Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust (2004) A Documentary Film by Daniel Anker Narrated by Gene Hackman

SYNOPSIS
This is the riveting story of the American film industry's complex and fascinating response to the horrors of Nazi Germany. Utilizing carefully selected excerpts from extraordinary and in some cases rarely-seen films, and told through the first-hand accounts of the directors, actors, writers, and producers, the film covers some of Hollywood's most important movies, including The Mortal Storm, The Great Dictator, The Search, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Pawnbroker, Judgment at Nuremberg, Sophie's Choice, and Schindler's List.

IMAGINARY WITNESS: HOLLYWOOD AND THE HOLOCAUST takes us from the American ambivalence and denial during the heyday of Nazism, through the silence of the post-war years, and into the present day. It asks hard questions: about the uneasy relationship between American popular culture and the Holocaust, about the responsibility of filmmakers in their portrayal of history, and about the power of film itself to affect the way we look at ourselves.

CREDITS
Narrated by Gene Hackman With
Steven Spielberg, Sidney Lumet, Rod Steiger, Branko Lustig, Annette Insdorf, George Stevens, Jr., Neal Gabler, Michael Berenbaum, Vincent Sherman

A production of Anker Productions, Inc.
Director Daniel Anker
Producers Daniel Anker and Ellin Baumel
Co-Producer Susan Kim
Editor
Bruce Shaw
Cinematography Tom Hurwitz and Nancy Schreiber
Associate Producer Nate Smith
Original Music Andrew Barrett
Executive Producers Diana Holtzberg and Jan Rofekamp
Executive Producer for AMC Jessica Falcon Shreeve

DIRECTOR'S BIO
Daniel Anker, an Academy Award nominee and Emmy winner for the film Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, has produced or directed numerous documentaries and specials, mostly for PBS. Most recently he produced and directed, in addition to: Imaginary Witness, Music From the Inside Out, a feature documentary featuring the musicians of The Philadelphia Orchestra. Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, which he produced and co-directed, premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and won numerous festival awards throughout the United States and abroad prior to its Oscar nomination.

A graduate of Harvard University with a degree in music, Anker has previously produced numerous award-winning music programs, including the Peabody Award-winning children's series Marsalis on Music, which was broadcast on PBS, the BBC and BRAVO. He was also producer for three seasons of the PBS series The Metropolitan Opera Presents and produced broadcasts of Parsifal, Elektra, Stiffelio, I Lombardi, Falstaff, La Fanciulla del West, and the world premiere of The Ghosts of Versailles. Additionally, Anker produced the PBS pledge perennial A Carnegie Hall Christmas Concert.

He was associate producer of Julie Taymor's filmed version of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, shot at the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto Japan, and the Emmy Award-winning Tchaikovsky 150th Gala from Leningrad.

Other documentary credits include the Emmy-nominated AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film Daley, the Last Boss (co-producer), the short The Magic of La Guardia (producer/director), and a series about campaign finance reform for THE NEWSHOUR WITH JIM LEHRER (field producer). Anker produced new documentary material for the PBS rebroadcast of the historic Horowitz in Moscow with Charles Kuralt, and several segments for the Emmy Award-winning series City Arts.

He was associate producer of the first two seasons of the PBS series Bookmark, the LIFETIME special Abortion: An American Controversy, and the cinema-verite film Abbado in Berlin (with Maysles Films). Anker's additional awards and honors include a Peabody Award, four national Emmy Award nominations, the Erik Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians, and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.

BACKGROUND
For over half a century Hollywood films have dealt with Nazism and the Holocaust in complex and often contradictory ways, marked by outrage and indifference, compassion and ignorance, the need to understand and the desire to forget.

For better or worse, much of what we know about the Holocaust comes from images in the movies. Daniel Anker's IMAGINARY WITNESS: HOLLYWOOD AND THE HOLOCAUST helps shed light on one of the darkest periods in human history as seen through the lens of American movies. With clips from over forty films and comments from leading directors Steven Spielberg and Sidney Lumet, actor Rod Steiger, producers, survivors and scholars, it is an enlightening and moving journey through horror and triumph, despair and nobility. It is the intriguing record of how Hollywood came to terms with a story that had to be told.

As the son and grandson of East European refugees, with a great-grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins who had perished, Anker grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. After making documentaries ranging from racism in the South to campaign finance reform to The Philadelphia Orchestra, Anker knew he would one day tackle a Holocaust film. "I always thought I would do a Holocaust story, though I thought it would probably be a film about my family's home town."

Anker was unsure how to tackle the material at first. "I didn't know what the film was at all," he says. "Initially I thought we would focus on the early history, the story of Hollywood's relationship to Germany and Nazism up until the war." But as is often the case, the project started to take on a life of its own. For five months, Anker and his team, producer Ellin Baumel and co-producer Susan Kim, started to digest all the writing and thinking about the Holocaust, and watching movies, lots of movies.

"Going into it we thought, maybe this will be a fun project, watching these wonderful old movies. But ultimately it became incredibly difficult. Difficult on an emotional level."

Anker watched some forty films, some many times over. " There aren't that many films about the Holocaust in American cinema." It's a finite number. So we were able to see every film on the subject made in Hollywood.

He also watched other documentaries about films and a method started to emerge. The best docs, like VISIONS OF LIGHT, about Hollywood cinematographers, and CELLULOID CLOSET, about gays in movies, used extended film clips to further the narrative, not just trailers or other material. "I am impressed by the achievement of those two films in particular, and wanted to be able to use film clips in the same way."

