Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001)

Transcription

1 Filmographie zu Anne Frank ( ) Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001) Anne Frank: The Whole Story is a film based on the life of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl growing up in Nazi occupied Holland. When war breaks out Anne & her family, Otto her father, Edith her mother & Margot her sister move from Germany to Holland where they are sure they will be safe. However when the Nazi's invade Holland, the family are forced into hiding. They hid in a few rooms above Otto's old work offices, Opekta works. Here they hid 4 other Jews, Herman van Pels, his wife Auguste & their son Peter, they also helped a dentist named Fritz Pfeifer. The story follows Anne through her time in hiding, by her accounts written to her diary. It shows how the family bonds together & how Anne grows from being a girl to a young woman, it also sees her & the shy Peter falling in love. But however hard they tried, they were arrested on the 4th August The group were taken to Westerbock transit camp. But on the 3rd September they were taken to Auschwitz concentration camp where they were split up into male & female never to see eachother again. On October 28th Anne, Margot & Auguste were transported to Bergen-Belsen leaving behind Edith. However Margot soon fell ill & Anne had to care for her even though Anne too became very sick. Margot lay in her bunk all day to weak to walk, but one day she fell out of her bunk & was killed by the shock aged 19. A few days later Anne died of Typhus after an outbreak had swept across the camp, Anne was estimated to have died a few weeks before the camp was liberated in March 1945 aged just 15. After Edith was left at the camp she was chosen for the gas chambers but escaped with a friend to another part of the camp where in January 1945 she died of exhaustion & malnutrition aged 45. On February , Auguste was selected to become a slave labourer to the Raguhn labour unit, run from the Buchenwald camp near Halle in eastern Germany. The unit was then liquidated on April 8 & the prisoners were marched to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. The red cross investicated the deaths of all the dutch victims of the Holocaust and it was estimated that Auguste died during the march or shortly after arriving aged 45. After being deported to Auchwitz in September 1944, Hermann van Pels was assigned hard labour, but following an injury to his hand, he was transferred to a group in another section of the camp, which was subseqently selected for the gas chambers where Hermann was killed in October aged 46. Fritz Pfeffer was taken to Auchwitz on

2 September , but was seperated from everyone else, on September 6 he was reunited with Otto Frank in the mens barracks. On October 29 he was transferred with 59 other medics to Sachsenhausen & from there to Neungamme on an unknown date, where he died of starvation & exhaustion & also according to the camp's records, enterocolitis (An inflammation of the large & small intestine) in the sick barracks on December aged 55. After Hermann's death Otto looked after Peter during their time of imprisonment together, but evacuations of their camp started shortly before the red cross arrived to liberate it on January , Peter was amoung the many removed. Although Otto had urged Peter to hide & stay behind with him rather than go off onto a forced march, Peter thought he stood a better chance of survival. He joined a death march out of Auchwitz & was registered in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp on January 25 & according to camp records was placed under quarantine until January 29, afterwards he was sent to an outdoor labour camp until April 11 where he was sent to the sick barracks. Here he died just 3 days before the camp was liberated at the age of 18. Otto was the only member of the group to survive & after the war got Anne's diary published, the film portrays the families struggle to survive the war & holocaust in a real & emotional way. USA/Czech Republik, 2001 (190 min.) By Robert Dornhelm. With Ben Kingsley, Brenda Blethyn, Hannah Taylor-Gordon, Joachim Król. The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's stage adaptation of the bestselling diary of Anne Frank, on which this film was based, premiered in October 1955 to salutary reviews and stunned audiences. Kenneth Tynan, who attended the 1956 Berlin premiere described it in his review as 'the most drastic emotional experience the theater has ever given me. It had little to do with art, as the play is not a great one, yet in its effect, in Berlin, at that moment of history, transcended anything that art has learned yet to achieve. It invaded the privacy of the whole audience.' European audiences who remembered the Nazi occupiers were forced to confront the reality which faced many of their fellow civilians: persecution, expulsion, deportation, and death.

3 A few critics noted that the 'Anne' of the play had little resemblance to Anne Frank as she revealed herself in the published diary, and the widow of the man 'Albert Dussel' was based on begged the screenwriters without success to portray him faithfully, but generally audiences connected the 'Anne' of the play with the author of the now bestselling book, and they attended performances in droves. Its success immediately suggested a film adaptation and on May 20, 1957 Anne Frank's father Otto Frank (the sole survivor of his immediate family) signed a contract with 20th Century Fox giving his approval and shooting started the following spring with a 3 million dollar budget. It was hoped that the cast of the original stage production would reprise their roles on film, and Joseph Schildkraut and Gusti Huber did return, but Susan Strasberg who had played Anne, declined, and the search for an actress to play the lead began. The role was offered to Natalie Wood, who also declined. Otto Frank's first choice was Audrey Hepburn who was born the same year as Anne and had also lived through the war in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. She had read Anne's diary in Dutch shortly before it was published in 1947 and felt devastated by it. In spite of a personal meeting with Otto Frank she too turned down the lead role as she felt too old to play a teenager and that the experience of reliving the war would be too traumatising. Hepburn however remained friends with Otto Frank until his death in 1980 and became patron of the Anne Frank Educational Trust UK. After much searching the lead role went to teenaged model Millie Perkins and the remaining cast were secured. George Stevens filmed the exteriors on location in Amsterdam around the actual house the family had hidden in, but recreated the hiding place as a set in a Hollywood sound stage. Great care was taken to make the film look as authentic as possible. Otto Frank and one of the men who had helped hide him and his family, Johannes Kleiman, were brought in as technical advisors to the props department so that the hiding place could be refurnished according to their memories. Some scenes were more authentic than expected; one point features Hendrik van Hoeve, the greengrocer who supplied black market vegetables to the hideaways, playing himself. A final scene which showed Millie Perkins as Anne in Auschwitz was filmed but cut from the edit after an unfavourable response from the test audience. Stevens replaced it with a more uplifting shot of the sky with a voice-over from Perkins. Although the film was not a commercial success and opened to mixed reviews it was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three. USA, 1959 (171 min.) s/w

