Holocaust Movies

A Skewed Vision
What's wrong with Holocaust movies.

BY THANE ROSENBAUM
Thursday, January 9, 2003 12:01 a.m.

Ever since Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," the Holocaust in film--actually the Holocaust itself--has never been the same. For decades it had been virtually a silent movie--images in our heads with no sound, a secret but unspoken language, even within the Holocaust survivor community. Everyone was awed by the moral implications of mass murder on such a grand scale. To speak of the Holocaust demanded great humility, which almost everyone exercised--artist and layman alike.

But "Schindler's List" slowly domesticated and democratized what had once been forbidden. Suddenly the Holocaust was on everyone's mind, and a source of inspiration for every artist. Even the survivors themselves began to speak, their testimonies filmed for archival purposes. (Ironically, many of these films were funded by the proceeds from "Schindler's List," which spawned an intensive effort to collect survivor testimonies, a project that was distinct from Claude Lanzmann's earlier documentary, "Shoah," which combined both artistic and archival elements.) Everything about the Holocaust was now fair game in either educating the public or firing the imagination. The Italian comedy "Life Is Beautiful" and the commercial success of the Broadway musical "The Producers" were offspring of this fertile, if not impious, era.

Now there are several new Holocaust films: Werner Herzog's "Invincible"; Tim Blake Nelson's "The Grey Zone"; Roman Polanski's "The Pianist"; and opening on Jan. 24 in New York and Los Angeles, Costa-Gavras's "Amen." Each represents a slightly new shift in the direction of the genre and the moral challenges that Holocaust narratives invariably represent.

The problem with "Schindler's List" is that the Holocaust is not about rescue and redemption, while the movie is. Indeed, there were rare occasions of virtue, but the calling card of the Nazis and their abetters was one of mass murder and moral failure. You can't claim to make a Holocaust movie if an audience leaves its seat feeling hopeful about humanity. The impulse to honor the good in man is noble, but disingenuous and misapplied when depicting an atrocity.

Unfortunately we live in an age where people learn their history from feature films. This has not served our memories well. It may be too much to ask film makers to tell the most complete, unwholesome aspects of a story. But it's worse when they focus instead on a more palatable, yet unrepresentative slice. The risk is in misleading
the audience, trivializing the horror, and reducing the madness into something mundane. These new films are each largely original, ambitious undertakings by acclaimed directors. But they suffer from the limitations of "Schindler's List."

"Invincible" is actually a pre-Holocaust tale, set right before the Nazis come to power. It is the story of a Polish-Jewish strongman who arrives in Berlin billed as a Teutonic god in an occult cabaret act. Later he announces his origins and eventually returns home with a sense of doom, certain that the answer to Jewish continuity is not in assimilation, but in the training of a new generation of Jewish Samsons.

"The Grey Zone" takes a similar position on Jewish empowerment, though in Auschwitz, of all places, and among already condemned men. The film is a moral examination of the Sonderkommando, squads of Jewish prisoners who worked the gas chambers and crematoria, essentially doing the Nazi's dirty work in helping to exterminate Jews.

The film, however, focuses on a group of street-hustling, foul-mouthed Hungarians who are planning to revolt but are foiled by the impossibility of their task and their own moral quandaries. Aside from setting the film in Auschwitz, which few have dared, "The Grey Zone," with its gray visual look, features an unusual portrait of those killed in the camp, shifting the moral choices away from the Germans, and onto the Jews themselves. And while uprisings make for compelling drama, they were impossible to orchestrate, which is why there were so few. Finally, those who survived the camps were generally the ones who possessed the cunning and street-smarts of Nelson's characters, and not the other way around.

