Met Showing Films On Holocaust Theme Featured Movies Present Opposing Views

Tue., May 9, 2000

By Dan Webster danw@spokesman.com

Got time for a free movie? How about two of them?

Art Cinema at The Met, in conjunction with the Gonzaga University Institute for Action Against Hate, is sponsoring the showing of two free Holocaust-themed movies on Wednesday.

“Anne Frank Remembered,” Jon Blair’s Oscar-winning documentary, will be paired with Errol Morris’ “Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leutchner Jr.”

“Anne Frank” will screen at 1:15 and 6:30 p.m. “Mr. Death” will screen at 4:20 and 9:05 p.m.

Directed by Jon Blair, “Anne Frank Remembered” won the 1996 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Unlike other Anne Frank studies, which saw the Dutch girl mostly as a symbol of life cut short, Blair’s film presents her as a typical teenager. She is at once intelligent, headstrong, demanding, romantic, sexually curious and so frustrating to deal with at times that her parents - especially her mother - must have been tempted to toss her out the window.

Told through Anne’s diaries, and through interviews with surviving friends of the Frank family, Blair’s film gives the diary the real-life footing that other versions lack.

Morris, who shot to fame with 1988’s “The Thin Blue Line,” set out to make a film about Holocaust skeptic Fred Leutchner because he found him fascinating.

“I think there’s something inscrutable about human behavior and about Fred in particular,” Morris said at the 1999 Sundance Film festival.

And indeed there is. Leutchner is a self-educated engineer who pioneered the technology of capital punishment - refining such devices as the electric chair, the gas chamber and methods for lethal injection.

He ran into trouble when he took up what, to him, seemed to be a scientific challenge: proving the truth of whether Auschwitz was ever a death camp.

In the end, Leutchner became a fixture at various Holocaust revisionist conferences. His claim: It never happened.

“This film is not about responding to these allegations,” Morris said. “This is not about history being anything you can choose. It’s about false history.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: FREE SCREENINGS Two films

“Anne Frank Remembered” will screen at 1:15 and 6:30 p.m., “Mr. Death” at 4:20 and 9:05 p.m. Wednesday at The Met, 901 W. Sprague. Admission is free. (624-0810) Directed by Jon Blair, “Anne Frank Remembered” won the 1996 Academy Award for best documentary feature.

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