He saw that the story of Hollywood's response to the Holocaust was all there in the movies themselves. Newsreel footage from the 1930s that treated Nazi book burnings like some fraternity prank demonstrated Hollywood's early avoidance of the issue. Hollywood was captivated by the imagery of the rise of Nazism, not the meaning. The
industry's relative ambivalence during the years before the war evidenced in films like CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY (1938) raise the question of what we knew and when we knew it. Complex economic ties to Germany and fear of anti-Semitism at home kept the lid on dissent in movies. And later on, filmmakers danced around the subject of the Holocaust in immediate postwar films like GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT (1947) and CROSSFIRE (1947), films that addressed anti-Semitism, but made no mention of what had happened in Europe only two years earlier.

After five months of research, they had the first draft of a script that gave IMAGINARY WITNESS a chronological framework. But new issues surfaced in the editing room. As the film started to deal with the post-war presentation of the Holocaust in Hollywood, the filmmakers ran smack into a philosophical debate that has raged for 50 years about the nature of artistic representation of the Holocaust. Hard liners like survivor and author Elie Weisel had declared the landmark Holocaust mini-series (1978) "morally objectionable and indecent" in a story in The New York Times. Interviewed in the film, writer and critic Thane Rosenbaum argues "there are events that simply should not be imagined or fictionalized because in some ways they are by definition unimaginable."

The question for Anker, and indeed for any filmmaker tackling the Holocaust, was not just about bearing witness but about how you bear witness without trivializing the material. "I had a real sense of responsibility, and that made me very sensitive to striking the right balance and being careful not to end up doing exactly what we were critical of others for doing in fictional films."

Anker was keenly aware that many films about films are blindly celebratory, but he also knew that wouldn't work when it came to the Holocaust. "It's easy to fall into that trap. You can applaud SOPHIE'S CHOICE for dealing with concentration camp scenes in such a realistic manner or SCHINDLER'S LIST that were both an artistic triumph and a box office winner. But the biggest challenge was avoid making a documentary that appears to celebrate these films."

So the broader goal of IMAGINARY WITNESS, beyond telling the story of the Holocaust through films, was a critical look at how the history has been portrayed by Hollywood, and how these films reflect how America itself has dealt with the Holocaust over time.

In any artistic endeavor, choices are made. The protagonist of SOPHIE'S CHOICE is not a Jew; SCHINDLER'S LIST is about a good Nazi; THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK doesn't take the story to its logical conclusion; THE PAWNBROKER, which in 1965 was the first feature to dramatize scenes in the concentration camps, chose a well fed Rod Steiger as its star.

For each clip he showed, Anker had to ask himself how it was being used historically in the film and in the context of the history of the Holocaust in American life during each decade. "All these films were noble in their intentions yet as Holocaust films attempting to recreate an unimaginable reality, I believe they will always be, by definition, flawed," says Anker. "We wanted to show how the flaws reflected the time in which they were made."
"The reason Hollywood hasn't done many Holocaust movies is because it is an ineffable experience only understood by those who survived the camps. " -Steven Spielberg

Even for viewers who think they know everything there is to know about the Holocaust, IMAGINARY WITNESS: HOLLYWOOD AND THE HOLOCAUST will still offer some surprises. Why, for instance, was Hollywood largely silent as the Nazis rose to power in the '30s? "I think we offer a new perspective," says Anker, " at least with regard to America's alleged complicity in the early years. The role of Hollywood in the debate about America's responsibility during the early days of Nazism may be new to some people."

Apparently in the late '20s, ten percent of Hollywood's grosses were earned in Germany, so no one was anxious to look too closely at what was happening there. Newsreel footage from the time, produced by the major studios, is particularly uncritical. And Hollywood was complicit when, in the late '30s, Germany asked that all Jewish studio employees in the country be fired. As the film notes, the studio moguls, who were themselves immigrants, did not want to call attention to their Jewishness and run the risk of having their allegiance to America questioned. Yet outside of the films they made, some were outspoken. Many joined the Anti-Nazi League, represented in rare footage of Melvyn Douglas reading a manifesto with James Cagney, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy and others looking on.

Hollywood did not totally bury its head in the sand. IMAGINARY WITNESS shows clips from Warner Brothers' CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY (1938), the first of several anti-Nazi features produced by the studios (no actor would agree to play Hitler so the part had to be written out of the movie) and MORTAL STORM, a brave and poignant 1940 MGM film starring Jimmy Stewart. But the most realistic portrayals of the time came from B films such as Columbia Pictures' NONE SHALL ESCAPE (1944) or a rare independent film like Charlie Chaplin's self-financed THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940). Director Sidney Lumet in a moving interview recalls attending the premiere of THE GREAT DICTATOR in New York and how surprised he was to hear the word "Jew" in an American film for the first time.

One of the revelations of the film is newsreel footage of thirteen studio moguls visiting the concentration camps immediately after the war at the invitation of General Eisenhower. "It felt to us like a seminal moment," says Anker who uncovered documents in the personal files of Jack Warner at USC. The message of the trip was clear: go home and bear witness to these atrocities, and for a time newsreels did carry graphic images of bulldozers burying bodies at Bergen-Belsen, an image that would be etched in the collective memory of a generation of people. But Eisenhower's mission was not accomplished and it would be decades before Hollywood would again depict a concentration camp on screen.

In the meantime, television surprisingly became the more vocal medium. Anker had read about footage from This Is Your Life, a fifties-style reality show in which guests were surprised by people from their past as their life story was presented in front of a national TV audience. In one such show, which Anker tracked down at the Jewish Museum, a Holocaust survivor is reunited with her best friend from Auschwitz and her brother from Israel, whom she had not seen since before the war. It's an almost surreal mix of wrenching emotion and Hollywood hokum.

