Director revels in success of ‘Frank’
Jon Blair’s outside perspective on Anne wins Oscar acclaim
By Lael Loewenstein
Daily Bruin Contributor
It’s just past noon on the day the Oscar nominations are
announced. In the wake of his nomination for "Anne Frank
Remembered," filmmaker Jon Blair is busy fielding congratulatory
calls in his suite at the Bel Age Hotel. He’s also wasting no time
campaigning for support.
"Let’s put in a call to Spielberg’s people," Blair tells a
colleague over the phone. "That ought to be good for at least 10
votes."
Asked if aggressive campaigning is the way to win an Academy
Award, Blair shrugs, "I haven’t the least idea. This is completely
new to me."
Nothing could seem more foreign to Blair, an expatriated South
African living in England. Known for his searing documentaries –
including the award-winning "Schindler" – and the blisteringly
funny TV series "Spitting Image," Blair is an outsider to the
Hollywood game. But he’s savvy enough to call in a few favors:
Spielberg helped finance the project and is a good friend.
Blair is understandably delighted at the reaction to "Anne Frank
Remembered," a documentary that blends never-before-seen archival
footage with interviews of Anne Frank’s friends and
schoolmates.
"I’m happy on a number of counts," Blair explains. "First, it’s
an honor for the subject matter. Second, documentaries are hard
sells even in the best of times, and it helps the film in that
perhaps a few thousand more people will go to see it who wouldn’t
have gone otherwise. And third, of course, it’s a great thing for
one’s ego. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that."
The nomination is particularly gratifying because two years ago,
Blair hadn’t even expected to make the film. Having made
"Schindler" over a decade ago, Blair had moved on to other subject
matter.
"I had no interest in being typecast as the Holocaust
documentary director," he says. "I’d rather leave that to Claude
Lanzmann (director of the monumental documentary ‘Shoah’) and to
others much more able than me."
But when the Anne Frank Educational Trust approached Blair about
making a film to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Anne’s death,
he was intrigued to discover that a documentary on her complete
story had never been undertaken. He soon signed on.
"I was adamant that I needed to demythologize Anne and examine
the reality under the mythology," he says. "Our whole perception of
Anne and her story has primarily been set by her diary, so I felt
it was time to get an outside perspective."
Blair indeed found a number of outside perspectives. As a
result, he breathes new life into the girl known through her
best-selling diary documenting two years of hiding from the Nazis
with her family. The participants range from Hanneli Goslar, a
childhood friend; to Miep Gies, who brought food every day to the
inhabitants of the secret annex; to Janny Brandes, one of the last
people to see Anne alive at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
As to whether it was difficult to track down the participants,
Blair explains, "It was very simple. You get someone else to do
it."
In fact, he hired the entire research department of the Anne
Frank Museum to work on the project. Having already located many
survivors, the research staff also knew where to begin the process
of unearthing those who had previously eluded them.
As a result, Blair and his team followed various leads and
circuitous routes to find the participants. Through municipal
records at the Hague they located Hans Weinberg, who as a youth had
burglarized the building in which the Franks were hiding. Now
living in Malta, Weinberg had never been interviewed before.
Blair classifies his participants into two groups – the
professional interviewees, such as Miep Gies, and the reluctant
interviewees, such as Weinberg. Each group poses a different set of
problems: the reluctant interviewee, traumatized by an experience,
may be hesitant to talk, while the professional interviewee can
seem too polished, having honed his or her memories into practiced
anecdotes and sometimes come off as emotionally distant from the
material.
Reading passages from Anne’s diary and other sources to the
latter group of subjects, Blair was able to penetrate their
polished exteriors. In one instance, Blair reads Miep a letter
written by Anne’s father Otto Frank to his mother. Otto explains
how he can never express his gratitude to Miep for all that she had
done for the family, and Miep, who has given scores of interviews
over 50 years, is visually moved.
"There’s a moment with Miep when you break through, when you can
see her eyes change, when you think, ‘It’s just like yesterday that
this all happened for her,’" Blair says. "It sounds a bit
manipulative and I don’t mean it that way, but in order to reach
the audience, it’s important to find more than the spoken
anecdotes. You’ve got to find some level of the emotion in the
people which takes you back immediately through all the years."
Blair was also able to travel back through time by shooting
sequences in the secret annex, now the Anne Frank Museum in
Amsterdam. The first filmmaker to have been granted full access to
the site, Blair had the extraordinary opportunity to recreate the
space as it was when the Franks lived there with another family,
the van Pelses. Shooting at night so as not to close down the
museum, Blair and his art director Rein Van Der Pol meticulously
recreated the furnishings. With a state-of-the-art,
computer-programmed motion control camera, Blair shot the annex
both empty, after the Nazis had looted it, and full. In the editing
room he cut the sequences together, dissolving from the recreated,
furnished space, to the current space, empty but for a few
cherished postcards of movie stars Anne had glued to the walls.
His decision to present the annex in that eerie, dreamlike way
evolved from a desire to replicate the feeling he had when he had
first visited it as a tourist some years ago.
"I had an extraordinary sense of the presence of these people
and I thought, ‘My God, this is where it all happened.’ That gives
a real potency to the place," Blair recalls. "But you can’t capture
that on film; it just doesn’t work. So I had to grapple with how to
dramatize it. The feeling I had which inhabits the whole film is
that it’s a story about ghosts, and that’s why I used the long
mixes and superimpositions to create the ghostly feel of memory and
of the past."
At times, while the complicated night shooting was underway in
the annex, Blair wondered what Anne would have thought. To this
girl who adored cinema, who never saw her 16th birthday, this
acclaimed documentary is an ironic and appropriate tribute.
"There was all this motion picture equipment around, and I
remember thinking that Anne had so loved the movies," Blair says.
"She wrote about wanting to go to Hollywood and Paris and London.
Anne would have been astounded to think we were shooting here where
she had necked with Peter van Pels. She would have been absolutely
in her element."
FILM: "Anne Frank Remembered," now playing at select
theaters.
Anne Frank and her older sister Margot (left) are featured in
Jon Blair’s new documentary film "Anne Frank Remembered."
Anne Frank was given her now-famous diary for her 13th birthday
on June 12, 1942.
Otto Frank with his daughters Margot (left) and Anne. Anne’s
diary forms the basis of the new documentary "Anne Frank
Remembered."
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