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223 17 Conclusions The received wisdom today is that the Holocaust simply was not represented on Soviet screens—the assumption is that films about Jewish suffering during World War II would have been banned just like The Black Book. However, the films analyzed in this book are evidence to the contrary: the Holocaust was represented on Soviet screens. Not only that, but paradoxically, the Soviets were actually ahead of the curve in representing the Holocaust: in 1938, they were the first to make films exposing Nazi anti-Semitism; in 1945, they were among the first to depict a mass execution of Jews in a major fiction film. Moreover, the bulk of Soviet Holocaust movies were made (or written) in 1960s, whereas in the West, Holocaust film production peaked only in 1980s.1 All the Soviet films discussed here were made despite the best efforts of Soviet censorship to ignore or silence the subject. All of the films (or at least the treatment of the Holocaust in the films) were initiated “from below”—by filmmakers , never by the film industry or party leadership. At the same time, while the Holocaust (and anything Jewish) was a touchy subject for Soviet filmmakers, it was not completely taboo. Jews, whether as victims or as heroes, appeared on screens, whereas some other categories of people, for instance, gays or lesbians, were wholly excluded as if they never existed. As in other media, the particular Jewish story on Soviet screens was submerged within the more “universal” war narrative. Jews were rarely, if ever, depicted as primary victims of the Nazis, or as having any kind of special status during the war. In the spirit of Soviet internationalism, Jews, to a degree to which they were featured at all, were not singled out—they appeared on screen as just one of the many categories of Nazi victims, be it Slavs and people of other nationalities, communists, commissars, partisans, or prisoners of war. Such universalization is not unique to Soviet film. In 1940s through the 1960s, Hollywood cinema also universalized the Holocaust in a variety of ways.2 But in Soviet film, the universalizing tendency was more pronounced and more pervasive , expressed not only through story but also visually. As part of this tendency, mass executions of Jews, which one would expect to be a hallmark of Holocaust representation in Soviet cinema, appear on screens very rarely. The images of Jews being marched toward their deaths are used as an indirect reference to such mass executions. In many cases, the Jewish identity of the victims is only inferred—they are “peaceful Soviet citizens.” Only in the post-Soviet cinema are victims of mass executions represented explicitly as Jews. 224 The Phantom Holocaust An equally important and uniquely Soviet tendency was externalization of the Holocaust in film. This tendency had significant consequences for Holocaust iconography, which relied predominantly on familiar camp imagery. In some films, even the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil are supplemented with camp imagery. Such representation was appropriate politically—in accordance with the party line, it located the Holocaust outside Soviet borders, conveniently avoiding the difficult questions of local collaboration and historic responsibility. But it also tapped into an enormous pool of symbolic power that camp images came to assume. The camp imagery on Soviet screens combined the best of both worlds: it passed the approval of the censors, and gave filmmakers an effective visual shortcut for representing the Holocaust. Universalization and externalization significantly impeded the development of native iconography of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Therefore, when the Soviet cinema did depict events of the Holocaust, its iconography ranged from rare but authentic images based on local representational traditions to externalized images derived from representing the camps. The Unvanquished is a good example of the former: the scene of the execution of the Jews draws on representation of violence in Eisenstein’s films, which, in itself, was influenced by pogrom imagery. Eastern Corridor presents an equally characteristic picture. Here the scene of execution draws on poetic cinematic language of the 1960s, including mythological motifs of water, fire, and religious mystery. Both films locate the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil, yet both consciously sacrifice historical accuracy for the greater emotional power of the scenes. Other films, like Commissar, present a composite or hybrid picture of the Holocaust: the famous sequence when Jews are marched toward their death is set on Soviet soil, but its representation relies on elements of camp imagery...

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