Schindler's List Research Articles

The Protection of Human Rights in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List: A Sociological Perspective

This research aims to describe how the depiction of human rights protection by Oskar Schindler is based on the movie Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg. This research aims to answer several questions that formulate the problem, namely the indicators of human rights protection, the depiction of human rights protection, and the director's reason for highlighting human rights protection in the movie Schindler's List. Later, this research will provide answers regarding the protection of human rights that occur through the film that has been determined as the object of research. This type of research is a literature study. Researchers used the document analysis method to collect data and used copy-and-paste and image-capturing techniques. The findings of this study show that there are five indicators of human rights protection, namely: (1) Employee Recruitment, (2) Making New Policies, (3) Buying the Jews, (4) Defending His Workers, (5) Transferring the Jews into Brünnlitz. The protection of human rights is depicted through characterization, setting, event, and style. As an American-Jewish, Spielberg strives to convince the audiences not to forget the history of the Holocaust.

No Crips Allowed: Magical Negroes, Black Superheroes, And the Hyper-Abled Black Male Body In Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther

No Crips Allowed:Magical Negroes, Black Superheroes, And the Hyper-Abled Black Male Body In Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther Charles I. Nero (bio) Initially, it might seem odd to discuss shared racial tropes in Amistad and Black Panther. Not only were the movies created over two decades apart, the films belong to entirely different cinematic genres. Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997) is a historical period drama that is based on the true story of an armed insurrection aboard a 19th century slave ship. Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018) is a fantasy film that focuses on a futuristic advanced mythical kingdom in Africa that produces superheroes. Nevertheless, these films are connected by their subject matter and a recurring strategy. At their cores, both films emphasize Black resistance to the white supremacy that trans-Atlantic slavery and European imperialism necessitated. Both films deploy as strategy the hyper-abled Black male body as a tool for resisting white supremacy and colonialism. I call attention to the hyper-abled Black male body in these two films specifically to focus on the Black disability that trans-Atlantic slavery produced. I am writing along the lines of Nirmala Erevelles brilliant reading of Hortense Spillers's now-classic essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," in which producing and maintaining slavery required the impairment of Black bodies. The racialization of slavery meant that Blackness was always impaired, or, as Erevelles concludes, it was "at the historical moment when one class of human beings was transformed into cargo to be transported to the New World that Black bodies become disabled and disabled bodies become black."1 On the one hand, Amistad reflects upon the trans-Atlantic slave experience, while Black Panther showcases a Black nation that was spared this terrible ordeal; yet, both create magical worlds in which Black people are hyper-abled. Subsequently, in this essay, I examine the limits of the hyper-abled Black body as a tool of resistance; I also raise the question of whether such a dependence upon a specific gendered type--hyper-abled masculinity--reproduces a logic of white supremacy that equates Blackness with physicality, yet simultaneously denies Black intellect, therefore refuting political agency, or the rights of citizenship. [End Page 52] Amistad Prior the film's debut in 1997, Steven Spielberg and the film's producer, African American dancer and actress Debbie Allen, held blockbuster aspirations for Amistad. Both believed that Amistad could build upon the success of Schindler's List, Spielberg's historical period blockbuster from 1993. The commercial and critical success of Schindler's List had cemented Spielberg's status as a "serious filmmaker," though Spielberg was long credited with developing films that defined Hollywood filmmaking during the 1970s-1990s: namely, Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Poltergeist (1982), the franchises that stemmed from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Jurassic Park (1993). Despite the success of these previous films, Amistad was not the powerhouse that Spielberg and Allen had imagined. Instead, Amistad barely recouped its investment and it failed among critics, arguably because the film confused audiences. A possible source of this confusion was because of the decision to transform a genuine story of resistance into an "interracial buddy film," a subgenre that became popular during the Civil Rights Movement and subsequently expanded to include Hollywood cop film franchises, such as Lethal Weapon (beginning in 1987), Beverly Hills Cop (beginning in 1984),48 Hours (beginning in 1982), Independence Day (1996) and Men In Black (beginning in 1997). These films celebrate the developing bonds between Black and white men who overcome their racial differences and learn to work together to solve a crime, prevent corruption, or even save the planet from alien invasion. At stake in these movies are the interracial relationships between the crime-fighting duos; certainly, the buffed bodies of the captured Africans suggested this possibility. The fitness of the Beninese actor Djimon Hounsou, who played Cinque, the leader of the insurrection, was especially notable. Previously known as a fashion model, Hounsou's first cinematic appearance was as "eye candy" in the pop star Janet Jackson's video "Love...

American Public Memory and The Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations by Lisa A. Costello

