Holofiction, a new documentary streaming on Hot 8 on August 2 and that will also be available on Hot VOD and Next TV, is a strange, original movie that examines fictional depictions of the Holocaust.
It opens with a quote from Claude Lanzmann, who made the most comprehensive documentary about the Holocaust, Shoah, and who said, “Fiction is a transgression. It is my belief that the depiction of certain things is prohibited.”
I have often shared his point of view. No amount of makeup, wardrobe, and dieting on the part of the stars can ever match the true look of emaciated, malnourished death camp victims, but it invites viewers to feel that they know what the Holocaust was about. The many Holocaust dramas in English add another dimension of falseness and staginess.
But the Holocaust was a major event in human history, and there is no way to stop moviemakers from dramatizing it.
There have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of feature films and television shows about it, more than any other event, according to a title in the movie, so it’s worth taking a critical look at the movies about it.
Kosakowski uses silence to tell a story
Holofiction, directed by Michal Kosakowski, does this in a very original way. It is made entirely of clips from Holocaust movies, with no dialogue (there is some background music), and uses these thousands of clips to tell a Holocaust story from beginning to end.
It includes every movie and television show you have ever heard of, including Schindler’s List, Inglourious Basterds, Defiance, The Pianist, Son of Saul (in my opinion, the best Holocaust drama of them all), and many others, as well as the miniseries, Holocaust, and even episodes of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek that had Holocaust flashbacks.
There are also clips from many films lesser known outside of Europe, such as the haunting 1949 Czech drama Distant Journey and other movies from Eastern and Central Europe.
It opens with clips showing Jews living their lives. There are scenes of family celebrations, and the director’s skill is in matching shots from different movies, so there are montages, for example, of characters raising glasses of wine and blowing out candles on birthday cakes from dozens of different movies.
It goes on to show Nazis beginning to persecute them – the montage of Nazis marking Jewish stores with Stars of David is particularly impressive. This escalates to a montage of Jews being forced to scrub sidewalks on their hands and knees, a crime that has been shown in many more movies than I would have guessed.
We see Jews going into hiding, Nazis having meetings, concentration camps being built, Jews rounded up and put on trains, taken off trains, etc., until the inevitable scenes of killings in forests and camps.
The films are identified by their titles and years, but the actors’ names are not given. However, there are some clever montages of actors who appeared in more than one Holocaust movie, such as Harvey Keitel and Willem Dafoe, who played both victims and Nazis in different films.
It’s a hypnotic film, and although I wondered how I would get through it, in the end, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The director may be trying to make a point that fiction is inadequate to depict this huge amount of human suffering, and yet I almost think that the movie backfires, because the clips, as they are presented, are often moving.
I still think that in an ideal world, no filmmaker would dramatize this subject, but given reality, Holofiction is an interesting way to take stock of what the movies have done with this event.
Michael Jackson biopic: one last payday for the family?
Another movie that looks at events that perhaps would have been better off had they not been dramatized is the wildly popular Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, which just became available on Apple TV in Israel. I can understand why this movie has been embraced by young viewers who may not have been familiar with his work before they saw it.
He was truly the king of pop, an extraordinarily gifted singer, dancer, songwriter, and showman. I became a fan of his back in the days when he was in the Jackson 5, and even as his behavior became stranger and he bizarrely altered his face, I continued to enjoy his music.
Then came the child abuse allegations, one of which he settled through a mega payout; another in which he was tried and acquitted. No matter what the legal outcome, he did admit to sharing a bed with children in a documentary, so no one can credibly call the accusations against him a “witch hunt.”
It was with great trepidation that I watched Michael, which is very much an authorized version of the story of his early life, with most of his surviving family members among the producers. It’s hard not to feel that, just as they were supported by Michael when he was alive, they are now trying to get one last payday out of their late brother.
It ends in 1988, before the pedophilia accusations.
But I have to admit that I love music biopics and that despite my misgivings, I enjoyed the early part of the movie, where Juliano Valdi gives a winning performance as the boy wonder, and the movie spotlights the Jackson 5’s early days performing in state fairs and other less-than-glamorous venues in Indiana.
Michael’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson, gives a creepy but not inaccurate performance as the young-adult Michael. Although he is a gifted performer, he cannot match Michael’s electrifying skill as a dancer.
But the real problem is the sanitizing of Jackson’s legacy, and scenes in which he visits children in hospital wards, meant to show him as saintly, are especially cringe-inducing.
Dan Reed, director of the documentary about the pedophilia accusations, Leaving Neverland, said recently interview: “He’s become part of the collective imagination, and the collective imagination can never include the fact that he’s a pedophile. It’s just not possible... That’s not a narrative people can hold in their minds.” And yet the filmmakers behind Michael try to do that.
Furious fails to entertain
Following The Silence of the Lambs, there have been few movies and series that have managed to make serial killer narratives anything more than lurid, but the Disney+ series Furious tries again to make compelling drama out of the hunt for such a killer.
It’s awfully well done, and stars Emmy Rossum as a police detective turned trainee FBI agent who begins to suspect that a woman who was trafficked as a teen is now killing powerful men. Despite Rossum’s engaging performance as a woman struggling in her personal life but obsessed with her quest for justice, it is so formulaic that it fails to entertain.
The identity of the killer is spelled out early on, and although there are some suspenseful scenes and interesting background about how traffickers work, it quickly becomes more annoying than engaging.