Holocaust And The Moving Image

Based on an event held at the Imperial War Museum in 2001, this book is a blend of voices and perspectives - archivists, curators, filmmakers, scholars, and Holocaust survivors. Each section examines films and how they have contributed to wider awareness and understanding of the Holocaust since the war.

East Germany’s ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany’s name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lügner – a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how GDR filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of Nazi persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.

Most Holocaust scholars and survivors contend that the event was so catastrophic and unprecedented that it defies authentic representation in feature films. Yet it is precisely the extremity of 'the Final Solution' and the issues it raised that have fueled the cinematic imagination since the end of World War II. Recognizing that movies reach a greater audience than eyewitness, historical, or literary accounts, Lawrence Baron argues that they mirror changing public perceptions of the Holocaust over time and place. After tracing the evolution of the most commonly employed genres and themes in earlier Holocaust motion pictures, he focuses on how films from the l990s made the Holocaust relevant for contemporary audiences. While genres like biographical films and love stories about doomed Jewish-Gentile couples remained popular, they now cast Jews or non-Jewish victims like homosexuals in lead roles more often than was the case in the past. Baron attributes the recent proliferation of Holocaust comedies and children's movies to the search for more figurative and age-appropriate genres for conveying the significance of the Holocaust to generations born after it happened. He contends that thematic shifts to stories about neo-Nazis, rescuers, survivors, and their children constitute an expression of the continuing impact the Holocaust exerts on the present. The book concludes with a survey of recent films like Nowhere in Africa and The Pianist.

Since its completion in 1955, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political and aesthetic response to what David Rousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, identified on his return in 1945 as the ‘concentrationary universe’ which, now actualized, might release its totalitarian plague any time and anywhere? What kind of memory does the film create to warn us of the continued presence of this concentrationary universe? This international collection re-examines Resnais’s benchmark film in terms of both its political and historical context of representation of the camps and of other instances of the concentrationary in contemporary cinema. Through a range of critical readings, Concentrationary Cinema explores the cinematic aesthetics of political resistance not to the Holocaust as such but to the political novelty of absolute power represented by the concentrationary system and its assault on the human condition.

Recent representations of the Holocaust have increasingly required us to think beyond rigid demarcations of nation and history, medium and genre. Holocaust Intersections sets out to investigate the many points of conjunction between these categories in recent images of genocide. The book examines transnational constellations in Holocaust cinema and television in Europe, disclosing instances of border-crossing and boundary-troubling at levels of production, distribution and reception. It highlights intersections between film genres, through intertextuality and pastiche, and the deployment of audiovisual Holocaust memory and testimony. Finally, the volume addresses connections between the Holocaust and other histories of genocide in the visual culture of the new millennium, engaging with the questions of transhistoricity and intercultural perspective. Drawing on a wide variety of different media - from cinema and television to installation art and the internet - and on the most recent scholarship on responses to the Holocaust, the volume aims to update our understanding of how visual culture looks at the Holocaust and genocide today. With the contributions: Robert S. C. Gordon, Axel Bangert, Libby Saxton- Introduction Emiliano Perra- Between National and Cosmopolitan: 21st Century Holocaust Television in Britain, France and Italy Judith Keilbach- Title to be announced Laura Rascaroli- Transits: Thinking at the Junctures of Images in Harun Farocki's Respite and Arnaud des Pallieres's Drancy Avenir Maxim Silverman- Haneke and the Camps Barry Langford- Globalising the Holocaust: Fantasies of Annihilation in Contemporary Media Culture Ferzina Banaji- The Nazi Killin' Business: A Post-Modern Pastiche of the Holocaust Matilda Mroz- Neighbours: Polish-Jewish Relations in Contemporary Polish Visual Culture Berber Hagedoorn- Holocaust Representation in the Multi-Platform TV Documentaries De Oorlog (The War) and 13 in de Oorlog (13 in the War) Annette Hamilton- Cambodian Genocide: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Cinema of Rithy Panh Piotr Cieplak, Emma Wilson- The Afterlife of Images