Reviewed by: American Public Memory and The Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations by Lisa A. Costello Jennifer Rich (bio) American Public Memory and The Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations. By Lisa A. Costello. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. x + 219 pp. Lisa Costello considers what and how society remembers about the Holocaust as we move further into a post-survivor era. As a rhetorician, Costello looks to fill a gap in scholarship that examines "how gender is performed in public memory processes to reengage, shift, or 'queer' audience orientations" (2). To this end, each chapter in this volume examines a "public memory artifact" (13). Public memory includes embodied knowledge, texts, videos, films, and museums "that perform memory, subvert binary gender constructions, and reorient audiences to connect" with the memory in question (7). Costello is especially interested in public memory created and shared by survivors and their families. This important monograph encourages readers to consider the relationship between gender, performance, and rhetoric in previously unexplored ways. The introduction is centered in the field of linguistics, and, at times, is steeped in theoretical language that may present challenges to readers in other disciplines. Chapters are connected through rhetorical concepts, most notably the idea of kairos, "a force of time that is sometimes in opposition to chronos (as chronological time) because it exerts pressure at unexpected moments" (7). Kairos, Costello explains, "is catalyzed by the movements between 'discursive moment(s)' (such as the discursive moment that a film is released and discussed), when a rhetor addresses the reader or listener" (7). In simple terms, kairos is an interaction between the creator and the listener, viewer, or reader, intended to jolt the ones taking in the creation out of their present space and into a different one. These rhetorical concepts are deployed throughout the volume, but each chapter can stand alone and is framed both within the field of rhetoric and outside of it. The first two chapters of the volume deal with film, including documentary, Hollywood movies, and recorded survivor testimony. In Chapter One, "Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and the Opening of Testimony Archives," and Chapter Two, "Schindler's List and its 'After-Affect,'" Costello carefully considers not only these two films, but also previously unexplored outtakes from Lanzmann's epic Hungarian film Son of Saul and recorded survivor testimony residing in the University of Southern California Shoah Oral History Archive. Costello asks if these visual representations of public memory will "remain simply chronos, a point on a timeline, or will it become kairos, that force that can open dialogic witness" (46). With this question, she suggests that they are powerful [End Page 292] enough to engage the viewers in a rupture in time, that viewers will respond emotionally and consider how to take the film into their own lived experiences. In this way, embodied memory lives within more individuals. Costello then shifts to written texts as forms of public memory and concentrates her argument around gender. Chapter Three examines two auto/biographies written by women. Ruth Kluger and Ruth Levy were survivors; Anne Levy is Ruth Levy's daughter. This chapter argues that women survivors delayed sharing their lived experiences because, historically, "women simply do not tell important stories – men do" (88). Costello does not summarize the texts written by these women but examines them, again, through the rhetorical lens of kairos. She argues that the authors wrote in response to the Holocaust, to bear witness, but, more urgently, to "warn humanity" (94). In this warning, that history was not inevitable and can repeat, Costello sees the written narrative as engaging readers across time and space. Costello's strongest chapter examines two films by and about the descendants of Holocaust survivors: the 2012 Israeli documentary Numbered, and a short 2009 Australian video called Dancing in Auschwitz. Both films are controversial in different ways. Numbered documents Israeli teens who have tattooed their grandparents' numbers from Auschwitz on their own bodies. Dancing in Auschwitz is a music video, of sorts, where a Holocaust survivor and his descendants literally dance at Auschwitz and in other sites of terror to the disco song "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor. Rather than a focus on an analysis...

Jeffrey Shandler. Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. ix + 232 pp.

Reviewed by: Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors' Stories and New Media Practices by Jeffrey Shandler Oren Baruch Stier Jeffrey Shandler. Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors' Stories and New Media Practices. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. ix + 232 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001120 Jeffrey Shandler's latest book is based on years of online access to the video testimonies collected by the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive (VHA). The VHA, he notes, arose and developed at a critical temporal juncture in both Holocaust memory and technological dissemination, "as it straddles the temporal boundary marked by the loss of living witnesses to the Holocaust, the VHA also bestrides the transition from the 'video age' to the 'digital age'" (3–4). Shandler asks: What are the implications and impacts of the mix of memory practices employed in and by these testimonies, as well as the archive that houses them? Preceded by a chapter that contextualizes the archive historically, memorially, and technologically, the remainder of this book presents a series of case studies grouped formally according to three categories derived from "Aristotle's Poetics—mythos, lexis, and opsis…. Situat[ing] VHA interviews within the extensive history of performed narrative works, rather than confining them to a particular genre (such as oral history or wartime memoir) or treating them as exceptional phenomena" (5). [End Page 224] The first of these groupings addresses the nature of video-recorded narrative, typically presented by various archiving projects as possessing "an unrivaled immediacy and authority" (43). But, in actuality, the narratives are highly contextual, dependent on social, structural, and institutional frameworks. Even the very nomenclature employed can affect how these narratives are understood: eyewitnesses offering their accounts are referred to as "survivors, which connotes tenacity" (46). Furthermore, "because these narratives are esteemed as providing information to historians, moral guidance to the young, and retorts to Holocaust deniers, survivor videos are often referred to as 'testimonies,' invoking this term's implication of bearing witness in a legal proceeding or making a religious avowal" (47). Of particular interest to Shandler in this chapter are "the VHA recordings in which survivors' life histories are informed by other narratives" (49), including other versions of their own story, because the "tales retold" reflect and inform the very act and craft of storytelling. Shandler focuses on two groups of testimonies that respond to other narratives: accounts that discuss the film Schindler's List (itself embedded in the origin story of the VHA, since the VHA emerged from director Steven Spielberg's discussion with Holocaust survivors in the course of making his award-winning movie) and interviews with celebrity survivors. The second set of case studies considers the complexities of language in the interviews. The VHA, like most collections of a similar nature, works on a monolingual model. Subjects chose which language to speak, which "constrained most survivors' full range of linguistic resources" (90). Shandler, an expert on Yiddish language, literature, and culture, focuses in this chapter on ways Yiddish is engaged in the VHA interviews; 633 of them were conducted fully or partially in the language (92), a choice of the interviewees that reveals the multivalency of Yiddish as well as their own thoughts concerning language and memory and the relationships between the two. In terms of the narration of the past, Shandler examines recordings in Yiddish and English in order to explore the practice of code switching and what it may indicate. He also looks at the significance of Yiddish for survivors who mention it in the course of their testimonies, a "limited, inconstant presence … [that] is itself revealing" (113). Finally, Shandler discusses cases in which Yiddish texts are performed in the interviews: episodes, typically near the end of their testimonies, in which survivors assert a greater degree of agency—moments that accentuate their very survival. Yiddish is not only symbolic in these cases, but it is also quite literally preserved "as a resource for the future" (124). The third and final group of case studies addresses optics. In a chapter titled "Spectacle: Seeing as Believing," Shandler analyzes the uniquely visual components of these interviews, including protocols for videographers and, as others have noted, the domestic setting...

