TELEVISION:'Holocaust' As Docu-Drama
Terzian, Philip
Workers' Union, has said many times: "If you were a doctor or a lawyer, and somebody brought you a Christmas basket, what would you say? You'd tell then you don't need it because you can buy your...
...Thi noticeable corruption is his appeal, in fact, just as ! is the fowl's...
...Some commercial decision, however, seems to have been made along the line, to wit that documentaries don't sell, or fiction moves better than non-fiction, as any drugstore owner could tell you...
...It seemed at some points in the 1950s you could not get through the week without witnessing "Victory at Sea" or Walter Cronkite portending into the microphone on this or that crisis of the twentieth century...
...Other scenes with Pierre function similarly...
...The execution of Private Slovik, the execution of the Rosenbergs, the love life of the Franklin Roosevelts, the Cuban missile crisis ---one can nearly imagine what future topics will be: the Hiss case, Sacco-Vanzetti, perhaps Loeb and Leopold will at long last be exonerated...
...Between the flailing about of her fingers, whic]~ thereby become objects, and the saxophone-ashtray, thi., sad scene is hilarious...
...History in the wrong hands is volatile, and the misunderstanding of historyRSO palpable in network manufacturings---is a menace...
...It was also, in its way, a kind of family soap opera of a very familiar type: tracing one line down through the years, although in that case through a remarkable (and almost unique) sequence of events...
...This is the per feet touch to establish the character of Pierre for u~, He is a bit gamy, an example of elegance that is over refined...
...The networks ought to be wary of cutting from scenes of the ovens of Auschwitz to commercials set in the ovens of Elm City, USA...
...It takes something more than a good treatment and some clever casting toequal what has been done before, and it takes as well a certain philosophical insight into history to make something of what is, after all, only one damn battle after another...
...cinated Chaplin more...
...No filmmaker has been more aware than Chaplin of the chance that art has to utilize objects in movies...
...i wonder how long they will succeed, however, because their nature is not necessarily so palatable for so long...
...Today, it itself draws the first of what turn out to be many laughs in a film whose appeal isn't serious at all...
...This, then, lies at the heart of what is wrong with "docu-dramas...
...Whatever may be said about "Holocaust" it did not provoke the sort of mass response that greeted "Roots," and that is probably just as well...
...In one, he is visiting at her apartment and incongruously picking out a tune on a little soprano saxophone...
...It used to be done rather frequently...
...Roots" was rather different in that it repeated what must truly be a consensus about America's historic treatment of blacks, but mixed as well with its author's trans-racial notion that a knowledge of one's ancestors is an essential ingredient of happiness...
...I contend that, where television is carrying the message, actual photographs are better than an actor and an imperfect impersonation...
...The greatest fault of "Holocaust" 26 May 1978:336 was theatrical: by basing itself in spurious melodrama, by introducing distractions in the form of coincidences, and, in essence, by drawing attention away from what was going on, it made one nearly impatient with it...
...They represent that stage in our culture where controversy and passion cool sufficiently to make way for revisionism...
...But Chaplin deflected it in another direction by having Jean give her with the coffee he offers her a napkin with a hole in it...
...Though A Woman ol Paris may have been intendec as a vehicle for Purviance, it is clearly Pierre who fas...
...So, then, with "Holocaust...
...Pierre is the character on whon most of these troublesome props focus our attention The saxophone is in effect a metaphor for him, as is pearl necklace which Marie throws out a window a one point...
...Indeed, the first of these touches is intro duced into the film at the moment that Pierre himself is Invited to the kitchen of a restaurant to select the low he will eat, Pierre chooses one so high 'that only h~ and the chef can stand the stench of it...
...But since he was worded that audiences would be disappointed by his absence from the film, Chaplin tried to forestall a bad reaction with a preface explaining that he was here directing his "first serious drama...
...But with his genius's instinct for what movies do best, he was continuously undercutting that melodrama, and its sentiment, with a comic by-play of objects...
...but we only see her reaction through the increasingly violent writhing of an outstretched hand which is being worked on by a masseuse...
...He has no more feeling than that fowl...
...And even in A Woman o/Paris, no matter how serious his original intentions may have been, this instinct couldn't be repressed...
...That's what the farmworker wants to be able to say...
...And, in a commercial enterprise, tragicomic...
...The difference between drama and comedy is, in movies at least, simple...
...The whole scene is then played out around his efforts to keep her from noticing the impoverished state of his linen...
...It seems that any visual medium has a certain advantage in our documented age...
...Nor has any filmmaker been readier to exercise the otheradvantage film has over theater in this regard--the advantage of the re-take--in order to bring a sight gag to perfection...
...While Marie agonizes over choosing bc tween him and Jean, and Jean goes through an agon of his own that ends in suicide, Pierre remains debonai detached, amused and, consequently, amusing...
...They throw away their subject...
