Holocaust Film Research Articles

The age of innocence? Child narratives and Italian Holocaust films

This article critically assesses the use of children as narrators in two recent Italian Holocaust films: Roberto Benigni'sLa Vita é Bella(1997) and Ettore Scola'sConcorrenza Sleale(2001). The analysis places the films and their choice of narrator in the context of the child in European Holocaust film and argues that the child's perspective, often used to qualify the actions of adult characters and cast a questioning or even accusatory gaze on them, is used in these Italian films to perform the opposite function. Focusing on cinema as a site of memory and as a site of emotions, the article suggests that Italian filmmakers use children to infantilise the audience, induce pity rather than reflection, and discuss Italy's role in the Holocaust while reassuring audiences of the life-affirming, democratic and humanitarian values of post-war Italians. This political and historiographical use of the child's emotions not only reinforces the need to insist on the revision of thebrava gentemyth, but also invites a thorough reconsideration of the complexity of the relationship between the historical film and the emotions.

The cartoon logic in Mitko Panov's With Raised Hands

The narrative of With Raised Hands is not governed according to the principles of verisimilitude, which is the presumed default mode of most Holocaust films. Rather, this film follows a narrative logic that is more akin to cartoon narratives. The 'Holocaust comedies' of the 1990s operate in a similar fashion.

The Goyishe Gaze: Reading Against American Movie Reviews of The Reader

Abstract: The ongoing American obsession with the Holocaust has had a profound effect on the production and reception of Holocaust films in the United States. This article addresses some of the American reviews—several by Jewish Americans—of the 2008 British film The Reader that are critical of the ambiguous characterization of former SS guard Hanna Schmitz, the film's depictions of sexuality, and the absence of images of Holocaust violence. The author offers an alternative reading that provides some historical context and focuses more on protagonist Michael Berg, the theme of Germany's struggle to come to terms with its murderous past, and the conflict between law and morality in post-war Germany.

Women in the "Grey Zone"? Ambiguity, Complicity and Rape Culture

Women in the "Grey Zone"? Ambiguity, Complicity and Rape Culture

Screening Women’s Complicity in the Holocaust: The Problems of Judgement and Representation

This essay analyses the representation of female perpetrators in Holocaust fiction films, particularly in relation to the persecution of prisoners in the Nazi camps. The screening of women in general, and female perpetrators in particular, is shown to be problematic due to their frequent marginalisation and the gendered, voyeuristic ways in which women’s bodies are often objectified in Holocaust films. While the actions of female perpetrators and their depiction in films pose acute problems of judgement and representation that need to be acknowledged, it is argued that films have the potential to effectively explore the issue of women’s complicity in the Holocaust.

Expertise, Criticism and Holocaust Memory in Cinema

This essay offers a critical examination of two recent Holocaust films that exemplify contrasting approaches to Holocaust representation: Peter Forgacs’s 1997 The maelstrom: A family chronicle and Quentin tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious basterds. One film is historical; the other translates history to figurative exaggeration. The essay explores how The maelstrom positions viewers within the constructed subjunctive spaces of the film, while Inglourious basterds positions viewers as spectators of history as comic book. Looking at these films together illuminates competing rhetorical claims to expertise in film production and reception, and, in the context of Holocaust memory, the levels of expertise required of viewing audiences. Moreover, the analysis reveals that rhetorical aporia no longer dominates inventional possibilities for cinematic memory construction of the Holocaust.

Testing the Limits of the Middlebrow: The Holocaust for the Masses

This essay explores how analyzing popular Holocaust films as a representation of Middlebrow cultural production changes conventional assessments of each. Unlike those writers who have suffered the opprobrium of too much accessibility, of being relegated to Middlebrow marginalization from canonical cultural status, Holocaust writers struggle to find the language and forms through which to bear witness to their experiences, in short, to achieve accessibility. In turn, just as popular Holocaust films defy the promises of escapist fantasy, so they demonstrate how Middlebrow culture can be seen as questioning and revising traditional forms of realism and modernist experiment.