Another landmark in the depiction of the Holocaust on film is the 1959 TV broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg, which incorporated some of the most graphic post-war newsreel footage. In an ironic aside, the film reveals how the show's message was compromised when the sponsor, The American Gas Company, balked at references to gas, as in gas chambers, and had the word struck from the broadcast at the last minute. The film was remade in Stanley Kramer's acclaimed theatrical feature version two years later.

And with every new film, a little more of the picture came into focus for audiences. "You just see it time and time again," suggests Anker. Films are crucial to the collective memory of historical events perhaps no more so than with the Holocaust." Each time a holocaust film is released by a major studio or television network, beginning with THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK (1959), the public becomes 'educated' about the Holocaust. It's easy to be cynical that so much of the world learns their history through Hollywood, but it's a fact of life."

Anker experienced this first hand when he was growing up with the broadcast of the mini-series Holocaust in 1978. Anker remembers that it was only with the broadcast of the series that the Holocaust began to have resonance among his peers. As the film notes, it was actually Roots, the previous year that paved the way for Holocaust. The very week Roots aired, another network gave the green light to go ahead with Holocaust.

Over the next decade the dialogue continued with films like SOPHIE'S CHOICE (1982) and TV productions like War and Remembrance (1988), which Steven Spielberg notes in the documentary was more graphic than anything he had ever seen before. In a way, it paved the way for Spielberg's own tour de force, SCHINDLER'S LIST in 1993. "SCHINDLER'S LIST was really a watershed moment. The story we tell ends, in a way, with SCHINDLER'S LIST. The relationship of Hollywood to the Holocaust begins with reticence and denial, and then 60 years later Hollywood's greatest director creates an Academy Award-winning Holocaust film," says Anker. "But in many ways Spielberg did so by taking stock of how the story had been told throughout the years-. It's not that SCHINDLER'S LIST was derivative, but it is derived. The graphic footage in films of the 80's, allowed Spielberg to use film in more subtle ways.

"SCHINDLER'S LIST also opened the flood gates. It sort of changed the playing field for Holocaust films in a way. And the danger is that the self-scrutiny that Spielberg gave himself in making that film, may not be felt as strongly by the filmmakers that follow," says Anker.

Media critic Neil Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own, a history of the Jews in Hollywood, comments that SCHINDLER'S LIST was so powerful because of the
casualness of its storytelling. "It's the reticence that makes it so effective," he says. But the film's happy ending still drew its share of criticism.

"What Hollywood does with the Holocaust is find a way to tell a good story, but give the audience a message of hope: something they can go home with feeling good about themselves and the world in which they live," historian Thane Rosenbaum argues in IMAGINARY WITNESS. "And that's the paradox when Hollywood turns its lens on the Holocaust."

Because he has such respect for the film, Anker says that the section of IMAGINARY WITNESS about SCHINDLER'S LIST was the most difficult for him to put together. The struggle was trying to find the balance between being analytical and still presenting the film in a fair way. "It took many weeks to select the scenes and figure out how to approach it. We didn't want to deify Spielberg," he says, "or suggest that Hollywood has redeemed its prior 50 years of silence by embracing the film."

THE INTERVIEWS
"The filmmakers who made Holocaust films, without exception, have been keenly aware of what they were getting into and the moral dilemmas posed by tackling the subject."
-Daniel Anker

After spending six months doing research, selecting film clips and writing a script, Anker and his team set out to do the 21 interviews that form the backbone of the film. Given the seriousness of the project, hardly anyone he approached turned down his request. "Everybody without exception went out of their way to help us on this film," says the director. "I didn't take no for an answer; I was persistent in every possible way, persistent because I felt in my gut that it would be possible to get this film made. Even heads of studios weighed in and helped us."

One area where persistence really paid off was in getting Steven Spielberg to participate. He was one of the last interviews, but without him, Anker felt that his history of Holocaust films would be incomplete.

Spielberg graciously sat for a 90-minute interview. He had seen most of the films Anker was using and was able to speak eloquently about them. One of the revelations that came out of the conversation was an explanation for why he had given a young girl in SCHINDLER'S LIST a red dress as the only spot of color in an otherwise black and white movie. It was, he explains, a metaphor for America's complicity. The Holocaust was, Spielberg says, "a large red blood stain, and nobody did anything about it."

Anker's determination also helped him land Gene Hackman to do the narration for the film. He was looking for someone with an authoritative but not pretentious voice.

Sidney Lumet was another filmmaker who couldn't have been more cooperative talking about THE PAWNBROKER. "He was very engaged and very smart, very open to talking about both the technical aspects of his craft, as well as the implicit moral issues involved in the subject matter," says Anker. Among the other directors questioned was Dan Curtis who talks about rebuilding the crematorium at Auschwitz from original blueprints for War and Remembrance in 1988.

In rounding up people to interview, Anker's goal was to get at least one major player from each film who could address the issues of that film. "We didn't want to get a brother or a wife. We didn't want to have witnesses who speak to these films second hand, but rather to hear from those who grappled with these issues directly."

Among those interviewed was Rod Steiger, star of THE PAWNBROKER, who describes the still chilling final silent scream at the end of the film. It proved to be one of Steiger's last interviews as he past away a few weeks later.

The oldest person interviewed was 96-year-old Vincent Sherman. Initially Anker went to him because he was a Hollywood old-timer, who had been at Warner Bros. in the 30's when the studio was making anti-Nazi films. But Sherman had also directed a B movie about the Nazi resistance in Germany, UNDERGROUND, and his interview proved incredibly informative.

When Anker went to interview two other former Warner Bros. employees, screenwriter Malvin Wald and film editor Stanley Frazen, he learned that they had been among eight studio employees, part of the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps, who had been present at the screening of the raw footage from the liberation of the concentration camps in April 1945. Ronald Reagan was also one of the eight. Frazen recalls being warned that this was the roughest stuff he would ever see. "After twenty minutes, I went outside and threw up. It was just devastating."

