Holocaust and Film

Cilj rada je da istraži odnos filmskog stila i reprezentacije nacističkih logora u jugoslovenskom igranom filmu do početka 1990-ih godina. U radu se postavlja teza da je stilsko pomeranje od klasičnog fabularnog stila ka modernizmu pratilo i pomeranje značenjskog središta filmova o logorima-od fokusa na zarobljene pripadnike pokreta otpora i "front među žicama", preko tematizovanja civilnih žrtava, torture i patnje, do pitanja o kulturi sećanja. Jugoslovenski igrani filmovi o nacističkim logorima dele se u četiri grupe i analiziraju se njihove žanrovske, formalne i stilske odlike. Ključne reči: nacistički logori, jugoslovenski film, holokaust, etika forme, kultura sećanja

Jusqu'au début des années 1970, les films de fiction réalisés en Israël demeurent sous l’empire de stéréotypes persistants à l’égard des rescapés du génocide. Il faudra donc plus d'une décennie pour le cinéma israélien s'approprie les enseignements du procès Eichmann et la perception nouvelle que celui-ci offrit des survivants. La notion d’empreinte du procès Eichmann désigne donc ici la manifestation cinématographique de deux de ses apports : d’une part, une vision historique beaucoup plus précise et différenciée des mécanismes de la « Solution finale » ; d’autre part, une considération plus juste (et surtout moins jugeante) des rescapés et de leur attitude durant la guerre. Ainsi, l’influence la plus immédiate du procès sur le cinéma israélien (dès le début des années 60) ne fut pas adéquate aux représentations et aux enseignements nouveaux qu’il avait générés ; et son influence la plus "adéquate" fut loin d’être immédiate.

Una comedia narrando el horror de un pasado real parece, para muchos y a simple vista, un oxímoron. No obstante, un sobreviviente de Auschwitz, el escritor Jack Fuchs, dijo: "Imagino que, dentro de pocos años más, todo lo acontecido será la visualización de una película. (…) En este caso La vida es bella, comedia costumbrista y romántica, se convierte, de golpe, en 'un manual de supervivencia en el infierno'. Claro está: el celuloide genera riesgos y el mayor de todos es tomar la película como la realidad sabiendo que la Shoah desafía al arte". Surgen así dos cuestiones: la importancia cada vez mayor del cine, que genera un desafío a la disciplina histórica como único modo legítimo de representar el pasado; y otra, que expresa dos grandes problemas de la representación cinematográfica del Holocausto: el de la adecuación o correspondencia entre el evento y su representación y el de los límites de esa representación. La vida es bella (Benigni, 1997) reactualizó los puntos ya tradicionales de esas discusiones, como la estetización de la violencia, la cuestión de los géneros "nobles", la validez o no del humor en el contexto del horror, entre otros. Así, nos preguntamos, ¿qué podemos conocer sobre el Holocausto mediante esta película? ¿Qué puede decirnos (históricamente) una comedia, costumbrista y romántica, que se convierte, de golpe, en un manual de supervivencia en el infierno? En este trabajo reflexionaremos sobre estas cuestiones a la luz de los aportes de Hayden White (2014), respecto de las características formales de la comedia en la representación del pasado, y de otros autores que han trabajado profundamente el problema de la representación cinematográfica del Holocausto, tales como Aaron Kerner, Rudolph Herzog y Annette Insdorf, entre otros.

In 1960, the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, undertook an operation in Argentina to capture the architect of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, and bring him to Israel to stand trial. Operation Finale [Chris Weitz, 2018] tells the story of this intelligence operation: the actions of and challenges for the agents involved, in a way that captures the banality of Eichmann’s personality before it was put on show for the world to see in his televised trial. Operation Finale is available on Netflix, rendering it a Holocaust film with an extraordinarily large reach.

Wanda Jakubowskas Die letzte Etappe von 1948 ist der erste Spielfilm  über NS-Konzentrationslager. Obwohl die Rote Armee und die polnische  Führung die Regisseurin und Auschwitz-Überlebende zunächst gefördert  hatten, geriet der Film bald aus ideologischen und ästhetischen Gründen  ins Abseits. Er entsprach weder den Vorgaben des Sozialistischen Rea- lismus noch der romantisch-patriotischen Tradition des polnischen Kinos.  Doch Jakubowskas Filmsprache wirkt bis heute. Sie schuf Bilder und  Einstellungen, die zu Klassikern der visuellen Darstellung des Holocaust  geworden sind und zahlreiche Regisseure bis hin zu Steven Spielberg  beeinflusst haben.

