Film and the Holocaust

New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films

Aaron Kerner

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441183897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

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.

Chapter One

Introduction

Introduction

As a broad survey of Holocaust films this book aims to introduce readers not only to the established canon but also to films that do not share the notoriety that Charles Chaplin’s 1940 comedy The Great Dictator or Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List enjoy. Whether it is more obscure experimental works or foreign films that never entered wide circulation in the English-speaking world, this book is not an end point, but rather an entry into a broader investigation of Holocaust films. In addition to the films themselves, the book also aims to introduce the reader to some of the scholarship and critical literature that engages with the complexities of representing the Holocaust.

The Holocaust is not subject to question here; rather what is subject to question is how to represent it, or even more accurately how it has been represented. The point is not to police representations of the Holocaust, nor is it to function as a perspective guide on how a Holocaust film should be made, but instead to document the strategies that filmmakers utilize when representing it. What rhetorical strategies are available to artists and filmmakers? In surveying different rhetorical strategies we will discover that with each approach a different set of theoretical or ethical concerns is evoked. The knee-jerk assumption that the Holocaust should be represented “as it really was,” maintains a strong hold on the popular imagination, and implicitly informs a lot of the critical literature, but the present book takes issue with this problematic assumption. With a circumscribed representational strategy we have perhaps unnecessarily hamstrung filmmakers, as Terrence Des Pres suggests: “We guard the future by bondage to the past. This seems a noble posture, reassuring, but perhaps also debilitating.”¹

Regardless of how fastidious, or not, a film might be, the popular imagination weighs heavily on the tradition of representing the Holocaust, and it’s the conservative doctrine of verisimilitude that rules the day. Quite critical of the conventional wisdom surrounding Holocaust representations, Des Pres observes that there are three basic commandments that govern its representations:

1. The Holocaust shall be represented, in its totality, as a unique event, as a special case and kingdom of its own, above or below or apart from history.
2. Representations of the Holocaust shall be as accurate and faithful as possible to the facts and conditions of the event, without change or manipulation for any reason — artistic reasons included.
3. The Holocaust shall be approached as a solemn or even a sacred event, with a seriousness admitting no response that might obscure its enormity or dishonor its dead.²

While rarely stated in such explicitly codified terms, these tenets breed what Millicent Marcus has dubbed, “Holocaust fundamentalism.”³ Imre Kertész, a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor, concurs, “A Holocaust conformism has arisen, along with a Holocaust sentimentalism, a Holocaust canon, and a system of Holocaust taboos together with the ceremonial discourse that goes with it; Holocaust products for Holocaust consumers have been developed.”⁴ These general governing principles have shaped the critical body of Holocaust film research, defining the standard cadre of films that consistently attract the attention of scholars, while quickly dismissing, or omitting altogether, films that are brazenly crass, or do not conform to the principles of verisimilitude. How then might we profit from other narrative strategies? What alternatives are there to the realist imperative? And rather than simply wag an indignant finger at the more dubious representations of the Holocaust, what might we learn from the more exploitative strategies? This is one feature that sets the present book apart from many of the other books on the subject; there is no intention to “recoup” films that are frankly offensive; however, it is critical to understand how the Holocaust is represented, even when the narrative strategies are dubious.

What is a Holocaust Film?

The term “Holocaust” originates from Greek, meaning “A sacrifice wholly consumed by fire; a whole burnt offering.”⁵ The first known use of the term in association with the destruction of European Jewry appears in 1942. The theological connotations of the term are troubling for some, not to mention that the genocidal act can be summed up (and perhaps even conjured away) in a single term. “Calling the Holocaust a burnt offering is a sacrilege, a profanation of God and man,” Bruno Bettleheim argues.

To call these most wretched victims of a murderous delusion, of destructive drives run rampant, martyrs or a burnt offering is a distortion invented for our comfort, small as it may be … it robs them of the last recognition which could be theirs, denies them the last dignity we could accord them: to face and accept what their death was all about, not embellishing it for the small psychological relief this may give us.⁶

Indeed, naming it, and in turn by implicitly situating victims as sacrificial offerings, might be all too easy (for us). Because of the problematic nature of the term some prefer the Hebrew “Shoah,” but this term too has similar connotations.

