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Sunday, May 25, 2003

"To be honest, I thought it would be worse."
-The Pianist

i was having a little Holocaust film festival to punish my self for being insensitive before and i was hoping to see enough awful shit to shock myself back into a more sympathetic tone of voice. i won't give the whole list but you'll just have to trust me that i think i've rounded up ALL of these movies. of course, it didn't have the effect i thought it would. a couple things spring to mind:

in these films, imaginatation is being used to invent new and creative ways to kill. all survivors accounts have long been exhausted (mostly in books) and screenwriters have been filling in the gaps with their own versions of horrors for many years now. i'm thinking there's something kind of dishonest about showing elaborate executions in settings and situations designed for maximum impact. that's fine in a movie. but these are holocaust films, and there's an unwritten rule that, besides the instant Oscars, you must treat these not as a movies, but with the respect you'd give newsreel footage. why is that? these movies have long since moved past historical accuracy. they are drama inside a historical situation. but they are movies and should be judged as entertainment. i'm thinking all war movies start out this same way, with a quiet kind of awe when they were being viewed, but after a while they became cartoon revenge fantasies as ridiculous as any ficiton. my problem is not that holocaust film's are dishonest hollywood entertainment (well, maybe) but i quess my biggest problem is that they aren't entertaining enough. these filmmaker are taxing their brains to show us awful shit. they are inventing specific horrible scenes played out by actors for maximum emotion. there must be some fear in these filmmaker that, if they don't somehow top the last holocaust movie, they will be forgotten. are they afraid that someone will see their version of events and get annoyed that the horror was sacrificed in favor of a story and say, "that wasn't nasty enough, it was worse that that." Can they not stop themselves from one-upping the shocks? Audiences just nodding like they're at school, not listening and not recognizing it as exploitation and just mumbling, "yep, that's history." it's the same attitude that got Schindler's List on prime time TV uncut. concentration camp dicks flapping and bullets in the head for three hours on network television as if it was the ugly truth you had to see and not just stylish black and white violence desguised as a history lesson. the liberties taken with Oscar Schindler's actual story are so extensive that Raiders of the Lost Ark is closer to the facts of World War 2. so why not use that imagination that comes up with new ways to torture and kill all those muddy extras for a more interesting story? would it be so bad to invent some more uprisings? more people running or fighting back when they got shot instead of just lining up on the ground? hell, the A-Team invented a cannon that shot heads of lettuce in like 10 minutes. and look at all the potatoes in those movies! every kid can make a potato gun. i know that actual survivors have to be real sick of young men saying "what they'd do!" in that kind of situation but i'm afraid i'm no exception. and i think it's time that the concentration camp was an area that's fair game to demand more interesting fiction. these are movies, not memories.

think about all the war movies you've seen. like Braveheart, Windtalkers and We Are Soldiers, where there are scenes of brutality that were created simply to manipulate the audience in the same way you watch a Nascar race waiting for a wreck. for some reason people stopped demanding historical accuracy in war movies a long time ago. Holocaust movies are now doing the same thing and i think should be held accountable for their intent.

question: In The Pianist, was that execution where the german ran out of bullets, calmly reloaded, then shot the last man, saying something about Spielberg's similar scene in Schindler's List? where the slow hinge maker was spared by about twenty missfires from Fiennes luger? i wonder. speaking of pianos, how about that scene in Schindler's List where the man is shot hiding in the piano (music that turns into the score for the rest of the slaughter in the ghetto) or that little girl in the red dress? tell me those aren't perfect examples of stylish, exploitative cruelty in a movie desquised as "history." Holocaust movie have simply become genre films, just like cowboy movies, vampire movies or buddy-cop thrillers. people who watch these movies to feel noble as if they're suffering through a church sermon are fooling themselves. these movies all follow a simple formula and provoke and excite the audience with the killing and danger just like any car chase would.

i'd have to say though, after all the killing i could stomache: the movie The Grey Zone had the most impact. i think it is the best/worst of both worlds. the story follows the only documented uprising, and (you'll know it when it happens) the worst thing i could think of in a Holocaust movie. someone thought long and hard for that horrifying subplot and i hate to say it but it's fucking effective as hell. a girl doesn't die in the gas chamber and everything changes in the camp after that. i haven't been able to shake it what i saw in that movie, and that's after about ten of these movies so that's pretty impressive. should the writer/director be rewarded for his creative cruelty or condemned for exploitation? well, i think since this director is also the actor who was turned into a frog in O Brother Where Art Thou, and judging by his "oh shucks" attitude in his acting roles, i'm surprised he had these things on the brain. The Grey Zone, check it out. i can't recommend it as entertainment but it's got to be the last word in stylish suffering and the story is creative and incredibly involving. again, i hate to be that Monday-morning-quarterback who swears he'd fight back if he was in the same situation but fuck it, i'm gonna swear.

when i say "swear" i just mean i'd say the word "fuck"

::: david - 6:26 PM [+] :::
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