Monuments Men: Opening Day Roundup

Two years ago I learned about the Monuments Men when it was announced that George Clooney had optioned Robert Edsel's book. In the ensuing months, I read all I could about the Monuments Men and art looting by the Nazis and blogged about it here, here, here, here, here, and here. 

In November of last year, I heard Robert Edsel speak about the Monuments Men at the Cleveland Museum of Art where I purchased an autographed copy of his newest book, Saving Italy. Edsel will be speaking at the National Archives on 19 February, details here.  If you can't make it to DC, you can watch him discuss his book on BookTV. He will appear live on BookTV on 22 February at 11 am ET. There is a profile of him in the Washington Post here and an interview with the Holocaust Memorial Museum here.

With the opening of the movie today, there is news about the Monuments Men (and women) everywhere. 

Reviews: Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, and Variety. The general consensus of the reviews is probably not what Mr. Clooney hoped for. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Getty, and the Huntington Library have posted articles about their connections to the Monuments Men.

There have been countless articles related to the history and mission of the Monuments Men: NBC Nightly News, the National Archives Prologue, the BBC, the Smithsonian, National Archives The Text Message, New York Times, the Huffington Post, the U.S. Army, Artlog, the Des Moines Register, and the National WWII Museum. 

Behind-the-Scenes/Making of articles are here, here, and here.

Read about the larger message of the film, the problem of looted art and heritage, in the Jewish Daily Forward. 

Robert Edsel and George Clooney were both scheduled to appear on the Charles Rose show this week.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for a genealogy blog, Ancestry.com reports that Clooney is distantly related to George Stout, the leader of the Monuments Men.

Art on a Train, Nazis, and Hollywood

In early February as I reading The Monuments Men, I mentioned the plot to my dad and that the book was to be made into a movie. He said, "they've already done that." He was referring to the 1965 film The Train directed by John Frankenheimer and staring Burt Lancaster and Paul Scofield. I realized I needed to see this film and requested it through interlibrary loan. A couple of weeks later, as I was walking out the door to pick it up, my dad said, The Train is on TCM tonight at eight o'clock. How weird is that?

The inspiration for this film is the effort of the French Resistance to stop a train full of artwork from leaving Paris in August 1944. My extensive knowledge of this event is drawn from Chapter 21, "The Train," in The Monuments Men. Rose Valland who worked at a museum in Paris controlled by the Germans was actually a spy. She learned that the artworks from this museum would be taken by truck, then loaded onto railroad cars, then transported to Germany. She suggested to Jacques Jaujard, the director of French National Museums, that it might be a good idea if the train were delayed. He agreed and alerted his contacts in the French Resistance. The train was delayed by strikes, mechanical problems, and low-priority as trains carrying possessions of Germans leaving Paris took precedence. Ultimately, the train never left Paris, but several items were stolen before the Free French army reached the train at the end of August. Some crates of art were recovered immediately, others would remain on the train until December 1944.

The Train is an excellent film - full of suspense and drama expertly executed by an incredible cast. On the other hand, it is a Hollywood film and bears little resemblance to actual events. In an early stage-setting scene, Rose Valland goes directly to the French Resistance about stopping the train. They are reluctant to act, not really understanding the importance of the art, "the patrimony of France." This scene condenses events well and relates the importance of the train's cargo to the audience.

While the men were risking their lives to save the art, it is actually mentioned very little after the first moments of the film. It's all about the train: stopping it, moving it, painting it, hating it, and dying for it. Another component of the film is the contest of wills between the German officer Von Waldheim (Scofield) who desperately wants the art, because he understands it and Labiche (Lancaster) the reluctant member of the French Resistance who has never scene any of the paintings but gives his all to stop the train.

History films, like history books, always say as much about the time they were made or written in as the time they were about. For the life of me, I can't quite put my finger on what it would be for The Train. Perhaps it raises questions about the destruction or stealing of cultural heritage. The Historic Preservation Act of 1966 was passed as a direct result of the rampant destruction of historic buildings and city districts to construct the Eisenhower Highway system. Or maybe it really is all about World War II and putting one over on the Nazis, but I don't think so.

Monuments Men by Hollywood

Robert Edsel and Brett Witter have crafted an excellent narrative for the events of the Monuments Men, a corps of men from the art world who rescued and protected the cultural treasures of Europe during the last year of WWII. I could hardly put it down. Seriously. I was totally fascinated and have since checked out every book I can find about looting during the war. Additionally, as I knew the book was to be a movie and knew a bit about the process (see this post) I couldn’t stop imagining how the story would be translated to film.  

Edsel had already applied story telling techniques to the “event” of Nazi looting during World War II. He focuses on the creation of the Monuments Men, their actions in the field, the search for the Ghent Altar Piece and the Bruges Madonna, and finally, the rush to reach the art repository in mines of Altaussee before they were blown up. Enough background is provided to give the reader insight to the scope and extent of the Nazi looting campaign and the efforts of US Armed forces to preserve cultural resources after the Normandy Invasion.

