Filmmakers, Clowns, and the Holocaust
August 3rd, 2007 by Andre Soares
Danny Leigh in The Guardian film blog:
"It was with an instinctive wince and a small, sharp breath that I read recently that one of cinema’s stranger sub-genres is to be revived. To be specific, the Observer reported last week that Paul Schrader is to direct Adam Resurrected — a ‘tightrope walk’ adaptation of Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk’s 1968 novel about Adam Stein, a former circus clown forced to perform for his fellow Jews in the concentration camps of the Holocaust.
"The raw obscenity of the juxtapositions still, of course, carry the power to shock. Even more startling, however, is the fact that the project will be the third major film to concern itself with slapstick amid the gas chambers — that queasy union apparently serving as irresistible bait for certain film-makers."
Leigh goes on to mention Jerry Lewis’s 1971 "trainwreck" The Day the Clown Cried and, inevitably, Roberto Benigni’s Academy Award-winning 1997 comedy-drama Life Is Beautiful (top photo). ("Hovering between the glutinous and the grotesque, the film turned genocide into the inane backdrop of an ode to the art of the teary-eyed Pierrot.")
UCLA’s International Preservation 2007 Series
Toronto Film Festival 2007 Real to Reel Documentary Line-Up
Benigni’s THE TIGER AND THE SNOW to Open in Italy
THE TIGER AND THE SNOW Fails to Impress Italian Critics
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