This publication considers how cinema, as a major modern art form, has covered topics relating to the Holocaust in documentaries and fiction, historical reconstructions and more symbolic films, focusing on the question of realism in ethical and artistic terms. It explores a range of issues, including whether cinema is an appropriate method for informing people about the Holocaust compared to other media such as CD-ROMs, video or archive collections; whether it is possible to inform and appeal to the emotions without being explicit; and how the medium can nurture greater sensitivity among increasingly younger audiences which have been inured by the many images of violence conveyed in the media. Films discussed include Schindler's List, Life is Beautiful, The Pianist, Sophie's Choice, Shoah, Au revoir les enfants, The Great Dictator and To Be or Not to Be.

In attempting to portray the Holocaust and crimes against humanity on the big screen, film-makers generally have to address the key question of realism. This is both an ethical and an artistic issue. The full range of approaches has been adopted, covering documentaries and fiction, historical reconstructions such as Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, depicting reality in all its details, and more symbolic films such as Roberto Benigni's Life is beautiful. Some films have been very controversial, and it is important to understand why.Is cinema the best way of informing the younger generations about what took place, or should this perhaps be left, for example, to CD-Roms, videos or archive collections? What is the difference between these and the cinema as an art form? Is it possible to inform and appeal to the emotions without being explicit? Is emotion itself, though often very intense, not ambivalent? These are the questions addressed by this book which sets out to show that the cinema, a major art form today, cannot merely depict the horrors of concentration camps but must also nurture greater sensitivity among increasingly younger audiences, inured by the many images of violence conveyed in the media. Anne-Marie Baron.

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.

Documentaire sur l'extermination des Juifs d'Europe par les Nazis au cours de la deuxième guerre mondiale à travers les témoignages de gens qui ont vécu à cette époque. Le réalisateur s'est surtout attaché à l'étude des méthodes utilisées dans les camps établis en Pologne tels Treblinka et Auschwitz en interrogeant des Juifs survivants, des Polonais qui vivaient à proximité de ces lieux et diverses personnes qui furent mêlées consciemment ou non à ce processus. En finale vient une section concernant la vie dans le ghetto de Varsovie et sa destruction.

Index. Biography and filmography: p. 194-205.

Collection of essays exploring the controversies surrounding images of the Holocaust

The articles in this book provide details and insightful observations on the political and social reception of 'Night and Fog'. They offer a new dimension to scholarship on the film and its place in the debate on memory and the Holocaust.

Comprehensive analysis of 220 hours of outtakes that impels us to reexamine our assumptions about a crucial Holocaust documentary. Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 magnum opus, Shoah, is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust—and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe, Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend fresh insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and, above all, gender—Lanzmann’s twenty hours of interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the predigital era of cinema, this unused footage challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film. “Cazenave’s immense work of scholarship and reflection offers an intimate and exacting account of the way Lanzmann’s approach to the project shifted and changed over the years of its creation. Never before has there been a more insightful study of the evolution of his thinking. I believe that any scholar who has worked on this film will agree.” — Stuart Liebman, editor of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays “This monumental book will profoundly change our understanding of Shoah and Lanzmann’s highly influential shaping of the Holocaust narrative. Cazenave reveals that the significance of Shoah is not only found in what is in it, but, perhaps more importantly, what was omitted from it.” — Aaron Kerner, author of Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films

When representing the Holocaust, the slightest hint of narrative embellishment strikes contemporary audiences as somehow a violation against those who suffered under the Nazis. This anxiety is, at least in part, rooted in Theodor Adorno's dictum that "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." And despite the fact that he later reversed his position, the conservative opposition to all "artistic" representations of the Holocaust remains powerful, leading to the insistent demand that it be represented, as it really was. And yet, whether it's the girl in the red dress or a German soldier belting out Bach on a piano during the purge of the ghetto in Schindler's List, or the use of tracking shots in the documentaries Shoah and Night and Fog, all genres invent or otherwise embellish the narrative to locate meaning in an event that we commonly refer to as "unimaginable." This wide-ranging book surveys and discusses the ways in which the Holocaust has been represented in cinema, covering a deep cross-section of both national cinemas and genres.

A nine-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Nazi extermination camps, Shoah (the Hebrew word for "Holocaust") was internationally hailed as a masterpiece upon its release in 1985. Shunning any re-creation, archival footage, or visual documentation of the events, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann relied on the words of witnesses—Jewish, Polish, and German—to describe in ruthless detail the bureaucratic machinery of the Final Solution, so that the remote experiences of the Holocaust became fresh and immediate. This book presents in an accessible and vivid format the testimony of survivors, participants, witnesses, and scholars. This tenth anniversary edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps, is newly revised and corrected in order to more accurately present the actual testimony of those interviewed. Shoah is an unparalleled oral history of the Holocaust, an intensely readable journey through the twentieth century's greatest horror.