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| Sunday, June 15, 2003 |
Holocaust fatigue: Is there such a thing as too much of a bad thing? The New York Times thinks so. The, um, newspaper of record, devotes the front page of it's Arts & Leisure section this week to an interesting look at Holocaust Documentaries. Author Barry Gewen poses an obvious question: "Are too many Holocaust documentaries now being made? Has supply outstripped demand?"
He parades the usual reason in front of the reader: Will too many films desensitize us to the real evil of the Holocaust?
But the piece poses more questions than it does answers. In what can only be called chutzpah, Gewen says that filmmakers should pander to the tastes of their target audiences, diminishing the relevance of atrocities of the Holocaust to mere market research. He writes: " Most movie audiences want to be entertained; they don't want to dwell on the sealed boxcars, extermination camps and mounds of corpses that are the staples of the Holocaust narrative. There has been a tendency of late among documentary filmmakers to concentrate on the more "positive" side — gentiles who opposed Hitler or rescued victims; Jewish resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere; and of course the survivors themselves. These individuals are often presented as inspirational (although, with the millions of victims who are not here to go before the camera, there is nothing inspirational about the Holocaust)."
The fact that Holocaust survivors are a dying breed is one of the greatest challenges facing the next generationof American Jews. In such an environment, there's no such thing as too many reminders.
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