![Ha! Alright, for you, I will seek it out! [Apologies for the following usage of your comment for what eventually becomes a digressive rambling about Holocaust and Hollywood, but take none of the following personally.] Anyways, I guess it’s about time I saw that, probably a bad look to write off Holocaust product by somebody who actually survived ghettoization, lost a mother to Auschwitz and nearly lost a father to Mauthausen. While his own story would have been interesting in itself—maybe an episodic narrative of interactions with host families during hideout (like Pialat’s L’Enfance Nue, but with Nazis, something that would probably resonate with my grandfather)—i’m sure the Pianist’s composition is informed by/embedded with recall. Something about how it reads on paper, though, “the struggle of an artist to continue bearing creativity when fascism won’t permit,” seems like a schmaltzy trope that films on the subject don’t need to subject themselves to for plaudits at this point.
Also, I just have memories of the way my temple’s afterschool youth program was abuzz during its release, and the obligation American Jews felt and lorded over other American Jews to SEE THIS MOVIE. My mom, an Israeli raised on the post-holocaust trauma of her elders and who is usually a sucker for sub-Schindler’s List oscar-bait, felt both oversaturated and underwhelmed by it. One of her criticisms, though, the lack of a compelling protagonist, seemed to be a plus for critics like Rosenbaum or Hoberman, who viewed his lack of heroic qualities as a grey-area antidote to the positively stereotyped and unrealistically angelic Jewry of other Holocaust films. From what I understand (now that i’ve done some pre-watching research) the film is a lot more restrained than the manipulative maneuverings of the List. I imagine it’s a lot more Jewish than that film, too. Major side note: Spielberg’s anglophilia hits a real low when his first film that at all acknowledges anything related to his ethnic identity is centered around a capitalist gentile savior.
Not that fictional treatment of the Holocaust should be catered to an nth generation Israeli-American but there’s this unfortunate blueprint of tropes that most of them seem to follow in a way that does a disservice to the myriad forms of trauma unleashed by the event. It ends up affecting endeavors like Magneto: Testament, which worked under the pretense of giving the definitive look at one of pop culture’s most interesting takes on the Shoah’s legacy, but instead doling out a fairly by-the-numbers portrait that mixed Swing Kids with that TV movie starring David Schwimmer.*
Every now and then there’s an anomaly, something like The Night Porter (which of course I haven’t finished, but respect nonetheless), whose off-putting focus on the psychosexual underpinnings to the a lot of the violence done there breaks a few rules of the proper approach to a subject built on impropriety. Mostly though it’s stuff like Sarah’s Key (that I’m not gonna watch), which by using documentary evidence as a framing device, suggests a new wave of Holocaust films built to deal with the oncoming loss of survivor testimony. But if real-life testimony dies off and all that’s uncovered is a period drama then what’s the point?
I mean, maybe my word on this is nulled by my favorable attitude towards Inglourious Basterds, but that film’s brash composite of Hollywood WWII film tropes exposes the way the subject’s blueprint is in service of genre as much as it is reality. And if you’re going for genre, anyways, might as well transcend that by getting weird and metaphysical i.e. The Keep (the plot, if not the unwatchable movie) or (the perhaps tired undergrad cliche) Gravity’s Rainbow’s flirtation with Kabbalah, some of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s less grounded works, or well, Magneto. There isn’t a lot out there that actually deals with Jewish belief systems or reflects on the way, say, belief system informed worldviews were shattered by the events, which leads me to believe, in what is a massive (and possibly self-contradictory) overstatement, that the dry, recycled and generally unremarkable pattern of Holocaust dramas actually aids the death of Jewish culture that years of covert yeshiva sought to keep alive.
