Norman Geras, in his ongoing War on The Guardian, targets a review of the film Defiance with a wholly disproportionate response.
I remember seeing trailers for the movie around halfway through the Gaza massacre. I thought it was ironic that a film that celebrated the resistance of Jewish “partisans” to the existential threat of the Nazi war machine should receive its UK premiere at the same time that the possible grandsons and granddaughters of those “partisans”, using weapons that the Germans could only have dreamed about, were trying to crush the resistance of the Palestinian “terrorists” in Gaza. Comparing recent history to current events, the oppressed have become the oppressors.
Philip French, in the final sentence of his review, arrives at a similar conclusion. Norman disagrees. He makes some blindingly obvious points about accuracy, “taste” and timing but as for the disturbing comparison French makes all Norman can manage as a rebuttal is to claim that French’s perception is a bit dodgy, perhaps from attending too many liberal dinner parties, and that nobody cares what he thinks anyway.
Philip French concludes his review of Defiance, Edward Zwick’s movie about the Bielski Partisans (which I mean to see but haven’t yet), thus:
But what is most striking is the ruthlessness shown by both Tuvia and Zus [Bielski], who begin by killing Russian collaborators in cold blood, shoot down those who challenge their leadership and end up slaughtering Germans with a glee associated with Hollywood wartime propaganda entertainments.
It took the American cinema quite a time to make pictures like Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow, which presented Jews fighting for the creation of Israel, but this week is not, I think, the best moment for a picture celebrating them in ruthless, take-no-prisoners mode.
As it seems to me, three different points are conflated here: they concern, in turn, accuracy, ‘taste’ (for want of a better word), and timing. Whether Defiance is accurate about the ruthlessness shown by Tuvia and Zus Bielski I don’t know, but if it is, then there is reason enough for Zwick to have portrayed that ruthlessness without being open to criticism for it – unless he does so in an aesthetically and/or morally brutalizing way. Why, however, a film about events in the 1940s – or, for that matter, the Bielskis, resisting one of the most unrestrainedly merciless of enemies – should be burdened with French’s perceptions of what is going on in Gaza at the moment, this is both a mystery and an anachronism. Apart from anything else, those who made the film won’t have known, while they were doing so, what was going to be happening in January 2009.