Kicz w kinie holokaustowym

The text deals with popular cinema that touches upon the subject matter of the Holocaust and the kitsch esthetics which is either intentionally or unintentionally often adopted in such films. The main questions to which the author seeks the answer is: why do we need kitsch to create stories about the Holocaust? The author defines the term Holocaust film and then suggests a typology of Holocaust films with respect to cultural references and narrative archetypes of stories which are often used in such films. Different types of Holocaust films are presented: Christian kitsch, Zionist kitsch, pathos kitsch and magic ending kitsch. The kitsch is treated here not as a critical category but as an esthetics having its own power and positive meaning. Nevertheless, the text refers to the ongoing debate about the subject matter of kitsch its one-sided perception, on the one hand, as esthetics destroying art and sensitivity, and on the other, as a necessary and creative element of culture.

After Postmemory: Holocaust Cinema and the Third Generation

This essay argues that some recent Holocaust films introduce a new attitude towards memory that moves beyond the notion of postmemory while remaining committed to the project of remembering the past and creating an ethical response. The films by Marceline Loridan-Ivens and Robert Thalheim focus on future generations and their ability to relate to the Holocaust in an ethical way that avoids the problems of traumatization and commodification that mark earlier Holocaust film and commercial cinema, respectively.

Holocaust and Genocide Cinema: Crossing Disciplinary, Genre, and Geographical Borders: Editor's Introduction

Holocaust and Genocide Cinema:Crossing Disciplinary, Genre, and Geographical Borders: Editor's Introduction Lawrence Baron (bio) Inundated by a spate of new Holocaust movies released at the end of 2008, New York Times writer A. O. Scott cleverly titled his column "Never Forget. You're Reminded."1 Despite predictions that media overexposure to the Holocaust eventually will dampen public interest in the subject or reduce its disturbing horrors to comfortable clichés,2 filmmakers continue to gravitate to stories about how Gentiles and Jews responded to the Third Reich's persecution and attempted liquidation of European Jewry before and during World War Two and about how the surviving bystanders, perpetrators, resisters, and victims of this onslaught and their children have coped with the ethical, political, and psychological repercussions of the event since 1945. Over the past decade, nearly 190 feature films employing the Holocaust as their primary or secondary plotline were produced. While constituting thirty fewer Holocaust movies than released in the 1990s, this corpus of works demonstrates the fascination that the "Final Solution" still holds for audiences and directors more than sixty years after it occurred.3 [End Page 1] Beyond the sheer quantity of such movies, many of them have garnered critical and popular acclaim on global scale. Consider the diversity of countries of production, genres, and themes of the following admittedly idiosyncratic list of one outstanding Holocaust film from each of the last ten years: Divided We Fall, directed by Jan Hrebejk (Czech Republic: 2000). An infertile couple encounter humorous and terrifying situations sheltering a Jewish man in their home under the nose of their collaborationist landlord. Oscar Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and winner of fifteen international film awards. Nowhere in Africa, directed by Caroline Link (Germany: 2001). A German Jewish family finds refuge from Nazi persecution in Kenya where they are temporarily interned as enemy aliens by the British. Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film and of seventeen other international film awards. The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski (France, Germany, Poland, United Kingdom: 2002). A renowned Jewish pianist survives the Warsaw Ghetto and hides on the Aryan side of the city with the aid of Polish friends and the spiritual sustenance he derives from music. Winner of three major Oscars, the Golden Palm from the Cannes Film Festival, and over forty other international film awards. Facing Windows, directed by Ferzan Ozpetek (Italy, Portugal, Turkey, United Kingdom: 2003). An unhappily married woman gains perspective on a contemplated affair with an attractive neighbor through her conversations with an elderly Holocaust survivor racked with guilt for deciding to warn the Jewish community about an impending round-up before he told his gay lover. Winner of nineteen international film awards. The Ninth Day, directed by Volker Schlöndorff (Czech Republic, Germany, Luxembourg: 2004). The SS releases a priest from Dachau and promises him permanent freedom if he can convince the Bishop of Luxembourg to cease criticizing Nazi policies. Otherwise, he will be sent back, his family will be arrested, and the other interned clerics from Luxembourg will be executed. Winner of five international film awards. Fateless, directed by Lajos Kostai (Hungary, Germany, United Kingdom: 2005). A teenage boy interned in German concentration and labor camps recalls both his suffering at the hands of his oppressors and the support he received from fellow inmates. Winner of two international film awards. Black Book, directed by Paul Verhoeven (Belgium, Germany, Netherlands: 2006). A Jewish woman whose family was betrayed and murdered while trying [End Page 2] to escape Holland joins the Dutch Resistance and infiltrates the local Gestapo by seducing its commanding officer. Winner of eleven international film awards. The Counterfeiters, directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (Austria, Germany: 2007). The SS recruits a Jewish counterfeiter to lead a team of other concentration camp inmates involved in a project to forge the British pound and American dollar. Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and three other international film awards. The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry (Germany, United States: 2008). An adolescent boy and an older German woman strike up an unlikely affair. As a law student years later, he subsequently attends her trial for serving as a guard at Auschwitz...