Anker also wanted to make sure he included survivors in the film. One of the first people he went to talk to in Los Angeles before he started shooting was Branko Lustig, producer of SCHINDLER'S LIST as well as associate producer of SOPHIE'S CHOICE and assistant director on War and Remembrance. "It was very important to me that he be in the film," says Anker. Lustig poignantly points out that he is one of the youngest Holocaust survivors, and perhaps the last working in movies, and in the not too distant future directors will have no one to ask what it was really like.

FEATURED FILMS
BLACK LEGION CABARET
CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY
CROSSFIRE
THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK
GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT
THE GREAT DICTATOR
HEROES FOR SALE HITLER'S CHILDREN HAROLD AND MAUDE HOLOCAUST, NBC MINISERIES
JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBURG (CBS TELEPLAY AND FEATURE FILM) I MARRIED A NAZI (OR "THE MAN I MARRIED")
THE MORTAL STORM NONE SHALL ESCAPE THE PAWNBROKER THE PRODUCERS
THE SEARCH SCHINDLER'S LIST SHIP OF FOOLS SINGING IN THE DARK SOPHIE'S CHOICE
TO BE OR NOT TO BE TOMORROW THE WORLD
UNDERGROUND WAR AND REMEMBRANCE


DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
This is one of those films that started in one place and ended up in another. When my colleagues Ellin Baumel, Susan Kim and I set out to make a film about Hollywood and the Holocaust, we were stymied as to how to approach the subject in a way that would not seem to trivialize it. In the wake of 9/11 we felt there were enough parallels that would make this a timely look at how an artistic community responds to atrocity. We were initially struck by the 1945 trip to Europe of thirteen Hollywood moguls, who, at the invitation of General Eisenhower, toured the liberated camps with the expressed purpose that they would then bear witness through their films and educate the world. But despite the declarations of intent from the moguls, the trip was followed by decades of silence from the studios.

Could we make a documentary about why Hollywood chose not to make Holocaust films? Should there be an expectation that Hollywood make films on a particular prescribed subject? Moreover, is it even appropriate to attempt such a film when the subject is atrocity? As the son of a refugee from Hitler's Germany, and the great-grandson of a victim of the Holocaust, it had been my core belief that any effort to shed light on those events, even if fictionalized, was worthwhile. But I would come to appreciate that there was another side to this question. The representation of the Holocaust in any art, let alone Hollywood movies, is at the center of an emotionally charged and polarizing debate that has persisted half a century. There were many points during our production, when we felt that the film was undoable, that we would in essence be guilty of celebrating the very thing we questioned.
Through much debate, research, and the invaluable aid of scholars Michael Berenbaum, Annette Insdorf, Neal Gabler, and Thane Rosenbaum, we settled on a narrative that has as its focus the singular relationship of American culture to the Holocaust and the evolution of that relationship, as seen through film, from a period of denial, to the present day when a National Holocaust Museum graces our nation's capitol. The contradictions and ironies are fascinating. The story begins well before WWII, and is one that is intertwined with Hollywood money, Hollywood moguls, and the movies themselves. Ultimately, it was this broader view of the place of the Holocaust in our society that allowed us the distance to explore a little-known chapter in pre-WWII American history, and to consider the issues of filmmaker responsibility that are central to any discussion of the Holocaust on film.

http://www.shadowdistribution.com/witness/downloads/IMAGINARYWITNESSpresskit.pdf

“Willowy, Blonde and Cool": The Icy Blondes, by Philip Kemp in Ken Mogg´s The Hitchcock Story

Hitchcock's ideal woman, at least in his films, was willowy, blonde, and cool. What intrigued him was the hint of
uninhibited passion behind the cool façade; in his own words, "the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they're in the bedroom ... Sex should not be advertised.

An English girl, looking like a school teacher, is apt to get into a cab with you and, to your surprise, she'll probably pull a man's pants open."
This revealing quote points to a recurrent (and some would say misogynistic) pattern in Hitchcock's treatment of his heroines.

Time and again in the director's films one of these cool, soignée blonde women is reduced to a disheveled, panic-stricken mess, or reveals unexpected depths of sexual ardor. This could be seen as the psycho sexual equivalent of Hitchcock's love of showing us danger and terror lurking beneath the surface of seemingly everyday events and places,

such as a children's party (Young and Innocent), an art auction (North by Northwest), a quiet London street (The Man Who Knew Too Much), or a sleepy small town (Shadow of a Doubt).

Like Hitchcock himself, the serial killer in The Lodger seems to have it in for blondes: All the women he targets are fair-haired, and we see nervous blondes donning wigs or pulling down hats before braving the foggy streets, while their brunette colleagues laugh smugly.

But the first of Hitchcock's ice maidens to be thoroughly disarrayed was Madeleine Carroll, who spent much of The 39 Steps handcuffed to Robert Donat, so that every time she moved her arm his hand stroked her thigh.

Not only in the film, either. On the first day of rehearsal, when Donat and Carroll had only just met, Hitchcock handcuffed them together and then pretended for several hours to have lost the key.
Hitchcock's mischievous, semi-sadistic treatment of blondes hit its stride in Hollywood, perhaps provoked by the flawless glamour of its screen goddesses.

Joan Fontaine, tormented by the sinister Judith Anderson in Rebecca, fears her husband is poisoning her in Suspicion. Her fears turn out to be illusory (though Hitchcock, if he'd been allowed, would have had it otherwise), but Ingrid Bergman really is being poisoned in Notorious, and again in Under Capricorn.

