Movie Review - 'Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust'

Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust

Featuring Sidney Lumet and Steven Spielberg; narrated by Gene Hackman
Directed by Daniel Anker
Not rated

Like most Americans, what I know of this darkest period in humanity is what I've gleaned from books, but primarily from what I've seen in movies. As Imaginary Witness points out, soon, that will be the only experience with the Holocaust any of us will know.

So while its survivors are still around, I would argue, it's important to make the most accurate renderings of the Holocaust as possible. Of course, that hasn't always been the prevailing wisdom.

As director Sidney Lumet points out in this historically rich documentary, the first American film that he remembers ever featuring the word "Jew" was 1940's The Great Dictator, a self-financed lampoon of Hitler/warning about Hitler from the great Charles Chaplin. Prior to that, argues director Daniel Anker, Hollywood was so concerned with upsetting Nazi Germany (which accounted for 10% of its foreign revenue) that it went to great lengths to avoid the rise of fascism and genocidal racism in Germany.

A scary thought, isn't it? That Hollywood studios, run primarily by Jews at the time, would acquiesce to the wishes of a madman in another country who would probably kill them if he had the chance?

Yet those were the conditions all those years ago. Anker's film presents a timeline of when films were allowed by Hollywood's codes to broach the subject and in what ways they could do it. For example, the landmark Playhouse 90 television production of Judgment at Nuremberg was not allowed to mention that Jews met their deaths in gas chambers because the program was sponsored by a natural gas collective. Instead, the words "gas chamber" were spoken but the audio was cut.

Two landmark miniseries changed the face of the Holocaust and in 1993, fifty years or more after most of the damage was done, Schindler's List became the living textbook of the horrible era.

Speaking of textbooks, that's what Imaginary Witness feels like. Its central theme, that Hollywood has always struggled with the right way to tell this story, is broken into chapters chronologically. Key moments in time are discussed intellectually but not very emotionally.

Imaginary Witness is a better textbook - a roadmap to history, if you will - than it is a movie, but that doesn't make it any less important. If you're interested in seeing how things have changed and why Holocaust movies are as necessary now as they were then, you should definitely give this studiously researched and effective documentary a look.