Gathering opinion and initiating debate: the success of the Delphi Method in purely qualitative research

Certain evaluation criteria have emerged frequently from the published literature on Holocaust film. This suggested that it might have been possible to establish a list of such criteria, to provide a framework for the evaluation of Holocaust films. A Delphi survey of United Kingdom Holocaust Studies experts was used to investigate this possibility. The survey elicited in-depth opinions from the experts, which the researcher analysed in order to conclude that evaluating the success of a Holocaust film is dependent upon the subjective interpretation of the individual viewer. This article concentrates upon the methodology used in this study, examining the suitability of the Delphi Method as a tool for rich qualitative research.

Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: Key Essays, Stuart Liebman, ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), xi + 253 pp. + 20 halftones, cloth $99.00, pbk. $30.00.

Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: Key Essays, edited (and, in part, translated) by Stuart Liebman, is an important collection that will prove indispensable to scholars and students of Lanzmann's monumental film. More broadly, it will appeal to anyone interested in Holocaust cinema and this seminal moment in its history—a film that Liebman terms “a cultural achievement of the greatest magnitude” (p. 4). In his introduction, Liebman points out the filmmaker's groundbreaking accomplishment in premiering Shoah in 1985, when few eyewitness accounts had reached broad audiences and videotaping projects were in their infancy. While there had been significant films on the Holocaust, none, according to Liebman, “had faced the awful facts of the Jewish genocide head on, without political distortion or mystification” (p. 6). Indeed, Lanzmann's signal achievement was his refusal to transform, instrumentalize, mythologize, or otherwise mitigate the horrors on which he focused. Nor did he wish to give a causal explanation or even memorialize in traditional terms. Rather, by insisting on the “moral proximity of the Shoah”—on its immediacy—Lanzmann made the past present for viewers “without adulteration, and with its ironies and horrors intact in all their grisly complexity” (p. 9). This immediacy is effected through the use of testimonial fragments that Lanzmann describes as constituting “an incarnation, a resurrection” (quoted on p. 13); as viewers of the film well know, the filmmaker concentrates on the mechanics of mass murder without any recourse to archival film clips, whose truth value he suspected. Liebman notes that “a firm principle thus anchors Lanzmann's film: mimesis, the pictorial reproduction of the awful circumstances in which the Jews met death, is not essential for—indeed, is a hindrance to—anamnesis, the calling to mind of the process of their destruction” (p. 14). Such anamnesis (really a different type of memorialization, perhaps without sentimentality) is assisted by Lanzmann's other innovation: the staged cinematic return of principal witnesses to the landscapes of their suffering. While by now this has become a common trope in Holocaust film (and other media), it was not as common in 1985. Altogether, Liebman's incisive introduction focuses on the enduring and disarming immediacy of Lanzmann's film and its argument against sense-making abstractions of the Holocaust, including those embodied in the use of the name itself. In creating a work of imposing length and in his refusal to present an all-encompassing narrative of the Shoah, in projecting disjunctures and pauses and long silences, Lanzmann “imposes an uncommon burden on the spectators of Shoah, one that requires commitment, sharpened attention, and reflection” (p. 17).

