Arthur Cohn, a Swiss producer who took home six Academy Awards over the years for wide-ranging films that included the fascist-era Italian drama “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” and the U.S. labor-strike documentary “American Dream,” died on Dec. 12 in Jerusalem. He was 98.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Emanuel, an actor.
The producer’s chief job is to assemble financing for a movie, but Mr. Cohn was unusual among independent film producers in that he insisted on a free hand in the creative aspects as well, such as editing and in rewriting scripts. In choosing material, he followed his own passions, which included a lifelong preoccupation with antisemitism and the Holocaust.
Mr. Cohn told interviewers that he had been shaped by his upbringing as the son of a prominent Jewish lawyer in neutral wartime Basel, Switzerland, who helped fleeing Jews escape Europe. As a teenager, Mr. Cohn was often dispatched by his father to the forests on the Franco-Swiss border to find refugees.
Tachles, a Swiss magazine of Jewish life, praised Mr. Cohn for making films that “were often uncomfortable, political and morally challenging.”
“The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (1970), was one of his best-known films, adapted from the novel by Giorgio Bassani about a doomed upper-class Jewish family in Italy in the 1930s and early ’40s. The movie, directed by Vittorio De Sica, won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film (though Mr. Bassani later disavowed it because of what he said was its distortions).
Mr. Cohn also produced “One Day in September” (1999), a documentary about the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. It included a rare interview with the one surviving perpetrator.
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