Deadly silence over Holocaust film

10 April 2012

At first sight, the two films are so similar. Both Roman Polanski's The Pianist and Constantin Costa-Gavras's Amen have been eagerly awaited as the first important new work in years from senior, internationally respected directors.

Both are set against the background of the Holocaust. Both ask tough questions about collaboration, moral ambiguity and betrayal. Both feature a benevolent Nazi as a main character.

While The Pianist harvested mixed reviews in Cannes and eventually won the Golden Palm, Costa-Gavras's film and the provocative poster for it have been at the centre of a furious controversy in mainland Europe. Yet Amen will open here on Friday almost silently, with a handful of prints, no big poster campaign and minimal public awareness. Of a dozen Catholic and Jewish sources canvassed for reactions to Amen's release this week, few had even heard of its existence - perhaps because, as one Catholic suggested: "We're one step removed from these events - we have a different attitude towards them here."

The extraordinary events drama-tised in Amen concern Kurt Gerstein (played by Ulrich Tukur), an exceptional man whose anti-Nazi activities in the early Thirties earned him a prison sentence and a trip to a concentration camp.

In 1940, however, his life took a very strange turn: rehabilitated, he joined the SS and, as a scientist, was detailed to supervise the cheap and efficient running of the gas chambers. Stunned by what he discovered, he attempted to alert world leaders, including diplomats, the Dutch Resistance and the Papal Nuncio in Berlin.

"A lot of films have been made about the victims of the war," says Costa-Gavras, famed for his hard-hitting popular dramatisations of political subjects such as Z, about the fascist dictatorship in his native Greece, and Missing, about the United States' involvement in the overthrow of Chile's President Allende.

"I wanted to make one about the ones who knew, or half-knew what was going on. Forty thousand soldiers were needed to run the camps. That was a lot of people."

Like the 1963 play on which it is based - Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), by the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth - Amen condemns the Vatican for refusing to speak out against Hitler. Hochhuth summed up his position in the bluntest possible terms in Berlin, where the film had its premiere in February. "The Holocaust would not have been possible if Pope Pius XII had said one word against it," he said, describing the pope as a "coward" and his silence as "a huge crime of world history".

The Vatican begged to differ. Almost daily during the week of Amen's premiere, its news agency, Zenit, issued a stream of bulletins, in which historians and Second World War survivors attacked the film.

Perhaps not by coincidence, the Vatican also announced at this time that it would finally do something international historians had been demanding for years: in order to put an end to "unjust and dis-agreeable speculations", it would open up its archives relating to Pius XII's pontificate.

More trouble awaited in France where a Right-wing Catholic organisation, The General Alliance against Racism, launched court proceedings in February to have the poster for Amen banned. Designed by Oliviero Toscani, the man behind Benetton's notorious use of dying Aids patients and Death Row prisoners in its advertising campaigns, the poster is dominated by a dramatic red swastika half-straightened into a cross.

Catholic leaders were affronted by the "intolerable identification of the symbol of the faith of Christians with that of Nazi barbarism". The judge ruled against them and soon afterwards the poster was plastered across France when Amen opened there. However, the film's Italian distributor removed this poster from its street campaign. In Germany, after Toscani's icon was attacked as offensive at the Berlin Film Festival, a different and much weaker image - light falling through a stained-glass window to form a swastika on the floor - was used.

Yet, in sharp and very curious contrast to these bitter debates raging over Amen in mainland Europe, the film faces an uncertain future in English-speaking territories. It has no American distributor, although its theme is more contentious than ever in a country currently rocked by a huge scandal over paedophile priests and the Catholic Church's efforts to cover up malpractices.

Speaking from Paris, Pascal Diot of Pathé, which handles international sales, said: "There has been quite a good response to the film from US distributors. But no one has jumped on it. They are being prudent."

In contrast to the impact of its huge releases in France, Germany and Italy, Amen opens here with minimal fanfares. Commenting on the poster, Oliver Wilson, of the Catholic Bishops' Conference, said: "It looks like a deformed swastika, not at all like a cross. I can't imagine many Catholics being offended by it."

A source from the Board of Deputies of British Jews thought the image likely to be less incendiary here than in France, where there has been a recent surge of anti-Semitic violence.

People are unlikely to have the chance to become outraged: contrary to recent press reports that the poster might be toned down for the London Underground, Jo Tomlin of Viacom, which books the advertising sites, confirmed yesterday that no campaign for Amen was running there. "We're surrounded by blockbusters," lamented a spokeswoman at Pathé's British office. "I don't know if people are as passionate here about religion."

She may yet be proved wrong. Pierpaolo Finaldi of the Catholic Truth Society said: "This is an unhistorical view of what happened. It has been fairly well proved that the pope was offering a great deal of help to the Jews", while Luke Coppen, deputy editor of the Catholic Herald, also believes Catholics will be angered by the film.

That contrasts sharply with the body of opinion summarised by a source within the Jewish Chronicle; the feeling that: "Jews will be very happy with the message that the Vatican colluded with the Holocaust." Amen will re-ignite those arguments about whether Pius XII was indeed, as one biographer controversially called him, Hitler's Pope - if, that is, anyone gets to see it.

MORE ABOUT

Campaigning

Deadly silence over Holocaust film

Read More