MOVIES : Dearest of Diaries : A new documentary sheds light on the life of Anne Frank and those near to her--and on the unnerving parallels between her world and ours.

Cultures create myths and fables because they need them; thus was born the real-life fable of Anne Frank. A Jewish girl who kept a diary during the two years her family spent hiding in an Amsterdam attic before her death in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, Frank fulfilled a complex collective need when her diary was published in 1947.

Putting a single face on the vast horror of the Holocaust, Frank served as a reminder of the quiet acts of heroism that were part of that high-water mark of evil, and quickly metamorphosed into a symbol of the indomitability of the human spirit. Still reeling from the nightmare orchestrated by Hitler, the world latched onto Frank as a way to begin to approach this most formidable of questions: Why does mankind occasionally elect to devour itself?

Frank blossomed into nothing short of a sensation when her diary was adapted into a successful Broadway play in 1955 by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, a play that was in turn transformed into George Stevens’ equally popular 1959 film, “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Translated into 54 languages and with sales hovering around 25 million copies worldwide, her book is an established part of most high school educations, and today hers is a story we pretty much feel we know.

However, as can be seen in “Anne Frank Remembered,” an Oscar-nominated documentary directed by British filmmaker Jon Blair opening Friday, there’s much about Frank that was left unexamined.

Before Blair’s exhaustively researched film, the story of Anne Frank pretty much began and ended in that Amsterdam attic. Here for the first time we learn the story of the Frank family in the decades preceding the Holocaust, and what befell them after they were discovered in hiding. We learn that Anne died in the typhus epidemic that killed thousands of prisoners in the winter of 1944-45 in Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp near Hanover, Germany, and that hers was probably one of countless bodies bulldozed into a mass grave by British troops after they liberated the camp in 1945. Overall, Blair presents a much tougher telling of the Anne Frank story than we’re used to.

“The war wasn’t so far in the past when the Hackett play and Stevens’ film came out, and at that point the only way you could tell these stories was to slightly sanitize them,” Blair says during an interview in a Hollywood hotel. “And Anne Frank--and this is particularly true in the United States--managed to convey a slightly softened telling of the Holocaust that allowed people to start to look at it.

“I would add, however, that this isn’t the only reason she was embraced by the culture. I think her book survived because it works on so many different levels. First, Anne was a hugely talented writer with an ability to evoke the experience of being an adolescent. The rows with her mother, the emergence and subsequent disappointment of her romance with Peter, her feelings for her father, her own emerging sexuality--these are generic subjects that transcend the wartime experience. At the same time, her diary shows a concern for events taking place beyond the four walls where she’s hiding, so the thing also works as a narrative of wartime events. And finally, it works as a record of what went on inside those four walls. All these stories are powerfully told with an intuitive understanding of how to tell a good story.”

Republished last year in a definitive edition that restored diary entries omitted from the original, Frank’s diary is also the subject of Lawrence Graver’s recently published book, “An Obsession With Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary.” A chronicle of the travails of Levin, the writer who played a key role in the publication of Frank’s diary in America in 1952 and whose obsession with it essentially derailed his life, Graver’s book also examines the conflicted stewardship of the legacy of Anne Frank and the way it has been positioned in the culture.

Graver’s book is a fascinating exercise in revisionist history that’s indicative of an evolving view of the Holocaust. “Public perception of the Holocaust has changed, and I think ‘Schindler’s List’ played a big part in that,” Blair says. “There’s a much greater awareness among survivors that if they don’t tell their story now they’re going to be lost to history, so there’s a great deal of new information coming to light right now.”

(Much of this information is being collected by Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a project launched by Steven Spielberg that’s attempting to record first-person accounts from all living Holocaust survivors. The resulting archive will be available for scholarly research at institutions in Los Angeles, New York, Washington and in Israel.)

As to how Blair wound up with the job of reintroducing Frank to the world, he explains that the wheels were set in motion in 1983 when he made a documentary about Oskar Schindler. “Universal bought the rights to the film and kept it on the shelf, then several years later Steven Spielberg made his film on the same subject,” says Blair.

“When Spielberg’s film was released I was interviewed by David Gritten [a freelance writer for The Times and other publications], who’s friendly with the woman who runs the Anne Frank Educational House, which is a branch of the Anne Frank Charity in Amsterdam,” he continues. “This woman asked him if he knew anyone who might be interested in making a film about Anne Frank and he suggested she contact me, which she did. My initial response was that I had absolutely no interest in making such a film. I didn’t want to be typecast as a Holocaust documentary filmmaker, the personal impact of dealing with the Holocaust wasn’t something I was eager to subject myself to again, and I felt that everything that could be said about this girl probably had been said.

“She replied that though she couldn’t help me resolve my feelings about the Holocaust, she could point out that no one had ever made a documentary telling the whole story of Anne Frank--and it’s true that no one had ever attempted to tell the story of this girl in full. When I realized that, the offer became irresistible. This is the first eyewitness account of the life of Anne Frank, and no one we wanted to speak to refused us.”

