The Scourge of “Arty Holocaust Films”
The Scourge of “Arty Holocaust Films”
By
David Gottfried
I just saw “The Pianist,” a film about the Holocaust, and I am utterly nauseated. “The Pianist” belongs in that genre of films that I will call, for want of a better term, “Arty Holocaust films,” or films which ignore morals, history and honor in favor of unmitigated, mindless genuflection before the glory of art. In my life, I have seen much of what passes for art and very little in the way of honor. I propose that my decadent fellow Americans turn down the volume on their histrionic sound systems and have a little more honor instead.
“The Pianist” was cut from the same cloth as a film I saw, in around 1980, that I think was called “The Last Metro.” Both films portray the miserable experience of Jews during the Holocaust. In both films, the Jewish sufferer and protagonist does little or nothing to fight the Germans even though he is a reasonably fit man. In both films, the viewer is coaxed into concluding that the Jewish protagonists are honorable and good even though they did not fight. After all, they had something higher to aspire to: Their art. The protagonist in “The Pianist” is a great artist. If I recall correctly, the protagonist in “The Last Metro” isn’t exactly an artist but he is steeped in the arts as the owner, or part owner with his wife, of a Parisian theatre of some sort.
These films have something for everyone who wants to see “cultured” or “educated” cinema. For those viewers who took too many undergraduate courses extolling the glories of art, it tells them what they have been taught to believe: That art is always godly and glorious. And for the old ladies and overprotective mama contingent, a huge and sickening lot that is the curse of academic life, films such as “The Pianist” seem to idealize their favorite sort of man, a man who is a mama’s boy and is in no respect a real man.
(No doubt the reader will conclude that I am merely a piece of work with a mama complex, but if I am, I am in classy company. I always thought that T.S. Elliot was thinking of the woeful feminine influence in the arts and sciences in “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. I am referring to the line, “In the Room the Women Come and Go Talking of Michelangelo.” All I have to do is read that line and I practically hear a horrible harridan in the psychology department of my mediocre University --- where I got straight A’s without working up a sweat– who used to coo sweet nothings in my ears about art and seemed to love me because I am gay)
These films make me think of Rousseau’s 1750 essay for the academy of Dijon. The learned men of Dijon were offering a prize for the best essay on what the arts and the sciences had contributed to Europe. Most contestants, I suppose, wrote rosy, hagiographic accounts of inventors and tinkerers and of even some scientists. (I really don’t know what the others wrote; I only read Rousseau’s essay, the winning essay) Rousseau’s essay lit up French thought like a Roman candle: He said the arts and sciences had mucked up society big time. He said many things, but the point most applicable to this essay is his statement that the arts and sciences “Strew garlands of flowers ‘round the iron chains of tyranny.”
In other words, Rousseau told us that art took your eyes off the ball, or the stuff that was truly important. It was a big, beautiful, masterful mirage. The fancy, shmancy, brilliant art of Europe was designed to avert your eyes from bleeding, bloodied, starving workers and peasants butchered in the Streets. The violin strings are designed to muffle the strings of the vocal cords of someone withering on the medieval rack. The pulsing, piano chords divert you from the pounding pulsations of the heart of a man about to be lynched.
“The Pianist” and its kindred films tell us that even if art diverts us from the agony of our friends and relatives, art is still glorious because it can make us stay alive. We’ve heard it all before: The breezy insistence that art will instill a rapturous. redolent love of life that will ward off death. But at what price?
I much prefer the ethics of La Passionaria, the sort of woman that I do love, a glorious fighter during the Spanish Civil War who said, “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.” How much can one enjoy one’s petty little life when one has not fought to save one’s parents, one’s brothers and sisters, one’s kin and kinfolk from the oblivion of the gas chamber. Perhaps in the course of one’s life one has crafted a clever couplet, but is it worth the slightest speck of dirt if you’re as innocuous as a tender veal cutlet in a German soldier’s mouth.
At the conclusion of “The Pianist,” a German officer listens to our Jewish Pianist play. He loves the Jewish boy’s music. He even gives the Jewboy (I don’t mean to sound anti-Semitic; I mean to say that the Jewish protagonist behaved like the stereotypical Jewboy) some food. And that goddamn Jewboy, who made me cringe in embarrassment, thanked him. This goddam moronic film seemed to say that the love of music, shared by the Jew and the German, somehow negated all the murders committed by the Nazis and justified a feeling of fellowship between the Nazi and the Jew.
We Jews say, “If I forget thee Oh Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning.” I say: If I ever befriend a Nazi, may I spend eternity in the hottest hell of Christian conviction.