Trespassing Bergman

In the documentary Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember (1997), the great Italian actor describes how, in the 1960s, busloads of foreign tourists would stop outside the house of Federico Fellini in Rome to maybe catch a glimpse of the great filmmaker. Fellini was as much a part of their Roman itinerary as the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, and the Trevi Fountain. Fellini's life was a part of the show.

But Ingmar Bergman's life was nobody's business. Once he had become world famous, he sought to protect his privacy from goofball fans who trekked all the way to his home on the remote island of Fårö to catch a glimpse of him. In 2013, five years after Bergman's death, a documentary was released called Trespassing Bergman. The title of this curiously mocking documentary comes from the garrisoned house on Fårö (off Götland, if that is any help) to which some of the people in the film - all filmmakers - come to visit, where Bergman lived and worked (on and off) for forty years. To any true cinephile who ever held the work of Ingmar Bergman in high esteem (and I don't believe it's possible to be one and to not do the other), the film lurches from touching reverence to effrontery and back again.

There is a quite bizarre fetishism at work here, almost as if Bergman's corpse was in the room while some of the people invited inside were poking around his inner sanctum (his study, his movie-viewing room), rifling through his books and collection of videos. Daniel Espinosa confesses that he feels like he is "trespassing" in Bergman's home, and Claire Denis becomes strangely spooked and has to leave the house. But a number of them had clearly shown up to bury Bergman rather than praise him. And what a very odd bunch of people they assembled to trespass on Bergman! Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Michael Haneke, John Landis, Lars von Trier, Tomas Alfredson, Daniel Espinosa, Claire Denis, Wes Craven, Ang Lee, Thomas Vinterberg, Isabella Rossellini, Harriet Andersson, Zhang Yimou, Woody Allen, Laura Dern, Francis Ford Coppola, Takeshi Kitano, Holly Hunter, Wes Anderson, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Pernilla August, Alexander Payne - all of them have something to say about Bergman's films, sometimes illuminating, sometimes not.

Ask your average movie fan today to name a "great" director and you might get answers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, or Ridley Scott. Further down the scale you might get J. J. Abrams, James Gunn, or Matthew Vaughn. Ask them to name a great foreign director and you would probably get the name of one of the many foreign directors who, early in their careers, defected to Hollywood. Like Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Denis Villeneuve, or Alfonso Cuarón.

Well, none of these "great" directors comes even close to my standard of greatness - a standard established by Ingmar Bergman and a handful of other filmmakers. I simply can't use the word in connection with them without putting it between quotation marks. Some of them have made good films. Michael Haneke, Claire Denis, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou. And I got the feeling that the makers of Trespassing Bergman at least sensed this as well. At one point, John Landis calls The Seventh Seal, the film that made Bergman almost a household word, a "joke" and Alexander Payne claims that it "doesn't hold up" and its once "profound" qualities are now "laughable." One of the problems that The Seventh Seal presents to the viewer is its solidity and concreteness. It isn't in the least abstract, which was Bergman's point. He wanted to show how, in the Middle Ages, things like death and hell weren't just concepts but extremely real, and he used medieval church paintings that represented death and the devil almost as everyday, familiar objects, as his jumping off point. Just because the film has been parodied so much doesn't diminish its power. People can parody the pared-down writing style of Ernest Hemingway without diminishing the greatness of The Sun Also Rises.

The worst offender by far is Lars von Trier, the Danish imbecile who appears to lack the ability to control the puerilities coming out of his mouth. After showing off an obscene figurine on his desk, he asserts that, because Bergman supposedly claimed to be in a constant state of sexual arousal, even into old age, he must have been masturbating nonstop. Coming from someone who has by now made several quite ineffective hardcore pornographic films, Trier's remarks are merely asinine.