On Shandler's Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age

On Shandler's Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age Shaina Hammerman Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors' Stories and New Media Practices. By Jeffrey Shandler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 232 pp., ISBN 1503602893. US $25. Every semester, I ask my students to think back to the first time they learned about the Holocaust and how that knowledge was imparted to them. The results of this survey are varied but expected: Anne Frank's diary, Elie Wiesel's Night, family stories, museum visits, Schindler's List (1993). My lesson to students is that although we can only approach the past in mediated ways, any study of the Holocaust comes with a remarkably diverse and consistently revitalizing set of sources for our analysis. It is because of Jeffrey Shandler's body of work—stemming all the way back to his (once controversial) first book, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust—that I have the language to teach about Holocaust beyond history and memory and toward the various tensions produced by its mediation.1 Since his first book, Shandler has become the undisputed expert in assembling some of the most compelling materials on how American Jews mediate their identities through emerging technologies. In his newest monograph, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age, he revisits an old topic—survivor testimony—and offers fresh insight into how these testimonies have been preserved, organized, and disseminated. Focusing on the newly digitized Visual History Archive (VHA), the central product of the Shoah Foundation (established by Steven Spielberg in 1994), [End Page 117] Shandler questions the impulses behind the preservation of survivor testimonies, how and why survivor video came to be the authoritative document for Holocaust history, and the complex ways individuals' stories merge with their mediation. The book takes on the tensions between the limits of video technology in the 1990s (tapes had to be changed after 30 minutes of recording, interrupting the story's "natural" flow) and the seemingly limitless, customizable search capacity of digitized information (a vast index of terms allows searching by language, geography, and "experiential" content such as the multiple, discrete categories of Holocaust childbearing). Shandler demonstrates how survivors shaped dramatizations of the Shoah, most famously in Schindler's List. More fascinating still is his exploration of how popular retellings like Schindler's List in turn shaped survivor narratives. For example, many testimonies refer to the film, either confirming or challenging its veracity or offering the nonsurvivor interviewer (and presumed viewer) with a useful reference point for their stories. As more accounts of the Shoah emerge—graphic novels, performances, exhibitions, films, second-generation memoirs—these new accounts do more than respond to testimony. They produce new testimony. As Shandler writes, "interviewees' discussions of Schindler's List complicate the notion that these [videotaped testimonies] offer straightforward presentations of survivors' recalled experience" (63). Following his detailed description of the VHA, one that places the archive in its historical and contemporary contexts, Shandler complicates any simple reading of the archive through three discrete lenses: "Narrative," "Language," and "Spectacle." The material he introduces becomes progressively more riveting as the book advances. The section on language explores the linguistic conditions of the interviews. What language do interviewees speak, and in what language do interviewers respond? Under which conditions do interviewees switch languages? What compels survivors to choose a language: because it renders a memory accessible? Because they are speaking to culturally specific details? Because they want as many future viewers as possible to understand them? Shandler contributes broadly to scholarship on the relationship between language and memory. He expands on his previous work about the "post-vernacular" life of Yiddish, demonstrating how Yiddish can serve in survivor testimonies as both signifier and signified.2 He draws our attention to the parallels between Yiddish and Holocaust memory—both widely perceived as [End Page 118] "dying" and in need of preservation. But the parallel stops there. To rescue Yid-dish, Jews and others are obliged to use the language, but to preserve Holocaust memory for future generations, survivors must transmit memories in languages everyone can understand (92). The book's final section unravels some of the visual outcomes of filming survivors, such as when they share photographs...

Schindler's List, Inglourious Basterds, and the Problem of Evil in American Cinema

The relationship between the cinema and history is distorted to sheer absurdity in Inglorious Basterds, a film that forces the viewer to look at these gross distortions of our familiar Holocaust and World War II genre. Within such a deformed space of Holocaust witnessing, the audience is implicated by the reflexivity of the cinematic apparatus in a climactic ending sequence: we look at Nazis looking at Nazis killing, and everybody laughs. The American audience laughs at the absurdity; the Nazis - Hitler and Goebbels among them - laugh at the screen of Nazi brutality; and Frederick Zoller (playing himself) laughs maniacally at the death of allied soldiers and his brutal efficiency. Within two cinemas, the cinema of the American audience, and the Parisian cinema house of Shoshanna, we all have a part to play in the entertainment of death. Inglorious Basterds is a celebration of the cinema, but it is also a disruption of the relationship between the screen and the Holocaust. A close analysis of the closing sequence in which Hitler is cut to pieces by a wave of bullets shows how our incitement to look at the Holocaust and Hitler is fulfilled by an incitement to violence. The Nazi pole of evil that is fixed so strongly in a landmark Hollywood Holocaust film like Schindler’s List is amplified to such an extreme in the Basterds that it casts the entire dynamic of identity/difference and good/evil into doubt. This analysis engages William Connolly’s Identity/Difference, a work of political theory that reveals a troubling tenor in postmodern politics and culture in which finding evil in the other is integral to identity formation. This paper will argue that Inglorious Basterds radically amplifies the good/evil dynamic in such a way that forces viewers into an agonistic reflection of their identity.

