Defiance
How much can we learn about Jewish history by watching movies? Actually, we can learn a lot, but only if we choose carefully and do a little homework.
Generally speaking, Hollywood films that are “based on a true story” have a little or a lot of fiction thrown in to make the film more attractive to general audiences. For instance, Defiance is based on the experiences of real people during the Holocaust, Jews who hid in the woods and fought back against the Nazis. While the screenplay was based on history, a number of historians complained that it seriously oversimplified the story. The movie presented the story in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys” when in truth the situation in Eastern Poland during the 1940’s was anything but simple. The film ignored the existence of Polish partisans, and portrayed its Jewish heroes in perhaps a more favorable light than they really merited. On the other hand, it tells a story that had gone largely untold: that in Eastern Poland there were Jews who fought back.
Au Revoir Les Enfants
Other films are not billed as “true stories” but they can still take us close to a kind of truth about a time and a situation. Au Revoir Les Enfants is based on Louis Malle’s experiences living in occupied France as a young boy. The headmaster of his boarding school had hidden several Jewish boys in plain sight, taking them as students and giving them less-Jewish names and stories. When they were betrayed to the Nazis, the children and the headmaster were marched out of the school in front of the other students, and the events of that day were seared into little Louis’ memory forever. While he fictionalized the story in some important details, the movie tells us a lot about what it was like to be in that time and place, either as one of those hidden children or as one of their helpless classmates. It gives us the feel of the time with a truth so sharp that we understand why Malle was haunted by those events to the end of his life.
Funny Girl
Then of course, there are films that don’t tell the truth at all: they take a real person or real events as a beginning point, but they go somewhere else entirely, usually in service of entertainment or art. The musical Funny Girl is a film like that: it begins with a real woman named Fanny Brice, and it tells a story that shares some facts with her life. She was indeed a Jewish star in the Ziegfeld Follies who married a man named Nick Arnstein, but the details in the movie are so far wrong that the main character is completely unrecognizable. However, while the depiction of the heroine isn’t even near the mark, the film itself is a bit of history (to learn more about that, read the commentary.)
So what’s a moviegoer to do? I’ve found that every film that has historical subject matter is a great beginning point for a little detective work. Wikipedia is a great beginning place to see how much of a film is historically accurate: for most films there is an entry that has something to say on the subject, with links for further reading. I try to alert readers to interestings facts and non-facts in my commentaries on this blog. The important thing is, no matter how much of the film was fiction, it can give us a platform from which we can visualize a place, a time, or a person. Just don’t believe everything you see on the big screen.
What about documentaries? I’ll look at those in the next set of features. Happy (secular) New Year, and happy film watching!