Martin Scorsese speaks about his first encounters with Bergman's early films, especially Summer With Monika, but then points out that, for a Roman Catholic like him, Bergman was on the "condemned list." And Robert de Niro appears briefly to inform us that, because he was too busy to watch the Bergman films with which the filmmakers provided him, he wasn't able to comment on them. Wes Anderson, whose Paris home is shown off to no purpose, makes some remarks about the lack of "comedians" among Bergman's actors. Anderson is becoming somewhat legendary for producing the longest string of totally pointless films on record. He should be in the Guinness book by now.

But before we're halfway through the film, the focus shifts abruptly from Bergman's work to Bergman's women. One of the things that the film points out is how Bergman was attacked by a new generation of Swedish filmmakers and critics and how Bergman responded to them in The Silence and Persona, radical departures from conventional narrative films. Bergman could have easily ignored the new generation and relax in his renown, without making another film to stand alongside Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal. The fact that he continued to make films that challenged viewers, like Winter Light and A Passion attests to his stature as an artist.

The 1970s were by far the most turbulent and difficult years for Bergman. He gave up asking difficult questions about God and death and focused instead on marriage and family. He had to flee charges of tax evasion in Sweden and work in Germany. I think his work during this period began to parody itself. When Woody Allen, who has always revered Bergman, made Interiors, which was released almost simultaneously with Bergman's Autumn Sonata, Vernon Young suggested that Bergman was copying or even parodying the style of Allen's film, rather than vice-versa. Isabella Rossellini makes the pertinent point that Bergman's portrayal of a successful woman ( Ingrid Bergman is a concert pianist in Autumn Sonata) who neglects her children and her family obligations is quite sexist, not to mention outdated.

Finally arriving at Fanny and Alexander, which was the most expensive film ever made in Sweden, earning the Swedish Film Institute some criticism for spending its entire budget for the year on one film, some actresses mention their nervousness working with Bergman, but Lars von Trier expresses his - justified, I think - outrage about how "blasphemous" Fanny and Alexander is because it is little more than a travesty of his life's work.


The film returns repeatedly to shots of Fårö, its stark landscape and stony beaches, its occluded horizons. You get a sense of how much it might have inspired Bergman, looking out on that denuded island, blasted by Baltic winds. It doesn't seem lonely so much as it might be populated by ghosts. There is a starkness that is beautiful, even lyrical, that only someone like Bergman would notice. After covering so much ground, the film closes with a touching moment when, in still photographs, a very old Bergman embraces Ang Lee. It offers us a kind of forgiveness for the trespassing we have all committed by watching this exasperatingly uneven documentary.

Hobbitual

For everything, it seems, there is a category, a classification, or a genre to which it must be assigned before any discussion of it can get off the ground. I recently blundered onto a blog devoted to film wherein the author described what are now known as "art-house films" and their relation to "other film genres". It's probably no accident that the contemporary film consumer should have come up with the idea of placing films that defy categorization - like Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Antonioni's L'Avventura, Ozu's Late Spring, and our very own category-defying Citizen Kane - in a separate section of the Netflix catalog. There was simply nowhere else to put them. I posted a comment on the blog, asking, "Since when is art a 'genre'? Unless you have conceded, at last, that L'Avventura is art and The Searchers is a Western?"

Every writer who attempts a work of fiction works in two directions. They work to set down a record of the world as they see it or as they think it really is. But they also work, whether they know it or not, to record their visions, a world that exists only inside their heads. So however much they might strive to be "objective" and be nothing more than a pair of eyes, sacrificing their egos to the objects of their love, every word they write is a personal choice that inevitably reveals their presence in the created work.

For the past few decades, a seismic shift has occurred in American popular culture. Its first manifestations occurred in the mid-1970s, when two filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, rose to such unprecedented prominence that they eventually established their own production companies, enjoying artistic freedom that rarely existed before. And they made a number of films that set box office records. The films they produced are examples of what I would call belated juvenilia - films that abide by an implied pact between the filmmaker and the viewer that adulthood is regrettable and that the point of their lives sometime prior to adulthood is not just preferable but endlessly renewable.