Bergman was the first of Hitchcock's actresses with whom he became obsessed, maintaining that she returned his passion. He became similarly fixated on Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren. Kelly was put through it less than her counterparts, though in Dial M for Murder

she was nearly strangled and then tried for murder; but more often she served to illustrate Hitchcock's taxi thesis (as outlined previously), revealing hidden fires behind her reserved, classic beauty. In To Catch a Thief, she makes bold physical advances toward Cary Grant, while in Rear Window

she teases the immobilized James Stewart with a filmy negligee, purring about a "preview of coming attractions." In North by Northwest the alluring but lethal Eva Marie Saint, with her penchant for sex on trains, is equally ambivalent.

This view of the cool blonde as sexually schizoid is made explicit in Vertigo where Kim Novak, having seemingly died as the elegant, fair-haired Madeleine Elster, is resurrected as Judy Barton, a brunette dressed and made up to look as tarty as possible.

But such overt carnality is rejected by James Stewart. Judy must dye her hair, change her clothes, and become Madeleine again before he'll make love to her.

(The analogy with the director, avidly molding his female stars to fit his template, is inescapable.) To Hitchcock, only when a woman's sexuality is concealed is it truly erotic.
In the case of some actresses, it seems that the concealment was too thorough; Hitchcock could do little with the wholesomeness of Doris Day (in the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much)

or Julie Andrews (in Torn Curtain). Conversely, revealing all too early is dangerous: Janet Leigh, first seen in Psycho half-dressed on a bed with her lover, suffers a terrible fate for her lack of modesty.

The most problematic and extreme instance of Hitchcock's attitude toward his cool blondes was his treatment of Tippi Hedren. "I had always heard that his idea was to take a woman—usually a blonde— and break her apart, to see her shyness and reserve broken down," Hedren later recalled. "I thought this was only in the plots of his films."

But the ordeal Hitchcock put her through in filming The Birds (where she was pecked and gouged by very real, panicky birds tied to her with threads) was matched by his obsessive personal pursuit of her off-screen. Hedren's rejection of his advances strained their relationship during the shooting of Marnie, where her icy blonde image is specifically linked with sexual frigidity.

Hitchcock liked to quote the nineteenth-century French playwright Victorien Sardou's advice, "Torture the women!" — adding provocatively, "The trouble today is we don't torture women enough." Hitchcock, at least, did his best to make up for the omission.

Westall '66 : A Surreal Suburban Tale by Rosie Jones (Australia, 2009)

Nobody denies that if all birds of land and sea suddenly, for any unknown natural reasons, or even perhaps for some mysterious genetic conspiracy, would decide to attack us, we would be really in big trouble. This ad absurdum scenery as quasi last ornithological "fantasy", immortalized in Hitchcock`s classic and its "realism", is nothing else then the actual camera`s cinematographic fictional eye precisely just because those damn bloody treacherous birds do not have good intentions with us and waited patiently for the right moment to attack.

This assumption of verisimilitude underlying each narrative structure also extends to the documentary form as well as to the newspaper news, which is also an exercise of fiction, because the perspective that underlies it is always manufactured, although we see it as a given second nature, as something self-evident.
When man walked on the moon for the first time in 1969, the New York Times produced perhaps one of the the most beautiful and almost "pristine" of all news headlines ever conceived. Playing with the required journalistic distance before an event so colossal, involving the whole of humanity, the NYT staff wished to counteract the tide of feelings around the world. For the first time something like an "unity" around what Humanity should be as a point of view went beyond political divisions, so how to reestablish a journalistic perspective above this consensus at that unique moment in History, in other words, how to achieve that meridian and also fictional point of view also called "journalistic impartiality". This was the chosen headline: “Men walk on the moon”. It sounds like if Martians "saw" men on that satellite who, for strange reasons, should not be there.
What is simply extraordinary in Rosie´s documentary is at first sight how he manages to break that stupid dichotomy around a taboo subject for journalists in general, it means, that silly common place play between "debunkers" and "believers" in this genre, as a high school discussion about what is right or wrong.

The point here is not if you believe or not, or how you interpret what has been seen. It is irrelevant whether if it were a military experiment, an "alien" spacecraft or a mass hysteric panic reaction. What really matters here is how these repressed memories and imaginary haunt and extend their shadow over the lost of the eye`s innocence in the childhood and how to cop with these feelings. Rosie´s point of view emphasizes how the human fictional eye organizes and simultaneously represses the experience, an experience which is always manufactured. But by whom, finally, how to become subject of his own experience and not simply an passive object, since flying saucers, by definition, can not exist. Rosie lights up the shadow zone of this manufacturing, how it is repressed,returns and how it can be re-incorporated into the actual current experience.

What is also extraordinary beautiful in this documentary is the ambiguity between that naive look of a child and the subsequent official denial. Children do not lie and that morning something very strange and inexplicable as the eternal and infernal Hitchcock’s birds invaded Westall to haunt forever their lives. 

Lee Whitmore`s illustrations gave the poetic tone of this nightmare. There is nothing worse for an open society than repression. What is repressed always will return in a brutal way. When printing was invented by Gutenberg, thousands of witches and heretics were burned by the proliferation of fairy tales and hoaxes. My site Urânia is also a plaidoyer for the imaginary and for the desublimation of the eye based on a Fichte´s sonnet, a German idealist Philosopher, about the double look of Urânia on the text of reality, the muse of astronomy and cosmology: "what lives in my life, sees in my seeing". Seeing is manufacturing a fiction, seeing is always a game.
José Galisi Filho

What to my eye has given such wondrous power,
That all deformity has ceased to be;
That night appears as brightest sunlight hour,
Chaos as order, death as life to me?

What through the misty clouds of time and space
Leads me unerring to the eternal flow
Of beauty, truth and goodness and of grace,
Wherein with self is lost all selfish woe?

