Facing the Past

First of all, let me tell you that I has never read a graphic novel before, and to tell you the truth my expectations were not high when I started reading Maus. I was deeply engaged with the story, which besides containing the obvious metaphor (anthropomorphic animals) it also has powerful Imagery. I was so in to the story that sometimes I forgot to REALLY look at the illustrations, but every so often I ran into one that demanded attention, such as this one:

 At first glance I thought “ohh! He feels guilty that he’s making money by writing about other people´s suffering”. But then I took a closer look and noticed the bar wire fence and watch tower outside the window, and how “we are ready to shoot” can be understood as “ready to fire”. The character has been sucked in to the holocaust farther than he ever thought he could. He is the son of a survivor, however, he still has the burden of his history and his linage. It’s not easy being Jewish.

Have you ever meet someone Jewish that didn´t tell you their religion within the first 10 minutes of conversation? Is not just religion, not just a race, not just a community, it’s a challenge. And it seems one of the challenges is “facing the holocaust”, even if you hadn’t been born when it happened.

Art Spiegelman’ "faced his holocaust" with Mause. Through writing this “not just another holocaust story”, he showed the world what being the wrong race during WWII was like, and he also showed the responsibility the younger Jewish generations feel about giving a voice to those who didn´t survive and to those who didn´t get to be born.

Thinking about this inevitably reminded of Steven Spielberg, maybe you´ve heard of him.

As a young movie director, Spielberg portrayed the Nazis as cartoonish evil bad guys whose sole purpose was to get beaten up by Indiana Jones. (have a look)

But then, after years of avoiding making a “just another holocaust movie”, he finally “faced the holocaust” by making Schindler´s List.

Maus and Schindler´s List both show the audience what the holocaust was like by focusing on what one character witnessed, and they both use this “trivializing” way of storytelling:

Spiegelman uses irony and metaphor, and Spielberg filmed his movie almost as a documentary, not planning his camera angles before shooting.

Also, Schindler´s list, just like Maus, uses string imagery to make a statement. The most famous example from the Spielberg film is the girl in the red coat. The film is in black and white, and this red coat is the only color we see in the movie. Schindler (played by Liam Neeson) notices the little girl in red, wandering alone, amongst the chaos, but decides to walk away. (If you wold like to see the scene CLICK here)

Later, he sees a man wheeling away some burned corpses, and one of them is wearing a small red coat.

I found an interesting interview were Spielberg talks about his relationship with the holocaust. I´ll leave some interesting excerpts here:

On learning about the holocaust: "When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands," he said. "I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews".

On how an Auschwitz survivor taught him the numbers: "He would roll up his sleeves and say, 'This is a four, this is a seven, this is a two,' " said Mr. Spielberg. "It was my first concept of numbers. He would always say, 'I have a magic trick.' He pointed to a six. And then he crooked his elbow and said, 'Now it's a nine.' "

"In a strange way my life has always come back to images surrounding the Holocaust. The Holocaust had been part of my life, just based on what my parents would say at the dinner table. We lost cousins, aunts, uncles."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/movies/bestpictures/schindler-ar1.html