Holocaust Film before the Holocaust: DEFA, Antifascism and the Camps

The period prior to the 1970s has frequently been portrayed internationally as one of public disavowal of the Jewish catastrophe politically and cinematically and as one in which there was a dearth of filmic representations of the Holocaust. In addition to the Hollywood productions The Diary of Anne Frank (1960), Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1965), one often spoke of just a few East and West European films emerging within a political and cultural landscape that was viewed by many as unable or unwilling to address the subject. This article takes issue with these assumptions by focusing on feature films made by DEFA between 1946 and 1963 in East Berlin’s Soviet Zone and in East Germany which had as their subject matter the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich.

Frames of evil: the Holocaust as horror in American film

American filmmakers appropriate the look of horror in Holocaust films and often use Nazis and Holocaust imagery to explain evil in the world, say authors Caroline J. S. Picart and David A. Frank. In Frames of Evil: Holocaust as Horror in American Film, Picart and Frank challenge this classic horror frame - the narrative and visual borders used to demarcate monsters and the monstrous. After examining the way in which directors and producers of the most influential American Holocaust movies default to this Gothic frame, they propose that multiple frames are needed to account for evil and genocide. Using Schindler's List, The Silence of the Lambs, and Apt Pupil as case studies, the authors provide substantive and critical analyses of these films that transcend the classic horror interpretation. For example, Schindler's List, say Picart and Frank, has the appearance of a historical docudrama but actually employs the visual rhetoric and narrative devices of the Hollywood horror film. authors argue that evil has a face: Nazism, which is configured as quintessentially innate and supernaturally crafty. Frames of Evil, which is augmented by thirty-six film and publicity stills, also explores the commercial exploitation of suffering in film and offers constructive ways of critically evaluating this exploitation. authors suggest that audiences will recognize their participation in much larger narrative formulas that place a premium on monstrosity and elide the role of modernity in depriving millions of their lives and dignity, often framing the suffering of others in a manner that allows for merely documentary enjoyment.