Harold French's Mr. Emmanuel (1944) holds the distinction of being the first and only wartime British commercial feature film to focus on Nazi antisemitism. 1 Adapted from Louis Golding's novel of the same title, the movie chronicles the perilous search by Isaac Emmanuel, an elderly Brit-ish Jewish man, for the German mother of a half-Jewish German refugee boy whom he has befriended in England. Isaac fails to realize that merely inquiring about the wife of a Jewish dissident who had been jailed and killed by the Gestapo will attract the attention of the authorities. Instead, he naively expects his British citizenship to protect him from any harassment. Although Patricia Erens commended it for its unique depiction of a Jewish protagonist fighting against German persecution, 2 Mr. Emman-uel strikes scholars today as timid, considering what was publically known about the extermination of European Jews at the time of its release, and they take the view in hindsight that American and British filmmakers should have depicted and denounced the ongoing genocide more forthrightly. Commenting on Isaac being shocked when the Gestapo grabs his passport and slaps him in the face with it, Ilan Avisar sarcastically remarks that British audiences probably deemed this " a grave national insult— certainly something more offensive than the persecution of the Jews. " 3 Estel Eforgan belittles " the groveling attitudes of the protagonist, " which she ascribes to the " incomprehension and vacillation amongst older Brit-ish Jews, " who " had been so browbeaten all their lives about their inferior

The notion of “Holocaust animation” may seem paradoxical; how can a medium which, in the popular eye, is usually associated with comedy, play and fantasy be used to remember one of the 20th century’s most traumatic events? By examining the textural difference of animation to our lived world in texts such as Silence (Yadin and Bringas 1998) and I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (Ann Marie Fleming 2010), it becomes clear how the medium can emphasise the fragile materiality of Holocaust memory. Adopting a methodology which blends transcendental phenomenology, as first outlined by Edmund Husserl, and existential phenomenology, brought into film studies in particular by Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, this paper considers the ability for animation to engage spectators with the materiality of memory, through bringing to the foreground a different way of experiencing the world to the quotidian.

»Scham« und »Schuld«-zentrale Narrationen, in denen die Verbrechen der Shoah verhandelt werden. Ihre geschlechtliche Codierung und strategisch-diskursive Ver-wendung in Bezug auf nationalsozialistische Täterschaft steht im Zentrum dieses Bandes. Aus unterschiedlichen wissenschaftlichen Perspektiven fragen die Beiträger/-innen unter anderem: Welche Bedeutung kommt der Verschränkung von Geschlecht und Religion bei der Auseinandersetzung mit nationalsozialistischer Schuld zu? In wel-chem diskursiven Geflecht stehen juristische/moralische Schuld und weibliche Täterschaft? Welche Bedeutungen haben Schamgefühle für die Weitergabe von Schuld in familiären Zusammenhängen?

Author examines body politics in Nazi cinema and propaganda movies (medical short films and materials filmed in the Polish ghettos) in terms of constructing visual identity of nation in opposition to the allegedly non-normative bodies of Jews and mentally ill persons. Author connects the visual material with notions of biopolitics (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito).

Pierwszy rozdział Od kroniki do filmu posttraumatycznego - filmy dokumentalne o Zagładzie

Niemieckie materiały dokumentalne na długo określiły wizualną pamięć o polskich Żydach w gettach, zaś radzieckie kadry z wyzwalania Auschwitz-Birkenau stały się symbolem Zagłady. Polscy dokumentaliści korzystali z tych materiałów, aby pokazać różne oblicza ludobójstwa, zbrodnie nazistowskie oraz losy Żydów podczas okupacji. Z czasem przywoływanie materiałów archiwalnych straciło na znaczeniu, a inne tryby dokumentalizmu wysunęły się na pierwszy plan: filmowa praca pamięci (w odpowiedzi na Noc i mgłę Alaina Resnais'ego), świadectwo audiowizualne, dokumenty o powrocie itd. Niniejsza monografia śledzi te zmiany, a także przedstawia polskie filmy na tle szerszego tła międzynarodowego zjawiska filmu o Zagładzie (Holocaust cinema). Aparat pojęciowy obejmuje psychoanalityczną teorię traumy, krytykę genologiczną, studia nad pamięcią oraz estetykę polityczną.

