Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the Holocaust
- The Cambridge History Of The Holocaust
- The Cambridge History of the Holocaust
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors to Volume IV
- Abbreviations
- Additional material
- General Editor’s Introduction
- Introduction to Volume IV
- Part I History
- Part II Geography
- Part III Culture and Ideas
- Part IV Culture and Fields
- 18 Holocaust Commemoration and Memorials
- 19 Holocaust Museums
- 20 The Holocaust and the Medical Professions
- 21 Holocaust Literature
- 22 The Holocaust and the Visual Arts: Perplexity, Meanings
- 23 The Holocaust and Film
- 24 The Future of the Holocaust – Timely Reflections
- Index
- References
23 - The Holocaust and Film
from Part IV - Culture and Fields
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2025
Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the Holocaust
- The Cambridge History Of The Holocaust
- The Cambridge History of the Holocaust
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors to Volume IV
- Abbreviations
- Additional material
- General Editor’s Introduction
- Introduction to Volume IV
- Part I History
- Part II Geography
- Part III Culture and Ideas
- Part IV Culture and Fields
- 18 Holocaust Commemoration and Memorials
- 19 Holocaust Museums
- 20 The Holocaust and the Medical Professions
- 21 Holocaust Literature
- 22 The Holocaust and the Visual Arts: Perplexity, Meanings
- 23 The Holocaust and Film
- 24 The Future of the Holocaust – Timely Reflections
- Index
- References
Summary
Few historical events have been more often depicted in film than the Holocaust. This started in the 1940s and continues to the present day. Many of the representational challenges and conundrums found in other arts are present in film as well, though if anything in more acute form. Film is arguably the most mimetic of all the arts, which makes the risk of prurience, voyeurism, or sadistic (or masochistic) pleasure in watching artificial depictions of the suffering of others all the graver. This chapter situates the history of Holocaust films between the poles of melodramatic realism embodied in the American television miniseries Holocaust and the epic documentary film Shoah. These represent conventional realism, on the one hand, and a rigorous and austere refusal to represent the past at except through images of the present, on the other. As the chapter shows, a myriad of other films situate themselves either at one pole or the other, or between the two.
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of the Holocaust , pp. 539 - 558Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
References
Select Bibliography
Assmann, A., ‘Transformations of Holocaust memory. Frames of transmission and mediation’, in Kobrynskyy, O. and Bayer, G. (eds.), Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Memory, Images, and the Ethics of Representation (New York, Wallflower Press, 2015), pp. 23–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baron, L., Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Lanham, MD, Rowman, & Littlefield, , 2005).Google Scholar
Bartov, O., The “Jew” in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cazenave, J., An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 2019).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frodon, J.-M. (ed.), Cinema & the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century, trans. A. Harrison and T. Mes (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Insdorf, A., Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Cambridge University of Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Kerner, A., Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (London, Continuum, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Konigsberg, I., ‘Our Children and the limits of cinema: Early Jewish responses to the Holocaust’, Film Quarterly 52:1 (1998), 7–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liebman, S., ‘Les premières constellations du discours sur l’Holocauste dans le cinéma polonais’, in de Baecque, A. and Delage, C. (eds.), De l’histoire au cinéma (Paris, Éditions Complexe, 1998), pp. 193–216.Google Scholar
Lindeperg, S., Night and Fog: A Film in History, trans. T. Mes (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Osborne, D., ‘Too soon and too late: The problem of archive work in Christian Petzold’s Phoenix’, New German Critique 47 (2020), 173–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinkert, A., Film and Memory in East Germany (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prager, B., After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty-First Century Documentary Film (New York, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shandler, J., While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steir-Livny, L., ‘Near and far. The representation of Holocaust survivors in Israeli feature films’, in Talmon, M. and Peleg, Y. (eds.), Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2011), pp. 168–80.Google Scholar
Trezise, T, Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (New York, Fordham University Press, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Accessibility standard: Unknown
Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown
and may be updated in the future.