REVIEW: Documentary restores the human dimension to Anne Frank

c. 1996 Religion News Service (RNS)-Anne Frank’s diary has been read by millions of schoolchildren. It has been made into a film, a Broadway play and a television special. Now, with the documentary”Anne Frank Remembered,”written, produced and directed by Jon Blair, an important character has been added to her story: Anne Frank. Sentiment has nearly […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-Anne Frank’s diary has been read by millions of schoolchildren. It has been made into a film, a Broadway play and a television special. Now, with the documentary”Anne Frank Remembered,”written, produced and directed by Jon Blair, an important character has been added to her story: Anne Frank.

Sentiment has nearly done to Anne Frank what the Nazis couldn’t do: erase her identity as a PERSON. Anne Frank has been treated for so long as a symbol of the horrendous fate of millions that it’s easy to forget that a flesh-and-blood human being hid in an attic for years, writing the book that would make her famous. Many people who see a stage or film version of the story seem to think they don’t need to read the book itself.


Blair wastes no time in focusing on Anne, who, it turns out, was starstruck by Hollywood, pinning pictures of American film stars to her wall.

A childhood friend, now in her late 60s, tells us that Anne was”what you would call a naughty girl, very impertinent.”The comment doesn’t seem to be criticism, but an attempt to summon up the real Anne, who, we’re told, would sometimes get attention from friends and family by dislocating her own shoulder.

Anne liked the attention of boys, and apparently she knew how to get it. The words she wrote in her diary, very nearly her last words, have an added poignance after one sees the film:”I want to go on living even after my death!” The awful irony, of course, is that it was her death that helped her to go on living-though we can’t help but wonder what else a teen-ager capable of such an extraordinary book might have accomplished.

That we know Anne Frank at all is a tribute to this film’s other heroine, Miep Gies, an Austrian-born woman who served as secretary to Anne’s father, Otto Frank. Gies brought food to the hidden Frank family. She also saved Anne’s diary when it fell out of Otto Frank’s briefcase as Nazis ransacked the attic hiding place. She lodges in our memory as a small-scale Otto Schindler. Blair had his camera ready for an extraordinary reunion: the elderly Gies and the son of Fritz Pfeffer, the Jewish dentist who hid out in the Franks’ attic.

The unexpected discovery in Blair’s film is Otto Frank himself, whose image lives on in several old film clips. Frank, who survived Auschwitz (he died in 1980), anticipated the coming Nazi storm and moved his family from Germany to the Netherlands in 1933. He even thought to build the fake attic in anticipation of a Nazi occupation.

Had the Frank family not been betrayed by an anonymous caller, if they could have held out a few months longer, the story could have been drastically different. As it was, Anne Frank began rewriting the manuscript of what was to be her immortal diary the day before the Allies landed at Normandy.

Anne Frank deserves the credit for writing the diary that allows her to live even after her death. By making this film, Jon Blair gets the credit for making her human.


CAPSULE REVIEW:”ANNE FRANK REMEMBERED:”An extraordinary film from master documentarian Jon Blair. Blair’s film rescues Anne Frank the person from Anne Frank the symbol through conversations with surviving friends and relatives and old film clips (including some of her father, Otto). Blair gives us a vivid picture of the world of the German Jew in exile, but also brings Anne into focus for the first time as a vivacious, attention-getting young girl who yearned to be famous. Anne Frank’s diary made her immortal; Jon Blair’s film makes her human. Rated PG-13 for adult content.

LJB END BARRA

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