Go back still further in American pop culture to the 1950s, when the dictatorship of youth transformed popular music. A generation of Baby Boomer teens, with disposable incomes of their own, took music away from their parents' generation and haven't relinquished it since. So instead of songs written by and for adults, speaking from an experience of life and of love, exploring and satisfying that experience in creative ways, songs were passed into the hands of children who needed nothing but lyrics that strung together comforting platitudes through endless variations of cliché. A generation of singers, whose oldest survivor today is Tony Bennett, that responded to the challenge of singing and creating standards in ways distinctive enough to make the standards their own, were replaced by singers whose talents were drowned out by the screams of teen-aged girls, singing songs that addressed the problems of teenagers.

And if you look back still further to 1937, to popular fiction, an otherwise insignificant book called The Hobbit was published in England, quickly followed by an edition in America. It was an elaborate fantasy story marketed to children, replete with maps and illustrations of hobbit characters, as well as various elves and dwarves that inhabit an alternate world that existed long before industry and technology, where magic antedates religions, reminiscent of Europe's oldest fairy tales that emerged from extinct mythologies. The author of The Hobbit was J. R. R. Tolkien, a most unlikely teller of fairy tales: an Oxford scholar of philology, of ancient dead languages and the epics and sagas written in them. Spending most of his creative life with these languages and their obscure significance and meanings known only to him and his colleagues, Tolkien tried, evidently, to expand and improve on them, without having to appeal to any scholarly authority, but deriving from scholarship of the highest authority. But it was marketed as a children's book.

So serious was Tolkien, however, that his fairy tales should be taken seriously, when he learned of an American publisher's interest in The Hobbit that expressed their intention to publish color illustrations to supplement Tolkien's own drawings, Tolkien wrote to his British publisher, Allen & Unwin, “It might be advisable, rather than lose the American interest, to let the Americans do what seems good to them - as long as it was possible (I should like to add) to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).”

According to his biographers, Tolkien had gone to see Disney's first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, accompanied by fellow Oxford don C. S. Lewis, and took umbrage at the depiction of the dwarfs. Who else but the creator of a (literary) world filled with elves and dwarves [to use Tolkien's spelling] should sit in judgement of Disney's silly misrepresentation of a classic fairy tale? What probably bothered Tolkien the most was that audiences took to Disney's film precisely because it is unlearned. Otis Ferguson, who called Snow White the best film of 1938, said that he found "something beautiful about all of it, I think, because it does not try to be wise about fairy tales, or fairy talish about its birds, rabbits, people." (1)

In 2009, I wrote in a post called "The Fairest of Them All" the following: "It was perhaps inevitable that folk tales should have been exiled to the nursery. before we renamed them fairy tales and heavily censored them, they were a kind of cultural subconscious. The original tales, like the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm, are filled with strange imagery and associations that only an ethnographer would understand." Or, indeed, a philoligist. But Tolkien rejected my hypothesis: "Folk-lore origins (or guesses about them) are here quite beside the point. It is of little avail to consider totemism." This line is from Tolkien's essay, "On Fairy Stories" in which he addressed the subject with much feeling and authority. What is most clear from my reading of the essay is that Tolkien wanted to rescue fairy tales from the nursery and convince people that they were worthy of being taken seriously. "Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything, even old theatre programmes or paper bags."

Tolkien described how he himself came upon fairy stories:

"I was keenly alive to the beauty of 'Real things,' but it seemed to me quibbling to confuse this with the wonder of 'Other things.' I was eager to study Nature, actually more eager than I was to read most fairystories; but I did not want to be quibbled into Science and cheated out of Faerie by people who seemed to assume that by some kind of original sin I should prefer fairy-tales, but according to some kind of new religion I ought to be induced to like science. Nature is no doubt a life-study, or a study for eternity (for those so gifted); but there is a part of man which is not 'Nature,' and which therefore is not obliged to study it, and is, in fact, wholly unsatisfied by it."

