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Imaginary Witness Hollywood and the Holocaust (1of2) Dvdrip Avi Xvid - EDIT
22.12.2011, 23:19

Imaginary Witness Hollywood and the Holocaust (1of2) Dvdrip Avi Xvid - EDIT
English | AVI | Mpeg4 | 608x352 | 01:32:19 | 29.970 fps 1061 kbps | MP3 128 kbps 48 KHz | 700MB
Genre: Documentary


The Holocaust: I was not there, and neither were you, yet we both know it happened. We know it happened, we are certain of the immense, implausible evil of it all, because someone told us the story. See? Storytelling really is central. As incredible as it may sound, no storytelling, no Holocaust. Without storytelling, the Holocaust would disappear, like last year's snow.
Stories are not natural products that pop out of our mouths the way that flowers sprout from soil. Humans engineer stories. We select this fact, and not that one. We highlight this event, and not the other. We do this in response to our audience's ability to hear what we have to say, and to achieve our own goal. The story of the Holocaust has changed over time, from teller to teller. In the immediate post-war era, as the 2001 radio show "This American Life" episode, "Before It Had a Name," reported, people were overwhelmed, and even survivors themselves didn't know how to tell their own story. Under the decades of Soviet domination, communists tried to turn Auschwitz into a site of class struggle, rather than, primarily, Jewish martyrdom. James Carroll's much lauded 2001 book, "Constantine's Sword," played games with the number of Polish non-Jews who were imprisoned and died at Auschwitz, thus rewriting the camp's history and significance to Poles and Jews. It is essential in understanding the Holocaust that we understand storytelling, too.
"The TV miniseries 'The Holocaust' had more impact in Germany than the original event." Film historian Michael Berenbaum's joke is an exaggeration. The kernel of truth at its heart is this: a Hollywood production forced Germans to confront the Holocaust in a way that many had not confronted the original event. Again and again the commentators in the 2004 documentary "Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust" attest to the power of storytelling through film to affect audience understanding of a world-historical event. As the documentary reports: "This most horrific chapter in modern world history happened far from America's shores. It has been American movies, perhaps more than any other medium, that have shaped how we understand and remember these events."
"Imaginary Witness" is an excellent introduction into understanding how the Holocaust story is told. The original music, by Andrew Barrett, creates a mood of intellectual inquiry, but also of the ache of a deep, unhealed wound. The scripted narration is beautifully, powerfully written – something one can't say about most documentaries, where words play second fiddle to images. Gene Hackman's narration hits the proper note of authority, respect and compassion. At several points in the documentary, I had to pause the frame because the film clip I had just watched was so overwhelmingly moving. This is especially true of the scenes selected from two different films, shown in two different media, and made in two different eras. "War and Remembrance" is a 1988 TV miniseries made five decades after the start of World War Two. It depicts naked victims falling to Nazi bullets and Zyklon B. "The Mortal Storm" was a very polite and reticent Jimmy Stewart movie made in 1940, under Hollywood's strict Production Code, while the Holocaust was happening. It is a film so careful the word "Jew" is never used. Even so, a "Mortal Storm" scene of Jimmy Stewart responding uncomfortably to a Nazi song sung in a restaurant gave me chills and will remain in my memory for a long time.


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Category: Documentary | Added by: Poster
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