Introduction

Larry Wilcox | Special In-Depth Section Introduction Larry Wilcox At the beginning of our new millennium, the mass media provide regular and disturbing visual images of all-too-frequent, inhumane atrocities committed in manyparts ofourworld. However , the most haunting and most enduring images ofthe twentieth century remain those ofwhat we now call the Holocaust, the attemptedNazi genocide againsttheJews ofEurope duringWorld WarII. RobertAbzug has written eloquently aboutinitialAmerican reactions to the first pictures of the liberated camps: "the image that news makes of reality is ephemeral; the reality itself remains. Piles of dead, sticks staring at the camera, the deep vacant eyes and emaciated body of the survivor multiplied hundreds or thousands of times—these were the fixed images that stunned America, and the realities from which they shrank."1 Cinemahouse audiences saw such images for the first time in April 1945, shortly before the final destruction of Hitler's ThousandYear Reich that had attempted a Final Solution of the Jewish Question. These newsreels, "the most horrifying images ever screened in American theaters," drew on footage collected byAllied cameramen from the liberated camps to document Nazi crimes against humanity in preparation for planned war crimes trials.2 These earliestvisual images ofNazi atrocities have played an important role in shaping our collective memory ofthe Holocaust since the end ofWorldWar II. The essays presented in the 2002 volume of Film & History (Vol. 32.1 and 32.2) illustrate some of the ways in which "films for commercial release and television have been instrumental in helping to assimilate the Holocaust into the popular consciousness."3 In addition to the use of such footage in commercial newsreels , the Allies drew on this visual record for other purposes. For example, American military leaders incorporated such footage in training films for occupation forces, most notably in a 1945 production of Frank Capra's film entitled Know Your Enemy —Germany.4 All ofthe occupying powers utilized such footage in the preparation offilms for viewing by German audiences, as in theAmerican production titled Death Mills {Todesmühlen), a compilation of gruesome footage apparently not widely screened in the context ofthe emerging ColdWar.5 A 1945 joint Anglo-American feature length documentary production, The True Glory, included camp footage in a visual celebration ofthe liberation ofWestern Europe.6 However, the best-known use of this camp footage after the end of the war came in a compilation film entered as evidence at the International Military Tribunal of the major Nazi war criminals in November 1945. This visual evidence, titled Nazi Concentration Camps, featured footage from twelve liberated sites, none ofthem death camps, shown on a large screen erected in the Nuremberg courtroom. One newspaper reported that this "one hour nightmare in motion pictures depicting the fear and terror and the nameless horror of the concentration camps" shocked the audience so much that it "remained silent for a few minutes, too stunned to express emotion."7 The US government compiled footage of this main war crimes trial for wider public distribution in America in a film released in 1946 titled simply Nuremberg} The Soviet Union also produced and distributed a documentary on the IMT, Nuremberg Trials, showcasing some of their footage from camp sites liberated in the east, especially Majdanek andAuschwitz.9 These early films on Nazi atrocities, largely forgotten in the early Cold War era, would be followed by near visual silence about issues we associate with the Holocaust until the 1978 NBC television miniseries with that title. 10 The six essays presented in this first 2002 issue of Film & History (32.1) focus, with one exception, on key examples of documentary films dealing with the Holocaust over the next half century, illustrations of how filmmakers have tried to remember the Holocaust. In particular, three of these authors address two ofthe best-known documentary films on the Holocaust—though neither used the term Holocaust. Both of these films were French productions, Alain Resnais's 1955 release, Night and Fog, one of the first films to focus on the camps, and Claude Lanzmann's 1985 nine-and-one-half hour Shoah, one of the few well-known films to consciously refuse to utilize allied films of the liberated camps or any other...