Mr. Polanski's film is perhaps the most personal of the four, largely because he himself is a Holocaust survivor. Based on Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir, it is the story of one of Poland's most accomplished pianists, a Jew who survived the entire occupation in Warsaw--first in the Jewish ghetto, and then on the other side of the wall. The film is visually stunning, and there is a real authenticity to the brutality and inhumanity of life inside the ghetto. But perhaps because the film is a valentine to Polanski's Poland, non-Jewish Poles are depicted only as freedom-fighters and rescuers. The Germans are shown as barbarians, but the attitudes of Polish citizens, most of whom were either complicit or indifferent to the fate of their Jewish neighbors, aren't represented in this movie at all. This skewed vision of Polish history is perhaps related to the fact that both Mr. Szpilman and Mr. Polanski himself--in their special, rarefied cases--would not have survived without the assistance of Polish Catholics. But in their gratitude lies a distortion that favorably colors the anti-Semitic attitudes that the vast majority of Poles had toward Jews.

Finally, "Amen," adapted from Rolf Hochhuth's play, "The Deputy," is another examination of the risks of moral choice. A German scientist recruited by the SS, and a young Jesuit priest--both religious men of conscience--learn that the Jews of Europe are being gassed. They seek to warn the Allies and the pope, and are met with silence and indifference. The murder machine grinds on, with so few willing to stand in its way. Mr. Costa-Gavras never shows the camps or the dead bodies, just the futility amid all the surrender. The impulse toward focusing on the redemptive, heroic rescuer is there, but at least the film doesn't sugarcoat the ultimate result.

As a group, these films are visually daring and morally complex, and have expanded the images and messages that Holocaust films normally project, without winning, as of yet--certainly in the case of "Invincible" and "The Grey Zone"--any significant audiences. ("Max," which opened recently as well, has peripheral Holocaust implications, focusing on Hitler in his youth and his friendship with a sympathetic Jewish art dealer. Of course, anything that humanizes Hitler and his prior friendships with Jews is like fictionalizing Osama bin Laden as a former struggling waiter in Windows on the World, waiting to get home to his MTV.)

Yet authenticity and history is a hard sell in a motion picture. Each film owes its allegiance to "Schindler's List" for widening the lens. The question is whether that is such a good thing.

Mr. Rosenbaum is a novelist and essayist. His most recent novel is "The Golems of Gotham."

The Grey Zone
A Film Review by James Berardinelli

Auschwitz, 1944. One of the darkest times in one of the darkest places in recent human history. The images are stark and unforgettable: furnaces belching black smoke, lifeless corpses piled atop one another like firewood, and gray ash - the incinerated residue of humanity - coating nearly everything. It is into this nightmarish world that director Tim Blake Nelson plunges us with The Grey Zone, a harrowing film about compromise, betrayal, and moral ambiguity. Based on the true story related in Miklos Nyiszli's book, "Auschwitz: A Doctor's Account", the movie tells the tale of the twelfth Sonderkommando at Auschwitz – the only group ever to lead an armed uprising at the death camp.

The term "Sonderkommando" was coined by the Germans to describe those Jews who agreed to collaborate with the Nazis. In return for herding their fellow internees into the gas chambers and disposing of the corpses afterwards, the participants were given wine, extra food, and cleaner, relatively spacious barracks – until their time for extermination arrived. In their view, they were doing what was necessary to survive - their rationale being that they weren't actually committing the murders (a dubious distinction they chose to make). To others, they were traitors to their people. History has judged these men; Blake chooses not to. He delineates hard questions for which there are no answers. From the comfort of a theater, it's easy enough to stand upon the pillar of moral certainty and assert, "I would never have done that!" But, as one of the characters notes, "How can you know what you'd do to stay alive until you're asked?"

In the darkness of the death camp, an armed uprising is being planned by the Sonderkommandos, who have been stockpiling illicitly gained explosives and guns. While some of the organizers, such as the self-serving Abramowics (Steve Buscemi), plan to use this as an opportunity to escape, others, such as Hoffman (David Arquette), Rosenthal (David Chandler), and Schlermer (Daniel Benzali) are more pragmatic. Their intention is to blow up the crematoriums, then die fighting. They do not believe they will ever again see anything outside of the walls of Auschwitz. Thirsty for some form of redemption, these men leap to the aid of a 14-year old girl (Kamelia Grigorova) who miraculously survives a gassing. They hide her, and, with the aid of Dr. Nyiszli (Allan Corduner), Mengele's Jewish assistant, bring her back to consciousness. Even when Muhsfeldt (Harvey Keitel), the Nazi camp commander, learns of her presence, they stubbornly refuse to let her die, even when their actions endanger the uprising.

