"Anne Frank Remembered" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL April 27, 1996 Anne Frank has perhaps been the world's most poignant and vivid symbol of the tragedy of the Holocaust. She has certainly been a presence in my life for forty years. In 1956, the year her famous diary was published, I was a sixteen year old exchange student in Germany, trying to begin to understand the horrors that had happened there a mere decade before. I noticed that my German sister was reading "The Diary of Anne Frank" in German. I wondered what she thought, but I didn't know how to ask. The next year as a freshman in College in New York I went to see Susan Strasberg play Anne Frank on Broadway in the moving stage adaptation of the Diary. A year or two later on another visit to Germany I visited a Nazi death camp for the first time, and found myself inadvertently populating its now empty rooms and spaces with conjured up images of the people such as Anne Frank who suffered there. This trick that the mind plays of filling the empty spaces and imagining what it must have been like is one of the techniques Jon Blair uses in his Academy Award winning documentary "Anne Frank Remembered." In the scenes shot in "the Annex"--the attic rooms where the Frank and von Peltz family hid from the Nazis for two years--he repeatedly overlays shots of the barren empty rooms with shots of the same space with bare furniture in it and then with the space filled with the objects of daily life that bespeak the cramped but emotionally heightened existence of the seven and then later eight people who too refuge in these cramped quarters, the entrance to which was hidden by a bookcase in the office of Mr. Frank's pectin company. The astounding and wonderful thing about this documentary is how much new information it brings to light. It uses interviews with participants in the life of the Frank family to tell the whole story of their experiences from 1933 when they fled Germany and settled in Amsterdam to the 1980s when the last member of the family, Otto Frank, died. The fact that Otto Frank actually survived the camps (the only one of the eight who did), was news to me. Blair, who wrote, produced, and directed this documentary as well as an earlier one about Oskar Schindler that inspired Steven Spielberg to do "Schindler's List," has done monumental research on the Frank family. He has found a large number of schoolmates and family friends and relatives, now in their 70s and 80s, who tell the story in their own words from their store of memories. Some carry with them images from Anne Frank's last days in Bergen- Belsen that even now, fifty years later, they are still unable to speak of, images, as Kenneth Branagh explains in his narration, of cannibalism and the depths of human degredation. The most moving woman in the film is a sweet, quitely dignified Dutch octagenarian named Miep Gies, who had been a secretary in Otto Frank's offices. She was the main person who hid and provided for the Franks during their two years in the attic and the one who asked them if they would make room for one more, her dentist Fritz Pfeffer. Blair creates two incredibly moving moments for Miep Gies while his camera is rolling. He introduces her, for the first time, to Pfeffer's son who had been sent to England for safety when he was eleven and never saw his father again. Near death himself from cancer, he wants to say two words to Miep Gies: "Vielen Dank"- -"Many thanks." At another point in the film Blair reads Miep a passage from a letter that Otto Frank wrote to his mother on his release from Auschwitz in which he tells how thankful he is to Miep for her loving and courageous sacrifices on their behalf. Visibly moved to learn of this letter for the first time, she quietly thanks Blair for sharing these words with her. There is a suprisingly large number of extant photographs of Anne Frank (and even one brief glimpse of her in a motion picture taken in 1940 before the family went into hiding, as she watches a wedding party coming out of her apartment building. These coupled with the descriptions of her friends constructs a vivid picture of the girl who, despite her tragic early death achieved beyond her wildest dreams her teenage ambition: not to be ordinary but to achieve fame that lives beyond her own mortal life. The only thing that struck me as peculiar about this documentary is how little description or information it contained about Anne Frank's mother, especially since we hear a lot about her father, her sister Margot, Peter van Pelz and even Pfeffer the dentist. In the "Diary" Anne Frank is going through a period of teenage estrangement from her mother so she doesn't always come off well there--nor does Pfeffer. The film goes to great lengths to show us him in a better light, but it hardly mentions Mrs. Frank, except for some eyewitness descriptions of her and Anne and the older daughter Margot when they were in Auschwitz. "Anne Frank Remembered" is, indeed, an outstanding and very powerful work of documentary filmmaking and I recommend it to you. It is playing now at the Tampa Theater. For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1996. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint or reproduce this review without permission of the author, mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.