The Holocaust, on celluloid

>> Two films, Train of Life and Photographer, offer different takes

by JOANNE LATIMER

This week two more films involving the Holocaust open and, as with recent cinematic takes like Schindler's List and Life Is Beautiful, the representations couldn't be more diverse.

Photographer, a feature documentary by Dariusz Jablonski, is an original look at the war period. In 1987, a series of over 400 photos were found in a bookshop in Vienna. It turned out that the photos had been taken by Walter Genewein, an Austrian who had served the Nazis in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland during the war. As it turns out, Genewein had received a camera which had been confiscated from a Jew and had taken numerous shots of the ghetto and his day-to-day life.

Polish filmmaker Jablonski uses the photos as the backbone of his film. Indeed, they're surreal to behold; not only is it jarring to see images of World War II in colour (wasn't this war fought in black and white?), one can't help but think of the photographer himself, a man working in collusion with the Nazis. The photos are sterile, banal, including shots of Genewein in his workplace--the kind of shot you'd take to polish off a roll of film.

Jablonski managed to track down a survivor of Lodz, Arnold Mostowicz, an 86-year-old with memories of some of those captured by Genewein's photos. The strength in Jablonski's vision is precisely that he doesn't try to capture the entire "Holocaust experience" in one movie. Instead, he presents a haunting and eerie barrage of images, all captured through the lens of a collaborator.

Comedy of errors

In an entirely different vein comes Train of Life, an audience award-winner at Sundance. Crowdpleasing comedies about the Holocaust make me cringe and, like Life Is Beautiful, Train of Life suffers from a bit too much mawkish, Hallmarkesque sentimentality. Set in 1941 in a small Jewish village somewhere in Europe, the film begins with the town fool warning of the imminent arrival of the Nazis. Desperate to avoid the wrath of the German forces, the villagers devise a bizarre plan: acquiring a train, they create their own deportation front, an impostor train led by some villagers dressing up like Nazis in order to smuggle the town's entire population to the Soviet Union.

It's a ridiculous story, with a few scattered laughs to be had. The silliness in much of the film reminded me of Fiddler on the Roof crossed with The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The appropriateness of Train of Life's style will undoubtedly inspire numerous debates. Those who enjoyed Benigni's rather slapstick, farcical, hyper-sentimental take on the Holocaust in Life Is Beautiful--and I was not one of them--should also take to Train of Life.

Photographer and Train of Life open Friday, November 12