Goldhagen & Spielberg's Zwolfkinder

[Roy Gordon]

> >Re Night and Fog: "In a control tower a French gendarme was clearly visible.
> >This visual evidence of collaboration was intolerable to the authorities.
> >After two months of negotiations, the producers of the film agreed to alter
> >the
> >image (and the evidence of history) by covering the gendarme's uniform." (from
> >_Alain Resnais_ by James Monaco (1978, p 22.)
> >
> >I mean, how could they???  Distory history?  In a documentary?  Intentionally?
> > Just knuckle under?  So they could satify their egos and get it distributed?
> >Wow, I'm sorry I ever saw the film.
> 
> But I _do_ find this an egregious distortion, a kind of insidious
> propaganda. If Resnais was responsible for it, then he should be held up
> for public obliquy and the record corrected. I'm glad Monaco wrote it up,
> and you quoted it.

Yes, it is a fault and so should be noted, but...

I don't buy the argument:

	(1) X is flawed

to, therefore:

	(2) X is bad, or even (2') X should not have been produced.

Similary, I don't buy the argument:

	(1) X has flaw Y

to, therefore:

	(2) Y is the most important characteristic of X,

and its sometimes seeming corollary:

	(3) Y should be the first (and sometimes only) thing mentioned about X.

Again, it's a matter of overall evaluation.  Yes, the modification to Night and Fog 
shouldn't have happened.  But if that was the cost of getting Night and Fog out 
(Monaco also says it was withdrawn from Cannes) it was well worth it.  Might you 
have preferred the film not to have been available?  Or only available black-market 
wise, so that many, many less people would have seen it?  (The school I taught at 
owned a copy, which is why I could show it, mid 70s, in all my classes.)

I mean, Verdi set Nabucco in ancient times and lands to satisfy the Austrian 
censors.  Would it have been preferable for him not to have done the opera?  
Particularly when the message came through quite clearly (at least to the 
Italians!).

Another example: Michael Moore's film _Roger and Me_: attacked on the basis that he 
got some of the dates wrong.  Let's assume that's true.  Does that therefore 
somehow invalidate the film's view of GM?  That the specific dates were more 
important than what GM was doing?  Some people sure made it sound so.

Energy could be better spent focusing on the more important issues.

					-- roy

Note: wrt Roger and Me, I heard the film attacked on its dates on PBS and also by 
others whom I would have thought favorable to it (like some of my friends).  In 
just now looking up the title of the film and Moore's name (forgot that it was 
Michael) I came across the following in--horror of horrors--Microsoft's Cinemania:

Michael Moore

Former editor of The Michigan Voice and, briefly, Mother Jones magazine who traded 
in his pen for a movie camera and concocted the piercing, scathingly funny ROGER & 
ME (1989), which documented the effects on Flint, Michigan, of plant closures 
carried out by auto giant General Motors. The film was a huge commercial success 
despite concerted attempts by GM to discredit it, largely through claims that Moore 
had "re-arranged" some of the events he recorded.