with Robert Cettl www.widerscreenings.com     

Actor Daniel Craig is currently best known as James Bond in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace (read more).  However, the actor has made a somewhat courageous and as yet unheralded decision in playing a Jewish partisan battling the Nazis in director Edward Zwick’s recent Defiance (read more).  The casting of Craig is telling in this instance less for any overt allusions to Bond but for Zwick’s unusual take on Judaic faith within the context of the atrocities of World War Two.  In this, Defiance is the latest in a series of films which have begun to re-assess the Nazi persecution of the Jews with a distinct leaning towards the re-assessment of faith – specifically, what lessons of World War Two are there for those still inclined to spiritual belief in a deity as essential to self-empowerment? 

In recent memory, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist have taken Awards honours as the responsible face of Holocaust cinema.  Yet, at the recent Oscars, former Titanic showcaser Kate Winslet was nominated for The Reader, a look at love, lust and Nazism with strong evocations of the Nazi decadence found in a morally problematic generation ago in such as Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and Tinto Brass’ Salon Kitty (read more).  And while the Academy was facing humanist ambiguities in such subject matter, mainstream cinemagoers also flocked to Good, in which Viggo Mortensen played a good German swept up in Holocaust fever and Valkyrie (read more) in which Tom Cruise played a good Nazi plotting to kill Hitler.  Of these, it is Valkyrie which set the thematic agenda – allegiance to Hitler is inferred as allegiance to Theist Dogma, the film renouncing Christian faith as wanting and empty by analogy.

This distrust of “faith” following the War on Terror, evidenced in such as Oliver Stone’s recent biopic of George W. Bush in W (read more) in recent cinema is finding a locus in the re-assessment of the legacy of the Holocaust.  At cinemas alongside Defiance is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (read more) in which a naïve young boy who puts his faith in his father and a prayer that God will help all children is shown to be the casualty of innocence that puts to rest any notion of a Deity having any role in human affairs.  The disavowal of a Deity (at least a benevolent one) in Valkyrie and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is echoed in Defiance.  Two brothers, played by Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber (recently in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate – read more), flee into the woods to escape the Nazis, soon finding themselves responsible for a motley community of Jewish escapees. 

One brother (Craig) stays to protect the community while the other goes to fight with Soviet partisans against the Germans.  Telling is a key moment where Craig, assisting a Rabbi, is told that he is sent from God: answered by a moment of decisive violence that leaves little doubt as to the non-existence of any (interventionist) God.  Indeed, by the film’s finale, director Zwick goes so far as to suggest a Jewish cultural identity without a religious component, essentially founded by the two Rationalist brothers as neither Schreiber nor Craig exhibit any religious faith in their guidance of those who do – ironically, the fate of the Jews here rests with two rationalists bound by a common cultural ancestry but with no shared religion, though a begrudging respect for such in Craig’s case. 

That makes for an intriguing, thematically exciting body of work newly emerging in contemporary Rationalist cinema: what might be termed the “Nazi humanist” genre.  With the assertion of humanity over dogma in Valkyrie and Defiance, theist faith in these films is seriously questioned, even sarcastically dismissed with wretched irony.  Indeed, just as the little boy in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas prays to a Christian God to protect the children only to end in the cruellest of ironies, so to the Rabbi in Defiance first loses his faith and regains it only to be given a final, cruel lesson.  Despite a self-conscious Moses allegory, the Old Testament Biblical Allegory in Defiance is used to highlight the absurdity of religious faith in Theist absolutism in the face of human capability.

Indeed, it is the stress on human capability in these films which is astonishing in its emphasis on rationalism as a means of self-empowerment.  Rather than rely on traditional Theist indoctrination, the heroes of these films take it upon themselves to act for their own survival.  Those who perish, do so in the belief in God; those who survive put their humanity above any God – such is the message underlying this essential re-birth of Rationalist cinema in the most unlikely of genres, Nazi Humanism.  Self-empowerment is not a matter of trust in a Deity or spiritual force, it is in accepting one’s nature as a human individual as the first step in a rationalist self-actualization – human rights / humanity above any God’s Laws, or of one who claims to act in His name.