Hard Child by Natalie Shapero

Reviewed by: Hard Child by Natalie Shapero Emma Bogdonoff (bio) Natalie Shapero, Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), 96 pp. Natalie Shapero's second collection, Hard Child, is a ferocious book. Darkly funny and incisive, it demands that the reader consider motherhood alongside tragedies both personal and public, alongside war and violence and suicide. In the first of the book's two parts, the child is hypothetical—a list of names, a hope for a daughter rather than a son, a "blip in utero" who can suffer from the mother's traumas. In the second part, the child is born, but still we see her only fleetingly, her existence often made most notable through her absence. To have a daughter, Hard Child suggests, is to live with the specter of her loss. To bring a child into this world requires a reckoning with its hardest realities. Hard Child dives headfirst into the opening poem, where Shapero's speaker rehearses baby names, saying she "made two lists: one if she's born breathing, / one if not. The second list was longer." The collection's title poem, which immediately follows, talks back to the first: So I had two lists of names for a girl, sowhat. The president's allowed tohave two speeches, in case the hostagecomes home in a bag. There's something defiant in this comparison, in its enjambed "so / what." Why, Shapero seems to ask, is it macabre for a mother to consider a worst-case scenario but not for a president to do the same? The dialogue between [End Page 457] the first two poems also sets a precedent: the poems are part of a larger whole even when they leap between seemingly unrelated topics, from the Challenger space shuttle disaster to Schindler's List to x-ray vision to the nerve endings in a turtle's shell. This ability to find significance in the most minute of details is particularly manifest in "Not Horses": What I adore is not horses, with their moderndomestic life span of 25 years. What I adoreis a bug that lives only one day, especially ifit's a terrible day, a day of train derailment orchemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a daywhen no one thinks of anything else, least of allthat bug. Shapero possesses a comedian's sense of timing and tension. The strangeness of the negation "not horses" gives way to the more commonplace phrasing of "what I adore is a bug." But the oddity of this sentiment pushes back against any familiarity or comfort, keeping the reader perpetually off balance. The details of the poem are humorous in their hyper-specificity, but their humor has a sharp edge, perfectly capturing the way our culture fixates on the disaster of a given moment, whether "chemical lake" or "cop . . . cover-up," before moving on to the next day's disasters. The poem ends with Shapero's speaker saying she wishes her dog "could have a single day of language, / so that I might reassure her don't be afraid— / our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm." This preoccupation with our dead world and human harm pervades nearly every poem, although Shapero's speaker repeatedly tries to deny her interest in the past, growing more insistent in every iteration. "I typically hate discussing the past," she says, early on, which becomes "I hardly think of the past" a few pages later, and finally, "I swear to God I hardly think of the past." But the past is indifferent to this insistence, finding a way into so many of Shapero's poems. She touches on slavery, speaking of her fear of "burial / beside a hateful tree," referring briefly to the history of lynching in the United States. She circles repeatedly around the Holocaust—"the great terror we're ordered to remember"—finding it in the least expected places, so that we begin to feel the magnetism of this kind of horror, the way the mind can't help but return and return to it. She touches on the Vietnam War, mass shootings, environmental destruction. "My greatest fear / is...

My Survival: A Girl on Schindler's List by Rena Finder

My Survival: A Girl on Schindler's List by Rena Finder

Microhistoricism in Schindler’s List

Thomas Keneally is one of Australia's most prolific contemporary writers and an Australian Living Treasure. He is of Irish- Catholic descent and an ex-seminarian. He has contributed immensely to Australian literature and this paper makes a modest attempt to highlight his contribution towards history. Though he has written many novels with historical background, Schindler's List, his master piece, which brought him fame and name, snatches the top cadre in exhibiting the nuances of the War and its impact on the society, especially in the life of Oskar Schindler. Reminiscence of the past is something that we all treasure and it is an important concept of this present era, because, we are living in a world devoid of our fruits and significance of the past. We normally tend to forget our past or at times knowingly or unknowingly, we hardly take any measures to probe into the ischolar_mains of the past. In order to identify ourselves in this world of selfies, whatsapp and facebook, it is best to interpret the past, view the present through the eye-piece of scrutiny and observation for a better future. Though it is difficult to know what is in store for us, and understand who we are, it makes little sense at least to know what process we have undergone to be in our present status. This process of what we have undergone readily paves the way to discover and rediscover ourselves. Micro historicism is a term by which we come to understand the events that are taking place in a particular area or country. This paper analyses the sequence of events that took place during the War and what message it gives to the modern world.

Bastardized History: How <em>Inglourious Basterds</em> Breaks through American Screen Memory

I think America is one of only countries that has not been forced . . . to look [its] own past sins in face. And it's only by looking them in face that you can possibly work past them.1-Quentin TarantinoDespite fact that Holocaust took place on another continent and directly involved few Americans, this event has become integrated into fabric of American story. The trauma of Holocaust entered American mainstream consciousness with publication in English of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952, which met with wild success when it was adapted for silver screen in 1959 as The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, USA). American awareness of Final Solution was reinforced for later generations with premiere of television miniseries Holocaust (Marvin J. Chomsky, USA, NBC) in 1978 and again with release of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (USA) and opening of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993. With proliferation of Holocaust memorials and representations in American arts since landmark date of 1993, Holocaust has been transformed in United States from a specifically Jewish trauma into a broadly defined mainstream American experience.2 America's adoption of European Jewish history is part of a process by which story of Holocaust-and America's presumed role in ending it-is incorporated into the fundamental tale of pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and human rights that America tells about itself.3 Peter Novick confirms this trend in his study The Holocaust in American Life, observing that the Holocaust has come to be presented-come to be thought of-as not just a Jewish memory but an American memory.4In its use of postmodern parody, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (USA, 2009) calls attention to American culture's appropriation of Holocaust memory through its conflation of Jewish and American identities in elite fighting unit that gives film its title. The film's self-conscious Americaniza-tion of Holocaust functions as a critique of American popular culture's tendency to adopt Holocaust trauma as a screen memory, a means of displacing or repressing its own historical guilt-traumas. Rather than participating in this phenomenon, however, Inglourious Basterds uses parody to lay bare ways in which American film representations of Holocaust have shaped, and in some cases have distorted, public cultural memory of event. Unlike earlier Holocaust films that endeavored to seamlessly integrate a specifically Jewish history into broader fabric of American story, Inglourious Basterds calls attention to its Americanization of Holocaust through its ironic revision of history. Tarantino confirms this reading, explaining that film broadly examines the tragedy of genocide. I'm dealing with Jewish genocide in Europe, but my Jews are going native and taking roles of American Indians-another genocide. Then there's a King Kong metaphor about slave trade, that's another genocide.5 Through this revision film challenges primacy of Holocaust as an American memory and consequently draws attention to America's reluctance to confront its own legacy of racial prejudice.Moreover, film unsettles received representations of America as liberator of Europe's Jews from their Nazi oppressors, and in this way acts in a manner similar to what Linda Hutcheon has called metafiction-what I term historiographic metacinema-which locates in popular film representations of Holocaust a complicated intertextual relationship between history and fiction.6 As metacinema-the film clearly situate[s] itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction7-Inglourious Basterds prompts us to question reliability of films as instruments of public memory by calling attention to cinematic strategies by which they represent Holocaust. …