But one important aspect of Tolkien's "escape" into fairy stories was his first-hand experience of war. He served in the British Army in World War I and his experience created in him a profound hatred for the modern world. "A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war." In other words, his discovery of ancient languages at university, followed by the traumatic experience of war, gave him a place of refuge from the modern world that could create such things as the maxim gun and mustard gas, whose effects on human beings he witnessed in the trenches.

But the subject of writing stories exclusively for children became an issue for Tolkien when his Lord Of the Rings trilogy was published, books that he insisted were written for an adult audience rather than for children. Literary critics (some of them anyway) took exception with Tolkien's claim. One review of The Rings that has had its own kind of immortality was written by Edmund Wilson. "Oo, Those Awful Orcs" is available for perusal in Wilson's collection, The Bit Between My Teeth, but, curiously, it is available online, quoted in its entirety, on some Tolkien fanzine sites, where Wilson's essay is used as an illustration of the lengths to which a literary critic will go to express his skepticism of their religion.

"Dr. Tolkien has announced that this series – the hypertrophic sequel to The Hobbit – is intended for adults rather than children, and it has had a resounding reception at the hands of a number of critics who are certainly grown-up in years." But Wilson, who had previously expressed his distaste of detective and horror fiction, refused to taken in by Tolkien's fairy stories. "One is puzzled to know why the author should have supposed he was writing for adults. There are, to be sure, some details that are a little unpleasant for a children’s book, but except when he is being pedantic and also boring the adult reader, there is little in The Lord of the Rings over the head of a seven-year-old child. It is essentially a children’s book – a children’s book which has somehow got out of hand, since, instead of directing it at the “juvenile” market, the author has indulged himself in developing the fantasy for its own sake ... An impotence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heartbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly."

Instead of simply dismissing Wilson's review as the expression of opinion that it is, and agreeing to disagree, some of these online Tolkien sites interrogate - feebly - Wilson's own motives for not falling in line with their orthodoxy. Especially since Wilson briefly examines the psychology of Tolkien's fiercest supporters - their insatiable taste for what I identified above as Belated Juvenilia:

"Now, how is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such tributes as those above? The answer is, I believe, that certain people – especially, perhaps, in Britain – have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. They would not accept adult trash, but, confronted with the pre-teen-age article, they revert to the mental phase which delighted in Elsie Dinsmore and Little Lord Fauntleroy and which seems to have made of Billy Bunter, in England, almost a national figure. You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubble, they squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and Spenser – both of whom have a charm and a distinction that Tolkien has never touched."

Perhaps in anticipation of Wilson's incredulity, Tolkien, in his "On Fairy Stories" essay, attacks the criticism directly:

"I do not deny that there is a truth in Andrew Lang's words (sentimental though they may sound): 'He who would enter into the Kingdom of Faerie should have the heart of a little child.' For that possession is necessary to all high adventure, into kingdoms both less and far greater than Faerie. But humility and innocence - these things 'the heart of a child' must mean in such a context - do not necessarily imply an uncritical wonder, nor indeed an uncritical tenderness. Chesterton once remarked that the children in whose company he saw Maeterlinck's Blue Bird were dissatisfied 'because it did not end with a Day of Judgement, and it was not revealed to the hero and the heroine that the Dog had been faithful and the Cat faithless.' 'For children,' he says, 'are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.'”

The issue arises again whenever J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are examined by anyone other than fans of the books. They wonder that such "young adult" fiction [a stupid term, equal to "old child" perhaps?] that centers on the fantastic adventures of adolescents in an imaginary world should attract adult readers. I won't go there, since I have never read any of Rowling's books, and the films did nothing to change my mind. (I loved, however, all of the great old actors in the films, some of whom we have since lost to various ailments of extreme old age.) I could, but I have not, expressed the wish that Harry Potter had come along in 1970, when I might have been (but wasn't) more amenable to its attractions.

