Last night I watched "Denial", the film version of the trial of David Irving. A BBC production, it should have had all the characteristics of a well researched, cleverly scripted docu-drama powerfully portrayed by a superb cast. In fact it was a mixed experience, at times overacted, unnecessarily reducing Irving to more of a caricature than he really is, and the scriptwriter playing a number of emotional cards that were at odds with the ruthless rationality of the legal team acting as defence.
In 1998 Irving brought a libel case against Deborah Lipstadt, an American Professor of Holocaust Studies whom Irving accused of ruining his reputation as an historian. The defence case was based on exposing Irving's programmatic, ideological and deliberate revision of historical facts and evidence, and also proving that the Holocaust did in fact happen.The core of the film takes place in the courtroom, so that, having known and followed the real case twenty years ago, the outcome of the film is already known.
Timothy Spall as Irving came across as an intellectual chameleon, saying one thing in his writing, then defending it in court by revising it further and further away from what he had originally written. But what remained unchanged was his ideological commitment to revising the history of the Third Reich, Nazism, Hitler, and the Holocaust, in particular, Auschwitz. Spall's portrayal was a mixture of eccentric buffoon, sham academic, sinister supremacist, racist, and slightly perplexed citizen wondering why freedom of speech did not extend to his opinions, historical judgements and public statements.
Rachel Weisz as Professor Lipstadt conveyed something of the intellectual energy and moral passion that drives scholars of events so pivotal in recent human history as Holocaust Studies. Yet sidelined for legal reasons, the script at key moments struggled to give her convincing opportunity to express that intellectual and moral energy. She wins no arguments about how the case is to be handled; when stressed she goes running unaccompanied in central London, at night, despite the hate speech and demonstrations aimed at her each time she enters the court; and her own inner life as a Jewish scholar is rarely evident.
The strongest link in the drama is her QC played by Tom Wilkinson. The exchanges with Irving in the film are psychologically convincing, and emotionally persuasive in the two voices, one cavalier and confidently convinced by his own ideology, the other patiently laying the charges outside the gates that will demolish the fundamental credibility and intellectual integrity of Irving's entire written corpus.
I have long had an interest in Holocaust Studies and remember the furore Irving created in the 1990's, and again when he was jailed for Holocaust denial in Austria. What this film does, despite the flaws, is show us the sinister underside of fake news, hate driven ideology, and revision of history as a programmatic exercise in persuasion. Yet more serious still than these grave dangers, the film comes as a warning of what happens when anti-semitism, racism, and white supremacism are confronted by mere law. The law can find against it; it cannot eradicate it, or persuade those who hold such beliefs that they are morally wrong or their views intellectually untenable, or legally disqualified, or politically toxic. That is a matter for much deeper reflection for a society like ours, now busy redefining the moral and social parameters within which we will all have to live.
Holocaust Studies is now an established area of historical research and reflection. The Holocaust itself remains a powerful generative event inspiring novels, poetry, art, films, music, documentaries, as well as academic study, writing and further reflection. The time is soon coming when there will be no survivors, therefore no witnesses, and there will remain those whose ideological goal is the elimination of the Holocaust from the historic record, or a diminishing of its significance, or reinterpreting of it as less evil than it was in fact and in reality. For those reasons one comment in the film, made by the QC played by Tom Wilkinson, standing in the delousing chamber at Auschwitz, and asking a question that should have been addressed decades ago, and is more urgent now: Why has there never been a proper internationally sponsored scientific, forensic and historically documented study of the very evidence Holocaust deniers deny exists? In our time, in the zeitgeist of a resurgent nationalistic Right in Europe, the securing of that scientific, forensic, historic, documented evidence is becoming increasingly urgent. Lest we forget; lest we fail to remember. Lest memory be erased.
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