The Grey Zone is as powerful as it is grim. The film illustrates the darker side of the human instinct for survival – how men can be capable of things they never would have thought possible in the face of death. In order to spare their consciences, the members of the Sonderkommando display an amazing ability to lie to themselves, but, the more aware they become of their culpability in what is transpiring around them, the greater their need is for a taste of redemption. In the grand scheme of things, saving the life of one girl, whose mind may have been irreparably damaged by the gas, is a small thing, but to those who initially herded her into the chamber, it is everything. It becomes a reason to go on. Even the doctor, whose moral compass has been hopelessly skewed, risks his privileged position and his life to save her, going so far as to blackmail Muhsfeldt.

Tim Blake Nelson (whose counts O among his previous films) presents events in an unsentimental fashion. His camera is cold and unwavering; the pervasive gloom renders everything almost monochromatic. Unlike Schindler's List, there is no ray of heroism shining through the smoky pall that hangs over Auschwitz. The movie has a tendency to be talky, but that's because it's based on a play that Nelson wrote. There are plenty of scenes to force more sensitive viewers to avert their eyes, including a vicious torture sequence (mercifully, the actual maiming is not shown on camera, although the reaction of the victim is) and an instance when Hoffman, enraged by the refusal of a condemned man to give up his watch, beats him to death.

Nelson has assembled a cast that is a mixture of recognizable names and solid character actors. Some of the higher profile performers include Reservoir Dogs alumni Harvey Keitel and Steve Buscemi, both of whom have small-but-important roles. David Arquette is adequate as Hoffman, but his low-key portrayal is overshadowed by the work of the lesser-known Daniel Benzali, David Chandler, and Allan Corduner. Meanwhile, Natasha Lyonne and Mira Sorvino are almost unrecognizable as the battered, tortured women who endure the worst the Nazis have to offer.

With its numerous complex issues, the Holocaust has formed the backdrop for countless powerful, emotionally wrenching dramas. And, with so many stories to tell, redundancy does not seem to be a problem – each new motion picture puts a face on another previously anonymous body. The Grey Zone gives life and meaning to an event that is little more than a footnote in history books (if that). Like so many of its fellow Holocaust dramas, The Grey Zone seeks not to comfort audiences, but to remind them.

© 2002 James Berardinelli

United States, 2001
U.S. Release Date: 10/18/02 (limited)
Running Length: 1:48
MPAA Classification: R (Holocaust images, nudity, violence)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Seen at: Ritz Five, Philadelphia
Cast: David Arquette, Daniel Benzali, David Chandler, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Allan Corduner, Natasha Lyonne, Mira Sorvino, Kamelia Grigorova
Director: Tim Blake Nelson
Producers: Avi Lerner, Danny Lerner, Pamela Koffler, Christine Vachon, Tim Blake Nelson
Screenplay: Tim Blake Nelson
Cinematography: Russell Lee Fine
Music: Jeff Danna
U.S. Distributor: Lions Gate Films

Polanski's 'The Pianist'
By Colin Covert
Star Tribune Published Jan. 3, 2003

"The Pianist," a WWII drama by Roman Polanski, is the story of one isolated man who survived the German extermination of the Warsaw ghetto. Adapted from Polish composer and pianist Wladislaw Szpilman's autobiography, the film charts his descent from urbane gentility to feral desperation.

Madness has always been Polanski's grand theme, and he finds much to explore in this story, where genocidal insanity collides with delusional denial. As the film opens, Szpilman sits at the keyboard, performing Chopin live for the state radio network. Impeccably civilized and cultivated, he feels the music so deeply that he ignores the producer's pantomimed instructions to stop playing and evacuate the studio. The sound of Luftwaffe bombs draws near. Only when a blast shatters the studio window does Szpilman concede defeat.