Preface

Preface Helga Kraft (bio) and Maggie McCarthy (bio) As Volume 23 goes to press, we're happy to report that the Women in German Yearbook continues to adapt to the electronic age. In recent years we transitioned to paperless editing, and as of 2008 the Yearbook's visibility will increase dramatically when it becomes part of Project Muse. Available online and in their entirety, our essays will be in the company of many other excellent journals of the humanities, arts and social sciences. Please alert your libraries and encourage them to subscribe. While the current volume also reflects advances in scholarship on gender, film and media studies, and Germanic studies, it begins with the voice of Esther Dischereit, last year's invited speaker at the Women in German Annual Conference at Sunbird, Utah. Lest we start feeling too smug about our progress on the electronic front, Dischereit keeps us grounded in the animism of everyday objects, like a piece of bread in a toaster, in a highly industrialized world. She also reflects on the complexities of writing from a Jewish identity, whether willingly or of necessity. Our film studies section features other kinds of thorny identities, born of the need to work through larger historical events and cultural anxieties. Cathy Gelbin's "Double Visions: Queer Femininity and Holocaust Film from Ostatni Etap to Aimée & Jaguar" offers a comprehensive overview of lesbian sexuality in Holocaust films, initially employed to underscore Nazi perversion and later to rewrite women's historical role as either victim or resister. Barbara Hales argues in her essay on the femme fatale in film noir that exiled German film directors in Hollywood used the female criminal and double to assuage the existential distress they experienced in the early days of the Weimar Republic. Christina Gerhardt's analysis of Hito Steyerl's film Die leere Mitte (1998) tracks several centuries of shifting historical boundaries around Potsdamer Platz and their implications for Germany's more liminal identities. Other kinds of concrete historical circumstances impacting women's lives and psyches emerge in a range of essays spanning the 18th to the 20th [End Page ix] centuries. Laurie Johnson's "The Romantic and Modern Practice of Animal Magnetism: Friedrich Schlegel's Protocols of the Magnetic Treatment of Countess Lesniowska" addresses Schlegel's investment in the psychiatric practice of "animal magnetism," its enactment on one woman's body, and its larger implications for philosophy and religion. Ritchie Robertson's essay on 19th-century Austrian writer Caroline Pichler argues that her conflicted notions of women's gender identity vis-à-vis both family and nation provide an important backdrop to her novel The Swedes in Prague. Twentieth-century women's expanded economic, intellectual, and political possibilities brought their own assorted consequences, evident in several essays that take journalism, political activism, and novels as their starting point. Julia Karolle-Berg's essay "Creating a Maidservant Community through Newspapers: The Berliner Dienstboten-Zeitung, 1898–1900" traces a newspaper editor's efforts to foster professional consciousness and community among female domestic employees not otherwise professionally organized. German-Jewish pacifist writer Clementine Krämer, the subject of an essay by Elizabeth Loentz, used both journalistic and literary outlets to promote her own brand of anti-war activism in the early twentieth century, while simultaneously negotiating her identity as a German/Jewish/feminist/pacifist. In a more personal realm, New Women struggled with the psychic downside of expanded choices, like the independent but melancholic heroines of novels by Franziska zu Reventlow and Gabriele Reuter that Lisabeth Hock an-alyzes, who nonetheless use their temperament to expand the creative possibilities associated with (single) motherhood. In a more conceptual rendition of emancipated lives, Lou Andreas-Salomé's novel Fenitschka, the subject of Laura Deiulio's essay, traces one academic woman's movement through the "forward" and "backward" spaces of Paris and St. Petersburg respectively, with the latter, paradoxically, offering a neue Frau more possibilities. Finally, Dagmar Lorenz's essay "Transatlantic Perspectives on Men, Women, and Other Primates: The Ape Motif in Kafka, Canetti, and Cooper's and Jackson's King Kong Films" expands our gendered frame to include "interspecies" concerns and the status of relations between humans and...

Rethinking Genre Theory

Rethinking Genre Theory Film Genre: and Beyond, by Barry Langford, Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Barry Langford correctly contends that while has become an increasingly contested concept in scholarship, the film continues to dominate much of Hollywood's annual output. To add to his point, at the time of this review, the top-grossing films in the United States include two horror films, a sports film, an action/adventure film, a historical drama, two teen films- one a musical and another a college comedy-and, finally, an animated children's film. While genre theory has traditionally focused on the formation of such Classical categories as the Western, the gangster, the romantic comedy, the horror, and the combat film, the need for a redefined understanding of genre-one which accounts for the post-Classical emergence of the notoriously difficult to define science-fiction and blockbuster action that make up the bulk of multiplex fare every summer- is more necessary than ever. Langford's Film Genre successfully addresses this growing need by working through the question of how the academic and industrial concept of genre emerges, and convincingly promoting an evolutionary model that focuses on genre formation as a process rather than as constant and internally consistent. Instead of decrying the post-Classical impulse toward genre blending and bending as a threat to traditional notions of genre theory, Langford effectively demonstrates that these impulses have been a key feature of genre since the beginning of narrative film. Langford carefully balances his critique of the constantly evolving generic categories between two audiences. On one hand, he pitches his discussion toward students who might be coming to an understanding of genre for the first time, and on the other, he successfully navigates the various and sometimes competing assertions of genre scholars. More specifically, Film Genre extends and revises the expert's sense of genre by pointing to the prescient need to reformulate rigid conceptions of genre films as being only systematic, routinized, and internally consistent productions intended for mass audiences. Langford divides his book into three major sections. First, he traces the emergence of four Classical genres-the Western, the musical, the war/combat film, and the gangster film-and provides significant examples of how scholarship and the industry have shaped the ways in which audiences have come to understand the key signifiers of each. The second section focuses on what he refers to as transition genres of the horror and science-fiction film, clarifying how each contributes to the destabilization of the categories described in the first section. Finally, the third section explores contemporary post-Classical genres like noir, the action blockbuster, and other complex forms like documentary, the Holocaust film, and pornography in order to demonstrate how the mutability of generic form has been a constant and consistent feature of narrative film. Each chapter, moreover, includes a discussion that goes beyond Hollywood to explore how other national cinemas have treated the specific genres under consideration. Lastly, each chapter provides a case-study of a specific analyzed within the matrix of scholarly approaches employed by the author throughout the book, which makes Film Genre especially useful for students. Langford's approach to Film Genre allows him to successfully achieve the important goals of extending the pioneering work of genre theorists like Thomas Schatz, Rick Altman, and Steve Neale, and providing an accessible explanation of Hollywood's historical relationship with the genre film. Langford's flexible definition of genre depends heavily on reinvestigating the significance of melodrama to narrative film. Identifying what he refers to as the melodramatic modalities of genres, Langford's theory helps to clarify why genre films often fail to fully satisfy the rules of their form. …