Claude Lanzmann, director of one of the single most important documentaries made about the Holocaust, Shoah (1985), struggled for years to come up with a title for his nine-and-a-half-hour film. Deeply troubled by the connotations of the word “Holocaust,” he sought to avoid it. Effectively at the last minute, he decided to title his film Shoah, as he recounts, “The word shoah imposed itself on me at the end since, not knowing Hebrew, I did not understand its meaning, which was another way of not naming it… . ‘Shoah’ was a signifier without a signified, a brief, opaque utterance, an impenetrable word, as unsmashable as an atomic nucleus.”⁷

Nevertheless, despite these reservations, in the English-speaking world, and certainly in other parts of the world, “the Holocaust” has come to signify the systematic destruction of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazi regime. Although well-established, especially in the wake of the publicity of the Adolf Eichmann trial held between April 11 and December 15, 1961, the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust, directed by Marvin Chomsky, helped to further solidify the term’s common usage in Europe and North America. (The NBC miniseries and its impact are discussed in the following chapter.)

While I recognize that the Holocaust, that is to say the historical event, is specific to a particular time and place, and is a uniquely Jewish event, for the purposes of the present book a “Holocaust film” encompasses a broader spectrum.⁸ Additionally, within the scope of systematic extermination other “undesirables” were targeted for liquidation as well, including gypsies, homosexuals, and Jehovah Witnesses. A “Holocaust film” is not the event; it is a re-presentation of the event, and fidelity as such is always already a problematic enterprise. Furthermore, understanding that Nazism, or fascism more generally, and the Holocaust are in fact two separate subjects, I nevertheless find it next to impossible to pry one from the other. How can one speak of the horrors of the Holocaust without in some way positioning it in a social, political, economic, and cultural operation that made the industrialization of murder possible? In fact most surveys of “Holocaust films” — whether it’s Annette Insdorf’s Indelible Shadows, or Ilan Avisar’s Screening the Holocaust — reveal that scholars have consistently looked beyond the specificity of the historical event when writing about Holocaust films. For example, Luchino Visconti’s 1969 The Damned has more to do with the rise of fascism than it does with the Holocaust, or for that matter, a film like Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dramatic narrative Schindler’s List, which now stands for better or for worse as something of a gold-standard for mainstream (Hollywood) narrative Holocaust films, is more about Oskar Schindler, a Gentile, than it is about the Jews that he saved.

Appreciating the difference between the historical event, and the subsequent representations that derive from it, a “Holocaust film” exhibits a number of different characteristics. Representations of Jews might materialize explicitly, implicitly, or even be altogether omitted from a Holocaust film. Alain Resnais’s 1955 landmark documentary Night and Fog, for example, does not focus on Jewish victims; instead it takes a more universal approach, and in fact only references Jewish victims once, along with images of deportees wearing the Star of David.⁹ Resnais has certainly been taken to task for universalizing suffering, effacing the differences between Holocaust victims, but the point here is not to register moral fidelity — as if it is necessary to tally points for representing Jewish suffering — rather the point remains to gauge the filmmaker’s rhetorical strategy. Within the confines of this book a Holocaust film, then, by precedent and by definition need not exclusively focus on Jewish suffering.

One of the major thematic tropes of a Holocaust film is the representation of victims and perpetrators. While Holocaust victims, and especially Jewish victims, have traditionally been feminized, the perpetrator — like the monster in slasher films — is frequently attributed with almost superhuman strength (or god-like powers). Recent trends in narrative film have broken with the more diminutive Jewish character — Edward Zwick’s 2008 film Defiance, or Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds are examples of this — nevertheless the Jew-as-feminized-victim is one of the most common tropes in Holocaust films.

Operating in a system of institutionalized cruelty, perpetrators are given to a sadistic pretension; and this general constellation of characters favors Manichaeist plots. A number of filmmakers utilize sadism as a character trope, but it materializes in many different ways. Sometimes simply manifesting as naked cruelty, and in the colloquial sense of the term characters seemingly derive pleasure from the pain and humiliation of others, such as those depictions found in exploitation cinema. There are, however, more cerebral forms of sadism that draw on its more clinical manifestation — a radical application of reason ungoverned by ethics — which is precisely what is found in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. There are still other examples of sadism, those films that willfully conflate sex and violence — Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film, The Night Porter, for example.

Content is of course important, but it should not come at the expense of neglecting form. The form that a Holocaust film takes dramatically shapes the perception of content. The historicist Hayden White reminds us that form inherently alters content; the discourse of history itself is a “manipulation” of content insofar as events are transfigured into the written form. His work challenges our preconceived notions about historicism, and “narrativizing” a historical event like the Holocaust. White observes that we all too quickly surrender to conventional thinking about representing historical events, “that a serious theme — such as mass murder or genocide — demands a noble genre — such as epic or tragedy — for its proper representation.”¹⁰ It is no accident given Western culture’s predilection for these “noble genres” when depicting historical events of such magnitude that films made outside the parameters of conventional dramatic cinema, or documentary, are met with deep suspicion.

