"Uprising" is an epic that deserves the widest possible audience among those who care to watch more about the lives, destiny, fate and remarkable bravery of Jews under Hitler's monstrous III Reich. The film also helps to remedy misconceptions about Jewish history.
I rate it alongside Polanski"s "The Pianist", also set in the Warsaw Ghetto, Stephen Daldry's "The Reader" and "Amen" by Costa-Gavras, to name but three. But the latter films deal more with the plight of Jews as victims of the Nazis and moral issues evoked by the horror of the death camps, while this movie focuses on a less well-known but tremendously heroic aspect of the war in Eastern Europe, in which Jews refused to submit to the slaughter.
At a length of almost three hours and with a superb ensemble cast, "Uprising" recounts the story of the armed insurrection against German invaders by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto that began in April 1943, from its inception months earlier to the ruthless crackdown - by means of weapons, gas and even water - that put an end to the main insurgency but not Jewish resistance.
Those hours never drag. We are shown a realistic treatment of daily life and death, conflict and mass destruction in the Ghetto. We follow the debates and acts of the Jewish Resistance Movement, particularly once it learns for sure that the hundreds of thousands of deportees from the Ghetto are being transported not to labour camps but to their extermination. "Uprising" also gives the viewpoint of those, including Jewish community leaders, who refused to back armed insurrection on practical or moral grounds.
The first time I watched the movie I gave it an 8/10, but have upped that score to a 10/10, for all its minor flaws, upon "going to source" for a while and discovering how much writer Paul Brickman and director Jon Avnet shared a commitment to accuracy, down to small details.
It's hard to know whether they told the truth about the love affairs that bonded some of the Jews in heart and spirit, but no matter. Such relationships are among the many things that give depth and humanity to the film, along with family ties and grief, and like dilemmas faced by collaborators and some of the Jewish police who served as puppets of the occupants.
Two or three people change sides, including a black marketeer and brothel owner who comes to play an important role, and they are tested according to a code laid down early in the film as a deceptively simple classroom debate on the possibility of being a moral person in an immoral world. We see what the leader of the Jewish community does on being ordered by the Germans to put children on the trains, we see the director of a Ghetto orphanage confronted by more kids than he can afford to take in, we see a woman tied with ropes to a chimney pot so that she can swing round and around on a rooftop to hurl Molotov cocktails down on troops marching into the Ghetto along with a Tiger tank, we see the daily struggle for food and we see courageous expeditions outside the walls and barbed wire to obtain guns, ammunition and explosives and to inform the Allies about the death camps.
Most surreal of all, we see Fritz Hippler, the filmmaker ordered by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels to make a hateful movie on "The Eternal Jew", in action several times shooting the violence of the Uprising, to the chagrin of German generals confounded by the astounding initial success of the Jewish resistance decimating their troops in a well-planned surprise attack.
Critics in other posts have accused the film of being unfair to the so-called "Aryan" Poles in Warsaw, claiming that they are portrayed as anti-Semitic, but this is not evident. True, some Poles are shown up as cowards living a life in fear, but others maintain safe houses outside the Ghetto for the Jewish resistance, which also gets support from the like of railway workers. However, the Polish national resistance rejects pleas from Jews for more weapons. Their arguments for denying help may seem spurious with historical hindsight, but they are tactical ones, which leave us to decide whether there is underlying prejudice.
What has long intrigued me has been the fiercely combative spirit of the Israeli people - despite the loss of six million lives and the tremendous scars borne by countless others after the Holocaust - that played a part in the swift and sometimes bloody foundation of Israel in Palestine, in political haste soon after World War II. This strength of will strikes me as being rooted in more than a fight to rebuild and maintain a Biblical homeland. In saying that, I equally fiercely refuse to bear either with Zionist extremists or their foes. But to watch "Uprising" is to help right a historical wrong that presents Jews as being the perpetual victims of persecution down the centuries, who never organized themselves and fought back.
In Warsaw, they did rise up and the film testifies to the way in which a deep-rooted, shared faith underpins such action, however hopeless it may seem. The insurrection was inevitably crushed, but when the film ends, we learn that afterwards, for all the might of the Wehrmacht behind them, German soldiers were too scared to enter the Ghetto at night for fear of "Jewish ghosts". Is it possible that the state of Israel has survived in part due to the persistence of ghosts?
