Generations of Genocide

One film begins with a low, murmuring, desolate hum, like wind over an empty Western plain.

In the other, we first hear a solitary woman’s voice, chanting an ancient, anguished Hebrew prayer.

As for the images: pure horror.

“American Holocaust: When It’s All Over I’ll Still Be Indian,” opens with a montage of still photographs of corpses in trenches: Indians slain by American cavalrymen in the 19th century, juxtaposed with Jews slaughtered by the Nazi death machinery in the 20th.

“Shadows” begins with doomed prisoners being herded through the gates of earthly hell: the infamous arched, wrought-iron entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp, with its chilling sneer of a motto: “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work will set you free”).

No, these bookends in a program of short films Tuesday at the Newport Beach Film Festival will not make for light viewing. For some, they may make for angry viewing. “American Holocaust,” a fierce documentary, and “Shadows,” a dark, stark, sometimes shockingly violent fictional short, bring forth overlooked, potentially contentious details about these two historic horrors.

The thesis of “American Holocaust,” by Los Angeles director Joanelle Romero, is that Americans never truly have absorbed and comprehended the enormity of what was perpetrated in the European settlement of North America between 1492 and the end of the Indian wars some 100 years ago. Romero, an American Indian actress, singer and activist, contends that it was nothing less than a genocidal episode worthy of the word “holocaust” (a biblical term meaning “completely burned sacrifice”), and that Adolf Hitler, himself, studied what European settlers did to American Indians and applied those lessons to his own project of racial cleansing.

The film is incomplete. It was meant to be a 90-minute feature, but Romero said foundations and funding sources in Hollywood have been turning her down since 1995, when she began trying to raise the $1 million she needs.

“We’ve gotten people saying the film is a lie, that there never was an Indian holocaust. The denial is so thick. Some foundations and museums that aren’t Indian have had trouble with the word ‘holocaust’ and can’t get past that.”

In September, Romero decided to start small. She had in the can 17 minutes of interviews with American Indian artists and tribal leaders talking about the history of persecution and destruction, and the lingering trauma it has brought to their people. She decided to intersperse the interview clips with still photographs and film footage. She recruited Ed Asner to read the frequently acid narration. The resulting 29-minute piece has been screened at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco (where it won a prize as best short documentary), and now in Newport Beach.

By getting the short piece out, Romero said in a recent interview from her home in Canoga Park, she hopes to attract the financing she needs for a full-length film that incorporates interviews with scholars, as well as portraits of current reservation life and re-creations of crucial historic episodes.

There are no punches pulled in the film. At one point, Asner intones: “For more than 500 years, American Indian people have been subjected to the ever-changing whims of white men who, with sword in one hand and Bible in the other, swept across this land like a plague of locusts.”

The film’s quotations from American military men read as chillingly as anything Hitler and his henchmen could have said: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” said General Philip Henry Sheridan, whom most Americans probably think of as a Civil War cavalry hero on the Union side. Major John C. Chivington, known as “The Fighting Parson,” led U.S. troops in a massacre at Sand Creek, Colo., and ordered his men, “Kill ‘em all, children as well. Nits make lice.”

In the film, demographic figures fly by quickly without citations from historical authorities. The numbers will clearly not be comforting.

According to Troy Johnson, professor of U.S. history and American Indian studies at Cal State Long Beach, scholarly consensus holds that about 10 million Indians inhabited what is now the United States when whites first arrived. By 1890, there were 260,000 left. Many had been slain, but most were eradicated by diseases that whites sometimes spread deliberately. The U.S. Census Bureau puts the current American Indian and Native Alaskan population at 2.4 million.

“I feel the United States has yet to come to grips with what happened,” Johnson said in a phone interview. “And I don’t have any problem with calling it a ‘holocaust.’ If you take what happened between 1860 and 1890 (the final conquest of the American West), the only thing that’s missing is the lines and the ovens.”

Marilyn Harran, director of Chapman University’s Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education, said even Holocaust scholars disagree whether it’s appropriate for the term “holocaust” to be used for genocides other than the Nazis’ uniquely racist attack on the Jews.