Tis this : since in Urania s eye, the still,
Self-luminous, blue, and transparent light,
My soul has looked, all thought of self being gone,

Since then this eye rests in my depths
And is my being – The eternal One
Lives in my life, sees in my seeing

DIRECTOR'S NOTES - Rosie Jones
When I came across an article about the Westall UFO sighting in The Age in late 2005, I was immediately drawn to it. Here was a surreal suburban tale with a detective character on a search for truth at its core. It embraced themes I had explored in my previous films (Visions of Yankalilla and Holy Rollers), but took them in a fascinating new direction. I met Shane Ryan, the subject of The Age article, and he leapt at the opportunity to be involved in a documentary.

Shane and I both thought we'd have the mystery solved in a year or so, but the story was buried much deeper than either of us expected. Witnesses had moved away or changed their names. Some had died with their stories. Authorities seemed reluctant to talk to us.
Our investigation led us into all sorts of archives and revived an amazing network of friends and families who lived in Westall in 1966. Hearing the stories of the eye¬witnesses who were brave enough to speak to us was a wonderful experience, especially as the sense that something had indeed been covered up grew stronger with each story. Thrilling, frustrating, puzzling and rewarding - it's been an unexpectedly rich experience.

In the course of this extensive research, I discovered how damaging the typical media response of ridiculing witnesses to UFO sightings had been. It took a long time to gain people's trust and some important witnesses are still unwilling to divulge their memories for fear of public ridicule. Although I found out that many top-level scientists had been (and still are) secretly active in UFO research, in public, UFOs are still on the fringes of respectability.
After three years of solid research, filming and editing, we've emerged with a gripping and cinematic story that uncovers new evidence about the sightings while it asks big questions about truth, trust, belief and responsibility. What are the effects on children when adults refuse to listen to them, or tell them that what they saw didn't exist? What are the ripple-down effects on society when those in authority lie?

SYNOPSIS
On 6 April 1966, in the Australian suburb of Westall, hundreds of students, staff and local residents watched as a strange object hovered overhead for several minutes, landed briefly, then lifted off and vanished. Witnesses described it as low flying, silver-grey and shiny, shaped like a 'cup turned upside down on a saucer' and accompanied by five light aircraft.

A mass of excited students surged out of school and ran after the object. Many reported seeing a circle of flattened grass on the ground where it had landed. Others observed men in uniforms cordoning off the 'landing site' and removing soil samples by the truckload. Some say they saw uniformed men torch the area a few days later.

The incident was reported on television news that night and in the local newspapers. But despite the evidence, that day at Westall High School, the headmaster called a special assembly. He told students and staff that they had not seen a flying saucer -in fact, they hadn't seen anything at all. And they were not to talk about it to anybody.

Afraid of being ridiculed or punished, many witnesses kept the secret of that day. Some are still angry about not being believed. Others say the incident has affected their lives and continues to haunt them today.
Forty-four years on, amateur sleuth Shane Ryan is stirring up the past. Motivated by a deep sense of injustice at how the students were treated, he's tracking down former students and staff and searching for the authorities that presided over the day.

This contemporary detective story is set against the backdrop of an Australian city, but it reflects on a fascinating and pivotal period in world history when rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union was played out in a massive conventional and nuclear arms race, the space race and the Vietnam War.

With its undercurrent of Cold War paranoia, and a burgeoning military relationship between Australia and America, this 1960s story has deep resonance in the current climate of cover-ups and lies delivered by governments in the interests of national security.

STYLE
The visual challenge was in representing something that was officially invisible - the events of the day and the UFO itself. In 1966, people didn't have cameras or mobile phones on hand as they do now, and the only footage of the aftermath of the sighting had apparently gone missing.

I wrestled with the question of how best to represent the past. I hadn't directed drama before and I worried that our very small budget wouldn't allow us the time, crew or equipment to create convincing re-enactments.

The decision to work with the very experienced animator, Lee Whitmore was key to the feel of the film. I'm delighted with the way her highly textured images, laboriously hand-drawn with charcoal and animated frame-by-frame, capture the raw emotions and childlike innocence of the day with great intensity.

Mark Street's multi-layered sound design and an eerie musical underscore from composer Jamie Saxe add tension and mood to the animated memories.
We were lucky that Westall High (now Westall Secondary College) gave us access to formal class photographs of teachers and students and wonderful archival film footage, shot by Westall High School media students around the time of the sighting.

The resulting film is a rich mix of dramatic eye-witness accounts, evocative animation, atmospheric archival footage and stylish motion graphics that tells a compelling story about ordinary people caught in an extraordinary situation.

THEMES
While it investigates a UFO sighting from the past, Westall '66 also deals subtly with core notions of belief, truth and faith. It's impossible to consider the existence of UFOs without thinking about who or what may be flying them, and many of the witnesses admit the sighting has opened their minds about other civilisations that may exist 'out there'.

Recent statements in the media by highly-respected public figures have re-opened this intriguing debate.
Father Jose Gabriel Funes, the Vatican astronomer and an internationally respected scientist, overturned centuries of Vatican denial by saying he believes it is highly likely that other intelligent life forms exist in the universe.
Then former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon and a respected scientist, said that he has seen many UFOs and this fact has been covered up by governments for the last 50 years. These statements support our witnesses' claims and challenge current attitudes to UFOs.

Although Shane Ryan and other protagonists are clearly searching for the 'truth', the film is about much more than that. In the process of uncovering what happened that day, it explores issues of personal and national identity, and pits our attitudes to authorities in the past against contemporary expectations about secrecy and government.

