Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss

mandy — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Harlan reworked brilliantly the Jew Suss film. This will be the anti-Semitic film. - From the diary of Joseph Goebbels, December 15, 1939.

You’re a talented, ambitious film director, lauded in your homeland and feted elsewhere for your movies. You can choose your projects. Producers throw money at you and don’t interfere with your work. You have final cut. You’re well paid. You lead a privileged life. You are married to a beautiful actress, who is your leading lady.

Suddenly: a political sea change. Ruthless men seize power. The Minister of Propaganda calls you in. He wants you to direct a film and use your wife and many another of your country’s famous actors in the cast so that the film will draw a large audience. He promises you a plentiful budget.

You read the script. It’s scurrilous propaganda that denigrates and villifies the government’s so-called enemies. Almost certainly, this film will inflame your countrymen against these perceived foes; many may die as a result. You can’t flee; you’re too famous, and they’d never willingly let you out. Don’t make the film and you might never work again; in fact, you might be killed and your family with you.

With some tweaks, this was the dilemma that faced Veit Harlan, a renowned German director of the 1930s. The Minister of Propaganda was Joseph Goebbels. The script he gave to Harlan in 1938 was anti-Semitic shit entitled Jew Suss (Suss the Jew). Harlan made the picture. It was a hit.

He would come to rue his decision, perhaps not so much for the film itself but for the repercussions that followed the Nazi defeat. He was twice tried, twice acquitted for contributing to the holocaust by directing Jew Suss. That wasn’t the end of it. The court of public opinion denounced him. After the war, he couldn’t find work; when he did, he had to direct under pseudonyms for a number of years.

This documentary about Harlan employs the customary mix of period photographs and movie footage, and talking heads, to examine Harlan’s case. Part of what makes the film unique is that the talking heads are mostly not pundits and historians proffering distanced or academic opinions. Harlan had five children by two wives. His kids, now elderly, and his grandchildren, mostly young women in their twenties, were filmed at length. Their responses manifest divided feelings about his actions and about being related to him by blood.

Harlan claimed he was forced to make Jew Suss and denied that he understood the possible deadly consequences. His apologists claim that he made the film well because he was a true artist and could not make a movie any other way. Some family members believe this. Some reject these avowals and say he knew what he was doing, he was responsible for the deaths of many Jews, and his crime was inflected by never confessing he had erred grievously in accepting Goebbels’s and Hitler’s commission. This division in the family—and some who speak are conflicted within themselves about Harlan’s guilt—lets us see how problematic, complex, and emotional the question of his culpability is.

So which way Harlan? Dupe under duress with no real clue about what he was doing? Skilled filmmaker who morphed into a stinking Nazi propagandist with buckets of blood on his hands? Somewhere in between? Have a look at this engrossing piece of work, a significant contribution to the cinema of fascism and the holocaust, and decide for yourself.

Written by: Neil Flowers, February 19th 2011

Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita

admin — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:07:00 +0000

By Phyllis Birnbaum

Faber and Faber Inc.

Readers interested in art, Paris, Tokyo, or multiculturalism in the first half of the twentieth century will enjoy Phyllis Birnbaum’s carefully documented biography of Foujita’s tumultuous life as an aristocratic playboy and fiercely dedicated artist, both acclaimed and vilified for his controversial works. She chronicles Foujita’s five marriages, repeated moves to France from Japan and back again, travels in Latin America and the United States, whimsical moods, political shifts, and mastery of a unique style fusing Western oil painting techniques with Japanese brushwork.

In 1920s France, Foujita painted elegant nudes, scandalizing his Japanese compatriots, and during WWII, in Japan, he created propagandistic war paintings that got him in trouble with almost everybody after the Allied victory -- Japanese, Europeans, and Americans. Even today opinions are divided about works such as Last Stand at Attu, 1943. Sasaki Shigeo compares these paintings unfavorably with Picasso’s Guernica, while the artist’s nephew, Ashihara Eiryo, defends him: “In the same way that Foujita believed that women were merely ‘flesh,’ so a gun or a flower was all the same to Foujita.”

Indeed, even though Foujita’s favorite painting subjects were women and cats, singly or together, his affectionate appreciation for them did not make him respect them. Birnbaum quotes without comment his oft-repeated statement to interviewers: “… women and cats are absolutely the same. If you treat them nicely, they are submissive, but if you don’t, they will turn on you. Just think about it – isn’t a woman just like a cat if you put on some whiskers and a tail?” A feminist analysis of the artist’s complicated ambivalence toward women would have strengthened this biography, but Birnbaum, while a noted biographer of Japanese women and their works, reminds us that she is “not writing the woman’s story this time around.” Her duty to Foujita, she believes, makes it necessary for her to take his point of view in everything.

Still, Birnbaum does an outstanding job of presenting her main thesis, exploring in intriguing detail the artist’s dilemma as a man between two countries and two cultures, and in the process she gives a vivid picture of the international art scene during the World Wars, background vital for understanding many of today’s cultural clashes, misunderstandings, and surprising fusions.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, February 20th 2007