| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Reviews

Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust. Prod. by Daniel Anker. AMC, 2004. 92 mins. (Anker Productions, 18 W. 21st St., Suite 801, New York, NY 10101-7336; 212-645-2205; <apifilms@aol.com>)
Despite its ambiguous title, Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust is a good introduction to an extremely important topic: Hollywood's presentation of Nazism and the Holocaust from the early 1930s to the present. It recounts the twists and turns of that story and opens for discussion the more general problem of depicting atrocity. Given the time limits of a ninety-minute documentary, it covers a great deal of ground. It exposes its audience to films long forgotten by all but scholars and places more familiar works in a reasonably coherent narrative and interpretive setting.	1
Imaginary Witness begins in the early 1930s with newsreel depictions of Adolf Hitler's Germany, most chillingly a somewhat mocking and dismissive account of the famous book burnings of 1933. The script underlines the importance of the German film market to American studios and notes that market considerations and film code prohibitions concerning political issues dictated muted visions of Nazism during most of the 1930s. The narration also notes that anti-Semitism in America led a significantly Jewish industry to bow to such demands. Clips of the German American Bund establish an extremist threat, while coverage of Joseph Kennedy's coercive chat with studio heads in 1940, warning them that movies favoring intervention might provoke an anti-Semitic backlash, and of the Nye Committee's investigation of Hollywood (1934– 1936) demonstrate the isolationists' linkage of Hollywood, Jews, and interventionism before the attack on Pearl Harbor.	. . .

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