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“There is a huge, huge debate whether you lose a sense of the uniqueness of the Holocaust by applying that term” to other atrocities, Harran said. “People of great goodwill feel fiercely about one position or the other, and it is very much an ongoing debate in Holocaust scholarship.”

“We knew it would be controversial,” director Romero said. “Holocaust means ‘consumed in fire,’ and we [Indians] still are. If anybody could come up with a better word, I would use it.

“It’s an honest film, and I don’t want to candy-coat it,” she added. “I wanted to make a film that can voice our truth and concerns from our community. I want to leave something for the next generation, Indian and non-Indian, to have the truth of what’s happened to our indigenous peoples.”

“Shadows” is not a sweeping lesson in history, but a moral dilemma that unfolds in the unspeakable extremes of Auschwitz.

A teenage boy, Joshua, and his sage-like father, Benjamin, are struggling to survive in the forced labor camp. The shock, for many, will be that those beating the workers like beasts are not uniformed Nazis, but “kapos,” Jewish prisoners enlisted by the Germans to keep order, mete out punishment and squeeze the last ounce of labor out of each doomed man.

Director Mitch Levine considered himself well-read about the Holocaust when he embarked on the film as his thesis project at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. He has been a director and stage designer for operas and plays, and for seven years he has been on the adjunct faculty of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. He said he didn’t know about Jews victimizing Jews in the camps until he began researching his story and interviewing survivors.

Levine said that when he told people about what he aimed to do, some had reservations: When the great truth of the Holocaust is Germans trying to eradicate Jews, why focus on how a few Jews were turned against their own?

“One of the reasons I made the movie was this is sort of an untold story,” Levine said. “In no way do I want to diminish the absolute responsibility of the SS and the Nazis, but it’s important to explore what happened in the camps.”

Levine said he received nothing but support after he showed potential backers and helpers the script by Arthur Lorenz, another AFI student. He was able to raise a $50,000 budget and rally enough volunteer assistance from actors and Hollywood experts in costuming, special effects, sound editing and other technical areas that the finished product, he guesses, would otherwise have cost $750,000 to $850,000.

“Shadows” shows Joshua being dragooned into service as a kapo by a brutal Jewish overseer. Although he doesn’t go eagerly, neither does he resist. The position of authority, he thinks, will help him get his faltering father the food he needs to survive.

But Benjamin is horrified and refuses such morally tainted help. “Joshua,” he says, “we have to choose how we live.” In the end, the youth chooses moral redemption in a wrenchingly moving way.

Levine said he worked hard to get the details right, down to what the lighting would have been like in a barracks at Auschwitz. He wanted to make sure that all the characters--including the brutal kapo--were developed enough to be complex and comprehensible.

“I didn’t want a Holocaust survivor to sit in the audience and say, ‘You just don’t get it.’ ” After one of the 24-minute film’s first showings at AFI, Levine said, “A survivor of Auschwitz came up to me and said, ‘Mitch, I go to all of these, and this is the closest depiction to my experience that I’ve ever seen on screen.’ I was overwhelmed. That brought me to tears.”

“Shadows” has been on the international film festival circuit for a year, selected by some 25 festivals in the United States, France, Spain, Portugal and Poland. It has won several prizes and awards; Levine said it is beginning to be shown by community groups, and he hopes to have it screened in museums and to sell it to cable TV.

He especially wants teenagers to see it.

“It’s about the experience of a teenager, and adolescents so rarely think about the ramifications of what they do,” he said. “We all believed [after the Holocaust] that we would never let this happen again. But, of course, it happens again and again and again. We’re confronted by a world of genocide and we need to think about what human beings are capable of, and how we can resist that.”

SHOW TIMES

“American Holocaust: When It’s Over I’ll Still Be Indian” and “Shadows,” along with two other films, “This Is for You Spike” and “Who Is Albert Woo?” make up the “Real World” shorts program, Newport Beach Film Festival, Edwards Island Cinema, Fashion Island. Tuesday, 2 p.m. $5. (949) 253-2880 or https://www.newportbeach filmfest.com. The festival ends Thursday.