I rate it alongside Polanski"s "The Pianist", also set in the Warsaw Ghetto, Stephen Daldry's "The Reader" and "Amen" by Costa-Gavras, to name but three. But the latter films deal more with the plight of Jews as victims of the Nazis and moral issues evoked by the horror of the death camps, while this movie focuses on a less well-known but tremendously heroic aspect of the war in Eastern Europe, in which Jews refused to submit to the slaughter.
At a length of almost three hours and with a superb ensemble cast, "Uprising" recounts the story of the armed insurrection against German invaders by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto that began in April 1943, from its inception months earlier to the ruthless crackdown - by means of weapons, gas and even water - that put an end to the main insurgency but not Jewish resistance.
Those hours never drag. We are shown a realistic treatment of daily life and death, conflict and mass destruction in the Ghetto. We follow the debates and acts of the Jewish Resistance Movement, particularly once it learns for sure that the hundreds of thousands of deportees from the Ghetto are being transported not to labour camps but to their extermination. "Uprising" also gives the viewpoint of those, including Jewish community leaders, who refused to back armed insurrection on practical or moral grounds.
The first time I watched the movie I gave it an 8/10, but have upped that score to a 10/10, for all its minor flaws, upon "going to source" for a while and discovering how much writer Paul Brickman and director Jon Avnet shared a commitment to accuracy, down to small details.
It's hard to know whether they told the truth about the love affairs that bonded some of the Jews in heart and spirit, but no matter. Such relationships are among the many things that give depth and humanity to the film, along with family ties and grief, and like dilemmas faced by collaborators and some of the Jewish police who served as puppets of the occupants.
Two or three people change sides, including a black marketeer and brothel owner who comes to play an important role, and they are tested according to a code laid down early in the film as a deceptively simple classroom debate on the possibility of being a moral person in an immoral world. We see what the leader of the Jewish community does on being ordered by the Germans to put children on the trains, we see the director of a Ghetto orphanage confronted by more kids than he can afford to take in, we see a woman tied with ropes to a chimney pot so that she can swing round and around on a rooftop to hurl Molotov cocktails down on troops marching into the Ghetto along with a Tiger tank, we see the daily struggle for food and we see courageous expeditions outside the walls and barbed wire to obtain guns, ammunition and explosives and to inform the Allies about the death camps.
Most surreal of all, we see Fritz Hippler, the filmmaker ordered by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels to make a hateful movie on "The Eternal Jew", in action several times shooting the violence of the Uprising, to the chagrin of German generals confounded by the astounding initial success of the Jewish resistance decimating their troops in a well-planned surprise attack.
Critics in other posts have accused the film of being unfair to the so-called "Aryan" Poles in Warsaw, claiming that they are portrayed as anti-Semitic, but this is not evident. True, some Poles are shown up as cowards living a life in fear, but others maintain safe houses outside the Ghetto for the Jewish resistance, which also gets support from the like of railway workers. However, the Polish national resistance rejects pleas from Jews for more weapons. Their arguments for denying help may seem spurious with historical hindsight, but they are tactical ones, which leave us to decide whether there is underlying prejudice.
What has long intrigued me has been the fiercely combative spirit of the Israeli people - despite the loss of six million lives and the tremendous scars borne by countless others after the Holocaust - that played a part in the swift and sometimes bloody foundation of Israel in Palestine, in political haste soon after World War II. This strength of will strikes me as being rooted in more than a fight to rebuild and maintain a Biblical homeland. In saying that, I equally fiercely refuse to bear either with Zionist extremists or their foes. But to watch "Uprising" is to help right a historical wrong that presents Jews as being the perpetual victims of persecution down the centuries, who never organized themselves and fought back.
In Warsaw, they did rise up and the film testifies to the way in which a deep-rooted, shared faith underpins such action, however hopeless it may seem. The insurrection was inevitably crushed, but when the film ends, we learn that afterwards, for all the might of the Wehrmacht behind them, German soldiers were too scared to enter the Ghetto at night for fear of "Jewish ghosts". Is it possible that the state of Israel has survived in part due to the persistence of ghosts?