Arena — Season 1, Episode 319: Of Cats and Mice
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Art Spiegelman is one of America's leading comic-strip artists. Earlier this year he created a stir with Maus, a novel in strip form. Maus tells of a young Jewish couple who are arrested and transported to Auschwitz - where Spiegelman's parents endured and survived the war. The Jews are depicted as mice and the SS guards as cats. The story is told by an elderly mouse to his young son who asks him about his life. The unlikely, perhaps provocative, form of the comic-strip has produced an extremely moving book which has had huge success on both sides of the Atlantic. Tonight's film follows Spiegelman's journey with his wife and child to Auschwitz for the first time.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.