Anne Frank and Wildness

As a teenage girl The Diary of Anne Frank made a strong impression on me. One of the things that was inspiring about Anne was her capacity to keep living a life of full-blown adolescent angst while the horrors of the holocaust closed in on her. The diary ends with the Franks and Van Pels being rounded up in August 1944 but Anne Frank (tomorrow, Channel 7, 8.30pm), based on the biography by Melissa Muller, takes us past those few sentences at the end of the book to the series of camps where the families were scattered and murdered. This is not like reading a diary full of life and enthusiasm: it doesn't flinch from showing us the horrors Anne Frank went through in her final 8 months and there is certainly no redemption to be found in Bergen-Belsen. She died there, soon after her sister, only weeks before the camp was liberated.

It is shocking all over again to see the increasing frenzy of the Germans to kill as many Jews as possible as defeat closes in on them, and the cloaking of this frenzy in a highly elaborate beaurocracy of lists and moving people from camp to camps. As if to create the impression that there was reason in what took place, not irrationality of the most primitive kind.

Hannah Taylor Gordon is gutsy as Anne. Ben Kinglsey is beautifully restrained as Otto. Brenda Blethyn is good as Auguste Van Pels, as is Lili Taylor who plays Miep Gies, the woman who was the keeper of the diary. I was moved by the British actor, Nicholas Audsley, who evokes the lumpy gawkiness and flashes of handsome bravery of Peter Van Pels.

While Anne Frank doesn't tackle head on some of the criticisms that have emerged of Otto Frank in recent years, it certainly hints at complexities in the family's life. And one has sympathy for Otto's belief in the good of humankind and the consequent misguidedness of his decision not to leave Holland and insistence that the war will be over any day. Nor does the movie overly gloss over the intensity of Anne's growing sexuality.

Anne Frank is a story that reminds us of the power of the images, taking us, as it does, from that famous photo of a smart and perky girl, staring confidently down the lens, to those images of walking skeletons, heads shaven. What this movie does is resist the anonymity of these images and the attempts to dehumanise their subjects.

If you need to be reminded of what is good in life, and that images can do powerful work, turn to (or tape) Wildness (Tomorrow night, 9.25pm, ABC). Nominated this week for two AFI awards, it's a very beautiful documentary of two of Australia's greatest wilderness photographers Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis. Their work has become synonymous with campaigns to protect Tasmania's natural heritage. Olegas captured on film, among many other images, the pink quartz beach and tea-coloured water of Lake Pedder before it was drowned by a protested hydro-electric scheme. Ten years later, Peter's magnificent photographs of the Franklin River were used to spearhead the successful national campaign to save it from a similar fate.

Olegas and Peter shared many things, and had a bond that was like father and son. Both migrated to Tasmania from Baltic Europe and both died alone doing what they loved - on photographic expeditions in the wild. Their philosophy was simple and remarkably effective - if people could see the beauty of Australia's wild places then they may be moved to protect them. They may also be encouraged to understand the true value of the world around them.

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