A scene from 'The Pianist'

Guy Ferrandis
Focus Pictures
He picks his way through the rubble and heads to his family's comfortable apartment. His family denounces, in their genteel, cosmopolitan way, the latest ghastliness. There is quiet heroism in this, but also a troubling detachment from reality. It's as if the graceful melodies in Szpilman's head drowned out the jackboots in the street.

The gravity of the subject reigns in Polanski's macabre humor and often-florid style. Like Szpilman, Polanski escaped the Krakow ghetto, finding shelter with sympathetic Poles while his family was shipped to death camps. Rather than show Holocaust horrors in panoramic detail, Polanski's approach is indirect. Szpilman watches the rising Nazi tide through apartment shutters. It's the end of the world seen through a keyhole.

In the title role, Adrien Brody solidifies his claim to the title of his generation's finest actor. He has transformed himself into a punk rocker in Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam," a lascivious French nobleman in "The Affair of the Necklace," a hot-tempered combat photographer in "Harrison's Flowers" and now, at 29, he might have his career-defining role.

Szpilman is no resistance-movement hero, but rather a complex, compromised survivor. He's a bit of a dandy, maintaining his appearance even as food is rationed. He enlists the help of a despised Jewish collaborator. When the man pulls Szpilman out of the line for concentration-camp boxcars, he accepts, watching his family being herded off to certain death. How many would have the courage to make a different stand?

Brody's fine-boned features lend themselves to grief, his lanky frame looks fearfully skeletal in later scenes, and his hands move authoritatively on the keyboard. But the real power of his performance is internal. Szpilman spends most of his time in hiding and silence, and for long stretches Brody is alone onscreen holding us with his haunted gaze. Every time a footfall sounds outside his hiding place, we feel the stab of anxiety pierce his heart. He gives us the distilled essence of persecution.

Through Szpilman's eyes, Polanski stages the destruction of Warsaw's 360,000 Jews in searing vignettes. We see the random sadism of individual German soldiers, mocking their prisoners and forcing them to perform like circus animals. And we witness the chilling bureaucracy of extermination, as troops systematically number every building in the Jewish District before detonating them.

Szpilman's war, and Polan ski's, isn't a matter of unalloyed good and evil, however. "The Pianist" gives us not only the heroes of the 1943 ghetto uprising, but also Jewish black marketeers busily amassing fortunes, and the Nazi-appointed Jewish police squads that aided the occupation forces. There are sympathetic Poles who risk their lives to keep Szpilman hidden, fed and healthy, alongside anti-Semetic bigots.

Most remarkable of all is a cultured German officer, played by Thomas Kretschmann, who saves Szpilman's life after hearing him play in a deserted mansion. He arrives late in the story, when the Germans are aware that defeat is just weeks away.

The soldier isn't presented as a moral beacon. Perhaps he's hoping to gain an ally on what certainly will be the winning side. More than anything, he simply seems weary of the obligation to go on killing. Szpilman, now a starved, bearded wraith, clings to a tin of pickles with the absurd tenacity of a Samuel Beckett antihero. The Nazi offers him a parting gift: a can opener. That bizarre, apologetic gesture of kindness in the vast, smoking ruins of Warsaw acidly underscores the tragic lunacy of the war.

The film ends where it began, with Szpilman playing Chopin on Polish radio. After his trip through hell, he's still devoted to the veneer of culture that overlays humankind's potential for barbarism. His beautiful playing feels poignantly noble and foolish at the same time.

We Saw Three Gallows

One day when we came back from work, we saw three gallows rearing up in the assembly place, three black crows. Roll call. SS all around us, machine guns trained: the traditional ceremony. Three victims in chains – and one of them, the little servant, sad-eyed angel.

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him.

This time the Lagerkapo refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him.

The three victims mounted together onto the chairs.

The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses.

"Long live liberty!", cried the two adults. But the child was silent.

"Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked.

At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs were tipped over.

Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon the sun was setting.

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive.

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive as I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking: "Where is God now?"

And I heard a voice within me answer him:

"Where is he? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows."