Documentary materials shot during the war by Nazi cameramen came to define the audiovisual memory of Polish Jews in the ghettoes and Auschwitz-Birkenau liberation footage became a powerful symbol of the Holocaust. Polish documentary filmmakers had relied on these materials in order to present various aspects of the genocide, Nazi atrocities, and the fate of Jews under the occupation. Subsequently, quoting of archival footage lost its appeal and other modes of documentary filmmaking prevail: cinematic memory work (in response to Alain Resnais's Night and Fog), audiovisual testimony, documentaries of return etc. The book traces these developments and adopts a comparative perspective showing Polish productions in the context of a larger international phenomenon of Holocaust cinema. The argument combines insights from psychoanalytical trauma theory, generic criticism, memory studies, and political aesthetics.

Projekt został sfinansowany ze środków Narodowego Centrum Nauki przyznanych na podstawie decyzji numer DEC-2012/07/B/HS2/01612

Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global discourse by critically examining their function and inherent dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued intellectual and practical discontent.

Der Propagandafilm »Jud Süß« (1940) wurde von den Nationalsozialisten gezielt eingesetzt, um antisemitische Gewalttaten hervorzurufen – zum Beispiel in den Konzentrationslagern. Umso erstaunlicher ist es, dass der Regisseur Veit Harlan nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg die antisemitische Stoßrichtung des Filmes leugnete. Bill Niven schildert in seinem Buch u. a. die intensive Debatte um den Film – und um die Person Harlans – im Nachkriegsdeutschland. Demonstrationen in Westdeutschland in den 1950er Jahren gegen Harlans Neueinstieg ins Filmgeschäft spielten eine wichtige Rolle bei der Entwicklung einer demokratischen Protestkultur und einer Abwehrhaltung gegenüber Antisemitismus. Im Nahen Osten aber fing Harlans Film ein neues Leben an – als antiisraelische Propaganda. Die Bundesrepublik reagierte auf diesen Missbrauch recht zögerlich. Damit war aber die Geschichte des Films keineswegs zu Ende. Bis in die Gegenwart versucht man, anhand von »Jud Süß« mit pädagogischen Mitteln aufzuzeigen, wie antisemitische Propaganda funktioniert – die Angst vor dem Film ist aber noch groß.

"Из всей сложности рефлексии о Холокосте, накопленной в западных обществах, Россия, кажется, вынесла лишь утешительную для себя мысль о том, что самое страшное зло в истории произошло на других широтах и сотворено не нами, а другими. Это значит, что с одной стороны, победа над гитлеровской Германией продолжает служить для русских неиссякаемым источником морального капитала, а с другой, по определению тривиализует, уменьшает другие исторические катастрофы и злодеяния, главным образом преступления советского режима."

This is a series that I created at Yad Vashem

Graduates of the Yad Vashem seminars are invited to attend Film Lessons, a new educational initiative of the International School for Holocaust Studies in collaboration with the Visual Center of Yad Vashem. An advanced learning opportunity, Film Lessons is an online film series where each film is followed by a lecture and a discussion open to all the participants. The objective of this initiative is to introduce lesser-known examples of Holocaust Cinema and—in order to unlock and expand the educational potential of the films presented—to engage and enrich the viewer’s critical vision.
The title of the series is “The Holocaust after the Holocaust:” the selected films illustrate, each in its particular way, how filmmakers operating in different cultural, temporal and topological contexts deal with the issue of the representation of the Holocaust. These films, moreover, shed light on the processes of communal memory construction: cinema, in fact, is a useful tool to investigate a community’s engagement with its past. During the course of the series, the participant-viewer is asked to critically consider the strategies of representation and to reflect on the changing legacy of the Holocaust.

Pre-print version of a chapter in a volume in honor of Christopher Browning on his 75th birthday.
This study examines the history of particularist and universalist interpretations of the Holocaust and their relation to the question of uniqueness, from the early stages of the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish policies in the 1930s through today.

Han pasado 54 años desde que Adorno, en su ya mítica conferencia "La educación después de Auswitch", demandara un giro hacia el sujeto para evitar que masacres, como la de Auswitch, volvieran a repetirse: "Hay que conocer los mecanismos que vuelven a las personas capaces de cometer estos crímenes, hay que mostrarles estos mecanismos y despertar una consciencia general de los mismos que impidan que hagan de nuevo esas cosas" decía. Sin embargo, pese a los esfuerzos invertidos, la educación después de Auswitch propuesta por Adorno no ha sido suficiente para subsanar este Mal, la violación masiva de los derechos humanos se ha convertido en el mayor mal de nuestro tiempo, ramificándose por todos los rincones del planeta.