Staging Memory and Trauma in French and Italian Holocaust Film

Reading Memory in French Documentary and Italian Fiction Film The lapses of trauma are conjoined with tendency compulsively to repeat, relive, be possessed by, or act out traumatic scenes of past ... In this sense, what is denied or repressed in a lapse of does not disappear; it returns in a transformed, at times disfigured and disguised manner. (10) --Dominick LaCapra History and Memory after Auschwitz This essay is about enactment of and trauma in !our films on Holocaust, two French documentaries--Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1984)--and two Italian fiction films--Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful (1997) and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1973). A comparison between French and Italian Holocaust cinema is not an obvious one in that filmmakers from both countries have approached subject in quite disparate fashions. In such films as Shoah, Night and Fog, The Sorrow and Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969), Weapons of Spirit (Pierre Sauvage, 1988) and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophuls, 1988), France is well-known for its documentary treatment of Shoah, representing at times banal or bureaucratic side of evil. (1) Italian directors, however, have produced various fiction films centered on grey areas of survival. This is case of Kapo (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1959), Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmuller, 1976), The Night Porter and The Damned (Luchino Visconti, 1969), in which survival is often connected with sexual deviance. (2) Despite their apparent differences, both genres deal profoundly with staging trauma and memory; that is, representing protagonists who relive past event, thereby accentuating impossible gap between narrative present and past. In History and Memory after Auschwitz Dominick LaCapra discusses sites--Pierre Nora's well known lieux de memoire--in terms of their connection to trauma. LaCapra contends that sites are usually also trauma sites, and degree to which trauma affects individual is marked by the extent to which has not been effective in coming to terms with [trauma], notably through modes of mourning (10). Mourning, however, came with difficulty, as post-war European society appeared to obtain a certain mask of normality. The economic booms all over Europe were of course one crucial factor in these delayed reactions to Holocaust experiences. Many survivors, it seemed, were not ready to enter into trying course of remembering, reliving and commemorating their pasts. Memory came later, and, as argued by Henry Rousso in The Haunting Past: History, Memory and Justice in Contemporary France, we are now living in an age of memory as relationship with painful past has been repeatedly fore-grounded in survivor's accounts, fictional films and novels, historical works, and so on. The basic premise of this article is that, in these four films, remembering Holocaust recalls original trauma, as wound is by no means healed. Trauma does not belong exclusively to past, and these films make explicit how trauma perpetually re-represents itself in present. Dori Laub in Bearing Witness, or Vicissitudes of Listening discusses incomplete nature of traumatic response. She argues that, as event never came to completion, survivors perpetually live with truncated versions of their past, and for survivors, trauma continues into present and is current in every respect (69). Traumatic response is also connected to how several characters or interviewees in these films assess their own survival in that many, both historical (Shoah) and fictional (Life is Beautiful and The Night Porter), have yet to come to terms with machinations of their continued existence. Cathy Caruth points out a critical parallel between trauma and survival in introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory. …

Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (review)