That night the soup tasted of corpses.

- Eli Wiesel, Night, pp. 75-76

Amen
Director: Costa-Gavras
Starring: Ulrich Tukur, Mathieu Kassovitz

Costa-Gavras stands alone in his consistent cinematic attempts to make compelling re-creations of modern history's atrocities. In the quest to turn expose into narrative, his films are easy prey to sniping over inaccuracies. The more toes his controversial honesty stamps on, the more, it seems, his essential use of poetic license becomes a target. The facts presented in Amen. hurt some very big feet through their very existence. The film dramatises the conflict of SS Lieutenant Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), a protestant whose scientific expertise has been abused to facilitate the use Zyklon B to exterminate the Jews, gypsies and mentally infirm in wartime Germany. Once he witnesses these chemical massacres he attempts to inform the world without losing his position. Realising that no one is more willing to risk their future than him in being the whistleblower, he sticks to his post to assist the Holocaust, under the self-delusion that he is secretly making the "mass processing of units" less efficient.

Costa-Gavras invents the character of a Jesuit priest, Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz) to aid his storytelling and open up those implicated to include the Vatican. By following the efforts of the real German officer and fabricated priest Costa-Gavras indicates his concerns are with the moral implications of the situation rather than with a mere regurgitation of events.

Amen. is attacking the institutions (The SS, The Vatican, even the family) which inhibit the ethical actions of individuals while purporting to exist to maintain morality. We last see Gerstein reading a report on himself that questions whether he did enough as a Christian to stop the silent extermination of a race. Costa-Gavras knows that this is a rhetorical question. He presents a playing field where Gerstein's goal of keeping his conscience without becoming a traitor was inconceivable. Perhaps the reason the film has fared less well critically than Schindler's List (1993) is that Spielberg's masterpiece vindicates the story of an entrepreneur who saved lives via the system, while this work of equal artistic and historical merit offers no such heroics or success. Here the system wins and destroys the individual.

This study of the inability of the individual within the mechanisations of power influences some marvellous diegetic sequences. Costumes play a key part in the film. We are introduced to Gerstein having his uniform tailored. Just as the fabric needs to be adjusted to allow him to salute properly, it later restricts his ability to be taken seriously by the liberals whose ears he wishes to use. Similarly when Riccardo realises that the Vatican may be complicit, he takes action by adding the Star of David to his robe. Riccardo's protest is to change the clothes that protect him from the consequences of his anti-Nazi actions, to implicate him as one of those he is trying to protect. Status is symbolised by appearance in this world of eugenics and diplomacy, only those who are willing to convert their dress can keep their conscience.

The script actively avoids the blunt imagery of emaciated corpses in rags, which have unfortunately become the cliché of the Holocaust. Instead we view images of German officers peeking at the gas chambers like voyeurs through spy holes. Trains punctuate scenes. Sometimes the boxcars are open, indicating another disposed of cargo of life. Others are impenetrable, the fact we cannot see through them as before suggesting that they are full of doomed people. The black smoke that billows from the engine is a graphic match to the incinerator chimneys at the camps. This adds urgency to Gerstein and Riccardo's futile actions but also emphasises the uniformity of the Holocaust. Costa-Gavras answers why such a clean, efficient, open system was so easy for the German people to discount and so necessary for those in power outside of Germany to cover up.

Reviewed by Bob Carroll

Invincible
BY ROGER EBERT

Werner Herzog's "Invincible" tells the astonishing story of a Jewish strongman in Nazi Germany, a man who in his simple goodness believes he can be the "new Samson" and protect his people. He is a blacksmith in Poland in 1932 when discovered by a talent scout, and soon becomes the headliner in the Palace of the Occult, in Berlin, which is run by the sinister Hanussen (Tim Roth), a man who dreams of becoming Minister of the Occult in a Nazi government.

The strongman, named Zishe Breitbart, is played by a Finnish athlete named Jouko Ahola, twice winner of the title World's Strongest Man. Much of the movie's uncanny appeal comes from the contrast between Ahola's performance, which is entirely without guile, and Roth's performance, which drips with mannered malevolence. Standing between them is the young woman Marta (Anna Gourari), who is under Hanussen's psychological power, and who the strongman loves.

