The Ambiguous Portrait of the Jew in Early Holocaust Film:

• In Event: Filming Anxious Memories and the Fate of the Jews

Abstract

Studies of early Holocaust feature films have demonstrated the importance of national contexts and political concerns. My paper intervenes in this approach in a comparative analysis of the 1938 Soviet film Professor Mamlock and the 1940 MGM production The Mortal Storm. This comparative method highlights how the character of the persecuted Jew is shaped by Soviet and American anxieties about the war in Europe. Professor Mamlock, cited by Annette Insdorf as “the first film made about the Holocaust,” heightened MGM’s concern about producing a film so similar in plot to a controversial Soviet import. Although both films provide the first depictions before the Holocaust of the plight of Europe’s Jews, I argue that the political notoriety of Mamlock encouraged MGM to expunge the word “Jew” from The Mortal Storm and replace it with “non-Aryan.” While this substitution can easily be assessed as a cinematic detail and deeply conservative, my analysis demonstrates its significant import for the study of early Holocaust films.
Film scholar Oksana Bulgakova has noted the ambivalence of both films towards representing the imperiled Jew (Kinojudaica, 2012). Both protagonists, Jewish scientists hounded by the Nazis, bear attenuated Jewish features, if Jewish features at all. Ambivalence toward motivating activism on behalf of endangered Jews beset both productions, but this is also where they diverge. In contrast to Jeremy Hicks in First Films of the Holocaust (2012), I argue that in making Professor Mamlock, Stalin sent signals to both the West and Hitler for an alliance. The Mortal Storm embedded a political message of its own. Its Jewish protagonist became “non-Aryan” to guard against accusations of highlighting sympathy for European Jewry in an American antisemitic and anti-interventionist climate. Nonetheless the film’s visual encryptions, along with its polemical dialogue, addresses the American context by advocating for intervention over isolationism. In their moral energy and visual impact, both films provoked audiences on the eve of war to relinquish their ambivalences about Jewish persecution and succumb to the representation of heroic clarity.

Author

• Alexis Esther Pogorelskin, University of Minnesota-Duluth