Israeli culture in the 1940s and 1950s was dominated by ideological considerations. Zionist films, as other aspects of Eretz-Israel and Israeli culture, distinctively propagated Zionist ideas. As a consequence of their sociopolitical focus, these films neglected the complexities of the relationship between Holocaust survivors and the native Jews in Eretz-Israel. Instead, Holocaust survivors were reduced to a homogeneous entity that bore distinct negative connotations. Films depicted female Holocaust survivors as mentally unstable, unfit mothers, and often played up negative sexual stereotypes. In these films, the women were "cured" or went through a process of "purification" thanks to the Zionist establishment. Historical research often cites the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961) as being a turning point in the Israeli public's perception of the Holocaust, and its representation in Israeli culture. This article will focus on an analysis of the film The Hero's Wife (Peter Frye, 1963) that was produced in the aftermath of the trial. It will discuss the innovative representations of this unresearched film, and will seek to answer the questions of why, and in what way, its narrative comprises a subversive antithesis to the narrative shaped by Zionist fiction films made prior to the Eichmann trial.

Polish People’s Republic implemented its historical policy by employing film and literature in order to portray the martyrdom brought about by the Nazi occupation of Poland. The decade of the 1960s was the most prolific period when it comes to the number of films devoted to the Holocaust and the camps. Some of the films were clearly motivated by political concerns and the fear that the past was forgotten and underrepresented in cultural representations. Two writers – Andrzej Brycht and Tadeusz Holuj – played a key role in bringing the past to the limelight despite generational differences between them. Holuj was a former inmate at Auschwitz-Birkenau whereas Brycht knew the past mainly from cultural representations.

This course features popular films to analyze, interpret, conceptualize, and critique issues and events in politics-specifically, within Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Films are viewed through specific topic domains and highlight important political issues of the day. We will examine how contemporary and historical films contribute to our understanding of the political world and genocide. While Hollywood movies have always been a way to entertain, they also reflect and influence how the public views genocide and history, if even in subtle ways. Sometimes these films are more propagandistic in nature, actively trying to shape political perception. This course explores a wide array of topics and issues related to politics, genocide, history, remembrance, justice, and human rights.

The Memory of the Village. On Paweł Łoziński’s Miejsce urodzenia
[Birthplace]

The article is an analysis of Paweł Łoziński’s documentary film Miejsce
urodzenia [Birthplace] which presents a return of Polish writer
Henryk Grynbeg to his family village. Grynberg aims to discover
the truth of the death of his loved ones during the Holocaust.
In my article I attempt to answer how the memory of the village
is formed, what is its specificity regarding the Holocaust and war
trauma, and what kind of relations and tensions appear between
a collective and individual memory. Besides that I analyse interrelationships between memory and landscape as well as different
ways of perception of the surroundings.

This article critically assesses the use of children as narrators in two recent Italian Holocaust films: Roberto Benigni's La Vita è Bella (1997) and Ettore Scola's Concorrenza 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 the brava gente myth, but also invites a thorough reconsideration of the complexity of the relationship between the historical film and the emotions.

Co widać zaraz po wojnie? Zapomniane obrazy Zagłady z lat czterdziestych Streszczenie Artykuł dotyczy zapomnianych opowiadań, ilmów i dramatów powstałych w pierwszych latach po wojnie (1945-1949), które przywołują niedawne doświadczenia Zagłady. Postawiona jest teza, że w tym krótkim okresie pojawiały się reprezentacje dotykające najtrudniejszych aspektów Zagłady i relacji między żydowskimi o iarami a etnicznie polskimi świadkami. Ponowna artykulacja tych kwestii mogła nastąpić dopiero współcześnie. Dzieła podejmujące temat wrogości polskiego otoczenia wobec Żydów, przejmowania ich własności, a także współsprawstwa w Zagładzie zostały albo zapomniane, albo-jak w przypadku ilmówzatrzymano ich dystrybucję. Okres tużpowojenny pozwala ponownie przyjrzeć się polskiej świadomości wydarzeń wojennych i okupacyjnych, a także unaocznić, w jaki sposób rodząca się wtedy dominująca narracja o Zagładzie maskuje te rozpoznania.

