HOTOCAUSTRepresentations

AND THEin Film and

edited by Toby Haggith & foanna Newman

MOVING IMAGETelevision Since 1933

WALLFLOWER PRESSLONDON & NEW YORI<

First pubÌished in Great Britain in 2005 byWallflower Press6a Middleton Place, Langham Street, London WIW 7TEwww.wallfl owerpress.co.uk

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-CONTENTS

AcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsPreface David CesaraniIntroduction Toby Haggith 6loønna Newman

SECTION I . FILM AS WITNESS

I Film and the Making of the Imperial War Museum's Holocaust ExhibitionSuzanne Bardgett

z Preparing the Video Displays for the Imperial War Museum's HolocaustExhibitionAnnie Dodds

: Filming the Liberation of Bergen-BelsenToby Haggith

4 Separate Intentions: lhe Allied Screening of Concentration CampDocumentaries in Defeated Germany in 1945-46: Death MiIIs andMemory of the CampsKøy Gladstone

5 A Witness to Atrocity: Film as Evidence in International War CrimesTribunalsHelen Lennon

SECTION 2 . FILM AS PROPAGANDA

6 Veit Harlan's lud SüssSusan Tegel

z Frttz Hippler's The Eternal lewTerry Charman

s Film Documents of TheresienstadtLutz Becker

9 Terezín: The Town Hitler Gave to the fewsZ d enk a F øntlov a - Ehrli ch

l0 The Ministry of Information and Anti-Fascist Short Films of theSecond World WarMatthew Lee

11 Fighting the Government With its Own Propaganda: The Struggle forRacial Equality in the USA During the Second World WarStephen Tuck

vltlxixxlI

26

JJ

65

t02

106

17 But is it documentary?

Orly Yadin

My film Silence (1998) (co-produced and co-directed with Sylvie Bringas) is a shortanimated film. It contains no archival images of the Holocaust, no interviews with sur-vivors, experts or eyewitnesses, no shots of the locations where these events took place,and yet it is a documentary and a true story. |ust as the title of this volume suggests, allforms of documentary are merely representøtions of reality and in that sense, an anima-tion film is no different from any other film style.

So many frlms and television programmes have been made over the past frfty yearsabout Holocaust-related experiences that when my friend Tana Ross, a survivor, askedme in 1996 to make a film about her own stor¡ I refused. Tana was born in 1940 inBerlin and was sent as a child to Theresienstadt. By some miraculous coincidence hergrandmother had been sent separately to the same camp, found her and kept her hid-den until liberation. In 1945, her grandmother and frve-year-old Tana were sent toSweden where they had relatives. Tana's mother had died in Auschwitz but Tana didnot discover the details until much later. Basicall¡ throughout her childhood and ado-lescence, she was taught to, and made to, keep silent and not to ask questions of herrelatives. Only when she left Sweden as an adult, on her journey to start a new life in theUS, did the Swedish uncle and aunt hand her a bunch of letters they had kept all theseyears: letters sent to them from Berlin by her mother, begging them to obtain visas forher and her baby daughter. To what extent they were responsible for not helping thefamily escape from Germany in time we shall never know, but obviously, they too hadkept silent. Like many survivors, Tana became skilled at adapting to new surroundingsand blending in.r Until quite recently she even kept her concentration camp experi-ences from her friends. There were so many silences relating to her story - self-imposedand inflicted on others - that we originally thought of calling our film Silences. Eventu-ally we decided that one generic term, Silence, would stand for more than the plural ofthe word.

Whilst I was interested in Tana's story for personal reasons, I could not imagine,initiall¡ how to produce a film that would shed new light on survivors' experiencesand how to reach out to a new audience. The only visual documentation that Tana hadof her childhood was a couple of photographs and three letters. Apart from the Nazipropaganda frlm made ofTheresienstadt, there was no footage that I knew ofthat couldhelp illuminate her story. I was not interested in filming yet another interview with asurvivor talking about events she experienced at a much younger age. So, I kept on say-ing no to the idea of making a film. Tana, however, was persistent. She was determinedto end her silence, but did not want to face an audience herself.

