The Holocaust as Oscar Bait

This holiday season the multiplexes, the art houses and the glossy for-your-consideration ads in publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter will be overrun with Nazis.

So begins A.O. Scott's recent New York Times piece highlighting the strikingly large number of films coming out this season about the Holocaust.

A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscar-season tradition, but 2008 offers an abundance of peaked caps and riding breeches, lightning-bolt collar pins and swastika armbands, as an unusually large cadre of prominent actors assumes the burden of embodying the most profound and consequential evil of the recent past.

This isn't something that's talked about much, but making a film about the Holocaust seems to be a pretty good way to get an Academy Award.

If the Holocaust can inspire a great work of art, then it can also incubate the ambition to achieve such greatness, and thus open itself up, like everything else, to exploitation, pretense and vulgarity.

To quote Kate Winslet, as Scott does (although he notes she says it in a joking manner):

“I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, you’re guaranteed an Oscar.”

Scott points out the biggest impact this has had on subsequent films about the Holocaust:

Thus “Schindler’s List,” for all its unsparing and powerful re-creations of the horror of the Krakow ghetto, is a story of heroism, resilience and survival. And a great many of the mainstream Holocaust movies that have followed, including documentaries and some foreign films, have emphasized hope and overcoming rather than despair and destruction.

This isn't true only for Holocaust films.  Look at Hotel Rwanda, Welcome to Sarajevo, and other films about subsequent genocides.  Each features a hero from outside the victimized group, coming in and rescuing those who need to be rescued.  This makes a great story - and an inspirational one (in fact, Schindler's List is partly what got me involved in the movement for Darfur).  But, it leaves the dangerous impression that victims of genocide  are only that - victims.

Scott selects two films that tell stories around the Holocaust that perhaps do the least amount of glossing-over, or through focusing on one "victim" make the struggles of survival, not outside heroism, an identifiable story.

Thus Roman Polanski’s “Pianist” and Lajos Koltai’s “Fateless,” though both tales of survival, register the absurdity and abnormality of survival in the manner of the first-person literary works on which they are based.

Of course, the Pianist won 3 Oscars, for best actor, best director, and best screenplay.

Another I'd add to that list is The Counterfeiters, the true story of "the largest counterfeiting operation in history" - and of the Jews and political prisoners who were forced to carry it out.  (You guessed it - The Counterfeiters also won an Oscar, for best foreign film).

Scott concludes with words that are important to keep in mind when viewing any American film about the Holocaust:

The big Holocaust movies of the big movie season will make more of an impression, allowing audiences vicarious immersion in a history that they nonetheless keep at a safe, mediated difference, even as they risk bathos and overreach in the process. We don’t have to ask what the Holocaust means to us since the movies answer that question for us.

For American audiences a Holocaust movie is now more or less equivalent to a western or a combat picture or a sword-and-sandals epic — part of a genre that has less to do with history than with the perceived expectations of moviegoers. This may be the only, or at least the most widely available, way of keeping the past alive in memory, but it is also a kind of forgetting.

For more resources on films about the Holocaust, read Yad Vashem's resource on Holocaust film.  Oprah's Book Club has a list of films about the Holocaust, sorted by rating.  For teaching guides on films about human rights, check out Teaching With Movies.  And for a list of films available on the internet that Michelle compiled, check out her post here.