Search This Blog

Monday, April 2, 2018

Denial (2016)

This is a film about a real life trial of a case brought by a Holocaust denier, David Irving, against a Holocaust scholar, Deborah Lipstadt.  He accused her and her publisher of libel when she described him as a liar and a poor historian in her book "Denying the Holocaust".  She is confident that she will win, based largely on her ignorance of British law, which requires that she prove that he is the things that she has said about him.  As the defendant, she must prove her innocence, rather than that he must prove her to be guilty.
The Jewish community urges her to settle with him out of court rather than to essentially put the Holocaust on trial and risk the outcome that there might be a valid difference of opinion on whether or not the Holocaust happened.  There are still many survivors about and the whole experience was painful for them to listen to and yet unavoidable to attend.
She hires a crack team of lawyers who correctly predict that Irving will be the prosecutor and therefore should not be allowed to interrogate a survivor.  Firstly, they will be emotionally crushed and secondly, they are poor witnesses.  It is like any trauma.  For every three people there are four different accounts of exactly what happened.  So instead they go about showing him to be a racist, through reading his personal journals and a bad historian, through minute examination of his writings and the verifiable facts.  It is fascinating and painful to watch, but is also a window into the rise of overt racism and xenophobia in our own country today.

No comments:

Post a Comment