Category Archives: Film

[from The Guardian]

Sixteen years after an English court discredited his work and the judge called him “antisemitic and racist”, the historian David Irving claims he is inspiring a new generation of “Holocaust sceptics”.

On the eve of a major new Bafta-nominated film about the trial, Irving, who has dismissed what happened at Auschwitz concentration camp during the second world war as “Disneyland”, says that a whole new generation of young people have discovered his work via the internet and social media.

“Interest in my work has risen exponentially in the last two or three years. And it’s mostly young people. I’m getting messages from 14, 15, 16-year-olds in America. They find me on YouTube. There are 220 of my lectures on YouTube, I believe, and these young people tell me how they’ve stayed up all night watching them.

“They get in touch because they want to find out the truth about Hitler and the second world war. They ask all sorts of questions. I’m getting up to 300 to 400 emails a day. And I answer them all. I build a relationship with them.”

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[From The Independent]

In all the controversy over the lack of diversity in this year’s Academy Awards, what hasn’t always been noticed is the remarkable story behind the Holocaust drama Son Of Saul, the front-runner for the foreign-language Oscar.

When it comes to the challenge of representing the Holocaust on screen, the risks of appearing clumsy, insensitive or downright trite are obvious (Roberto Benigni’s 1997 comedic Life Is Beautifulmay have won an Oscar but is still seen by many as ill advised).

Laszlo Nemes, 38, the Hungarian film-maker behind Son Of Saul, was born long after the Second World War. But he knew he was tackling taboos by recreating the horrors of the Nazi genocide on screen with his story about a sonderkommando in Auschwitz – an inmate who disposed of the corpses.

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[From The Guardian]

Documentary takes sons of Nazis and professor whose relatives were killed back to the horror of occupied eastern Europe.

Seventy years after Hans Frank, the SS governor of Poland who oversaw the Holocaust, appeared before the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, a documentary is released this week exploring his embittered family legacy and the possibility of reconciliation following the atrocities.

My Nazi Legacy is a compelling journey into the horrors of occupied eastern Europe in the company of Frank’s son, Niklas, Horst von Wächter – whose father, Otto, was Nazi governor of Galicia (now mostly in modern Ukraine) – and Philippe Sands QC, professor of international law, many of whose family died during mass murders of the Jewish community there in 1942.

The film deals with the relationship between the three men and their attempts to come to terms with what their parents inflicted or suffered, examining the way Germans have dealt with their poisoned inheritance and Ukrainians embroidered their fragile history of independence.

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[From Variety]

JERUSALEM– Laszlo Nemes, whose directorial debut “Son of Saul” won Cannes’s Grand Prize, attended the Jerusalem film festival to participate in the Sam Spiegel Film Lab’s Jury and took the opportunity to chat about his movie’s journey from financing to premiering it at the festival, as well as his views on the European film scene.

“Concentration camps were a mix of organization and chaos and that was our approach for this film,” said Nemes, who expresses a blend of determination, strength and humility. “Everybody came to the shoot with the Holocaust in mind. I had a lot of discussions with the actors, I told them to ban this feeling of self-pity, to bring (their act) down, do less. In a way it’s the most primitive way of directing.”

There has been countless movies about the Holocaust but Nemes says none truthfully “conveyed the experience of the camps, its limitations, its chaos, what it meant to be a human being living in the camps.”

“I wanted to make a film about the Shoah, but I didn’t know how to do it. I wanted to stick with one character but I needed an angle. After two or three years, the sentence came (…) it had to be about a member of the commando who was burning his own people,” explained the helmer.

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[From the Guardian]

Auschwitz-set Son of Saul is focusing the film industry’s attention on the wartime atrocities committed by the Nazis – and it couldn’t be more relevant.

“No one could bear to look at these things without losing their sanity,” said WG Sebald, just before he died in 2001: he was talking about the Holocaust, and specifically the numerous acts of bestial persecution visited on the Nazi’s unfortunate victims. This has been a preoccupation of film-makers too, ever since the first newsreels emerged from concentration camps after their liberation. The desire to show, to tell, to educate, comes up against decency, taste and revulsion. What purpose, exactly, is served by documenting and/or recreating unwatchably violent and horrible images: hapless civilians murdered in their millions; shot, beaten, starved and tortured in greater numbers than ever believed possible; an entire national civilisation that prided itself on its sophistication undergoing the most spectacular moral breakdown in history. At what point do film-makers take responsibility for the trauma their images inflict, even if they are simply reflecting actual events?

The story behind the recently completed German Concentration Camps Factual Survey film attests to that: it was compiled from footage sent to London in 1945 by combat film units, as Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald were liberated: more was acquired from the Soviet film crews present at the death camps further east, Auschwitz and Treblinka. At some point the project – which briefly involved Alfred Hitchcock as a consultant – was abandoned, for no clear reason. The best guess is that its stated aim – to confront the surviving German population with atrocities carried out in their name, and partly in their midst – was neither effective nor expedient, as the allies sought to rebuild and reorganise in the already-burgeoning cold war with the USSR. But even at 70 years distance, the images it contains are appalling. The enormous mounds of emaciated corpses, tipped into giant burial pits; crowds of starving, disease-ridden survivors barely clinging to life; the unutterably gruesome remains of a man who had attempted to dig his way out under the wall of a burning building, only to be shot by soldiers waiting on the other side.

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[From The Guardian]

In 1945, Alfred Hitchcock advised on a film that would catalogue the atrocities uncovered in concentration camps by Allied troops. Now the Imperial War Museum has completed the film with previously unseen footage.