Reviewed by: Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema Deborah Carmichael Lawrence Baron . Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema. Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Paperback, 320 pages; $29.95. "An Important New Perspective on the Holocaust in Film" Some authors provide sound scholarship, others supply detailed analysis, but few combine these accomplishments with prose that bridges the gap from the academic to the general reader. Historian Lawrence Baron has done just that while dealing with the often-controversial area of cinematic representations of the Holocaust. Because World War II genocide remains so dark a subject, it is easiest to see the era in high contrast black and white. This author points to the complexities of history, filmmaking, and cultural perceptions by contextualizing his work within classic films of the Shoah (from 1945-1979) while identifying trends and shifts in how stories of the Holocaust are now brought to the screen in the twenty-first century. Few previous works study more than the obvious contemporary movies Schindler's List (1993) or Life is Beautiful (1997). This author looks at a wide range of films, including X-Men as "Holocaust pop metaphor," indicating that the shadow of past atrocities pervades our culture. Baron meticulously developed a database of films to discern changes in filmic Holocaust narratives. His interest is in storytelling; to include documentaries would lengthen the book and discourage an audience outside the scholarly realm. Journal subscribers will recall "Holocaust Iconography in American Feature Films About Neo-Nazis," Lawrence Baron's contribution to Film & History 32.2, the 2002 thematic issue of "The Holocaust on Film." Although Baron grounds his work in critical perspectives, primarily genre studies and the famous work of Robert Rosenstone, the text is designed to be readable for undergraduates as well as more senior scholars. Chapter notes provide extensive references to critical sources as well as contemporary reviews and responses to each film. A detailed bibliography and filmography organized into useful categories concludes this work. A particularly welcome feature is a reference section for Internet resources, the first research tool many college students turn to for information. The organization of the text is also classroom friendly. After establishing the tradition of Holocaust films in such expected titles as The Diary of Ann Frank (1959) or the mini-series, Holocaust (1978), the chapters that follow introduce the intersection of genre conventions with Holocaust themes, examining four or five films in depth in each chapter. Although some might quarrel with genre as a critical lens, this seems to be particularly appropriate when exploring connections between the historical past and the images of that past that reach the movie screen. These recognized cultural codes immediately evoke responses and provide information for the viewer (and reader). In addition to the expected categories such as biopic or ill-fated lovers, Baron provides an insightful analysis of Holocaust-themed films produced for children and the possibly unsettling use of comedy for such a sobering topic. Another chapter identifies "Neo-Nazis as Holocaust Ghosts" and also examines films dealing with the children of survivors; these topics link the familiar treatment of the Holocaust period with the lingering effects of historical horrors on current issues. Throughout the text, Baron inserts tables quantifying his extensive research and identifying films within, for example, decades or national cinemas that share common themes. His work also indicates the quantity of multinational film productions on the Holocaust that have emerged, reminding the reader that this is a subject of history and memory that extends across national boundaries and generations. While not diminishing the Jewish tragedy of the Final Solution, the author includes a discussion of others who were persecuted as dangerous or deviant or both—gypsies, the mentally retarded, and homosexuals. Supported by his extensive research and precise explication, Baron demonstrates that the relationship between Holocaust studies and cinematic interpretations of this history are far more multifaceted than many previous works have acknowledged. He responds to critics who believe only documentary film should [End Page 59] be allowed to speak of the Shoah, or to those who feel no representation can be accurate, by developing a measured, carefully constructed...

Not in Kansas Anymore: Holocaust Films for Children

As the Holocaust has been incorporated into the curricula of most American schools, the demand for age-appropriate stories and the increasing leniency of the movie ratings system have stimulated the production of feature films depicting Jewish youngsters facing persecution and genocide. This article analyzes how the films >A Friendship in Vienna, The Island on Bird Street, and The Devil's Arithmetic employ the narrative strategies of the children's novels on which they are based to convey positive messages while portraying the horrific plight of European Jewry under German rule.

Public memory and active recall in two holocaust films: Partisans of Vilna (1986) and come and see (1985)

(2002). Public memory and active recall in two holocaust films: Partisans of Vilna (1986) and come and see (1985). Immigrants & Minorities: Vol. 21, Representing the Holocaust, pp. 89-107.