of the most horrific Holocaust moments on film shows no physical violence at all. It is Meryl Streep making the impossible decision between her children referred to in the film's title, "Sophie's Choice" (1982). The same is true of the moment in "Schindler's List" when a gentle rain of ash falls on a beautifully dressed Polish woman on a stroll, who has no idea that the ash's source is a nearby crematorium.

The depths of trivialization are illustrated by a clip from, of all things, "This Is Your Life," the 1950's NBC series. As Gene Hackman, who narrates "Imaginary Witness," says, it was network television that "first found a way to package the Holocaust for mass consumption." In his familiar pseudo-sympathetic voice, Ralph Edwards, host of "This Is Your Life," honors a woman who survived Auschwitz. Still, there is genuine, intense feeling (despite simultaneous bad taste) when she and her brother are reunited onstage, for the first time since the war.

"Imaginary Witness" is specific enough that a very young person who knew almost nothing about World War II could watch and understand the overall history. "Hitler's final solution, the systematic murder of all Europe's Jews, became German state policy in January 1942," Mr. Hackman says at one point, adding that gas chambers were soon operational at six death camps.

In the end, it is undeniably true that the Holocaust is, in Mr. Spielberg's words, "an ineffable experience only understood by those who survived the camps." But the fact that this documentary is still deeply disturbing attests to the need for continuing remembrance. And without the film and television dramatizations and the broadcast of film and photographs from the camps themselves, there would be many Americans, and I am one of them, who would have had no grasp of the atrocities at all.

Directed by Daniel Anker; narrated by Gene Hackman.