Happy New Year. Let's talk about the Holocaust.

(Note: Yes, I'm reposting stuff from my old LiveJournal blog.) 

A friend sent me the following item from _The Guardian_. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/03/kubrick-holocaust-installation-wilson-southbank

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Stanley Kubrick worked on an adaptation of Louis Begley's novel _Wartime Lies_. The story was of a young Jewish woman who managed to maneuver herself and her son through wartime Poland, posing as non-Jews. The working title Kubrick used as _Aryan Papers_. Although Kubrick had cast a lead and explored locations in Czechoslovakia, he decided to not make the film. Two art students have been given access to the Kubrick Archivs to develop a presentation of Kubrick's material on the subject. 

Excerpt: "Kubrick put an awful lot of effort into Aryan Papers: writing the screenplay, casting Ter Steege and travelling to the Czech town of Brno as a possible location for wartime Warsaw. That the film was never made seems to be due to a combination of factors. Spielberg's Schindler's List came out in 1993 and Kubrick may have felt beaten to the line. He may also have got sidetracked by his project to make the film AI – which Spielberg ended up making after Kubrick's death."

I can certainly see _that_.

There was piece at _Slate_ this December about how the basic approaches the film industry takes for the Holocaust. It's at http://www.slate.com/id/2207553/, but the basics are: Good but conflicted Germans, Jews who fought back, postwar justice, the lingering scars of the survivors, and Fables. There are some great films among nearly all of these, but it's really easy to simply ride with one of these and wind up with a conventional and not very compelling movie.

It seems to me that if you want to create a work of art that contains the Holocaust, in some kind of essential way, you're going to create something that stresses _hopelessness_. You're addressing the mass murder of millions, and there's no real guarantee that it won't happen again, and otherwise decent people were made complicit in it... well, where's the hope and uplift and moral lesson? There's not a lot there. If you're realistic about life and art, you can't even delude yourself into thinking that your work of art about the Holocaust art is likely to change anything or prevent another one. Picasso's _Guernica_ might inspire our respect, but it didn't give Hitler or Franco or Curtis leMay any second thoughts about bombing cities.

And this is _before_ you start thinking about the marketing campaigns and box-office potential. I would have loved to see what Kubrick would have created from _Wartime Lies_. But if he decided that it couldn't be done or that he couldn't bring himself to do it, I understand.

I think Spielberg once said something about the awful sensation of directing crowds of naked, shivering inmates on _Schindler's List_, and feeling a bit like a Nazi commandant. (That's one thing I like about Spielberg: he's actually very candid when he talks about his work.) Which-- thinking of Terry Southern's _Blue Movie_-- makes me wonder if a funny movie can be made about a filmmaker doing a Holocaust movie and trying to "get it right." Sure, it could be a comedy like _Tropic Thunder_, but there's the potential for something really disturbing there.