Harlan--In the Shadow of “Jew Süss” follows in the footsteps of its historian-filmmaker-coproducer Felix Moeller’s mother, Margarethe von Trotta. Her New German Cinema treats of psychology and politics, personal belief vs. community pressure, and cultural history carried down through (and against) generations.

Ex-actor Veit Harlan was a Nazi-era director, supremely successful and a favorite of Joseph Goebbels (for whom he also supplied a trysting place). While some hundred million Europeans saw his prewar and wartime output, his fame or notoriety is today totally eclipsed by that of Leni Riefenstahl, even though he, not she, was the only Reich artist ever tried, and twice acquitted, for war crimes.

Including clips from several of Harlan’s two-and-a-half-dozen films, Moeller’s documentary is backboned by the 1940 drama Jew Süss/Jud Süß, an anti-Semitic “true story” distortion of a Jewish author’s anti-Fascist novel and obligatory viewing for SS and concentration camp officials.

Detained four years, her cinema career ending in boos at Telluride, Riefenstahl pleaded political ignorance and reinvented herself as a still photographer out of Africa. Harlan, in contrast, never explained or apologized, made ten post-1950 films, and died unrepentant at sixty-four in Capri.

Its title from its subject’s unmentioned autobiography, In the Shadow of My Films, this one is less definitive assessment of the man and his little-known works -- DVD distribution of the 1930s films was recently suspended -- than of the personal effect on those around him, immediate family and descendents.

Thus the excessive headshots of his children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and of cinema scholar and curator Stefan Drösler. With no interviewer prompting, in three languages the family members speak to the camera from different settings, with a recurrent central locale at the state IMNS museum exhibit of the director’s films and of photos, news clippings and documentation, where particularly the third generation size up notorious grandfather.

Writer as well, Moeller keeps himself out as far as overview is concerned and allows the family to speak for itself along with excerpts from Goebbels’ diary, e.g., that the Fuhrer wept over scenes of the fight-to-the-death rah-rah of 1945’s Kolberg/Burning Hearts. This hands-off approach unfortunately results in too many undigested faces and cross-opinions for the majority unfamiliar with Harlan. The progeny, some learning anything about all this for a first time, see their father or grandfather as an artist, a friend of Jews, a “kitsch melodrama” hack; a murderous dangerous Nazi sympathizer, a puppet or an opportunist for financing; an egotist who enjoyed the perks, or a naïf in the Riefenstahl mold.

Not to excuse their themes, but clips from the films do reflect a Zeitgeist and are technically no worse or better than many others, if one considers the propaganda drama of nations at war or of Cold War Soviet Realism. Harlan can by no stretch be ranked as a filmmaker of the first water and, were it not for the National Socialism bedfellowship, would be at best a footnote. Of more interest is the family division caused by subsequent infamy when victors wrote history; his descendents mostly move away, though all remain somewhere in Europe, and change their surname or else come to grips with it.

Even more tantalizing is the Jewish bloodline connection. Jew-baiting and -hating or self-loathing, Grand Inquisitor Torquemada and Hitler and their rumored Hebrew grandparentage are not brought in, but it is quietly suggested that Harlan’s attitude might have come from bitterness at being left by the first of three wives, a Jew murdered in Auschwitz years afterwards. A suicide in 1989, sister Susanne Christa converted to marry a Jew whose whole family had died in Nazi camps. And, the only female at all in documentary-like antiwar Paths of Glory, niece Christiane married Stanley Kurbick from the Bronx, who projected a film about Veit and who felt on meeting the family “like Woody Allen, looking like ten Jews.” Such ethnic connections stand in marked contrast to Harlan’s third wife and frequent leading lady, a compliant Swedish Aryan nicknamed “The Water Corpse.”

As Harlans or Körbers -- the second, also actress wife’s maiden name -- this is a family whose present umbilical to the past reflects their nation’s. Veit Harlan’s final film was The Maharajah’s Blonde (1962); his descendents still grapple with the symbolic blonde and the brunette.

(Released by Zeitgeist Films; not rated by MPAA.)