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1/13/2010 8:59:00 PM
Evil in the everyday With Fiennes as guest, Holocaust museum explores the Shoah as subject of film
by Suzanne Kurtz
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Even when the cameras weren't rolling on the set of Steven Spielberg's acclaimed film Schindler's List, British actor Ralph Fiennes struggled to distance himself from the Nazi character he was portraying.
Fiennes, nominated for an Oscar for his role as the sadistic concentration camp commander Amon Goeth, remembers a day when, on break from filming, he and actor Ben Kingsley walked the streets of Krakow's old Jewish quarter. The two, still in costume, came across a coffee shop with a sign reading the Jewish Cafe.
Kingsley -- Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern in the film -- suggested they stop for a bite to eat. For Fiennes, the visual impact of wearing an SS officer's uniform was so disturbing, he refused to go inside the shop.
"I said, 'I don't think I can go in... I really don't think so, I'll come in another time," Fiennes told an audience of nearly 400 at a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum event on Saturday evening.
"The production value of the film was disturbing. The truthfulness, the feeling of it being real, was very strong," said Fiennes, who despite being delayed at the airport in London for several hours -- and being in the middle of preproduction for his latest film -- made the trip to Washington to participate in the museum's Next Generation fund-raiser and dessert reception.
The event, a discussion moderated by Washington Post associate editor and investigative journalist Bob Woodward, was titled, "The Power of Film and the Holocaust." --
"Film was a genre that the museum hasn't explored with a formal program and it was [a topic] of interest to the board" said Adam Falkoff, 40, event chair and Next Generation board member.-- Fiennes was the perfect choice to discuss this topic, said Falkoff, because the actor's film biography includes portrayals of both a Nazi perpetrator and a Jewish Holocaust victim.
Museum director Sara Bloomfield noted that the Holocaust has been the subject of major films since the 1950s, The Diary of Anne Frank among them. And, she said, 65 years after the end of the World War II, "the number of films [about this time period] is greater than ever."
Last year, eight of the 65 films submitted for Oscar consideration in the foreign film category dealt with Holocaust or World War II themes.
Though "one often hears about an overabundance of Holocaust-themed films," Bloomfield remarked, it was Meyer Gottleib, president of Samuel Goldwyn Films, as well as a child Holocaust survivor himself, who said: "The Holocaust has 6 million compelling stories, and Hollywood is always desperate for a good story."
Ultimately, said Bloomfield, films about the Holocaust are stories about survival and explorations of universal themes about human nature: evil, apathy, heroism, guilt and redemption.
It was Spielberg who had described the nature of Fiennes' portrayal of Goeth in Schindler's List as one of "sexual evil," Woodward remarked.
The characterization does not bother the actor.
Fiennes agreed that there was "something sensual in the part" of Goeth, but his job as an actor "was to portray the man, the human being." As for the evilness, the actor said it was in "the banality, the everydayness ... that is where the evil is."
Later in the program, Fiennes read from the epilogue of Gitta Sereny's book Into That Darkness. Sereny had done extensive interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka death camp. She found that Stangl was able to rationalize and carry out duties by making lots of "little compromises" with morality. Fiennes noted that this might also be a key to understanding Goeth, more so than merely labeling him "psychotic."
Fiennes also discussed his role in Sunshine, a 1999 film that had him portraying three generations of an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family living before, during and after the Holocaust.
After a clip from Sunshine was screened -- depicting Fiennes' character being brutally beaten and killed by a soldier for not admitting to being Jewish -- Woodward asked the actor: "What do you do after a scene like that? What is the cost to you?"
The scene, Fiennes acknowledged, left him wiped out. "You feel spiritual and emotional exhaustion," he said, comparing it to stage roles of characters such as Hamlet, roles that tend to give him "a rush of adrenaline afterwards."
With the success of the event and the interest in the discussion topic, Falkoff said there are talks to bring additional high-profile actors and directors to the museum to address the portrayal of the Holocaust in film.
http://www.washingtonjewishweek.com/main.asp?Search=1&ArticleID=12114&SectionID=4&SubSectionID=&S=1
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