FrontPage | Anne Frank Dream Sequence | Advertisement from New York Times 25 Mar 1949

"To Encompass the Unseeable": The Last Stage (Times Film, 1949) and Auschwitz in the Mind of Cold War America.  Reimagining Jewish History in the Cold War.  Cold War Cultures: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives.  U of Texas at Austin, Austin TX.  1 Oct. 2010.

Introduction

In the middle of The Diary of Anne Frank (20th Century-Fox, 1959), a rather mysterious dream sequence occurs.  Anne has a nightmarish premonition in which she imagines her best friend in a concentration camp.  Significantly, the scene is the only time that the film explicitly references a camp, and it is one of the first times that a postwar Hollywood film depicts a camp within the context of the Holocaust.  Although uncredited, the sequence comes from The Last Stage, a 1948 Polish film shot on location at Auschwitz and based on the personal experiences of director Wanda Jakubowska, screenwriter Gerda Schneider, and some 3,500 female extras, all of whom had survived the camp and returned to re-enact its history.  Even in the director's commentary featuring the film's associate producer George Stevens, Jr. and star Millie Perkins, neither one mentions the origins of the footage.

Anne Frank dream sequence

More recently, The Last Stage has received renewed attention in its own right with PolArt's recent release of the film on DVD.  As Hanno Loewy has argued, the film ultimately created a highly influential "iconography of the camps" that reinterpreted certain details through "cinematic visual traditions."  As a result, the film has become something more: an authentic document in its own right that other films treat as evidence (Loewy).  Thus, the appropriation of the film's iconography, plus the erasure of its provenance, only work to enhance the film's authenticity.  Like a dream sequence, the film slips in and out of other Holocaust films, leaving the audience to imagine its footage as actuality, and to wake up to subsequently less authentic and fictionalized representations of the Holocaust.

Much criticism has emphasized the failure of Hollywood film to adequately "encompass the unseeable," as New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther noted in his 1949 review of The Last Stage.  Wulf Kansteiner, in considering the influence of Holocaust film on what he calls "the recalibration of collective identities after the Cold War," concludes that the U.S. and Western European post-war cinema misrepresented the Final Solution by universalizing, democratizing and popularizing the Holocaust.  Drawing from Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life, Kansteiner particularly singles out The Diary of Anne Frank as "the first international Holocaust-related media event" to offer a powerful global consensus: "no camps, no brutality, and no Jewishness, but a distinctly generic representation of innocence and tragedy in times of crisis" (Kansteiner 163-64).  While Kansteiner also notes that The Last Stage also downplays Jewishness, he finds that as a Polish film, it offers a comparatively "honest filmic exploration of the Nazi legacy," at least until Soviet control tightened over its satellite countries (155-56).

While I do not entirely disagree with these accounts, I find them incomplete when taken in and of themselves.  The notion of an inherently European sensibility to address Auschwitz in film certainly is not a recent development.  In the week following the 1949 opening of The Last Stage in New York, Times critic Crowther already had ranked the film alongside such neo-Realist classics as Open City, Paisan, and Shoe Shine.  The only Hollywood film among them was The Search (1948), which even then was an MGM-PraesensFilm international co-production .  Crowther observed that "the only films which have yet really shown some deep and mature comprehension of the great human tragedy of our times" have been the ones made in Europe, and that it wouldn't be fair to expect "the people working in our studios" to have "faculties sufficiently up" to making such films (Crowther).  Thus, without disparaging anyone's faculties, not much has changed in the sixty plus years regarding the basic argument that European films did a better job of depicting the Holocaust than American films.

Indeed, it is hard to dispute the legacy of the European Holocaust film when compared to Hollywood.  A more interesting set of questions involves the kinds of assumptions that one might derive from this disparity.  Were American audiences indeed sheltered and kept in the dark from iconographic imagery of the Holocaust until such films as 20th Century-Fox's 1958 The Young Lions or the studio's Anne Frank the following year?  Did European audiences encounter a more honest depiction of the Holocaust earlier than other audiences, and therefore develop a more sophisticated understanding of Holocaust film?  Because so much of Holocaust film scholarship remains determined by texts, we have a very limited understanding of what kind of influence early images of the Holocaust had on actual audiences, and how these audiences made actual meaning as fuller details of the Holocaust were coming to light.

