[Previous entry: "Immigrants are taking more British jobs than ever"] [Next entry: "Homosexuals increasingly involved in "hate" crime against those who oppose their agenda"]
11/25/2008: "21st century culture in Europe continues to be morbidly preoccupied with the holocaust"
And of course there will be plenty of room on screen for the victims and survivors of Hitler's regime. Adam, the title character in "Adam Resurrected," is a Berlin nightclub performer, played by Jeff Goldblum, who finds himself, after enduring the camps, confined to an Israeli asylum somewhere between "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "King of Hearts." And in Edward Zwick's "Defiance," Daniel Craig transmutes his James Bond action-heroism into the moral heroism of Tuvia Bielski, the real-life leader of a group of Jewish partisans who fought the Germans in the forests of Belarus. Meanwhile the wave of European cinema dealing with Nazism and the Holocaust â€" most prominently represented on American screens in recent years by "The Counterfeiters," which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film back in February, and earlier aspirants like "Downfall" and "Black Book" â€" continued this fall with the American releases of "A Secret" and "One Day You'll Understand," two quiet, powerful French-language films exploring themes of memory and its suppression.
The near-simultaneous appearance of all these movies is to some degree a coincidence, but it throws into relief the curious fact that early 21st-century culture, in Europe and America, on screen and in books, is intensely, perhaps morbidly preoccupied with the great political trauma of the mid-20th century.
The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many?
[ Anyone trying to ensure the success of their novel, movie, etc knows that a theme of Jewish persecution is always going to help it get promotion. The public should be sick of it by now. ]
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/movies/23scot.html?_r=1