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March 6, 2003
ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny: Now more than ever!
Before I forget - there is a new news service that might be
of interest to you. I haven't yet had a chance to check it out myself, and I
invite your comments. Here is the information:
AlterMedia is proud to announce AlterMedia Canada. The new
Canadian news site is in English and in French and is updated very
regularly.
http://ca.altermedia.info/
AlterMedia is a free news service which relies on the work
of volunteers. If you wish to be part of AlterMedia, tell me more about you
and your motivations, I'll send you a user name and a passwords so you can
post your own news.
The AlterMedia team wishes to express its support to Mr.
Zundel. We neither condone nor condemn what Mr. Zundel says, but we believe
that freedom of speech should also apply to people who disagree with the
official version of history.
***********************************************
If you feel the traditional media lies to you, if you find
that is biased against Europeans, Euro-American and people of European
descent, if you would like to give your version of the truth but the so
called open (leftist) media censor your comments, be part of the growing
AlterMedia community. If you want to inform people of your community, your
town, state or country, AlterMedia would be glad to help you. Send me a mail
explaining your motivations.
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Next leaf:
I had a chance to talk a bit longer yesterday to Ernst, and
also received the first letter from the Canadian Detention Facility where he
is still held in Maximum Lockup - ostensibly because he is a "flight
risk" but in reality to keep him from talking to media. He told me he
felt "very calm inside", and that he looks forward to "taking
a strip out of CSIS" if and when those barbaric hearings commence.
I read the transcript yesterday of his first immigration
interview regarding his asylum claim and/or his landed immigrant status -
what a phony issue to drag up by the hairs that he should be a
"security risk" - not for what he has ever done or even MIGHT
do in the future, but for what somebody else might do who comes into contact
with him!
Threadbare is all I can say!
There are a few small light beams emerging from the Zundel-Saga,
but I would rather wait until things are firmed up and the direction is
clearer. I talked at length to various people last night and had some
feedback regarding the Wiesenthaler's back-pedaling on the German arrest
warrant, for which they have lobbied for years - and the consensus is that
Jews world-wide, and the Canadian Jews specifically, are extremely jittery
at this point, what with all the anger building to almost critical mass
about the looming Iraq war that no one wants, it seems, except the Zionists.
Those folks don't need another spotlight on Ernst Zundel's claim that all
those grueling "gassing stories" of the Jews in Germany just do
not meet the test of truth for verifiable scientific reasons.
Besides, were concentration camps really that bad? I
personally never was in a concentration camp, but I can tell you that it was
no picnic either being outside. Hasn't Ernst argued for years, perhaps
decades, that the German concentration camps, put into service at a time of
mortal national crisis to neutralize people perceived as a danger and a
menace to their struggle, were NOT the murderfactories the Holocaust
Lobby has claimed?
Was there not a swimming pool for detainees? Didn't inmates
have art lessens, musicals, their own script money, sanitary hospitals where
3,000 babies were born, not one of which was harmed at birth? Didn't they
even have - get this! It upsets me, prude that I am! - a brothel?
So what do you say to the newest artistic development below?
To mind comes a vignette that fits - that has become a
standard joke between Ernst and myself as we are battling the censors. When
Ernst was still living in Toronto, he would take much of his printing to a
Chinese-run print shop. The owner, who was very fold of Ernst, would always
greet Ernst with the widest grin and ask: "More plopaganda for the
Fuehrer?"
Look at the movie review below. More "plopaganda"
for the Holocaust?
[Start]
In the name of art
By Matthew Hays
Toronto Globe and Mail | March 6, 2003
Montreal - You'd think there would be some opportunities to
see the feature-length Prisoner of Paradise, Canada's contender for the
best-documentary Oscar. But unless you live in the Toronto suburb of North
York, you won't have a chance to catch its Canadian premiere.
That's because the film's distributor has opted to release
the film in but one Canadian cinema, the relatively obscure Empress Walk
Theatre. For the filmmakers, this is undoubtedly a bitter pill to swallow.
Their film has become the surprise nod in a field of candidates that
includes Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine.
Montreal-based Malcolm Clarke, co-director of the film, has
difficulty concealing his disappointment about its limited release.
"You'd have to ask the distributor about that," he says evasively.
Jim Sherry, executive vice-president and general manager of
Alliance Atlantis, says the single-cinema opening is not a slight against
the film, but rather a measured approach to distribution. Sherry says he and
the Alliance Atlantis team were thrilled with the nominations of both
Prisoner of Paradise and Bowling for Columbine, which the corporation also
produced.
"Prisoner of Paradise is a film which has gotten an
extreme push from the Academy Award nomination," he says. "In
response to that, we've actually rushed to get the film to market
prematurely. If the film performs strongly enough in Toronto, we obviously
will look to take that momentum and push it into Vancouver and
Montreal."
