his time. If he had waited 25 years, then he'd be bounding over those seats grabbing his Oscar". Similarly Amy Wallace in GQ Magazine wrote: "He was mercilessly criticized for attempting to mix comedy with the ultimate tragedy. However, in 1999, when Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful won three Oscars for a similar story line, many noted that Lewis had tried it first." After Lewis's death in August 2017, Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote, "I don't know whether the film is as bad as Lewis himself has said that it is. The point is that, in the early 1970s, when the very term "the Holocaust" was hardly known and when the extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany was a little-discussed phenomenon, at a time before Claude Lanzmann made Shoah, Lewis took it on. He may have been naïve to do so with a twist of comedy, he may have been naïve to do so with such uncompromisingly direct and untroubled cinematic representation—but he also went where other directors didn't dare to go, taking on the horrific core of modern history and confronting its horrors. What childhood can there be with such knowledge, and what comedy? The moral complicity, the self-scourging accusation of the role of the clown in amusing children en route to their destruction, is itself as furious a challenge to himself, and to the entertainment of the time, as any by the most severe critic of media." Lewis was at the forefront of what became a Hollywood genre, films exploring the events and personal experiences of the Holocaust. He was doing so at a time of virtually no Holocaust scholarship in academia, minimal recognition of the loss of European Yiddish culture, with limited public documentation, and only the initial stirrings of survivor testimonies. Viewings and footage On April 9, 2012, Flemish public service broadcaster VRT re-released—on its cultural website Cobra.be—a film piece its predecessor BRT had aired 40 years earlier to the day on the film show Première-Magazine. It includes behind-the-scenes footage shot in a Paris circus and some takes with sound from the film. On February 3, 2016, German public TV ARD aired a 2-hour documentary called Der Clown. German film maker Eric Friedler shows interviews, a 31-minute version of original footage and re-staged scenes from the original scripts with some Swedish actors who participated in Lewis's movie. Finally, the film shows the