"Perhaps there is no simple, easy way to educate children about the Holocaust. Yet [this] new extraordinary work in the form of a nonfiction graphic novel for children is a valiant attempt to do just that. These testimonials... serve as a reminder never to allow such a tragedy to happen again."—BookTrib Between 1933 and 1945, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were responsible for the persecution of millions of Jews across Europe. This extraordinary graphic novel tells the true stories of six Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. From suffering the horrors of Auschwitz, to hiding from Nazi soldiers in war-torn Paris, to sheltering from the Blitz in England, each true story is a powerful testament to the survivors' courage. These remarkable testimonials serve as a reminder never to allow such a tragedy to happen again. Features a current photograph of each contributor and an update about their lives, along with a glossary and timeline to support reader understanding of this period in world history.

This work offers insights into how specific films influenced the Americanization of the Holocaust and how the medium per se helped seed that event into the public consciousness. In addition to an in-depth study on films produced for both theatrical release and TV since 1937 - including The Great Dictator, Cabaret, Julia, and the mini-series Holocaust - this work provides an analysis of Schindler's List and the debate over the merit of Spielberg's vision of the Holocaust. It also examines more thoroughly made-for-television movies, such as Escape From Sobibor, Playing For Time, and War and Remembrance. A special chapter on The Diary of Anne Frank discusses the evolution of that singularly European work into a universal symbol. Paying special attention to the tumultuous 1960s in America, it assesses the effect of the era on Holocaust films made during that time. It also discusses how these films helped integrate the Holocaust into the fabric of American society, transforming it into a metaphor for modern suffering. Finally, the work explores cinema in relation to the Americanization of the Jewish image.

The author's discovery of a brief 16mm film shot by his grandfather during a 1938 visit to his soon-to-be-extinguished birthplace in Poland unfolds like a detective story. Now the basis for the documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening. Named one of the best books of 2014 by NPR, The New Yorker, and The Boston Globe When Glenn Kurtz stumbles upon an old family film in his parents' closet in Florida, he has no inkling of its historical significance or of the impact it will have on his life. The film, shot long ago by his grandfather on a sightseeing trip to Europe, includes shaky footage of Paris and the Swiss Alps, with someone inevitably waving at the camera. Astonishingly, David Kurtz also captured on color 16mm film the only known moving images of the thriving, predominantly Jewish town of Nasielsk, Poland, shortly before the community's destruction. "Blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that lay just ahead," he just happened to visit his birthplace in 1938, a year before the Nazi occupation. Of the town's three thousand Jewish inhabitants, fewer than one hundred would survive. Glenn Kurtz quickly recognizes the brief footage as a crucial link in a lost history. "The longer I spent with my grandfather's film," he writes, "the richer and more fragmentary its images became." Every image, every face, was a mystery that might be solved. Soon he is swept up in a remarkable journey to learn everything he can about these people. After restoring the film, which had shrunk and propelled across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; and into archives, basements, cemeteries, and even an irrigation ditch at an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield as he looks for shards of Nasielsk's Jewish history. One day, Kurtz hears from a young woman who had watched the video on the Holocaust Museum's website. As the camera panned across the faces of children, she recognized her grandfather as a thirteen-year-old boy. Moszek Tuchendler of Nasielsk was now eighty-six-year-old Maurice Chandler of Florida, and when Kurtz meets him, the lost history of Nasielsk comes into view. Chandler's laser-sharp recollections create a bridge between two worlds, and he helps Kurtz eventually locate six more survivors, including a ninety-six-year-old woman who also appears in the film, standing next to the man she would later marry. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. "I began to catch fleeting glimpses of the living town," Kurtz writes, "a cruelly narrow sample of its relationships, contradictions, scandals." Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the most important record of a vibrant town on the brink of extinction. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a poignant yet unsentimental exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world.