Like so many other Jews, I have made my contribution toward the multiplication of Holocaust films. On New Year’s Eve 1985, I chose to spend my money at a theater watching Part 1 of “Shoah.” A few years later, when asked in the wake of “Schindler’s List” how many more Holocaust films the world needed, I snapped, “We can stop at 6 million.”
But now, some dozen years and perhaps hundreds of movies later, I respectfully request a moratorium on Holocaust films. By continually replaying and reframing and reinventing the past, these movies are starting to cloud the very history they claim to commemorate. Very soon, with Holocaust movies, we’ll need to forget if we want to remembe
To give a rough estimate of the numbers: The standard work on Holocaust cinema, Annette Insdorf’s “Indelible Shadows,” catalogued 272 titles in its second edition. Though not comprehensive, the list accounted for the great majority of Holocaust films from 1939 to 1989, as well as quite a few pictures (such as “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”) that were about the Holocaust only by implication. By the time of the third edition, in 2003, Insdorf had added 170 titles to the filmography, nearly all of them made since 1989.
In that time, I did not perceive an accompanying 62 percent rise in solicitude toward the Jews.
The Holocaust film may fulfill multiple functions: offering recognition, collecting and disseminating information and urging a response from a population that extends beyond Jews. The problem with these films is not necessarily one of impurity — of method or intent.
Rather, the issue is where does this all lead? Todd Solondz showed us in his 2001 feature “Storytelling” in a corrosively funny scene set at a dinner table in New Jersey. A family of suburban Jews, all of them born in the United States well after 1945, are drawn into a discussion of the Holocaust, and by the end manage to conclude that they, too, deserve to be called survivors.
As the pace of Holocaust film production continues — the recent onslaught includes “Defiance,” “Valkyrie,” “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” “The Reader,” “Adam Resurrected” and “Good” — there are several outcomes we may expect. These include a loss of urgency, a loss of documentary conviction and a loss of recognition — offset by a net gain in jokes about the Hitler Channel.
It’s gone so far that some of these filmmakers can scarcely bring themselves to put a Jewish character on the screen (“Valkyrie,” for example).
When I saw Edward Zwick’s film about the Bielski brigade, “Defiance,” at a preview at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, a fellow reviewer and I discovered that we were the only critics in an auditorium otherwise filled with surviving partisans and their descendants.
The film so moved its viewers that one of them began crying “Tuvia! Zus! Asael!” as the actors who played the heroes each appeared on the screen. That audience, with its special moral authority, clearly did not care that the story of the Bielski brothers was being filtered through calculated performances, invented speeches and dramatic conventions.
What mattered to them, as people irrevocably claimed by these events, was that their past was real, and so was the movie that acknowledged it. The ovation at the end was a thunderclap, shot through by the bolt of a voice shouting “Never again!”
Yes, never again, I thought. Now that these partisans and their families have had cinematic justice, we can remember to forget about Holocaust films.
Stuart Klawans is the film critic of the Nation and author of the books “Film Follies” and “Left in the Dark.” Reprinted from Nextbook.org, a new read on Jewish culture.