You make an interesting case for the films that deal with this “off-screen.” The only problem, I suppose, is that people have an understanding of the actual horrors that went on. We’d like to think that everyone does. . .but the amount of ignorance would surprise you.

“The Pawnbroker” is a masterpiece in this regard — holocaust images are only shown in flashes — litte rememberances of a dead man walking twenty years later. “Enemies: A Love Story” I don’t think has any imagery at all.

“The Grey Zone,” on the other hand, may challenge the Wiesel position — and confronts (to a certain extent) Cynthia Ozick’s position as well. It is just about as brutal a film as I have ever seen — where the audience finds themselves rooting for the deviance of suicide. There are action elements, but I things are so horrible along the way it hardly feels like “adventure.” (I recently rewatched The Mission, and its laying-of-booby traps and battle preperation scenes also somehow magically lacked the “Dirty Dozen”-like feel, even though they were the same visual tropes.)

There’s an argument that only non-fiction can be adequate to the Holocaust. Night and Fog, The Sorrow and the Pity, Shoah, S21 might be the only appropriate way to approach the topic of genocide. I do believe that fiction can deal with anything though–it might just be a lot harder. I see a number of problems for making it into drama:

1. Using the holocaust as exciting backdrop: exploitative trash like Black Book and Life is Beautiful isn’t even really set in history but in some sort of imaginary movie land that uses very real horror for ulterior motives. This stuff I find inexcusable.
2. Some movies I just don’t buy. I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I couldn’t stomach Sophie’s Choice. Perhaps it aged very poorly, perhaps it’s my allergy to Kevin Kline or Meryl Streep’s accent, perhaps it was the overly formulaic plotting, but I just didn’t *believe* any of it. Seems to work for others though.
3. Other movies that deal directly with the holocaust and do it well–convincing, with proper gravitas–but I still remain skeptical. I’d include Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and Hotel Rwanda here. This group has more subtle problems:

1. The Diary of Anne Frank is not an uplifting story about the endurance of the human spirit–it’s the story of a young girl who gets murdered, along with the rest of her family. In a New Yorker essay a few years ago, Cynthia Ozick argued that holocaust stories tend to be about the exception, not the rule: we love  the story of the unlikely survivor, the story of the good Nazi. But this distorts the reality of what happened. Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda, The Pianist (and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center) all tell exceptional stories, and they give us the wrong idea.
2. To quote QT, “violence is the most cinematic fuckin’ thing ever.” You can’t show certain things on screen without making them into something sensational. That’s why our top ten anti-war movies barely show any fighting. If you have a battle on screen, it’s exciting–there’s no way around it. The same may be true for the pivotal images associated with the holocaust. People forced on trains, people in hiding about to be found,the ghetto uprising, attacks by the resistance, people going into gas chambers: apparently, it’s difficult to show any of this without getting cheap movie kicks out of it–even if you’re not Paul Verhoeven.

That’s why I suspect that in my eyes, the most successful holocaust/WWII dramas are the ones, like the best anti-war movies, that deal with it somewhat obliquely, that come at the topic at an angle, that deal with causes or results without showing reenactments of what we’ve already seen in Night and Fog. Nowhere in Africa, Downfall, The Last Metro, The Night Porter,  Safe Conduct, Das Experiment–these aren’t movies that are exactly “about” the Holocaust, but reveal something about it without being burdened by the problems outlined above. There must be many more; I’ll add them when I think of them. I haven’t seen Grey Zone or Pawnbroker.

You write, “There is a entire tradition of very good and very necessary movies about the Holocaust and the Resistance. . .” but I am trying to recall which films that deal with this subject you haven’t blasted.

I know you hate “Life is Beautiful” (which definitely is polarizing) but you also hate “The Pianist” and “Sophie’s Choice” (two films I greatly admire.)

Have you seen “The Grey Zone” or “The Pawnbroker?” I’d give those two high marks as well. Also, although it does have faults, there is a lot of good happening in “Schindler’s List.” (Also, although it is almost exclusively “after-the-fact” “Enemies: A Love Story” is brilliant.)

Which films, other than documentaries, tackles this subject matter and wins your approval.

Yours,
Lt. Commander J.S. Hoffman (Ret.)