In Monuments Men, Edsel highlights 10 individuals acting in Northern Europe in addition to dozens of other individuals mentioned. Clearly, several of the characters will have to be combined or left out. A movie audience would totally lose track of seven or eight different men traipsing across worn-torn Europe searching for different repositories and pieces of art. The three most indispensable characters to the story, in my opinion, are George Stout (the role, I think, most suited to Mr. Clooney), James Rorimer, and Rose Valland (the only major female character). I would imagine Eisenhower and Patton will make an appearance, as they do in the book, but what happens with all the other historical characters is anyone’s guess.

Most of the set-up for the activity of the Monuments Men could be handled in an opening montage – the Nazi’s stealing art in Germany, Poland and Austria; museum officials in the US discussing plans to protect their collections; European museums protecting their works of art in rural houses and mines. On the other hand, the real work of the Monuments Men began in June 1944 and opening a film with the D-Day Invasion would be impressive.

Like the book, the film will probably highlight the hunt for the Bruges Madonna and the Ghent Altarpiece. The two most important repositories found by the Monuments Men were in Neuschwanstein Castle and the salt mines at Altaussee. They might even limit their story to just one of these locations. As the salt mines were the repository of these two prominent works of art and were almost blown up, I would image that will be their choice. One event in the book, while not integral to the hunt for the two aforementioned repositories, but would be absolutely fabulous on the big screen, is the discovery of the Merkers mine which, in addition to many priceless works of art, housed the bulk of the Third Reich’s gold reserves. Near this mine, the US forces discovered Ohrdruf, a Nazi work camp.

The time period of the book is already, in the main, the last 10 months of the war, a relatively short time period. The genre for the film will likely be a buddy/war movie. I’m not certain how romance will be worked in. Edsel includes letters the men wrote home to their wives, so perhaps they can work that it as off-screen romance. 

I can already see the movie in my head. If you have read or do read the book, you will probably see an entirely different movie. I wonder what kind of movie Mr. Clooney and his production team will see? I hope it's as good as mine.

You can learn more about the Monuments Men here, the Monuments Men Foundation here, and follow Robert Edsel on Twitter @RobertEdsel.

History and Hollywood

Last month, I read this notice, that reported the book Monuments Men will be adapted for the big screen by George Clooney. To be honest, I clicked on the link because of Mr. Clooney, but I checked out The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History from the library because it totally sounded like my thing – people rescuing Europe’s cultural heritage from the Nazi’s at the end of WWII.

I used give a lecture on history and film which came to mind as I was reading this book. It was the first book I have ever read knowing it would be made into a movie.  Historians (myself included) quite often become all bent out of shape over Hollywood interpretations of historical events. Often with good reason. On the other hand, many historians don’t have a firm grip on how filmmakers “work.” Everything I know about film and history, I have learned from Robert Brent Toplin, John  E. O’Connor and Robert A. Rosenstone.

Historians write books and paint their stories and arguments with words. They can keep going until the publisher tells them to stop. In these lengthy books, historians have the time to examine the background of an event, the event itself, and then its aftermath. Historians can also investigate abstract historical events, like the history of an idea (democracy) or struggle (emancipation). Monuments Men which falls somewhere between a proper history book and a novel, is over 400 pages. Filmmakers have at most 2 hours and 20 minutes.

Filmmakers may have a STATEMENT to make, but they also need to entertain their audience. Unlike the historian, they cannot present a movie about the causes of Great Depression (which start in the 1920s and are numerous), but they can tell the story about a person during the depression. So the first object of a filmmaker is to reduce history to a story about a person or small group of people. Because filmmakers tell stories there must be a beginning and an end. Of course, life and history aren’t like this. A movie might end with VE Day in May 1945; but in reality life kept moving on to VJ Day and then the Cold War. To make their stories engaging to the widest audience filmmakers take the past and make it more personal and more dramatic. They also simplify it by collapsing or combining historical characters, condensing time, focusing on only a few moments of a crisis, and leaving out “extraneous” details.  They also create the past visually, and this, I think, is the benefit of history on film over history in a book.

Filmmakers use traditional story telling methods to turn their chosen historical event into a film. The two main ones are stories told in three acts (exposition, complication, and resolution) and applying a genre (buddy, war, romance, etc.) For the former, Toplin (I think) provides a simple example: of exposition - put the man in the tree; complication - throw rocks at the man; resolution - man is rescued from the tree. Genre, as best I understand it, provides the rhetoric or framework for the story. Audiences expect and anticipate different plots and results in a Romantic-Comedy then a Buddy Movie. 

The next time you watch an historical film, think about the different mediums of historical books and historical film and consider whether the tools used by the filmmakers were in a sense “true” to the past or not.