vital visuals

Film production is an adventure. 
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Here's the problem: we travel all over the world to interview the most interesting people anywhere.  Over the years we've interviewed Ian Wilmut (who led the team that cloned "Dolly" the sheep), Hamza Yusuf (one of America's most important Muslim leaders), Rudolf Weckerling (the oldest surviving pastor of the German "Confessing Church"), and many others.  Larry King never had it so good.  So why is this a problem?

Because we only use 5% of the material we gather in our films.  Where does the rest of it sit?  "On the cutting room floor."

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Two new hour-long documentary films now available on DVD, and produced by Steven Martin of Vital Visuals Inc of Oak Ridge Tennessee, depict in an excellently scholarly manner the more regrettable side of the Protestant church in Germany during the Nazi regime. "Theologians Under Hitler" is virtually an illustrated version of the book with the same title written by Robert Ericksen of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Ericksen himself introduces the film and is assisted by an expert team of scholars, both German and American. He describes the careers of three of Germany’s most illustrious theologians, Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch and Gerhard Kittel. Photographs from the archives are melded in with the campus scenery, along with commentary on their writings by today’s church historians.

By Bob Allen
Published: June 05, 2009

ATLANTA (ABP) -- A document written three-quarters of a century ago to protest rising nationalism in Nazi Germany's Protestant churches provides instruction for American Christians navigating through today's culture wars, say a Baptist ethicist and Methodist filmmaker working together against torture.

Sunday, May 31, marks the 75th anniversary of publication of a statement that came to be known as the Barmen Declaration. Drafted by Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, the six-point declaration challenged the popular "German Christian" movement, which at the time was lending theological support to Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) party.

by John Conway
Association of Contemporary Church Historians

Heroines are seldom found in the story of the Protestant Church Struggle against National Socialism. Very probably, this is because the history was written entirely by men. But now, recognition is being given to one woman, Dr Elisabeth Schmitz, for a small but striking contribution, which was alas! ignored at the time and forgotten ever since. In 1935 she had the courage to challenge the members of her Confessing Church, led by such men as Martin Niemöller and Karl Barth, to face up the Nazis‚ increasingly violent persecution of Germany's Jews. The Memorandum she produced for the 1935 Synod was a model of clarity and foresight, which accurately predicted the likely fate of the Jewish minority in Germany. At the same time, she called on the Church to stand by its responsibility to defend the most threatened members of society, and to protest against the criminal discrimination being practised by the Nazi government.

There is a break in a rail of the old tracks by a platform where Jews were once loaded on cars for their trip to Auschwitz. In the film Elisabeth of Berlin, the camera lingers on this detail. The break in the tracks seems to suggest what the power of Christian conscience might have meant, and what it could mean for a society heading in the wrong direction.

As contemporaries whose resistance to Nazism came at great personal risk, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Elisabeth Schmitz never met. While Bonhoeffer’s courage has been documented since the end of World War II, evidence of Schmitz’s defiance of Nazi ideology was lost for decades. The story of her heroism is just now being widely shared with the release of a documentary, Elisabeth of Berlin, which premiered at Duke.