IAtthetimelhadaproductioncompanythatspecialisedinanimationfrlms.Over

ten years I had produceà a variety of animatio¡ films - almost a

or'issoe' subjeãts. I am not sure' therefore' why it took s9 l-ong

ó.,. auy, ho*"u.r, I had a flash of inspiration and realised that ichildhood experiences and enter the realm of imagination that way, then the film could

work for us.Before describing in more detail how we constructed silence, here are a few more

g.rr.*i,fro.rghts*abãut the compatibility of animation and documentary'

Animøtion cun be the most honest fotm of documentary filmmøking

Iwritethispartlytoprovoke,partlybecauselbelievethereismuchtruthinthisstate.ment. The power of the photoiraphlc image is so great that even the.most sophisticated

of viewers easily forgetsihat any ãocumentary we see on the screen is not a transparent

record of life but a filmmaker's interpretation of it. This could be merely in the choice ofe shots are edited togetherfact that the filmmaker is

subject and if we believes true. In historical docu-

mentaries, where frequently there is no su e found of a specific event

ã. u ,p..in. Person' hlmm"ktrs choose to re-enact' to film modern-day locations' to

use graphics. They might even resort to using the 'wrong' footage.in desperation! A

documentary animatiå film claims from the start: what you are seeing is not a photo-

graphic ,..ord but it is nonetheless a true re-presentation ofa reality'

Anímotion is less exploitative of íts subjects

One of the advantages of using animatperson (even when it is about their pas

ãbly voyeuristic. So often we see a filminto sensitive subjects (and first-handthat realm) and I tend to ask myself to wand to what extent a morbid and voyeuristic fascination with the subject' Opting to use

animation is a gesture of respect by the frlmmaker towards the subject' It also points to

the limitations of traditional documentary methods in adequately revealing the survi-

vors' (or other personal) experiences'

AnimøtíoncøntakethevíewertolocøtionsunreachablethroughconventionalphotograPhY

Animationcanshowusanun-filmedpastandcanenterthedepthsofhumanemotions.Achild,sexperienceofbeinginaconcentrationcampasrememberedfiftyyearslater_ how can this be *rr*y.ãihrough archival footage of children fo_und by the Allies at

the end of the war? rnrá"gn the syãrbolic effects of dark and light? By filming an inter-

view with a 60-year-old *ã-u. and trying to imagine her as little girl? Or " ' by creat-

ing a child's *orta ti.oogh animated irnug.r. this, in a nutshell, was what convinced

THE HOLOCAUST DOCUMANTARY 169

Animøted charscters con seem mote reol thon actors

Perversel¡ a strange thing happens with the so-called non-realistic medium of anima-

tion: oncå we, the ãudienãe, accept that we are entering an animated world, we tend tosuspend disbelief and the animation acquires a verisimilitude that drama-documenta-ries hardly ever achieve. In drama-documentaries, however convincing the actors may

be, the viewer never wholly forgets that they are actors standing in for someone else,

someone who really existed but cannot be seen.

Tana leaves Sweden clutching her mother's letlets. Silence (1993) (O Orly Yadin and Sylvie Bringas)

Tana in a classroom in Theresienstadt, in Silence (@ Orly Yadin and Sylvie Bringas)

The background to Silence is the Holocaust. The story itself is about a damagedchildhood and the strategies for survival that an orphaned child develops when pre-vented from speaking out about her memories and pain. It is also the story of lostidentities and the search for new ones.

Tana came to me with a poem-like piece about her childhood, co-written to musicby the composer Noa Ain and commissioned in 1995 by the municipality of Stockholmfor an on-stage performance. This text needed to be adapted to the medium of film. Itwas beautiful in itsell but very long, wordy and too sentimental to be used as a sound-track. Animation can condense a remarkable amount of material with utmost fluidityand the film had to be precisely eleven minutes in duration (a Channel 4 commission).Gradually we deconstructed the poem and stripped it of sentiment and of words thatcould be better expressed through images. One option was to interview Tana and thenedit the interview to length, but we decided that with such a short frlm and so much tosa¡ the voiceover had to be scripted as tightly as the visuals were storyboarded.

