I didn’t see Life is Beautiful as a slapstick comedy. I didn’t see much funny about the movie at all apart from some of the beginning scenes. Really it was about a father trying to protect his son from the horror around them by creating a fictional world for him to believe in.
Does every Holocaust movie have to be graphic and gruesome? Can’t some of them tell stories of whatever semblance of hope and love the victims managed to hold on to?
Yes, and Yes.
If they “tell stories of whatever semblance of hope and love the victims managed to hold on to”, they will still be graphic and gruesome, (perhaps especially so) because the context permits nothing else. It will have to be doomed hope, and doomed love, and often (perhaps worse), doomed love which doesn’t survive degradation.
10th grader means they are around 15 or 16, right? In that case a documentary is IMHO entirely suitable, it will be graphic but also as accurate as it can get.
Sorry for the grave dig, I have no idea where to put this.
The Pianist is one of those movies I revisit annually. I just learned that Wilhelm Hosenfeld. the German officer who discovered Władysław Szpilman at his hideout and asked him to play a song after learning Szpilman used to be a pianist, actually wrote about how he felt about German atrocities against the Jewish people in his diary and letters to his wife.
Knowing that was how he felt about what was being done to the Jewish people living in the Warsaw ghetto really explains a lot, and adds another layer to Thomas Kretschmann’s performance, especially when he just sat there listening to Spzilman play, without saying a word.
https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/hosenfeld/hosenfeld-writings.html
…I don’t like being here any longer. What is being done here, how they kill the Jews – in other cities thousands have already been murdered; now the ghetto with half a million people is to be emptied. Himmler was here, so they say – can a German at all show his face to the world? Is this what our soldiers are dying for at the front? There are probably no precedents in history. Prehistoric men may have eaten each other, but plainly slaughtering an entire people – men women and children – in the 20th century, by us, who are leading the campaign against Bolshevism – this is a bloody guilt that makes one want to collapse on the ground. The question is whether the responsible people are at all normal. Did the devil take on human shape? I have no doubt. This is not a nice end to a letter, but I am so miserable, so depressed, that I cannot fight the hopelessness of our future…"
"Innumerable Jews have been killed like that, for no reason, senselessly. It is beyond understanding. Now the last remaining Jewish residents of the ghetto were annihilated. An SS-Strumfuehrer boasted that he had shot the Jews who jumped out of the burning houses. The entire ghetto is a burned ruin. This is how we want to win the war. These animals. With this horrible mass murder of the Jews we have lost the war. We have brought an eternal curse on ourselves and will be forever covered with shame. We have no right for compassion or mercy; we all have a share in the guilt. I am ashamed to walk in the city….
The Soviets claimed Hosenfeld worked for an espionage unit, and tortured him for information, and refused to let him free.