Comparing Film Language Amongst Genres: A Comparative Analysis of Schindler's List, In Darkness and The Last Days

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of the film language and genre conventions used in three Holocaust films, Schindler's List, In Darkness and The Last Days. Each of these films provide the perspective of a unique genre on real historical people and events that took place during the Holocaust. Schindler's List is a biopic film that follows the true story of Oskar Schindler, a wealthy German businessman who managed to save the lives of more than 1,000 Jews by keeping them employed in his factory during the Holocaust. In Darkness is a Polish-made drama film which profiles Leopold Socha and the 10 Jews he managed to save by helping them to hide in the sewers during the Holocaust. The men profiled in both movies were declared Righteous Among Nations for their heroic real life actions. The final film, The Last Days is a documentary, which profiles the stories of survival of five Hungarian-Jews during the Holocaust. Through the use of film language, Schindler's List, In Darkness and The Last Days are all able to effectively communicate key themes and ideas present during the Holocaust. Symbolism is used in each of these films in the areas of colour and light. This symbolism, most heavily present in Schindler's List, seems to depict the lack of light, or lack of hope during the Holocaust. Another theme present in the films is the stark inequality between Germans, common people and Jews. This inequality is particularly relevant to both Schindler's List and The Last Days. All three films effectively capture the emotion of their audiences by making them feel as if they are actually experiencing the Holocaust through the use of both camera movement and real footage. A final important idea surrounding this Holocaust that can be taken away from each of these films is the brutality of German soldiers. Overall, the analysis of these three films provides a powerful and personalized insight into the Holocaust.

The Stakes in Holocaust Representation: On Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

Despite its unalterable march into past history, the Holocaust remains an object of fascination to contemporary novelists and filmmakers as well as to the public. Along with works that are recognized as enduring masterpieces (Lanzmann's Sboah, David Grossman's See Under: Love, Kertesz's Fatelessness), this fascination has produced dozens, if not hundreds, of films and novels that deserve to be forgotten quickly. In the wide terrain between these two extremes, one finds a small number of works that have enjoyed worldwide success even while provoking passionate critical debates: what some viewers or readers consider as an important artistic achievement, others consider as a piece of commercial marketing with no artistic merit, or maybe even as an insult to civilized values. Jonathan Littell's 2006 novel, Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), featuring a former Nazi as first-person narrator, was extolled by some extremely distinguished critics and received two major literary prizes in France before becoming an international publishing phenomenon, but it was also trashed by other, equally distinguished readers. Similarly divided opinions greeted Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1994), Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997), and most recently Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009). Such contested works--we could call them crisis works or weathervanes--point to unresolved ethical and aesthetic issues concerning representations of the Holocaust. can or should be shown or told in a work of art dealing with a historic event that has been called unrepresentable? Even more importantly, what can or should not be shown or told? When Schindler's List first came out, a number of commentators--foremost among them Claude Lanzmann--expressed outrage at the sequence where a group of women deported to Auschwitz are shown naked, entering a room that looks as if it could be a gas chamber. Such a representation is, according to Lanzmann, positively obscene--not to be shown. (1) By showing it, Lanzmann contended, Spielberg had committed both an artistic sin of bad taste and a grave ethical lapse, even if the room in question turned out to be an actual shower room, not a gas chamber. If the question raised by Schindler's List was What can be shown? then the question raised by Benigni's Life Is Beautiful was How should it be shown? Negative criticisms of that film emphasized its unrealistic way of depicting the concentration camp where Guido and his son are imprisoned: the camp looked too manicured, not at all like the real thing. And whoever heard of a Jewish inmate who succeeded in keeping his young child hidden for weeks or months in a Nazi concentration camp? Such criticisms focused on the criterion of historical authenticity--and once again, the issue was both ethical and aesthetic. Those who criticized this aspect of the film maintained that it is ethically reprehensible to go against historical facts in representing the Holocaust. The other, related theoretical issue concerned humor: Was humor, and the comic in general, an acceptable mode for treating this most serious subject? Those who defended Benigni's film declared not only that the artistic imagination must brook no limits, including that of factuality, but that comedy could be a powerful means of expression, even about the Holocaust. The eminent specialist of Holocaust literature Sidra Ezrahi argued that since Benigni presented the film from the start as a fable, it should be interpreted as a comic counterfactual story, a kind of Purimspiel that presented a meliorative version of history and that should not be interpreted with dead-minded literalism. Ezrahi saw in Benigni's film--as well as in several other comic representations of the Shoah, such as Radu Mihaileanu's film Train of Life (also from 1997) or Jurek Becker's novel Jakob the Liar (1969)--a continuation of the tradition of Jewish humor that one finds in the stories of Sholem Aleichem, for example. …

