I watched this last night on Netflix, and I can appreciate nuanced arguments about how when you choose to portray something, your portrayal might be different from survivor's authentic memory of what happened. But I had trouble grasping what the takeaway message was. Can anyone sort of spell it out for me?
shareWhat I took from it was that we can never properly tell the story, but we must still try.
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If you look for perfection, you will never be content.
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I also gathered that Hollywood felt it had to spoon-feed people very slowly with real-life horrors. Wouldn't want to offend the public with ugly truths all at once.
I thought the same thing sort of. I think the irony of the film is that it doesn't "touch the absolute" in it's own conversation: that there is nor will there ever be any absolute knowing except for those who lived it and even then only their own experience.
This really stood out to me at the end, when the one filmmaker said he would be the last person in the movie industry to be able to walk on to a movie set and say "No. That's not how it was...it was like this." because he's a survivor. The failure is to not recognize his own experience is biased as well and doesn't tell everyone's story, only his. For sure he can use those gifts to help inform the rest of us, but even our own memory fails us. Retelling stories modifies the story each time--adding higher highs or lower lows--there is no pure recount except perhaps documentary filmmaking (like that of the prison camps) but even then the human carrying that equipment has made editing choice.
Life is experience and our collective conscience is what we make of those experiences. Failure to directly address that becomes the achilles heel of this film. And perhaps to expect any film (or person) to do that is asking the impossible.
there is no pure recount except perhaps documentary filmmaking
The actual footage wasn't the main theme of the documentary, rather Hollywood's interpretation and willingness to tell the story of the Holocaust. The footage has been out there and available for years and most people who have any interest in studying the Holocaust have seen it. Adding it to this documentary would not have made much of a difference.
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