The goal of this Master’s Research Paper was to oversee the conservation, repairs, and provenance research of 159 total film reels, 157 on 16mm and 2 on 35mm, that were in the possession of the Polish Consulate of Toronto from 1976 until 2012. To promote national pride and to divert attention from human rights atrocities under Communist policies, the Polish Consulate of Toronto, in partnership with the federal entity Towarzystwo Łączności z Polonią Zagraniczną “Polonia” (Society for Foreign Liaison with Poles), organized screenings of epic wartime feature films, children’s cartoons, and short travelogues, among other genres, that also aired on Polish television. However, the screenings of such films only strengthened the pride of the diaspora, who largely supported the Solidarność (Solidarity) movement. By contextualizing the films within the history of Polish cinema and nationhood, this project underscores the necessity to save films that served diplomatic, propagandistic, and patriotic purposes.

This essay​ ​will analy​z​e​ ​the relationship between the cinematic representation ​​of​ ​the memory and the photographic steadiness of the present, staged in the film The Passenger (Pasażerka, 1963, Andrzej Munk). Moving​ ​both from a textual and a contextual point of view, this article will​ ​focus on the posthumous film​ ​reconstruction made by Munk's collaborators. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to discuss the​ ​relationship between time and death, past and present, but also victim and​ ​perpetrator, which all contribute to create an implicit wistful feeling of historical suspension, which creates​ ​a «double memory» storytelling.

Апстракт: У овом раду изведена је упоредна анализа филмског сценарија односно самог филма Горке траве из 1965/1966. године и истоименог романа Фриде Филиповић из 2000. године. Методолошки оквир за поређење две медијске форме обликован је укрштањем два приступа и поступка: а) књижевноисториографским позиционирањем ових дела Фриде Филиповић у контекст њихове генезе, како у склопу југословенске ангажоване (женске) прозе, тако и у склопу индивидуалне стваралачке еволуције ауторке и б) упоредном наратолошком анализом одговарајућих поступака у два различита медија. У раду се скреће пажња и на место Горких трава у студијама Холокауста, односно у актуелним истраживањима женских искустава и сећања на Холокауст. Циљ рада је да, ослањајући се на претходне анализе романа и филма (Васа Павковић, Мерима Омерагић, Славица Гароња Радованац, Керстин Штајц, Рони Леви), истакне она њихова значења и функције која су условљена контекстом.

Studies in the field of history and cinema have found that viewers’ historical consciousness is structured by mass media in print and the audiovisual media of cinema, video, theater, and other visual and performing arts. This is particularly true of representations of the Holocaust. The audiovisual media and the arts have reflected relatively fewer representations of the impact of the Holocaust on the Jews of North Africa between 1943 and 1945 than the visual representations of the experience of European Jewry. The present article focuses on this absence and the reasons why the experience of North African Jewry has become a site of amnesia.

in  Katrin Huxel / Juliane Karakayali / Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck / Marianne Schmidbaur / Kyoko Shinozaki / Tina Spies / Linda Supik / Elisabeth Tuider eds.. Postmigrantisch gelesen Transnationalität, Gender, Care, Transcript Verlag, 2021. 219-234.

Claudia Bruns, Asal Dardan, Anette Dietrich (Hg.), Welchen der Steine du hebst. Filmische Erinnerung an den Holocaust, Berlin (Bertz + Fischer) 2012.
Tobias Ebbrecht, Geschichtsbilder im medialen Gedächtnis. Filmische Narrationen des Holocaust, Bielefeld (transcript) 2011.
Sonja M. Schultz, Der Nationalsozialismus im Film. Von Triumph des Willens bis Inglorious Basterds, Berlin (Bertz + Fischer) 2012.
Bettina Noack, Gedächtnis in Bewegung. Die Erinnerung an Weltkrieg und Holocaust im Kino, München (Wilhelm Fink) 2010.
Simon Rothöhler, Amateur der Weltgeschichte. Historiographische
Praktiken im Kino der Gegenwart, Zürich (diaphanes) 2011.

Towards the end of the decade long Iran–Iraq war, Saddam Hussein launched a deadly attack against the Kurds, known as the Anfal Campaign, killing more than a hundred thousand. One of the largest acts of genocide occurred on 18 March 1988 in the Kurdish city of Halabja. On that day, sweet-smelling poison gas was poured over the city, killing at least five thousand. Since 2001 Kurdish moviemakers have memorialized the tragedy of the Halabja massacre by producing cinematic dramas and narrative documentaries. These films are part of a discourse of authenticity and a politics of culture that permeate the Kurdish independence movement. This essay proposes that Halabja films can be divided into three stages: the era of consolidation, 2000 to 2009; the golden era, 2009 to early 2014; and the fall which followed the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Each era reveals new attitudes towards politics, society, and the massacre.