How Art Grapples With History

I read an article in The New York Times this morning that discusses a subject I’ve often thought about – namely, the moral grey area that is art’s effort to grapple with catastrophic events like the Holocaust.

There is, I believe, an unquestionable need for art and for artists to grapple with such events; and yet I sometimes feel a little queasy when individuals in certain artistics fields try just that. Literature and the documentary format (in film, in radio), for example, are better equipped to deal with a subject like the Holocaust than is narrative film. Non-fiction works deal (in theory, anyway) strictly with the facts as they were and are - they recreate nothing. Novels that attempt to explore such issues rely on the boundaries of the readers' minds to construct a story, and they do not require the physical reconstruction of any events or locales.

However, there has always seemed something a little unseemly about filmmakers recreating or rebuilding the gas chambers and ovens for the purposes of fictional films (albeit film that are based on history). Given the gravity of what happened, and the number of victims, it somehow seems a morally questionable thing to recreate the buildings and arenas in which those victims died - even if a filmmaker has noble intentions.

Which is why a film like Roman Polanski’s The Pianist works better for me than some other Holocaust films. In The Pianist, viewers see terrible things, but they never see into the heart of the concentration camps. It is as though Polanski, himself a survivor of Nazi occupied Poland, couldn’t bring himself to “imagine” the unimaginable for his film.

Anyway. Here’s the link to the article.