KEY CHARACTER - SHANE RYAN
Shane Ryan, a Canberra father and teacher, first heard about the Westall UFO story some years ago when he came to Melbourne to attend university. As someone with a deep interest in Australian history, government and the democratic process, as well as a passion for science fiction, Shane was immediately drawn to the story. It was a 'real' mystery that combined his two special interests in an extraordinary way. He started sleuthing in his spare time and very soon was 'hooked' on it.

He says:
This is the biggest mass UFO sighting in Australia, yet it seems to have been suppressed - deliberately kept out of the public view. Like the witnesses, I want to find out why.

As a former teacher, he'd like to see the students' experiences become a point of discussion in contemporary classrooms, through the film. How would teachers and students of today respond if a UFO flew over and landed near their school? Would the authorities be able to suppress information today as it seems they did in 1966? What can be learnt from the past about different attitudes to authority, and the change in teacher/student relationships between then and now?

Shane's quest to find the elusive 'proof' of what happened at Westall has taken more than four years and will continue until he is ready to publish a book that collates his findings.

WITNESSES AND PARTICIPANT'S IN THE FILM
Jacqueline Argent, Keith Basterfield, Harry Berger, Norman Bury, Bill Chalker, Joy Clarke, Lawrence Cummings, Brendan Dickson, Jeff Holland, Kevin Hurley, Gail McKirdy, Les Medew, Claude Miller, Peter Norris, Terry Peck, Lisa Ryan, Brendan Ryan, Max Samblebe, Suzanne Savage, Gerry Shepherd, Graham Simmonds, Marilyn Smith, Neil Smith, Paul Smith, Ron Sullivan, Victor Zakruzny

QUOTES FROM THE FILM

We were out playing sport on the oval. One of the kids yelled out 'Look, look - up in the sky - it's flying saucers!'. And I remember we all looked up and it really was - a flying saucer. TERRY PECK

All the students were just running all over the place, hysterical. My girlfriend and I sat on the fence - climbed the fence at the school boundary - and we were crying, thinking it was the end of the world. MARILYN SMITH (NEE EASTWOOD)

Like a lot of other people I just shut up about it because of the ridicule, and it was everybody - you know - you were a kid, you were making it up. So you'd just be quiet and in your mind, you just think, I know what I saw, and no one's ever going to shake me from that. I know what I saw.
JEFF HOLLAND

You're asking me whether a Research & Development establishment would destroy evidence? Yes, of course they would...
LIEUTENANT COLONEL NEIL SMITH

ANIMATION PRODUCTION
The director, Rosie Jones first contacted me to see if I'd be interested in animating sequences for her documentary after seeing my film, The Safe House on SBS. She was particularly taken by the black and white animated sequences that re¬created newsreel footage from 1954. I agreed right away since the Westall story was so unusual and interesting.

Rosie sent me photos of the school and its students and a set of notes, while I started trying to work out a visual style for the film. I explored paint on glass, charcoal drawing on paper - both with lots of permutations.
I began storyboarding from Rosie's notes and gradually we developed thirteen sequences. The storyboard was done in pencil drawings, working as much as possible from the photos we had from 1966. Some of the sequences we imagined as a series of still drawings and others seemed to call for full animation. I then created an animatic (a storyboard shot to time) to which Rosie added some rough sound, to see how it would work dramatically.
At this stage I asked to go down to Melbourne (from Sydney) to meet Rosie and Carmel and visit the school - the site of the UFO sighting in '66. Perhaps I thought there would be some revelation or even a repeat sighting - I don't know. I wasn't disappointed. It was a very positive step in the process and it motivated me enormously.
Rosie and I then spent a day cutting the animatic sequences into the live action footage, which really helped us work out how best to continue. We were still undecided about the visual style of the finished art, endlessly tossing up between charcoal drawings and painted black and white imagery.
When I returned to Sydney Rosie called: I was to go with the charcoal! And so I did.
The next stage was spent with my head down, fingers covered in black soot, working to get the artwork completed. The animated sections were done drawing directly under the camera - drawing in, rubbing out and redrawing, continually animating until each shot was complete. The images were recorded digitally and put together on Final Cut Pro to send to Melbourne.
It's always good to finish animation work, but I have to say I felt quite sad at the end of this quite long process to no longer be involved with all the wonderful characters who populate Westall '66. I had gotten to know them all and now I would put their photographs back in an envelope and my drawings I would stack on a shelf. I hope the film and the animated sequences bring them and their amazing story to life once again.

PRODUCTION TEAM BIOGRAPHIES

ROSIE JONES - WRITER/DIRECTOR/EDITOR
Since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts Film School in 1985, Rosie Jones has established a reputation as an award-winning documentary writer, director and editor. She directed the one-hour documentary Holy Rollers, a wry look at Christian pilgrimage amid the tensions of Israel (Melbourne International Film Festival and SBS-Television) and Visions of Yankalilla, about an apparition of the Virgin Mary that appeared on an Anglican church wall in South Australia (St John's International Women's Film Festival (Canada), Hot Springs Film Festival (USA), Mumbai International Film Festival and SBS-Television). Her editing credits include numerous single documentaries and series commissioned by Australian and international broadcasters. She is currently writing/directing two documentaries, The Art of Walking: A History of Subversion (in post-production) and The Triangle Wars (in production).

CARMEL MCALOON - PRODUCER, ENDANGERED PICTURES
Carmel graduated from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology with a BA in Media Studies and has been producing independently for the past 7 years. She has been commissioned to produce three shorts for the Australian Film Commission including The Audience, which received a Dendy Award nomination at the Sydney International Film Festival, and Paul's Beautiful Laundrette, screened at Silverdocs AFI/Discovery Channel and the Melbourne International Film Festival. Her Film Victoria short drama Parts of a Horse was pre-selected for Cannes Film Festival, received an Australian Teachers of Media nomination, and screened at Kinofilm and Vermont International Film Festivals. In 2004 Carmel formed Endangered Pictures Pty Ltd, to make the documentary Endangered (MIFF 2005, FIFO Tahiti 2006, Real Life on Film 2006, DOXA Vancouver 2007) for SBS Television. That year she also made the short drama The Road Ahead (Palm Springs International Film Festival, Uppsala Film Festival, Sao Paulo Film Festival and Flickerfest 2005). She currently has a feature Love Motel and the documentary The Divided Heart both in development with Film Victoria.