Tolkien wrote about one of the requirements of reading fairy stories, the "suspension of disbelief."

"Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief.' But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a  successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed."

But this is precisely where I find myself when I read Tolkien, or listen to popular music (which includes several genres, like rock, pop, rap/hip hop, country, et al), or watch the Indiana Jones or Star Wars movies - on the sidewalk outside, in the Primary World, my credulity reawakened, my disbelief functioning fully.

All of which reminds me of a remark made by G. B. Shaw in reference to the faith we have developed (even while some of us - including the current American president - seem to have abandoned) in Science:

"I have pointed out on a former occasion that there is just as much evidence for a law of the Conservation of Credulity as of the Conservation of Energy. When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe. The humans who have lost their simple childish faith in a flat earth and in Joshua's feat of stopping the sun until he had finished his battle with the Amalekites, find no difficulty in swallowing an expanding boomerang universe."

Look out. The Flat-Earthers are back.


(1) Otis Ferguson, "Walt Disney's Grimm Reality," The New Republic, January 26, 1938.

Gullible Gilliam

The following thoughts are completely off-the-cuff - in fact they are provoked by a clip I ran across on YouTube, taken from what (I guess) is a longer discussion by Terry Gilliam for Turner Classic Movies, and I have had to transcribe his remarks on scraps of paper (I wasn't wearing cuffs at the time) in order to copy them here.

The short clip (just shy of 2 minutes) that caught my attention (without rewarding it) was titled "Terry Gilliam criticizes Spielberg and Schindler's List." By no means do I intend to add emphasis to Gilliam's utterly glib comments [I examined the merits of Gilliam's work a few years ago in "One Trick Python"], but the subject is fascinating to me because I still haven't quite recovered from the surprise (more like the shock) of finding so much in Schindler's List that is brilliant and moving and disturbing in quite positive ways, when it was made by one of Hollywood's most phenomenally successful whizkids, maker of Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and Jurassic Park. Though he indicated now and then (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun) a capacity for seriousness - that is, the ability to distinguish intelligence from mere cleverness and to reflect that ability in his approach to his material, it wasn't until Schindler's List that Spielberg showed us all what he could really do. Most of the time, the efforts of commercially successful film directors, writers, and composers to create something that they want people (critics) to take seriously end in disaster. Think of Liberace's first recording of his interpretations of works by Chopin, Liszt, and Beethoven. The music critics savaged it because, without the charming presence of Liberace himself in concert, the music sounded terrible. The recording quickly outsold every other available classical recording. When asked for his reaction to the critics' verdict on his recorded piano stylings, Liberace famously said, "I cried all the way to the bank." Who needs to be taken seriously when you're rolling in cash?

Here is everything Gilliam said in the clip:

"The great difference between Kubrick and Spielberg is Spielberg is more successful. His films make much more money. but they're comforting, they give you answers - always the films are answers. And I don't think they're very clever answers. And 2001 had an ending - I don't know what it means. I don't know, but I have to think about it, I have to work. And it opens up all sorts of possibilities and probably the next person I speak to has a different idea of what that end means. Suddenly we're in discussion, now we're talking. Ideas come out of that. That's what I always want to encourage. Spielberg, and the success of most films in Hollywood these days, I think is down to the fact that they're comforting, they tie things up in nice little bows, gives you answers - even if the answers are stupid, they're answers. You go home and you don't have to worry about it. The Kubricks of this world and the great filmmakers make you go home and think about it.