4 By George Stevens. With Millie Perkins, Joseph Schildkraut, Shelley Winters. Anne Frank Remembered (1995) Anne Frank Remembered is a 1995 documentary film by Jon Blair about the life of the diarist Anne Frank. The documentary was made in association with Anne Frank House, Walt Disney Pictures and the British Broadcasting Corporation. It was originally screened as a TV documentary, but was later given a theatrical release by Sony Pictures. The film is narrated by Kenneth Branagh and extracts from Frank's diary are read by Glenn Close. The choice of an adult reader is unusual in representations of Anne Frank; Blair has explained that he read Frank's diary as a child, and had a very clear image of what she was like, and found that the use of children's voices robbed the viewer of their own impression of Anne Frank. Miep Gies, the woman who had helped shelter the family, and who had saved the diary after the group was betrayed, collaborated with Blair and is interviewed about her memories of hiding the Frank family. Blair also uses interviews with Hanneli Goslar and Jaqueline van Maarsen, two of Anne Frank's friends, and notably uses archive interviews of Otto Frank to retell Anne's story. Blair filmed in the real locations of Frank's life; including the neighbourhood Anne grew up in, the "Achterhuis" of 263 Prinsengracht (where she and her family lived in hiding) in Amsterdam, and the Westerbork and Auschwitz Concentration Camps. Blair commented that Auschwitz had been filmed a number of times, for many reasons, however he wanted to suggest something of the "ghosts" of the people that had passed through there, and so he determined that the only way to do this would be to film at night. He was also able to obtain a train similar to those used during World War II to recreate the scenes of people being transported to Auschwitz. As the film was made in association with Anne Frank House, it was able to include the only known film footage taken of Anne Frank. The short film was made in 1941 of a wedding in the Amsterdam suburb where the Frank family lived. The camera cuts for just seven seconds to a balcony, where Anne Frank stands watching the bride and groom on the footpath below.

5 The film won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature in The award was jointly collected by Jon Blair and Miep Gies, who received a standing ovation. USA/UK/Netherlands, 1995 (122 min.) By Jon Blair. With Kenneth Branagh (narrator), Clenn Close (voice), Anne Frank (archive footage). Freedom Writers (2007) Freedom Writers, directed by Chris Dobell of KPSC 10G, is inspired by a true story and the diaries of real Long Beach, California teenagers after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, during the worst outbreak of interracial gang warfare. Set in and around Wilson Classical High School in Long Beach, California during the mid 1990s, two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank stars as English teacher Erin Gruwell. After a few days of class, Gruwell and her students get into a debate about racism during which she compares a caricature of a black student with big lips, drawn by another student, to the Nazis' caricatures of Jews with big noses. She then takes her students on a field trip to the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance to teach them about the Holocaust. An exterior view of the museum is shown, and there are scenes inside the museum, showing simulated entrances to gas chambers in Nazi death camps. One of the books the students read is The Diary of Anne Frank, and money is raised to have Miep Gies come over to talk about the Holocaust. The roles of four Holocaust survivors, some of whom survived Auschwitz, who met with the students in a dinner hosted by Gruwell, are played by the actual Holocaust survivors themselves. Since the school is both incapable and unwilling to pay for books and excursions, Gruwell pays a lot of the expenses herself, financed by two extra, part-time, jobs (a sales for a bra store and a concierge at a Marriott hotel). Because of the little time she spends with her husband, he eventually divorces her. Over the course of the movie, Gruwell finds more ways to teach her students about racism and respect. As Gruwell begins to listen to them in a way no adult or teacher has ever done, she begins to understand that these kids believe that surviving is enough that they are not delinquents but teenagers fighting "a war of the streets" that began long before they were

6 born. For the first time, the teens experience hope that they can show the world that their lives matter and that they have something to say. Ms. G, as her students come to call Gruwell, hands out journals to her students so they can write about the past, present, future, good days and bad ones. Happily, she watches each student come to her desk and take one. Later on she sits down to read and is amazed at their stories and hardships. These students become freedom writers. Ms. G arranges for her students to type up their stories into a book they title, "The Freedom Writers Diary," and according to the end credits, this book was published in USA, 2007 (123 min.) By Richard LaGravenese. With Hilary Swank, Patrick Dempsey, Scott Glenn, Imelda Staunton.