*I still haven’t seen X-Men: First Class, and probably won’t since it also looks like the cinematography was informed by Oscar-quality period pieces and JFK tv dramas, but apparently Magneto becomes Simon Weisenthal (or at least his unfiltered self-conception) for a minute? [I see someone’s comment now: “I saw First Class and I thought its handling of the subject was sophisticated!”] Personally I think it’s unfortunate they canned the planned Magneto movie and just dumped him into a prequel omnibus as there’s so much to mine there about the modern Jew’s knee-jerk and violent relationship with victimhood. One could even use the introduction of his backstory in issue 150, completely bypassing the film industry’s current, borderline hegemonic obsession with sequential origin stories, as a framing device. But that’s for another post.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzrjia9WmX1qzyur6o1_1280.png)
Ha! Alright, for you, I will seek it out! [Apologies for the following usage of your comment for what eventually becomes a digressive rambling about Holocaust and Hollywood, but take none of the following personally.] Anyways, I guess it’s about time I saw that, probably a bad look to write off Holocaust product by somebody who actually survived ghettoization, lost a mother to Auschwitz and nearly lost a father to Mauthausen. While his own story would have been interesting in itself—maybe an episodic narrative of interactions with host families during hideout (like Pialat’s L’Enfance Nue, but with Nazis, something that would probably resonate with my grandfather)—i’m sure the Pianist’s composition is informed by/embedded with recall. Something about how it reads on paper, though, “the struggle of an artist to continue bearing creativity when fascism won’t permit,” seems like a schmaltzy trope that films on the subject don’t need to subject themselves to for plaudits at this point.
Also, I just have memories of the way my temple’s afterschool youth program was abuzz during its release, and the obligation American Jews felt and lorded over other American Jews to SEE THIS MOVIE. My mom, an Israeli raised on the post-holocaust trauma of her elders and who is usually a sucker for sub-Schindler’s List oscar-bait, felt both oversaturated and underwhelmed by it. One of her criticisms, though, the lack of a compelling protagonist, seemed to be a plus for critics like Rosenbaum or Hoberman, who viewed his lack of heroic qualities as a grey-area antidote to the positively stereotyped and unrealistically angelic Jewry of other Holocaust films. From what I understand (now that i’ve done some pre-watching research) the film is a lot more restrained than the manipulative maneuverings of the List. I imagine it’s a lot more Jewish than that film, too. Major side note: Spielberg’s anglophilia hits a real low when his first film that at all acknowledges anything related to his ethnic identity is centered around a capitalist gentile savior.
Not that fictional treatment of the Holocaust should be catered to an nth generation Israeli-American but there’s this unfortunate blueprint of tropes that most of them seem to follow in a way that does a disservice to the myriad forms of trauma unleashed by the event. It ends up affecting endeavors like Magneto: Testament, which worked under the pretense of giving the definitive look at one of pop culture’s most interesting takes on the Shoah’s legacy, but instead doling out a fairly by-the-numbers portrait that mixed Swing Kids with that TV movie starring David Schwimmer.*
Every now and then there’s an anomaly, something like The Night Porter (which of course I haven’t finished, but respect nonetheless), whose off-putting focus on the psychosexual underpinnings to the a lot of the violence done there breaks a few rules of the proper approach to a subject built on impropriety. Mostly though it’s stuff like Sarah’s Key (that I’m not gonna watch), which by using documentary evidence as a framing device, suggests a new wave of Holocaust films built to deal with the oncoming loss of survivor testimony. But if real-life testimony dies off and all that’s uncovered is a period drama then what’s the point?
I mean, maybe my word on this is nulled by my favorable attitude towards Inglourious Basterds, but that film’s brash composite of Hollywood WWII film tropes exposes the way the subject’s blueprint is in service of genre as much as it is reality. And if you’re going for genre, anyways, might as well transcend that by getting weird and metaphysical i.e. The Keep (the plot, if not the unwatchable movie) or (the perhaps tired undergrad cliche) Gravity’s Rainbow’s flirtation with Kabbalah, some of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s less grounded works, or well, Magneto. There isn’t a lot out there that actually deals with Jewish belief systems or reflects on the way, say, belief system informed worldviews were shattered by the events, which leads me to believe, in what is a massive (and possibly self-contradictory) overstatement, that the dry, recycled and generally unremarkable pattern of Holocaust dramas actually aids the death of Jewish culture that years of covert yeshiva sought to keep alive.
*I still haven’t seen X-Men: First Class, and probably won’t since it also looks like the cinematography was informed by Oscar-quality period pieces and JFK tv dramas, but apparently Magneto becomes Simon Weisenthal (or at least his unfiltered self-conception) for a minute? [I see someone’s comment now: “I saw First Class and I thought its handling of the subject was sophisticated!”] Personally I think it’s unfortunate they canned the planned Magneto movie and just dumped him into a prequel omnibus as there’s so much to mine there about the modern Jew’s knee-jerk and violent relationship with victimhood. One could even use the introduction of his backstory in issue 150, completely bypassing the film industry’s current, borderline hegemonic obsession with sequential origin stories, as a framing device. But that’s for another post.