"There's a wonderful quote in the book that Freddie Raphael wrote about the making of Eyes Wide Shut. It's called Eyes Wide Open, and he's talking to Kubrick about Schindler's List and the Holocaust, and he says, 'The thing is, Schindler's List is about success. The Holocaust was about failure.' And that's Kubrick, and that's just spot-on. Schindler's List had ... we had to save those few people - AH! Happy ending. A man can do what a man can do, and stop death for a few people. But that's not what the Holocaust was about. It was about the complete failure of civilization to allow 6 million people to die. And I know which side I'd rather be on. I'd like to have a nice house like Spielberg, but I know which side I'd be on."

I don't know what the context of Gilliam's remarks was, but it was probably Spielberg's film A.I., which was based on ideas developed by Kubrick. Evidently, Stanley Kubrick saw the serious streak in Spielberg that I mentioned above, which explains why he consulted Spielberg extensively in preparation for the project A.I. When Kubrick died suddenly, Spielberg felt obliged to take over and finish the project. Heaven only knows what Kubrick would've made of the project, but Spielberg made a great mistake in taking the helm. As Stanley Kauffmann commented: "Spielberg's roseate view of science fiction--as a means to glimpse future possibilities--grated with the view of Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, in which the human race is riven by disjuncture between moral stasis and scientific advance." (1)

For several years, in the 1960s and into the '70s, Stanley Kubrick was the Great Hope of American film, just as Orson Welles had been for a short time in the '40s, before a series of tough breaks and bad choices effectively dashed that hope. After the success of Dr. Strangelove in 1966, Kubrick was in a position, with his own production company (Hawk Films, Ltd.), to make virtually any film he wanted. The first result was 2001, which was technically interesting, and remains the finest example of the science fiction film genre. But the "ideas" behind the film are damned silly. And the phantasmagorical ending, which makes perfect sense given the premise that some alien intelligence immensely more advanced than our own has visited the human species in the form of a black monolith that emits Gyorgy Ligeti music at certain moments in our evolution and has helped us along toward the ultimate immaculate conception of the "star child" who appears in the size of a planet to the grandiose opening notes of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra - to me, that ending didn't provoke discussion. It ended discussion.

Kubrick's next films, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining ... to list them is to relive one's mounting dismay at Kubrick's squandered talents. He left a number of unrealized projects at his death. Steven Spielberg adopted some of them - like Kubrick's long-cherished Napoleon project, which is being developed (the last time I checked on it) as a series for HBO.

But, Schindler's List is a success story? It's the story of real people, some of whom lived through the Holocaust. Spielberg's film doesn't elaborate on their subsequent lives, but that they owed their lives to the reluctant heroism of Oskar Schindler is not arguable. Spielberg's treatment of the story has its momentary missteps, but it is a formidable, if utterly unexpected, achievement from a filmmaker who proved that he had it in him. The fact that the importance of the film has sparked so much "discussion" is proof enough against Gilliam's point. I, too, know which side I'd rather be on.


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, July 23, 2001.

Fateless But Fallible

From an informed and intelligent source comes another attack on Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, and his Shoah Foundation. Imre Kertesz, Holocaust survivor and award-winning novelist, wrote the script and apparently had "veto" control over Lajos Koltai's film adaptation of his novel Fateless. In an interview included in the Fateless DVD "special features", Kertesz makes his opinion of Schindler's List, Spielberg, and the Shoah Foundation unapologetically clear:

Kertesz: "Spielberg I dislike very much. Schindler's List is a mistake for a person who knows exactly what happened. Schindler's List is unacceptable for those people. It's unacceptable because all this horror is pictured like it's about the victory of humanity. But humanity will never get over the Holocaust. So it's a totally fake interpretation, it's a lie."

Interviewer: "This is your opinion of Spielberg's Foundation, too?"

