THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605140472
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E8 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Movie review
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, MOVIE CRITIC
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
IN A CLIMACTIC SCENE from the Oscar-winning documentary ``Anne Frank Remembered,'' there is a fuzzy bit of film of a 12-year-old girl leaning precariously out a third-floor window to wave to a wedding party. Her energy and enthusiasm is that of unbridled youth.
It is with some degree of shock that the audience is informed that this is the only actual moving image of Anne Frank, the teen-ager who, in the decades since the Holocaust, has become the most famous and poignant of Hitler's victims.
Initially, audiences may well question whether another documentary on Anne Frank or the Holocaust is necessary. After the multi-hour documentary ``Shoah'' and the many dramas, including Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning ``Schindler's List,'' the Holocaust has been well-represented on film.
A case could be made that Anne Frank is suffering from overexposure. Her diary has sold over 25 million copies in 55 languages. The Broadway play ``The Diary of Anne Frank'' won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 and was followed by a widely seen 1959 movie version. There was a 1988 television drama (``The Attic'') and a 1985 musical called ``Yours, Anne.''
But little is generally known about what happened after Anne Frank and her family were taken from their attic hiding place in Amsterdam on Aug. 4, 1944. The new documentary, narrated by Kenneth Branagh with Glenn Close reading excerpts from the diary, answers these questions, and many more.
In a highly factual and non-cloying manner, eyewitnesses tell of the Frank family's plight as they were carried on a freight train to Auschwitz and of their separation. Anne and her older sister, Margot, were separated from their mother and sent to Auschwitz-Birkneau where they were among 50,000 Jewish prisoners to die that winter of typhus. Her life, we learn, would have been saved if she had not been too sick to be transferred to another camp. Just as tragic is the fact that her death came not long before liberation.
The film takes its audience to the events in a down-to-earth, human way via the memories of people who were there - a woman who threw food across a barbed wire fence to a naked and defeated Anne days before her death, the faithful secretary who fed the Frank family during their two years in hiding, and many others.
The film, written and directed by Jon Blair, is a wonder of understatement. The witnesses' honesty and candor effectively suggest that they were not playing to the camera. They make the ordinary extraordinary. Little events, such as bringing groceries to the hiding place, are given new drama and urgency.
Blair is an Englishman who also made a documentary about Oskar Schindler.
Most winning is the fact that the documentary, like Anne's diary itself, creates a picture of a spirited, mischievous and sometimes ``naughty'' teen-age girl who, while she has become an icon, still survives more as a symbol of real youth than of idealized youth.
Anne was a teen-ager who pasted pictures of movie stars on her wall and had a crush on the boy whose family was imprisoned with her own. She brought the plight of millions of Nazi victims down to a personal level for us all.
``Anne Frank Remembered'' is, indeed, new. It is a viewpoint that is peppered with chilling understatement. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
MOVIE REVIEW
``Anne Frank Remembered''
Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Glenn Close, Miep Gies, Hanneli Goslar and
Peter Pfeiffer.
Director: Jon Blair
MPAA rating: PG (holocaust horrors)
Mal's rating: Three stars
Location: Naro in Norfolk
by CNB