PETER ZAKHAROV - CINEMATOGRAPHER
Peter has 25 years of experience as cinematographer on a diverse range of productions, including feature films, documentaries, short dramas and television series. Awards include a Gold Award for Cinematography from the Australian Cinematographer's Society for his work on the feature In Too Deep. Recent projects include the feature Takeaway, the documentary series The Shearers for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Welcome to My Deaf World (nominated for Best Documentary in the Australian Film Institute Awards 2006), and Family Footsteps Series 1 and 2 for the ABC.

LEE WHITMORE - ANIMATOR
Lee Whitmore is a Sydney based independent animator. Her beautiful hand drawn films are mostly autobiographical, about childhood, memory and family. They have been shown at Festivals around the world, receiving numerous awards. They include Ned Wethered (1984), On a Full Moon (1997), Ada (2002) and her most ambitious film to date, The Safe House (2006). Lee has combined her own filmmaking with teaching and creating sequences for many Australian feature films and documentaries.

CRIS JONES - MOTION EFFECTS ARTIST
Chris is an award-winning director, editor, animator and visual effects artist. His short films The Funk, Excursion and The Heisenberg Principle have screened at over 100 international film festivals, garnering countless awards. In 2003, Cris received the Emerging Filmmaker Awards of both the Melbourne International Film Festival and the Film Critics Circle of Australia.

JAMIE SAXE - COMPOSER
Jamie Saxe has been working on music composition for documentary film and television since 1994. He has composed music for children's television series The Wayne Manifesto and Fergus Mcphail, for which he received a nomination for best children's music in 2004. His documentary film credits include Surviving Shepard's Pie (2001), Last Valley (2005) Endangered (SBS, 2005) and Alter Ego (SBS, 2008) and he has also written for adult drama (Marshall Law) 2002. He has also released an album on ABC music through his rock band for children, 'The Mighty bUZZniks' with whom he continues to perform.

MARK TARPEY - SOUND RECORDIST
Mark Tarpey is one of Australia's most experienced sound recordists. Over the last 25 years his work has included feature films, television drama and international documentaries. Amongst his many awards are several Australian Film Institute Awards for Best Sound on documentary and drama productions, including the documentary Vietnam Nurses in 2006.

MARK STREET - SOUND DESIGNER
Mark graduated from the Swinburne Film and TV School in 1982. From stills and cinematography, he moved to editing and sound design, joining the ABC in 1989 to work on drama, comedy and documentaries. Here his work was awarded a Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival for Best Sound on Mysteries of the Wandering Albatross. He has also won awards for Best Sound on Lizards of Oz at the Missoula Film Festival, and Best Sound at both the New York Festival and at the Australian Sound Guild Awards for Australia, Land of Parrots. He is now also producing and directing.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The film takes viewers on a journey into the collective memory of this extraordinary event that swept into the everyday lives of witnesses like a "bolt out of the blue". Students, teachers and nearby workers all share, in startling detail, their recollections of the day's events. Many of their stories are revealed here for the first time.
Unfolding like a classic detective story, the film is driven by the search of tireless investigator Shane Ryan, who has his own, very personal reasons for wanting to uncover the truth. It is both a riveting investigation into Australia's own 'Roswell' and a powerful examination of belief, truth, imagination and memory.

STATISTICS ABOUT THE MAKING OF THE DOCUMENTARY
- Filmed over three years using thousands of hours of research
- With numerous government departments refusing to comment
- Whole boxes of official files missing, lost or unaccounted for
- More than two hundred witnesses were contacted and asked to speak out for the first time about Australia's biggest mass UFO case.

OTHER AUSTRALIAN UFO CASES IN EARLY 1966
- 19 JANUARY 1966, TULLY, QUEENSLAND: George Pedley was driving a tractor on a cane farm when he saw a saucer-shaped object rise out of a swamp and fly off at speed. In the swamp he found a perfectly circular, flattened area of reeds floating on top of the water. The reeds were swirled clockwise in a circle of about nine metres in diameter. A search later found two smaller "nests" about eight metres away from the first "nest".
- 24 JANUARY 1966, PERTH, WESTERN AUSTRALIA: Mr L Benedek was taking photographs during the evening when he saw a bluish green light. He described it as "oval shaped with an antenna on the front" and said it dropped towards the river at terrific speed. He managed to take two shots. The Royal Australian Air Force examined them and later received requests for information from the US Pentagon.
- 2 APRIL 1966, BALWYN, VICTORIA: When his garden was suddenly lit up with a strange light, a witness looked up to see a mushroom-like object that seemed to be floating towards the ground. As it made a 180° turn through its vertical axis, he took a Polaroid photograph. The object then flew away at incredible speed. Seconds later a loud boom was heard.
- 4 APRIL 1966, BURKES FLAT, VICTORIA: Ron Sullivan was driving at night along a straight stretch of road in Central Victoria when he saw a bright, cone-shaped light in a paddock in front of him. Suddenly his car's headlights veered to the right for no apparent reason and he had to struggle to keep the car on the road. He reported the incident after a young man, Gary Taylor, died on the same spot two days later. A saucer shaped depression, about one metre across and 12 centimetres deep, was found in a paddock where the light had been seen. No human or animal tracks were visible at the spot.


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