The subject of the Holocaust in American films gets a dutiful survey in a 2004 documentary just now finding its theatrical release: “Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust.”
Rich with film clips and a few well-informed talking heads, and narrated by Gene Hackman, “Imaginary Witness” doesn’t flinch from exposing Hollywood’s sometimes insufficient job of looking at the subject. But it also shows the background of Hollywood’s complicated history with Germany.
Even as Adolf Hitler was consolidating power in Germany in the 1930s, and making clear his hatred of Jews, Hollywood stayed mostly neutral on the subject. The movie suggests the reasons were twofold: The studios didn’t want to alienate the huge German market with negative German images, and — because many of the studio chiefs were themselves Jewish — they didn’t want to appear to be advancing a pro-Jewish agenda.
An exception was Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” a gleeful nose-thumbing at Hitler and fascism. But Chaplin financed his own movies and didn’t have to answer to anybody else’s opinion.
Director Sidney Lumet recalls seeing “The Great Dictator” when it opened and being startled at actually hearing the word “Jew” in a Hollywood film.
Hollywood’s greatest single contribution to the acknowledgment of the Holocaust was sending some of its cameramen and directors into the concentration camps and extermination camps to photograph the evidence of the Nazi methods of mass murder.
Curiously, although “Imaginary Witness” asserts the importance of this footage when it was shown as newsreels around the world, there is very little of it in this film (except as included in the 1961 film “Judgment at Nuremberg”).
Despite two influential 1947 films, “Gentleman’s Agreement” and “Crossfire,” the subject of anti-Semitism remained an infrequent one in Hollywood immediately after the war. The Holocaust itself was alluded to only glancingly, despite the fact that the studio heads had toured the Nazi camps after the end of the war.
Director Daniel Anker nods toward television in this time (“Judgment at Nuremberg” itself began as a live TV play), including rare footage of the trial of war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961, which brought the realities of the death camps into people’s living rooms. He misses a few serious TV shows, including the efforts of writers such as Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky to dramatize the Holocaust.
Proper attention is paid to landmarks such as the 1978 TV miniseries “Holocaust” and the film “Schindler’s List.” Much to Anker’s credit, he also includes the criticisms of those efforts as well as praise. All in all, a decent introduction to a subject that shouldn’t go away.
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