...Holocaust" might have done the same thing, and if it were to be true to history would have: the saga of the Jews in Germany did not begin in 1933, and it did not end in 1945...
...In fact, the film differs from Charlie's other silent work not by being a "serious drama," but by being a comedy about a rich man rather than the poor one Charlie himself always played...
...Unfortunately, the audience was dis~ appointed anyway, so Chaplin withdrew the film from circulation...
...That supposes, of course, that a contrived drama is somehow a superior education to reading...
...That is what distinguishes "docu-dramas" from dramas based in history...
...Now that the film has been re-released, however, Chaplin's preface seems a puzzling document...
...Nearly every one I have seen has been devoted to an event about which there is a kind of evolutionary attitude, or where the certainties of yesteryear are called at long last into question...
...Of course, we have always had a fondness for sackcloth and ashes, but it is only recently that television has joined the throng...
...It was clear from the beginning what was going to happen to that family, and whatever drama there might have been was discarded at the beginning...
...On the contrary, there is in Chaplin's comedies a prominent element of drama which derives from his sentimentality, his love of melodrama...
...That is the potential harm of "docu-dramas:" not so much the banality of evil, but the evil of banality,rmLn, TmtZ~S THE LAJY KILIJEM @ 0 0 0900 0 O00 000 'lille SallLgal A Woman ol Paris, which Charlie Chaplin made in 1923, stars Edna Purviance as the mistress of a rich bon vivant (Adolphe Menjou...
...There has never been much debate about file matters treated in the two programs--at any rate it would be difficult to find apologists for slave-traders and Nazis--and so what is of interest about them is their format...
...Well, that is the sort of debate about integrity in the news that Edward R. Murrow lost twenty years ago, and there is not likely to be much of an argument, particularly when "docu-dramas" succeed in the ratings...
...Since he is the competition for her current lover Pierre (Menjou), their reunion is an emotional moment...
...This scene ought, again, to be a painful one for Marie, and presumably it is...
...Then later, when a friend of Marie's has come to divulge an infidelity of Pierre's, she absent-mindedly uses the saxophone as an ashtray...
...Not long ago there was a speculative trial of Lee Harvey Oswald which permitted all the convenient theories of subsequent years to be transported in time for the illumination of John Kennedy's assassination...
...A certain amount of totemism surrounds it and for a long time to come it will remain sacred ground, but "Holocaust" is the sort of thing that makes dramatization seem trivial...
...One justification for "Holocaust" was that it served to educate a generation that did not grow up in the wake of the real thing...
...I think in that connection of one Catholic magazine's complaint that "Holocaust" represented no worse than what is taking place in abortion clinics around the country, the kind of insane comparison that gripped elements of the Left during the Indochina war...
...Purviance had played opposite Chaplin himself in many an earlier film, and he made this one as a tribute which would launch her on a career of her own...
...Chaplin would on occasion re-do a single shot dozens of times to get it" right...
...Everyone el~ flinches when it passes under his nose...
...They ought to realize that while commerce can be oppressive, history is overwhelming, and the two do not always mix well, and sometimes explode on impact...
...This leaves television with a couple of alternatives...
...Docu-dramas" have been with us for a few years now, and it is difficult what to make of them...
...HOLOCAUST' AS DOCU-DIAMA 0000000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 TELEVISION It would seem that the television audience can absorb only one cathartic per year...
...There is a scene, for instance, where Marie (Purviance) accidentally meets her long-lost love from back home, Jean (Carl Miller...
...It seems to have stirred a greater tempest among critics than among its potential audience and, as is so often the case, revealed attitudes that make one fear for the future...
...It is "Sesame Street" brought to Modern European History...
...In drama people come into conflict with each other, whereas in comedy they usually come into conflict with objects...
...It is all very well to render historical events into fiction, but with the example of Shakespeare looming overhead scriptwriters ought to be careful...
...or, worse, that it requires simple visual imagery to get the message across--learning, even about World War II, should be fun, or at any rate passive...
...Comedy therefore finds its natural medium in movies, in which props can have more function than on the stage because the distance from the spectator can be varied to show the prop clearly...
...You'd tell then you don't need it because you can buy your children whatever they need...
...It is, for that matter, the difference between a dramatist and a publicist...
...What is the point...
...Nearly all the commentary about "Holocaust" had nothing to do with the show at all, but about its subject, and whether the subject lends itself to dramatization...
...As th~ little saxophone he fools around with at Marie's apar Commonweal: 337...
...Of course it does...
...in fact, in the case of World War II, was nearly overdone...
...This is not to say that straight drama won't play in movies, or that Chaplin never attempted it...
...Most of them won't be able to say it this Spring...
...What is wrong with bringing true footage to life...
...it is impossible to compare what has been made of more recent events with, say, Robert Sherwood's speculations about Lincoln...
Vol. 105 • May 1978 • No. 11