To understand the later emergence of what American audiences came to know as the Holocaust film, then, involves moving beyond some of the more categorical frameworks used to define the Holocaust film.  Instead, understanding how American audiences made meaning of a Hollywood film such as Anne Frank may show that the European Holocaust film was integral to that understanding.  Furthermore, even if audiences had not seen these European films, knowledge of these films and their inherent superiority in depicting places like Auschwitz helped shaped an understanding of what a Holocaust film should look like when Hollywood did make one.  In this respect, the formal aspects of The Last Stage (Times Film, 1949) become less important in determining what a Holocaust film should look like, than the various discourses which emerge around this film.  Thus, one could understand the influence of a film like The Last Stage without ever seeing have seen the film, but knowing of it through a remarkably coherent and prevalent recitation of its formal qualities through advertising, newspaper reviews, and even other more mainstream films.  It is in this sense that The Last Stage functioned as a site to forge popular understandings of the Holocaust film amid a shifting and negotiated set of understandings concerning foreign film, genre, actuality, and Hollywood.

Unencompassable Seeing

To address an American encounter with European film as a way to understand how American audiences perceived the significance of the Holocaust thus requires a shift in the kinds of questions asked regarding Holocaust films.  To what extent did American audiences encounter these films, and how might this encounter have influenced and shaped subsequent audience expectations?    In this regard I propose to take what Janet Staiger describes as "a historical materialist approach to audiences and media reception," emphasizing "contextual factors, more than textual ones" (Staiger 1) and propose a fuller explanation of how everyday audiences made sense of the emergent genre of the Holocaust film within the emergent politics of the Cold War.  Certainly, one must take into account as contextual influences the newspaper reports and atrocity footage of the camps which were screened in theaters in April 1945.  Surprisingly, though, little scholarship has attempted to account for other kinds sources of influence that would have had at least equal influence over this encounter, such as radio broadcasts, immediate postwar Hollywood films such as RKO's 1945 Cornered and 1946 The Stranger, and of course foreign film.  Thus, if Hollywood had failed to "encompass the unseeable," The Last Stage may point to the "unencompassable seeing" of what audiences did encounter of the Holocaust.

As a film, The Last Stage confounds many assumptions scholars hold about American audiences' encounters with the Holocaust film.  While a casual interpretation might conclude that a banal universalism of Anne Frank utterly drove The Last Stage and its specificity of depicting camp life into obscurity, the latter film received extensive publicity well before it opened in New York.  The Times first began reporting on the film in October 1948.  By the end of the year, the United Nations Film Board had issued a special commendation for the film "in recognition of its moral and artistic values" (New York Times).  Throughout February and March, the film figured prominently in the Times' coverage of foreign films screened in the U.S.  By the end of May 1949, The Times noted that the film was about to begin its 10th week run.  Even if the film had achieved niche appeal with a New York audience, that appeal had longevity.

The film confounds many assumptions regarding the American encounter with Holocaust film, not just because many of the Times' readers would have known of the film well before Hollywood produced a Holocaust film, but because those readers would have known so much about the unique conditions of production for the film.  The recitation of details of this production became a framework through which an audience could understand gruesome aspects of daily life in the camp.  In "Nazi Concentration Camp Reactivated for Film," William Friedberg focused on the details of the film's authenticity: 45 crew members using obsolete and inferior equipment; 27 performers; 3,500 extras who were actual prisoners of Auschwitz agreeing to relive their experiences.  As if anticipating the opening of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog six years before that film's release, Friedberg noted how "a field of beautiful green, billowing grass that was waist high" had grown around the camp, and "had to be cut down and the original filth" restored (Friedberg).

In addition to its emphasis upon scale and actual location, this article helped to establish the beguiling and compelling aspects of the film's authenticity.  So realistic and seductive, the authenticity of the production compels the performers to actually become their parts outside of filming:

Polish actors, at first reluctant to portray the hated Nazi officials, took to playing their parts so wholeheartedly that the former prisoners began to fall into their former habits.  Everything about Auschwitz was restored with such frightening accuracy that during lunch hours the prisoners would go to eat five by five.  In groups of five was the way they were commanded to fall out by the Nazis.  The mass scenes were so realistic that the extras hesitated to break their lines until told to do so (Friedberg).

While this recitation of scale and overwhelming actuality was certainly not new to film advance publicity, with the Holocaust film, it took on added urgency.  Indeed, such details became part of a production history lore for later Holocaust films, such as Schindler's List (1993) and The Pianist (2002), where the production history of these films becomes history in its own right.  Even if this history exists in subservience to Holocaust history, in its relation to the Holocaust, there is an autonomous history to the making of the film bestows added credibility to the film's fictional account of the Holocaust.