Kertesz: "It is. It's not the right way to interview survivors, 500 old ladies who tell the same thing: 'we were deported, put in a wagon, we were thirsty, we were hungry, dogs were barking, there was yelling. . . .' We know that. I respect the survivors, I am one of them too. If somebody wants something to remain in the audience's mind, the stories of 500 survivors is not the way. The story of only one, that's the way, like in [Claude Lanzmann's documentary] Shoah. That's a film. When Muller, survivor of the Sonderkommando, starts to speak, everybody cries, although he himself is not even moved. Just tells the facts. . . . Look, lots of directors tried to reconstruct concentration camps. [In Schindler's List] they are speaking from the Auschwitz camp to Schindler. So they say 'Hello Boss!' through the barbed wire to a civilian passerby. That's ridiculous. But that's not the biggest problem, although it's a problem. The biggest problem is that it's inauthentic, that he has no idea of the whole thing."


This argument is an old one, going back to the first attempts to represent the Holocaust on stage and on film. Whenever a playwright or filmmaker attempted a mimetic approach to the subject - trying to re-create the camps realistically - there were predictable, and quite natural, objections, largely from the survivors themselves. (1) Some of them argued, as Kertesz does, that there cannot possibly be a re-creation of the Holocaust, that the subject is not "reduceable" in any linear, literal way. The only way to touch the subject through art, they argued, is in a non-linear, allusive way, as in Paul Celan's poem "Totesfuge" and in Alain Resnais' film Night and Fog.

But some of Kertesz's comments are disingenuous, as when he attacks the Shoah Foundation for recording the stories of "500 old ladies" and praises Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah for being "the story of only one". Shoah is more than nine hours of the stories of dozens of Holocaust witnesses, in their own words, carefully intertwined by Lanzmann to form a fascinating, comprehensive whole. When Kertesz claims that Filip Muller, survivor of five liquidations of the "special detail" at Auschwitz, "is not even moved" when he speaks, he is simply distorting the truth. If "everyone cries" when Muller speaks, it is because of his highly emotional delivery. In fact, Muller is so "unmoved" that he even breaks down in tears when he relates the moment when he knew that his life had no more meaning. And when Kertesz singles out a specific scene from Schindler's List for attack, he says that it is from "Auschwitz" where prisoners speak to Schindler through the "barbed wire". The scene is actually at Plaszow, not Auschwitz, and it is Stern, Schindler's bookkeeper, who motions to him through the fence. For someone who insists on the importance of getting the facts straight, and who claims that Spielberg got it all wrong, these factual errors are rather sad.

It is clear that Kertesz is so resentful of Spielberg and of Schindler's List that he was determined to hate them for having the presumption to trespass on a subject that he regards as his private preserve. Kertesz has conveniently forgotten a scene in his novel, and in the film, Fateless, that should be a warning to those who take on the responsibility of caretakers of history. When the war is over and Gyorgy and his compatriots are on their way back to Hungary, he is approached by a man in a railway station where the following exchange occurs:

Man: Did you see the gas chambers?
Gyorgy: We wouldn't be speaking now if I had.
Man: Did they exist?
Gyorgy: It depends. They definitely did in Auschwitz. But I've come from Buchenwald.
Man: From where?
Gyorgy: Buchenwald.
Man: From Buchenwald.
Gyorgy: Yes.
Man: So you heard about the gas chambers, but you didn't see them with your own eyes, right?
Gyorgy: Right.
Man: Thank you, that's all I wanted to know.

No single Holocaust survivor can speak for them all, since no single personal account of the Holocaust (which the film Shoah most definitely is not) can lay claim either to the entirety of the event or to all the ways in which it can be remembered. Kertesz may be a gifted novelist, but his account of his Holocaust is just one of thousands. The whole point of Spielberg's Foundation is that every account, regardless of its consistencies with other accounts (or perhaps because of them) contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust - despite some people's insistence that we cannot hope to understand it. And I have news for Kertesz: humanity has already "got over" the Holocaust. And that is the biggest problem.


(1) Bruno Bettelheim attacked Lina Wertmuller's use of a concentration camp in her film Seven Beauties (1976). In the film, an Italian prisoner decides that the only way to survive the camp is to seduce the camp commandant, who is a woman.