Can Hollywood successfully address the horror of the Holocaust?
Three new films about the Holocaust are set to be released this year, as Hollywood continues to grapple with the horror of the Nazi murder of six million Jews.
The films “couldn’t be more different,” she said. WatchmanJonathan Friedland But they have one thing in common: “the implicit belief that the Holocaust remains the ultimate moral test of humanity.”
Friedland added that as the films prepare for release, an important question remains: “Can cinema hope to adequately confront humanity’s darkest chapters?”
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‘A big challenge’
Countless films have been made about the Holocaust, from George Stevens’s “The Diary of Anne Frank,” to Roberto Benigni’s “Life is Beautiful,” to Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.”
They all face a “daunting, and perhaps insurmountable, challenge,” they said. The Economist. “They must try to convey horror knowing that their efforts will be inadequate, and risk appearing disrespectful to the suffering.”
Part of that complexity, Friedland said, is “the natural urge to tell the stories of those who lived and did not die.”
Director Stanley Kubrick abandoned his Holocaust film after “Schindler’s List” came out, saying, “The Holocaust is about 6 million people who were killed, and ‘Schindler’s List’ is about 600 people who weren’t killed.”
Holocaust films “mostly come in two types,” said Roger Ebert, US film critic website. Some are survival stories, others are “grim and harrowing viewing experiences” that underscore the fact that “survival was unfortunately not the reality experienced by most European Jews.”
“Schindler’s List,” which turns 30 this year, “somehow navigated both of those realities at the same time, and did so for a wide audience,” Ebert said.
Like “Schindler’s List,” this year’s lineup of films shares “an unexpected message of hope as well,” Friedland said. “Even the deepest darkness eventually passes” and that “for all the torments of the present…we are lucky to live now, not then—even if we sometimes struggle to see it.”
“Connecting the past to the present”
to New York timesEsther Zuckerman’s three films scheduled for release this year seek to “challenge the idea of what (Holocaust films) can and should be.”
In “Zone of Interest,” British director Jonathan Glazer adapts a novel by Martin Amis that depicts the daily life of Rudolf Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz. The film “barely gets inside the camp”, instead focusing on “the visually perfect world the couple creates for their family as they obsessively plot the extermination of the Jews imprisoned next door.”
The film “Occupied City”, based on Bianca Stegter’s book “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945”, explains what happened during the Nazi occupation of various buildings in the Dutch city. The film is directed by British director Steve McQueen, who is married to Steiger.
The third picture released this year, titled “Origin,” was also inspired by a book: Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling nonfiction book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” The film compares the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany to the treatment of blacks in America and Dalits in India.
All the films are successful in different ways, Zuckerman said, because they all “look with an analytical eye at their subject, connecting the horrors of the past to the present.” Doing so makes “the subject matter feel more disturbingly resonant than ever.”