The End of The Holocaust

The End of The Holocaust

On Reimer and Reimer’s <em>Historical Dictionary of Holocaust Cinema</em>

On Reimer and Reimer's Dictionary of Holocaust Cinema Dictionary of Holocaust Cinema. By Robert C. Reimer and Carol J. Reimer. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 272 pp., ISBN 978-0-8108-6756-7 (hc). US $75.00.As part of the Scarecrow Press series Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts, Robert and Carol Reimer's volume on Holocaust cinema fulfills the aim of these reference works to provide concise A-to-Z entries on key events and figures in the history of Nazi Germany's persecution, internment, or murder of European Jews, gay men, the Roma, and the severely disabled, and on how these policies and their postwar repercussions have been represented in documentary, experimental, feature, short, and television films. The book begins with a chronology of the evolution of Nazi policies to disenfranchise and eradicate groups targeted as threats to the Third Reich, but omits dates relating to the suppression of male homosexuality and the implementation of state-sanctioned euthanasia in 1939. Background on the former appears in the entry on homosexuals later in the book. The timeline is more detailed on the release years of significant films depicting these crimes against humanity and their lingering impact on those who condoned, perpetrated, resisted, or survived them.Reimer and Reimer's introductory essay divides Holocaust cinema into five chronological periods: pre-1945; the immediate postwar period; 1950-1970; 1970-1990; and 1990-2011. While this periodization identifies the characteristic themes of the limited corpus of such films made before, during, and immediately after World War II, the three twenty-year periods after 1950 are too broad to adequately categorize the national and international trends in Holocaust movies and the contemporary events that influenced their production as their numbers rapidly proliferated from the 1960s on. For example, the discussion of films from the sixties attributes their focus on concentration camps, survivors, and war-crime trials to Israel's capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann at the beginning of the decade. Other historical events, however, sparked interest in the Holocaust, including the rise of the American civil rights movement, the Frankfurt trial of Auschwitz guards, demonstrations against the Vietnam War, protests by reform movements in countries behind the Iron Curtain, and the beginnings of ethnic identity politics. Within the length constraints imposed by the format of the series, Reimer and Reimer still manage to engage in insightful, albeit brief, analyses of the impact of documentaries like The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) and Shoah (1985), television docudramas like Holocaust (1978), blockbusters like Schindler's List (1993), and comedies like Life Is Beautiful (1997) and on the genres, iconography, and storylines of subsequent motion pictures dealing with the Holocaust and the issues it raises. I wish the authors had been allotted more space to elaborate on these subjects.Although the individual entries are typically several paragraphs long, they delve more deeply into these films than the plot synopses presented in The Holocaust Film Sourcebook, edited by Caroline Joan Picart (Westport, Conn. …

On Critical-Rhetorical Pedagogy: Dialoging with Schindler's List

The two prevailing critical paradigms in rhetorical and media studies can be characterized as artistic and ideological. Despite their evident differences, both of these analytical modes impose a final signified on the text. That is to say, each approach insists its critical interpretation is authoritative. Consequently, neither mode is particularly well suited to the broad aims of critical pedagogy, which values the dynamic and always-unfinished interplay among text, citizen-student, and other. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogism, this essay offers an alternative critical paradigm that values the lived experiences of students and promotes agentive citizenship. This paradigm, which we have dubbed critical-rhetorical pedagogy (CRP), conceptualizes criticism dialogically and situates it in a much larger network of pedagogical and political discourses. To illustrate the utility of CRP, this essay provisionally sketches how it might be practiced to critically engage Stephen Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List.

The conflagration of community: fiction before and after Auschwitz

After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric. The Conflagration of Community challenges Theodor Adorno's famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. J. Hillis Miller considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake. Miller juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust - Keneally's Schindler's List, McEwan's Black Dogs, Spiegelman's Maus, and Kertesz's Fatelessness - with Kafka's novels and Morrison's Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, Miller questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitz - a difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaust - and the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The Conflagration of Community is an eloquent study of literature's value to fathoming the unfathomable.

Kamp (review)