Skeletal figures, too weak to move, wait limply for help. At gunpoint, blank-faced SS officers manhandle the twisted bodies of the prisoners they starved to death, slinging them into gigantic burial pits that will eventually be filled with thousands of corpses. Bullet-riddled bodies and skulls smashed into grotesque shapes line country roads. Having frantically tried to dig his way out of a barn where hundreds were being burned to death, a man’s body lies wedged under a wall where he was shot by German troops.

The catalogue of horrors uncovered by the film German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is unremitting, but they remained unseen for decades.

After production got under way in 1945, it was never completed and simply shelved. Only extracts have previously emerged, notably in the 1985 TV film A Painful Reminder. The story of the film, perhaps best known for the involvement of Alfred Hitchcock, was recently told in the documentary Night Will Fall, released in cinemas last September and screened on Channel 4 in January. Now, however, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, restored and completed to the film-makers’ original specifications, has gone on public release for the first time, with a two-week run at the BFI Southbank in London, and further screenings in May through the Picturehouse chain of cinemas.

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[From The Guardian]

At 87, Claude Lanzmann is still capable of enforcing his film-making personality on European cinema: he is a landmark in the shadow of his great subject, the Holocaust. His film, Shoah, is now best seen not merely as an incomparable record, but as an intervention in history, an insistence on eyewitness testimony and compelling truth. This new film is a remarkable companion to his masterpiece Shoah: a fascinating encounter, recorded in Rome in the 1970s, while working on his great film but not used at the time, for reasons that Lanzmann leaves us to ponder.

It is an interview with Benjamin Murmelstein, an Austrian Jew and last surviving “chairman” of the Theresienstadt ghetto, near Prague, a supposedly comfortable Potemkin-style arrangement that was part of a sickening pantomime of ostensible good faith after the Anschluss. Murmelstein explains that their inhabitants, and the world, were distracted with the fatuous fantasy of being shipped over to Madagascar: a cynical euphemism for the death marches and extermination, in which Murmelstein was held to be complicit. The Nazis coerced leading Jews to be their administrative “elders” there, a queasy use of Judeophobe-propagandist terminology, and Murmelstein was the last surviving example (his predecessors were murdered by the Nazis).

He was a man hated after the war for being a collaborator. But he was someone who perhaps saved lives due to his endless and often terrifying negotiations with Adolf Eichmann on the subject of emigration, when the Nazi authorities still believed that allowing Jews to depart without their money might be practicable and profitable.

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[from the Sydney Morning Herald]

Writer-performer Olivia Satchell flits between the branches of her family tree in this fiction-streaked biographical work inspired by the life of the grandmother she never met.
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In 1938 Truda Vitz, a 17-year-old Viennese Jew, escaped Nazi Austria and, we can assume, almost-certain death. Arriving in England she was registered as an Enemy Alien and very much alone. Her mother had died earlier that year. Her father, who insisted on her leaving Vienna, fled to Cuba with a mistress.

All that stood between the teenage Truda and destitution was the grudging hospitality of wartime Britain and the jewellery she had smuggled from Vienna under her fur coat.

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[from Ha’Aretz]

[Interesting position piece about Holocaust cinema]

Cinema is entertainment. This has been the thorny challenge for filmmakers who’ve chosen to grapple with the subject of the Holocaust, and the reason why, from ‘Kapò’ to ‘Schindler’s List,’ most of their attempts have failed.

The Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo is best remembered for two powerful films, “The Battle of Algiers” (1966) and the Marlon Brando-starring “Burn!” (1969). But in 1960 he directed another very important film, called “Kapò.” It was important for two reasons: It was the first prestigious European movie set in a concentration camp; and the criticism written about it had a formative influence on film criticism ever since.

Pontecorvo’s film told the story of a Jewish girl (the American actress Susan Strasberg, who a few years earlier played the lead role in the original Broadway production of “The Diary of Anne Frank”). The girl is sent to Auschwitz with her parents. After they are killed, she tries every possible way to survive, including becoming a kapo.

The movie aroused controversy as soon as it was released. The few feature films before it that had dealt with the memory of the Holocaust – such as Edward Dmytryk’s “The Juggler” (1953), filmed in Israel and starring Kirk Douglas as a Holocaust survivor struggling to overcome the aftereffects of the war, or “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959) – did not depict life in the camps.

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[from The Independent]

Steven Spielberg will be asked to help create a permanent British memorial to the Holocaust which will capture the audio-visual testimonies of all the survivors of Nazi persecution who forged a new life in the UK.

The film director sent a message of support to 400 survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution who gathered at Wembley Stadium for a consultation staged by the cross-party Holocaust Commission, announced by David Cameron in January.

The Commission was set up to investigate what more needs to be done to ensure Britain has a fitting memorial to the Holocaust and the right resources to educate future generations about the genocide, in which an estimated six million Jews were killed.

Spielberg, whose USC Shoah Foundation has filmed about 52,000 two-hour eyewitness accounts in 34 languages and in 58 countries, told the gathering: “The singular perspective of those who were there is vital. You are teachers of the next generation. The power of your stories is an inspiration to me and people the world over.”

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[From The National Post]

The Holocaust continues to cast a long and varied shadow over our cultural landscape. Seventy years on, with the number of actual survivors dwindling, the stories and lessons from that time continue to echo through generations, and across the planet. This week sees the opening in Toronto of three films dealing with the Holocaust and its repercussions.

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