To understand the importance of this emphasis on production history as a way for audiences to experience the Holocaust film before, after, and even without having seen that film, historians would do well to look to Italian neo-Realism as an interpretive frame through which American audiences could understand the importance of such dimensions as on-location shooting and the use of non-professional extras.  The film's advertising highlights not just the film's ties to such postwar classics as Open City and Paisan, actively encouraging audiences to categorize the film with those films.  This advertising also emphasizes the role of the World Theatre in serving as a showcase for this new kind of "world film."  The experience of the Holocaust film thus gets mediated, not just by other kinds of foreign film, but by the very theater where the film gets shown as well.

Advertisement, New York Times, 25 Mar. 1949. 

In subsequent years, Cold War ideology could justify the film's obsolescence just as easily as neo-Realism could help audiences appreciate the film's relevance.  In reviewing a 1996 festival retrospective of Polish film, New York Times critic Stephen Holden noted that The Last Stage was "bleaker and more terrifying than Schindler's List," yet "one false note--and it is glaring--is the movie's portrayal of Soviet Communists as the world's shining saviors" (Holden).  If popular discourse could so effectively establish a neo-Realist frame of reference for the film in 1949, how could the film's political slant have eluded becoming a central concern for critics at the height of the Cold War?  The propagandistic aspects of the film clearly had become more of a concern in 1996, a full five (5) years after 1991.

The way in which popular criticism could help to establish audience expectations for what a Holocaust film should be, even in the face of pointed Soviet propaganda amid a turbulent political time in American and world politics, only underscores an important conclusion.  The Holocaust film did not emerge fully formed, but rather resulted from how audiences negotiated meaning through a set of flexible aesthetic, cultural, and ideological practices. These practices helped to shape an American understanding of this film genre, long before Hollywood began making its Holocaust films, through the European films that were widely screened and discussed among actual audiences in the United States.  

Original Proposal

Abstract

At one time, the Polish film The Last Stage earned little more than a footnote in the history of the Holocaust film as one of the earliest quasi-fictional depictions of Auschwitz and concentration camps.  Shot on location at Auschwitz and based on the personal experiences of the director Wanda Jakubowska, the film deployed some 3,500 extras who themselves had been inmates at the women's section of the camp.  While more recent attention has focused on everything from the film's influential formal qualities in depicting the camps (Loewy), to its ideological underpinnings in Stalinism (Mazierska), little if any attention has considered the importance of this work as an instance of early reception for American audiences of what has come to be known as the Holocaust film.

In this regard I propose to take what Janet Staiger describes as "a historical materialist approach to audiences and media reception," emphasizing "contextual factors, more than textual ones" (Staiger 1) and propose a fuller explanation of how everyday audiences made sense of the emergent genre of the Holocaust film within the emergent politics of the Cold War.  At its premiere in New York in 1949, the New York Times hailed the film as compelling "imagination to encompass the unseeable," and using "the medium to perfection to crystallize the aspects of a cosmic crime" (Crowther).  As opposed to the reception of Hollywood film, while reception of this foreign film initially prized its realism for how it depicted the camps, that early reading gave way to a larger anti-Communist discourse that treated the film more ambivalently, both prizing the its documentary realism while dismissing the film's doctrinaire social realism as a fatal flaw.

Bio

Steven Alan Carr is Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor of Communication at Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, a 2002-03 Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and Co-Director of the IPFW Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He received an M.A. from Northwestern University in 1987 and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994, both in Radio-Television-Film. Reviews of his first book, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War II (Cambridge U P, 2001), have appeared in Commentary, The Forward, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, and The Washington Post. His present project, which explores the response of the American film industry to the growing public awareness of the Holocaust, received an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2002.

Works Cited

Friedberg, William.  "Nazi Concentration Camp Reactivated for Film."  The New York Times 20 Feb. 1949.

Holden, Stephen.  "On How to Suffer, and the Reasons."  The New York Times 25 Jan. 1996.

Kansteiner, Wulf.  "Sold Globally - Remembered Locally: Holocaust Cinema and the Construction of Collective Identities in Europe and the US."  Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media, and the Arts. Berger, Stefan, Linas Eriksonas, and Andrew Mycock, eds.  New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. 153-80. 

Loewy, Hanno. “The mother of all holocaust films?: Wanda Jakubowska's Auschwitz trilogy.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 24.2 (2004): 179-204. Web. 

Mazierska, Ewa. “Representation of Women of Different Generations in Invitation (Zaproszenie, 1985), Directed by Wanda Jakubowska and It’s Me, Now (Teraz ja, 2004), Directed by Anna Jadowska.” Women's Writing Online 1 (2009): n. pag. Web. 28 Mar. 2010.

Staiger, Janet.  Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception.  New York NY: New York U P, 2000.