We decided that the film would have two main sections with visual styles to echothe two locations of the frlm: Theresienstadt and Stockholm. We chose to work withtwo animators whose work we knew: Ruth Lingford with her black-and-white wood-cut-style images (reminiscent of Käthe Kollwitz) for the camp scenes, and Tim Webbfor the colourful, crowded, Swedish part of the story. For the Swedish section, we wereinitially inspired by the drawings of Charlotte Salomon and showed them to Tim as aguideline for the kind of cinematic framing we were interested in.2 We then workedon a storyboard and on re-writing the voiceover. From the storyboard and a rough

voiceover guide we set about hiring our team - animators and painters to flesh outthe film. We recorded Tana's reading of the script only after the picture was locked. Upuntil the last minute, as the film was taking shape, we kept fine-tuning the words. Oneof our main concerns was not to spell everything out and to leave space for the viewerto bring something of themselves to what they saw and heard. Throughout the wholeprocess, we collaborated closely with Tana who commented on all our ideas. At timeswe walked a tightrope between respecting her sensitivities and trying to take the viewerinto a more objective, universal sphere. I am pleased to say that my friendship withTana survived the tensions of filmmaking.

Silence has been shown throughout the world - on television, in film festivals, inschools and in museums. In Sweden it is apparently now compulsory viewing for high-school kids. Reactions to the film have followed a similar pattern: initial scepticism atthe combination of 'animation and Holocaust' or 'animation and documentary'; thenvery strong and emotional reactions to the film itself and an understanding of the me-dium we had chosen. A historical documentar¡ regardless of the media it uses - archi-val footage, dramatic reconstruction or animation - succeeds when it takes you to theheart of a historical moment and has a clear vision of what it is trying to say. I hope wedid that.

Nofes

Tana left Sweden for the US as a young woman oftwenty and has been living in New York ever since. She

has two daughters and two grandsons. She is a documentary filmmaker, a photographer, an interpreterand a tour guide.Charlotte Salomon was a young fewish German artist who kept a flamboyant visual diary of her middle-class Berlin life until she was forced to escape to France where she was eventually caught by the Gestapoand deported. Charlotte Salomon died at Auschwitz in L943.

l8 Silencez the role of the animatorsRuthdingford 6 Tim Webb

RL: I was asked to work on Silence ( 1998) on the strength of a short film I had madecalled Death and the Mother (1998) which, though drawn digitall¡ has the appear-ance of woodcuts. It was in black-and-white, and had a strong gritty look. Tim Webband I were involved in some of the thinking and planning lor Silence, although direc-torial decisions were made by Orly Yadin and Sylvie Bringas. The starting point was apiece of writing by the protagonist, Tana Ross. We also looked at Tanat photographs,and at a variety of archive material. The colour sections of the film were based on thepaintings of Charlotte Salomon, an artist who died in the Holocaust but who kept adiary of paintings about her life (publishe d as Charlotte Salomon, Life or Theatre?).1These paintings had a particularly beautiful use of colour and also a distinctive nar-rative approach, where different phases of the story flowed into each other on thesame page.

My brief was to animate the sequences set in Theresienstadt. The gritt¡ black-and-white look was very different, and it was a tough job for Tim and I to find commonground in terms of character design, and in the sequences where one world, in memor¡changes into the other. For me, these moments are the strongest in the fllm, where ahorrible and repressed memory exerts its grip on the safe and colourful present.

The film was very challenging to make. Orly and Sylvie had made a decision earlyon not to be too grim, not to use horrific images. So my job was to evoke the misery ofTana's situation without resorting to scenes of obvious horror.

Animation's access to the language of metaphor and transformation allowed, Ithink, a subtler and more concentrated portrayal of the situation than would have beenpossible using live-action drama. Images such as the one where the children transforminto cockroaches and are swept away with a giant broom have, I think, an effect thatare both visceral and thought-provoking. Using animation makes it clear that this is asubjective account. It is not trying, like drama-documentary, to blur the edges of ob-jectivity. Animation can allow the production of strong harsh images without repellingand alienating the audience.

On a technical level, I animated the black-and-white sequences on an Amiga com-puter, drawing straight into the computer with a digitising tablet and pen and a simpleprogramme called Deluxe Paint. In some sequences, I started from photographic ref-erence. After I had finished the animation, the frames were transferred on to a Mac,which Sylvie then treated with a glow-effect. The decision to apply the glow-efect cameIate in production, and I was rather put out, as a lot of my detail was lost. But looking atthe frlm from this distance, it seems like a good decision, and has worked well.