The Devil's Arithmetic

Dir. Donna Dietch
1999
Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Brittany Murphy, Paul Freeman, Mimi Rogers

Synopsis: Rebellious teenager Hannah, opens the Passover door and finds herself transported to Poland, during the Nazi reign. She is soon taken to a concentration camp with the others and learns about the Holocaust, her family and her heritage: three things which until now she had no concern for.

Review: One one level, The Devil's Arithmetic serves as the essential film for the new generation, a generation fully removed from the Holocaust unlike those previous. The transportation of the young Hannah serves as a relevant point of view for a young audience to relate too and learn through, thus perhaps why the original book is so popular amongst educators of young teenagers and children. The film serves as a moving, but perhaps less distubing film than other major Holocaust films, such as Schindler's List which could otherwise serve this purpose. Also, unlike Schindler's List it uses familiar technique, such as colour and a "Wizard of Oz" transformative "pseudo-flashback" structure to engage a younger audience.

However, it is in part these techinques which make the film suffer. The film is one which could be criticised for trivalizing the Holocaust, there are three particular elements which provide the evidence basis for this critique:

firstly, the allegory to Oz, positions Hanah as the "Dorothy of the Holocaust", which in turn positions the Holocaust as a "fable" dissolving the seriousness and the reality of the event. Particularly worrying that the film's audience are likely to have no/ little connection with any sense of the Holocaust as a "real event" as survivors die and atrocity footage appears less frequently, if at all in the media. This generation's only connect with the Holocaust is likely, in many cases to be through the media- a form that they generally associate with fiction. Whilst Hannah's comment suggests she questions the dream-like, fantasy grounding of Oz, the audience's omnipotent knowledge identifies Oz as fantasy and thus draws a potential parallel between the world Hannah finds herself in and dorothy's fantasy world: a signifier reinforced in the closing scenes as Hannah "awakens" from her nightmare; the Holocaust.

Secondly, the inclusion of Jewish ceremonies has become an important stock feature of the Holocaust film. These ceremonies make a statement, they retain the humanity, the culture and the language: the very things the Nazis tried to strip from the Jews. This ceremonies invite the audience to participate and be part of the Jewish Culture breaking down any sense of "otherness", an otherness the Nazi thrust upon the unwilling Jews. The prayers and Passover traditions spoken in English, take away the language of Judaism, the only prayer which is expressed in Hebrew is the prayer for the dead- symbolising the death of Hebrew rather than inviting the audience to embrace the culture. Also, the film allows the audience to identify with the point of view of the Nazis, when the escapees are caught and beaten, the camera crosses the barbed wire fences as the audience look over the shoulder of one of the officiers, his prescene is large in the foreground, theirs- minor in the background, they and their plight becomes almonst insignificant, as it is to the officier. Another example of these change in perspective is during the gas chamber scene where the audience watches the women die, as "spectator" and the Holocaust era ends with a track in towards the peep-hole, this use of the shot-reverse-shot or point of view and eyeline match grammatical structure identifies the spectator with those on the other sideo f the door- to have this "priveledged position was rare- it is certainly not through the eyes of one of the Jewish women that we "witness" this sequence, they have died, they were not witnesses but part of the submerged.

Thirdly, the final gas chamber sequence tries to imagine the "unimaginable", whilst most Holocaust films refrain from portraying the process of gassing in part due to the fact it is "unimaginable", as many critics have expressed. By this, of course it was an "imagined" process- it happened, it was real, but none survived to tell of the experience- it was mass murder- thus none can explain or describe the experience. What happened in the gas chambers died with those in it, usually the camera stays on the "safe" side of the closing door and all that can be heard is the scream- and the silence. The horrors on the other side, one knows that whatever one can imagine, it was worse. However, this film simplifies/ trivalizes one of the most horrific signifiers of inhumanity in human history to a matter of minutes, a small number of shots of blue pellets falling and women coughing- it is calm and almost has an angelic quality about it, whilst the image of the peep-hole disturbs this, the "perfect" bodies that lie dead as the sequence closes, look peaceful and serene- yes, they are at peace now, but in many ways it underminds the unimaginable cruelty and the symbolism of the gas chamber for the Final Solution, as a grand mass extermination project.

The Devil's Arithmetic acts both as an introduction to the Holocaust for a young audience and a story of a young girl learning about her culture, whilst is suitable for a young audience. But o the trivalizing debate- this is perhaps one of the few films which does appear to trivalize and somewhat simplified the experience of th Holocaust.