British Cinema and the Holocaust

Abstract

This chapter emphasises the ways in which British “Holocaust film” responds to the shifting contexts of British film culture as a whole as well as the evolution of British Holocaust consciousness, which film has at different times and in different ways reflected and occasionally helped shape. I suggest that the seventy years since the liberation of the camps—Britain’s closest encounter with the Nazi genocide which itself continues to shape the contours of British collective memory—can be sub-divided into several more-or-less distinct phases: once the initial horrified publicity attendant on Allied troops’ discovery of German concentration camps in the last weeks of the war had waned, during the subsequent two decades Nazi wartime atrocities were almost never directly addressed, still less seriously explored in British feature films—indeed, they were actively avoided as subject matter (though a variety of submerged and/or allegorical references are to be found in sometimes unexpected parts of the cinematic environment). A brief phase of increased visibility during the 1970s, responding both to sharpening public awareness of the Holocaust and to the changing production contexts of British filmmaking, is succeeded by another period of general abeyance even as Holocaust education and scholarship and public debate and commemoration all expand enormously. This does not change in the immediate aftermath of Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, US 1993), notwithstanding or perhaps because of the latter’s enormous impact in the UK as worldwide: but by the start of the twenty-first century, with the Holocaust now established as a central “location” in British culture, a stream of productions addressing different aspects of the Holocaust and also its postwar legacies indicate that the Shoah has become a viable option—commercially and, just as important, cognitively—for British filmmakers.