Prisoner of Paradise recounts the story of Kurt Gerron, a
popular German Jewish actor who found himself making a Nazi propaganda film
in order to survive. The documentary was made for both PBS and BBC
broadcast. Sherry says that since the film was made for TV, there weren't
any prints ready for big-screen distribution. Thus the film will be
projected from a DVD in North York.
Clarke says he was as surprised as anyone by the Oscar nod.
While Holocaust documentaries appear to please the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences (Anne Frank Remembered, The Last Days and Into the Arms of
Strangers have all won Oscar nods), Clarke says that if anything, he feared
"Holocaust fatigue."
"I assume most people are so damn sick of hearing about
it," says Clarke, who has already received one Oscar nomination and an
Oscar win (for Soldiers in Hiding and You Don't Have to Die , respectively).
"There's often a degree of iridency about discussions surrounding it.
No, I wouldn't have thought a Holocaust-related documentary would
necessarily have an edge."
What did grab Clarke and co-director Stuart Sender (an Emmy
Award-winning documentarian) was the moral ambiguity surrounding Kurt Gerron,
something that struck them when Montreal filmmaker Jamie Gilcig presented
them with Gerron's life story as a movie idea.
Gerron was a household name in Germany when the Nazis
ascended to power, a theatrical actor who had broken into films and made a
number of memorable appearances, most notably with Marlene Dietrich in her
star-making turn, The Blue Angel. Gerron had also taken to the director's
chair, making a series of entertaining films that were a hit with German
audiences. Gerron's story then takes on dimensions universal to Jews in
Germany (and throughout most of Europe) at that time: rights stripped away,
employment terminated, and ultimately, interned in a camp.
In Gerron's case, he was detained at Theresienstadt (or
Terezin), a camp near Prague where the Nazis sent Jewish intellectuals,
artists, musicians and religious leaders. What happened to Gerron then is
far from universal and forms the crux of Prisoner of Paradise. The artist
was made an offer he couldn't refuse: make a propaganda film that makes the
concentration camps look like beautiful oases, Gerron was told, and his life
would be spared.
(The Nazis, of course, weren't so famous for keeping their
promises, particularly those made to Jews. It wouldn't be giving anything
away to say the film doesn't have a happy ending.)
The result was The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews , a
horrifying, surreal film in which the camps are made out to be luxurious
bastions of promising, happy family life. Everyone appears well fed and
content - intended to stand in stark contrast to the bad rap Hitler's regime
was gaining interna-tionally as word of the genocide slowly spread. In
effect, Gerron, himself a persecuted Jew, was forced to put a Nazi PR spin
on the Holocaust. Though much of the film was destroyed, parts were
resurrected and Sender and Clarke spent time piecing together as much of it
as they could. "I couldn't quite believe it when we watched it,"
Clarke says.
Though the story does involve the Holocaust, Clarke points
out that the film has a morally ambiguous figure at its centre, something
that's not part of most films on the subject. Like The Grey Zone , Tim Blake
Nelson's recent dramatic film about camp detainees at Auschwitz, Prisoner of
Paradise examines levels of complicity in the genocide, meditating on the
excruciating choices offered to Jews who negotiated with the Nazis in a
desperate effort to survive. "I'm not sure I wouldn't have done the
same thing had I been Gerron," Clarke says. "The film makes us
think about how heroic we really would be as opposed to how we'd like to
think we'd behave under very difficult conditions."
And if Gerron's uncertain place in the moral universe made
him all the more attractive to Clarke and Sender, it didn't make funding
come any easier. Clarke says they scored a coup early on when they presented
a treatment of the film to Steven Spielberg, who promptly "flipped
out," says Clarke, writing them a cheque for $100,000 (U.S.) of seed
money. "He was like, what a brilliant idea." With that name behind
them, you'd think the rest of the funding would simply fall into place.
"But you'd be wrong," corrects Clarke. Instead, he
says, "no one really wanted to support a film about a sort of traitor.
We thought it would have been relatively easy. And with a saint it would
have been. But Gerron was not a hero. When he accepted the gig from the
Nazis, he hadn't directed a film in seven years and he was desperate to.
Only this time, the National Socialist Party was the studio. I think people
hated him all the more because he made such a good film. He pissed off a lot
of people, who said he should have taken a bullet instead - which is
something many people did, of course."
Clarke points out that the nature of Gerron's character and
his actions lend Prisoner of Paradise an openendedness that makes the film
all the more fascinating and open to interpretation. "It's great to see
how the film has been received. I think we've made a really solid
documentary. I just want as many people to see it as possible."
[END]
(Source: http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030305.wpara0503/BNStory/En
tertainment )
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