Boundaries: Ethics and Prohibitions

No sooner had Roberto Benigni’s 1997 comedy Life Is Beautiful been released than were heard the shrill cries from some critics screaming blasphemy.¹¹ On the grounds that it crossed some ethical boundary by daring to represent the Holocaust in the form of a fanciful comedy, its lack of historical fidelity, and despite (or perhaps because of) the critical accolades bestowed upon the film and its filmmaker, a number of critics lined up to vociferously decry the film. Never mind the fact that by its very definition comedy is exaggeration (read: distortion), and that the film is framed as a fanciful recollection of a childhood memory, critics like David Denby nevertheless felt compelled to rail against it. Reflecting on Life Is Beautiful, Hilene Flanzbaum observes that, “It has become too easy a response, and a form of intellectual chic, to look disdainfully at popular representations of the Holocaust.” Flanzbaum continues, “Let’s all agree right now that no artistic representation of the Holocaust will ever sufficiently depict the horrors of that event — and move on to more explicit and meaningful discussion.”¹² Despite the fact that it is abundantly obvious that a re-presentation of the Holocaust comes after the fact, and is always already an imperfect narrative construct, some stubbornly still demand that representations adhere to the principles of verisimilitude.

The stringent parameters of “permissible” representational form continue to evolve. There appears to have been, for example, comparatively little criticism of the Jewish Nazi hunters in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds. That’s not to say that the film received praise from every corner, again Denby’s New Yorker review finds Tarantino’s film morally suspect. The ethics of representational boundaries and prohibitions have been shaped over time by figures like Holocaust survivors Bruno Bettelheim and Elie Wiesel.¹³ The general anxiety about representations of the Holocaust resonates in Theodor Adorno’s often-cited proclamation that, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”¹⁴ And despite the fact that later he would revise his position, in fact reversing his position altogether, saying that suffering “has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems,”¹⁵ the conservative opposition to poetic strategies, and by extension all artistic representation of the Holocaust, weighs heavily on popular and critical assumptions leading to the insistent demand that the Holocaust be represented, “as it really was.” In addition to Adorno’s reversal there is also some irony in the fact that Adorno himself, along with his colleague Max Horkheimer, co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment, which includes a discussion of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, which they read as a prophetic allegory of modern totalitarianism (discussed in Chapter 6, “Sadism and Sexual Deviance,” and Chapter 9, “Body Genres III: The Horror Genre and the Holocaust”). So even while Adorno articulates the conservative perspective regarding representational boundaries for the Holocaust — condemning the use of the poetic form — at the same time, he “makes sense” of the Holocaust in the literary arts, through the poetic, the allegorical form.

The resistance to artistic treatments of the Holocaust, including approaching the Holocaust through the allegorical mode, is the result of a complex confluence of multiple historical trajectories, including the cultural and historical time in which the Holocaust is set, and the historical attitudes about narrative forms. By contrast a comparative study of the Japanese response to atomic attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveals a plethora of allegorical and poetic accounts, owing of course to the fact that the Japanese were not subject to the same historical prejudices.¹⁶ Appreciating the history of narrative forms is important in contextualizing the motivation for the realist imperative when representing the Holocaust.

Whether we are discussing a documentary, or narrative feature films, these representational forms are always already constructs; there is no clear window onto the past, h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: The Realistic Imperative
• Chapter Three: The Holocaust as Dramatic Spectacle
• Chapter Four: Defiance and Resistance
• Chapter Five: Holocaust Comedies?
• Chapter Six: Sadism and Sexual Deviance
• Chapter Seven: Body Genres I: Melodramatic Holocaust Films
• Chapter Eight: Body Genres II: Pornography and Exploitation
• Chapter Nine: Body Genres III: The Horror Genre and the Holocaust
• Chapter Ten: Holocaust Documentaries I: Telling It Like It Really Was
• Chapter Eleven: Holocaust Documentaries II: Testimonials
• Chapter Twelve: Holocaust Documentaries III: Personal Documentaries
• Chapter Thirteen: Holocaust Documentaries IV: The Poetic Documentary
• Chapter Fourteen: Experimental Films I: Rituals of Memory
• Chapter Fifteen: Experimental Films II: Lost and Found (Footage)
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• eCopyright