Steve McQueen was living in Amsterdam when he conceived 12 Years a Slave. “I used to go by Anne Frank’s house almost every day,” he said. “Reading [Solomon] Northup’s book, I could not ignore the similarity. I felt that it was like Anne Frank, but a hundred years earlier.”
Forgive me for using an Oscar contender to make Anne Frank “relevant.” She doesn’t need the click bait. Her teenage diary of genocide and first love has sold over 30 million copies, inspiring adaptations by Hollywood and Broadway. Right now there are two European film versions of her life in the works plus a TV mini-series.
Frank is also the subject of a semi-permanent exhibition at L.A.’s Museum of Tolerance, titled “Anne.” That’s one name, like Michelangelo or Lorde. Don’t discount the pop diva billing. In her diary, Anne dreamed of moving to Hollywood and becoming a movie star. Were it not for some eucalyptus trees on Pico, the eyes of MOT’s Anne Frank photo-mural would have a straight shot to the Hollywood sign.
“Anne” is indeed a cinematic experience more than a typical museum show of historic documents. Timed groups of visitors circulate past video stations of various sizes and shapes. Some videos are predictably heavy in historical B-roll. Others have fresh testimony of witnesses such as Buddy Elias, Anne’s cousin. Elias did go on to a movie career in Europe, and he tells parts of Anne’s tragic tale much as that funny/wise 14-year-old might have liked.
The exhibition’s centerpiece is a near-cycloramic (260-degree) video about the “secret annex,” the attic space where Anne and seven other Jews hid from the Nazis. Needless to say, the video is 100 percent reenactment. I know, that sounds like the cheesiest History Channel deal ever. It’s not. It’s more like an adventurous opera staging. Anne is a shadow or silhouette whose face is never seen. Without punching the obvious Holocaust museum buttons, it is moving and inspiring. The room in which the immersive video is shown approximates the size of the secret annex itself (preserved as Anne Frank House in Amsterdam). You enter as the Franks did, through a sliding bookcase.
As I noted in a previous post, the show has almost no authentic letters or documents. Instead the MOT presents facsimiles, even of the autograph diary itself. It’s in a luminous, trippy case worthy of the end of Kubrick’s 2001—halfway to Barry Lyndon and that great crypto-Holocaust document, The Shining.
I’m not crazy about museums showing fakes, and here the subterfuge seems especially needless. How many visitors can read Dutch? Most will glance at the simulated autographs a second and move on.
As far back as the 1950s neo-Nazis were claiming that Anne Frank was a hoax contrived to cast Third Reich child murderers in an unflattering light. That motivated Simon Wiesenthal, namesake of MOT’s parent organization, to track down Karl Silberbauer, the Nazi officer who arrested the Franks. But it’s the continuing existence of conspiracy theorists that makes museum fabrications of Anne Frank documents problematic. Why give hate-mongers any pretext to cloud the water?
“Anne” would work fine without the bogus documents. It’s a perfect school field trip exhibit that is satisfying for adults. The more who see it the better, and that raises another issue, the admission cost. “Anne” runs $15.50 for general admission plus another $15.50 to see the MOT’s permanent galleries. You can see either or both, but a full museum admission comes to a staggering $31. That’s more than the much-criticized $24 admission to be charged by New York’s National September 11 Museum.