Reviewed by: Kamp James M. Cherry Kamp. Hotel Modern. 9th International Toy Theater Festival, St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn, NY. 3 June 2010. In Kamp, a production by Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern, a gigantic scale model of Auschwitz covered the floor of St. Ann's Warehouse, an avantgarde performance space in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. Measuring 36 × 33 feet, the set was meticulously rendered, complete with rows of barracks, crematoria, and a sign that declares "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work makes you free). Fenced in by barbed wire and guard towers, 3,000 three-inch-tall figures of prisoners and guards "performed" a series of vignettes that depicted the debasement and viciousness of the Holocaust in a harrowing and visually arresting manner. The three members of [End Page 109] Hotel Modern, Pauline Kalker, Arlene Hoornweg, and Herman Helle, dressed in muted earth-tones, manipulated the figures around the set, depicting a day in the life of Auschwitz. Guided by hands, by control sticks, and by wire, prisoners filled bags with stone, ate soup from makeshift bowls, and were sent to die in gas chambers. Often acting as documentary filmmakers, the three performers captured the action as it unfolded using small handheld digital cameras. These images were then projected in real time on the rear wall of the theatre. No one spoke in the piece, and no words were needed. Through innovative use of digital technology and puppetry, Kamp evoked the gross absurdities and terrors of the Holocaust. It was an hour-long tour of hell in miniature. Click for larger view View full resolution A scene from Hotel Modern's Kamp. (Photo: BZA Photo.) Structurally, Kamp alternated sequences in which the puppeteers moved within the set, preparing the figures for the next scene, with the scenes themselves. Importantly, there were no individual characters in Kamp. There was no real story-arc outside of the progression of day to night, no "girl in a red coat" with whom to empathize, as in Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List. Without any characters with whom to connect, the audience was forced to consider the vast scope of the horror. Created by troupe member Helle, the crudely fashioned figures who occupied the space of the camp were made of moldable plasticine and paint. With holes for eyes, a nub for a nose, and a gaping mouth, their doughy faces recalled Edvard Munch's iconic The Scream. Ultimately ambiguous in affect, these faces suggested bewilderment, anger, alarm, exertion, desperation, or pain depending on the context. That the very same faces were to be found on the SS officers suggested, paradoxically, both a common humanity despite the circumstances, and also how the mechanization of death rendered everyone inhuman. The performers' manipulations of the figures worked in precise choreography with the cameras, giving a sense of what Kalker, one of the founders of Hotel Modern, has termed a "live animation film onstage." The audience, seated at a distance from the tiny figures, viewed the action in tight close-ups. Such apparent proximity to the action—in a space where death is omnipresent—created a sense of perpetual dread. Death seemed always to be lurking just off-screen. Interactions between puppeteer and figure often created meaningful symbolism. In a vignette at the beginning of the piece, four prisoners were hanged at a tiny gallows in the middle of the camp. Slowly, almost tenderly, a puppeteer placed small boxes under the gallows. Then the puppeteer placed the heads of figures in the nooses. Finally, the hand of a puppeteer reached over, in view of the camera and the audience, and pulled each block away one at a time. The hand appeared so large onscreen that it seemed almost God-like in scope, a parody of Michelangelo's The Creation of Man. The camera shot framed the dangling figure, an object seeming to struggle and jerk, but eventually becoming still. This was repeated over and over until finally the camera panned away to reveal a group of thirty more prisoner figures that looked as if they were watching the event. Their gaping mouths seemed to be reacting to the execution. The scene ended with the camera operator...

When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German–Jewish Literature (review)

Reviewed by: When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German–Jewish Literature Sander L. Gilman (bio) When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German–Jewish Literature. By Vivian Liska. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 249 pp. Cloth $29.95 The problems of "center-periphery" arguments are many: the one is always more interesting than the other; the center always defines the periphery or the other way around; and the author who uses this model always takes one side against the other. And that not always consciously. Vivian Liska, a distinguished scholar of Paul Celan and modern Jewish thought who teaches at the University of Antwerp, presents a study of modern Jewish thought at the periphery that is "a symptom of a lack of inner wholeness and coherence associated with what is generally called the 'modern crises in identity'" (1). For Liska, following Homi Bhabha, such a position is neither center nor periphery but "inbetweenness" (7). And she finds such a position compulsively repeated from Herzl's late tales to Kafka, Nelly Sachs, and Celan and through to contemporary Austrian-Jewish writers such as Robert Menasse. A "symptom" of the malaise of modern Jews caught between center and periphery? But of what disease is this a symptom? The very notion of standing "between" is only a recapitulation of the older center-periphery model with a postmodern twist: "between" is a self-conscious position that allows Jewish writers of a certain moment in time and space to suspend their sense of belonging. But if this is a symptom of a malaise, Liska does not offer us an explicit cure, as the disease seems to be [End Page 117] productive rather than destructive. Its product: the high-charged, modern literary text. The difficulty with such an argument is obvious. Between what and what? Why is this malaise "Jewish"? Is it a good thing that the most creative Jews selected for their creativity by Liska suffer from this Jewish disease? She claims the same kind of authenticity for the "inbetweenness" of these writers as those who argue for writers who are canonical do for theirs. Their disease is the product of their "inbetween" position and it is a good thing. Let me tell a story. Many years ago I was with a German Jewish friend, who had been born in Poland, on a trip back to Plaszow, the reconstituted suburb of Krakow, crystallized for the modern imagination in Schindler's List. We were having dinner in the mikva, the medieval ritual bath, which had been transformed into a "Jewish-style" restaurant. Our waiter had a skullcap and side locks (peyas) and was dressed in a version of the garb associated with ultra-Orthodox Jewry. My dining companion asked in Polish in the course of the meal whether the waiter was Jewish and was answered with a smile: "Oh, I'm not Jewish, but I feel Jewish." A bit of this is present in the self-consciousness that Liska attributes to her stable of "in-between" writers. They "feel Jewish," as a symptom of their modernity. But of course the shoe is on the other foot in modern German literature. Certainly Alfred Döblin states in 1934 that the Nazis made him (born a Jew but without any sense of Jewish identity) into a Jew; yet by the 1940s he is a practicing Buddhist. Likewise the clearly non-Jewish, anti-fascist Bavarian folk novelist Oscar Maria Graf demands that he be put on the register of banned Jewish books after 1933 out of a sense of solidarity with his Jewish colleagues. Liska is presented with a bit of a problem. She wishes to constitute "Jewishness" not as religious authenticity, which she seems to imply is beyond modernist self-doubt. (Any critical reading of Samson Raphael Hirsch or Martin Buber or Emmanuel Levinas or even Joseph Soloveitchik will quickly cast doubt on that notion.) But she also wants to suggest that Jewishness goes beyond merely a communitarian moment of identity formation, which is, of course a problem if you see Jewishness as independent of the nation-building impulse of Zionism. Yet in doing so her exemplary Jewish writers are suddenly in no way special; instead, they...