"Invincible" is based, Herzog says, on the true story of Breitbart, whose great strength contradicted the Nazi myth of Aryan superiority. I can imagine a dozen ways in which this story could be told badly, but Herzog has fashioned it into a film of uncommon fascination, in which we often have no idea at all what could possibly happen next. There are countless movies about preludes to the Holocaust, but I can't think of one this innocent, direct and unblinking. In the face of gathering evil, Zishe trusts in human nature, is proud of his heritage, and believes strength and goodness (which he confuses) will triumph.

The movie has the power of a great silent film, unafraid of grand gestures and moral absolutes. Its casting of the major characters is crucial, and instinctively correct. Tim Roth is a sinister charlatan, posing as a man with real psychic powers, using trickery and showmanship as he jockeys for position within the emerging Nazi majority. There is a scene where he hypnotizes Marta, and as he stares boldly into the camera I wondered, for a moment, if it was possible to hypnotize a movie audience that way. Late in the film there is a scene where his secrets are revealed, and he makes a speech of chilling, absolute cynicism. Another actor in another movie might have simply gnashed his teeth, but Roth and Herzog take the revelations as an opportunity to show us the self-hatred beneath the deception.

As for Jouko Ahola, this untrained actor, who seems by nature to be good-hearted and uncomplicated, may never act again, but he has found the one perfect role, as Maria Falconetti did in "The Passion of Joan of Arc." He embodies the simple strongman. The camera can look as closely as it wants and never find anything false. A naive man from a backward town, not especially devout, he gets into a fight when Polish customers in a restaurant insult him and his little brother as Jews. A little later, entering a circus contest, he watches as the strongman lifts a boulder--and then puts an end to the contest by, lifting the strongman and the boulder.

The talent scout takes him to see his first movie. Soon he is in Berlin, where Hanussen sizes him up and says, "We will Aryanize you. A Jew should never be as strong as you." Zishe is outfitted with a blond wig and Nordic helmet, and presented as "Siegfried." He becomes a great favor of Nazi brownshirts in the audience, as Hanussen prattles about "the strength of the body against the dark powers of the occult." But Zishe's mind works away at the situation until finally he has his solution, tears off the helmet and wig, and identities himself as a Jew.

Here as throughout the film Herzog avoids the obvious next scene. Is Hanussen outraged? To a degree. But then he reports: "There's a line three blocks long outside! It's the Jews. They all want to see the new Samson." And then, at a time when Hitler was on the rise but the full measure of Jewish persecution was not yet in view, the Palace of the Occult turns into a dangerous pit where audience members are potentially at one another's throats.

This is the first feature in 10 years from Herzog, one of the great visionaries among directors. He strains to break the bonds of film structure in order to surprise us in unexpected ways. His best films unashamedly yearn to lift us into the mythical and the mystical. "Our civilization is starving for new images," he once told me, and in "Invincible" there is an image of a bleak, rocky seashore where the sharp stones are littered with thousands or millions of bright red crabs, all mindlessly scrabbling away on their crabby missions. I think this scene may represent the emerging Nazi hordes, but of course there can be no literal translation. Perhaps Herzog wants to illustrate the implacable Darwinian struggle from which man can rise with good heart and purpose.

The strongman in "Invincible" is lovable, and so deeply moving, precisely because he is not a cog in a plot, has no plan, is involved in no machinations, but is simply proud of his parents, proud to be a Jew, in love with the girl, and convinced that God has made him strong for a reason. He may be wrong in his optimism, but his greatest strength is that he will never understand that. The Roth character is equally single-minded, but without hope or purpose--a conniver and manipulator.

Watching "Invincible" was a singular experience for me, because it reminded me of the fundamental power that the cinema had for us when we were children. The film exercises the power that fable has for the believing. Herzog has gotten outside the constraints and conventions of ordinary narrative, and addresses us where our credulity keeps its secrets.