Completing this ambitious film in just nine months for $800,000, Blair says he couldn’t have done it without the help of Spielberg. “I’d managed to pull together part of the money we needed, some of which came from some people at the Disney Channel who I found to be incredibly supportive and intelligent. But what we’d managed to raise wasn’t nearly enough, so I contacted Steven and said, ‘I’m not asking you for money, but could you suggest some charitable foundations that might be interested in putting some money into this project?’ His response was to fund the film himself with no strings attached.”

With the money lined up, Blair dove into the research process “prepared,” he says, “to discover that Anne was an icon with feet of clay. In fact, she emerged as a much more interesting person than the iconic image suggests. The popular image of her derived from the George Stevens film isn’t terribly accurate, and I think Millie Perkins--who, by the way, was not Jewish--was probably miscast.”

Given unprecedented access to the archives of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and permission to bring elaborate special effects into the hiding place itself to film there, Blair crafted a film full of surprises, some of which are quite gruesome.

“I don’t want people to go to this film expecting to be subjected to two hours of unbearable horror, but I did feel obliged to present the information I uncovered. I learned, for instance, that there were incidents of cannibalism in the camps. I didn’t believe that at first because it was the first time I’d ever heard of it, but in fact, it’s true, and when you think about it it’s not surprising.

“However, I attempted to present information of this nature as delicately as I possibly could. I remember seeing a film about survivors where people in the audience were breaking into tears every few minutes, and I don’t think that’s how you structure a documentary. I didn’t omit material I felt was too disturbing, but I was faced with choices and the film could’ve been much more graphic. But I feel that to be graphic is finally to desensitize. What I tried to do instead was to give the film a classic narrative structure in that the second part of the film doesn’t work without the first part, where you’re introduced to a regular kid in a family that just doesn’t see the brick wall coming up against them.”

It’s Blair’s hope that the classic narrative structure of his film will also serve to invest Frank’s story with an element of timelessness.

“I’d be terribly disappointed if someone came out of sitting through this film thinking only about what happened 50 years ago, because one of the key points I was hoping to get across were the generic lessons to be drawn from the story,” he says. “History doesn’t repeat itself in a direct way, but conditions comparable to those in Germany of the ‘30s are definitely coalescing today in various parts of the globe.”

They’re also coalescing on the Internet, where various neo-Nazi groups are colonizing the information highway with their own Web sites. Blair, however, finds the neo-Nazi movement considerably less sinister than that of the ultranationalists. “There are people in Eastern Europe who don’t describe themselves as fascists, neo-Nazis or anything like that, but who are very, very dangerous. I hope that anyone who goes to see this film will reflect on these things and will look into themselves as well, because every political event is made up of thousands of personal choices. I tried to reflect that in this film, which is as much about the people who made the decision to help the Franks as it is about Anne.”

In this regard, Blair inarguably succeeds; Miep Gies, for example, the Frank family employee who risked her life to help the Franks while they were in hiding, emerges from the film as a towering presence, as does Hanneli Goslar, a friend of Anne’s who attempted to smuggle food to her shortly before she died in Bergen-Belsen. The modesty and courage of these women is profoundly moving, and it helps temper the tragedy of the story they’re a part of, which will remain an irreparable disaster for the human race.

“The effect of immersing myself in the Holocaust a second time was considerable, and I’m certain it will be at least another decade, if ever, before I approach the subject again,” says Blair, who was raised in South Africa and lives in London. “It depressed me making this film, there’s no question of that, but if I hadn’t put my all into it I think it would’ve been a lesser thing.

“In working on this project I spoke to many survivors, and I noticed they tend to fall into three categories in terms of how they dealt with this event. Some do it through denial, others do it by taking on a public persona and talking about their experience--which is another form of denial--and some actually manage to process it to the point that it becomes part of their biography, but not the whole thing, and those people are very rare.

“As to whether making the film answered any of my questions about why the Holocaust happened--I don’t know if it’s possible to understand that. I covered the aftermath of the war in Cambodia, which was a comparable case of a nation turning in on itself, and there’s no real way to explain it. There’s no evidence to suggest that kind of tribal aggression is built into us as a species, and yet it continues to happen. This aspect of Anne Frank’s story is incredibly depressing--and yet, curiously, her story is ultimately uplifting for me.

“It was weird actually shooting in the annex,” he recalls. “No one has ever filmed there in the way we did, with lots of special effects equipment and so forth, and we always shot at night so the museum wouldn’t have to close. The first night of filming we were shooting at the top of the annex where Peter and Anne used to sit together, and I was struck by the fact that if Anne had been there she would’ve been totally in her element. I had the same feeling when we recorded the music. We had a full orchestra and I thought to myself, we’ve all gathered together here because of this young girl who wanted to be famous. Anne would’ve loved every minute of it.”