Imaginary Witness: Hollywood And The Holocaust

Daniel Anker’s 90-minute documentary takes on over 60 years of a very complex subject: Hollywood’s complicated, often contradictory relationship with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The questions it raises go right the very nature of how film functions in our culture, and while hardly exhaustive, Anker’s film makes for a good, thought provoking starting point.

Anker's history divides itself into four distinct phases. The first reveals Hollywood’s reluctance to critique the rise of Nazism during the 1930s, even though the majority of its powerful moguls were Jewish. Germany accounted for 10 percent of the world market, and few wanted to risk alienating such ...