The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler's List (review)

The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler's List, by Mietek Pemper, translated by David Dollenmayer. New York; Other Press, 2008. 250 pages. $24.95. In a New York Times book review (December 26, 2008) of Thomas Keneally's memoir Searching for Schindler, Keneally is quoted as saying, both commercial reasons and reasons of passion, I didn't want this book stuck in that section against the back wall of most American bookstores labeled JUDAICA. Tfoe Road to Rescue certainly belongs in that spurned section, for at its heart is the story of the cruel disruption and ultimately loss of life suffered specifically by Jews when Nazi Germany invaded and terrorized Poland in September 1939. The original memoir - Der rettende Weg - has been fluently translated from the German into an equally sober and unadorned prose. The Road to Rescue embodies both a personal memoir - the author and several members of his family were on Schindler s list - and the broader history of the Generalgouvernement that the Nazis imposed on Poland. In the latter case, the memoir provides significant information about how tht irta, was governed, the mutual antagonisms among Nazi leaders who were responsible for administrating it, and the power struggles between the Generalgouvernement and Berlin. If that were all this book had to offer, it would be worth reading. Pemper begins his narrative in Krakow, a city that was once home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in Poland. Within months of the German attack on Poland, Jewish civilians were rounded up, the white armband with Jewish star was introduced, the Polish press was shut down, and Krakow became an important center for the Reich, and specifically for the administration of the Generalgouvernement. Pemper's testimony has a double edge in that his fluency in German allowed him to penetrate the network of the German occupation, initially as an interpreter for thousands of Polish refugees who had been deported in 1938 from Germany to Poland, then as a member of the ghetto Judenrat in the summer of 1941, but above all as personal stenographer to Amon Goth, who became commandant of the Krakow-Piaszow camp in February 1943. For more than six months, until the end of 1943, Pemper had access to the personnel files of all the SS men in the camp and was able to keep abreast of news from Nazi Germany by clandestinely reading German newspapers like the Volkischer Beobachter. Pemper begins his narrative, however, well before Goth took up his job as commandant and thus before the relationship between Goth and Oskar Schindler. His story will ultimately rest on Schindler and his list, but the reader needs patience as Pemper carefully tracks the escalating hardships that were imposed on the local Jewish population. In the fall of 1940, for example, 60,000 Jews were ordered to leave Krakow to make room for German officials, the SS, and war profiteers from Germany. In March 1941, the announcement was made that the Generalgouvernement would be'judenfrei, and in November the Beizec camp was completed where 600,000 Jews were killed within eight months. Pemper never allows the reader to disassociate the famous list either from the historical context that preceded it or indeed later from the many intricacies that shaped it. …

<i>Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights John Cappucci (bio) Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights. By Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 272 pp. Cloth $60.00, paper $23.95. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg's Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights is a unique work that provides an "ethic of fictionalizing historical experiences" (193). The author focuses her attention on the inhuman and criminal acts of torture, rape, and genocide depicted in a series of selected [End Page 117] films, novels, and other media (193). The author's basic argument is that the process of "fictionalizing historical atrocities necessitates attention to the ethical claims originating from the experiences of victims and survivors of historical atrocities" (16). Goldberg asserts that the ethical issues that have emerged from these forms of narrative are essentially "unsettled" (17) in an era in which postmodernism continues to sway scholars and to imbue the "ethical turn in literary studies" with a sense of uncertainty (17). Beyond Terror is divided into five core chapters plus an epilogue. The first three chapters all address the depiction of torture in selected films and novels; however, in order to provide a more nuanced examination of the complex concept of torture, Goldberg breaks the chapters up thematically: chapter one explores safety, chapter two citizenship, and chapter three desire. The fourth chapter discusses rape, while the fifth chapter concerns itself with genocide. The first chapter begins with a brief exposé of one of the most talked-about films of the last decade of the twentieth century: Schindler's List (1993). Goldberg's decision to begin the chapter with a discussion of this film is smart, considering that most readers will have an intimate familiarity with it. This blockbuster is an exemplar of a type of film that Goldberg calls the "counterhistorical drama" (28). Goldberg defines the counterhistorical drama as form that not only traverses the "generic boundaries" of film but also presents a "counternarrative" to the accepted and "official version" of the historical event (29). In addition, counterhistorical dramatic films tend to make use of a contemporary version of the bildungsroman archetype, whereby a Western protagonist is forced to contend with the "undemocratic practices" of a non-Western and/or subaltern nation (29). Goldberg analyzes three films in this new genre: John Boorman's Beyond Rangoon (1995), Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom (1985), and David O. Russell's Three Kings (1999). She looks at how these three films have constructed a notion of safety in the face of torture that has occurred in non-Western states, arguing that the tortured body of the non-Westerner unintentionally "becomes [the] signifier of the relative safety and security of the western body from such acts" (33). In other words, the idea that "it can't happen to me" is emphasized throughout these films to different degrees (17). In the second chapter, Goldberg further explores the origins of the "myth of western bodily safety" (59) that is depicted in counternarrative dramatic films. Often, one hears people saying "You can't do that! I'm an American citizen." The assumption is that one's diplomatic status acts as a sort of "geopolitical shield" (58) protecting the Westerner from the forms of torture that non-Westerners habitually experience. Goldberg looks at how such a "cultural/national/ideological distinction" (58) manifests itself in Oliver Stone's Salvador (1987) and Jon Avent's Red Corner (1995). [End Page 118] The claim that the "privileged national" (59) is infallible tends to be made only by white, heterosexual, Christian males. The third chapter begins with a discussion of Alan Dershowitz's speech on the proliferation of torture practices in the post-9/11 environment. In an address given at the City University of New York, Dershowitz argued that governmental intelligence agencies have the right to obtain internationally recognized "torture warrants" that would permit them to torture a suspect who they think is involved in terrorist activity in order to extract information from him or her (88). What Dershowitz did not realize was that his speech was to be preceded by an address by Sister Dianna Ortiz, director and founder of the Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition...