First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946

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First Films of the Holocaust Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946 Jeremy Hicks FILM STUDIES / HOLOCAUST STUDIES “First Films of the Holocaust tackles a little known but deeply important subject—Soviet filmmakers, who were the first ones to visualize the mass murder of Jews and others on the Eastern front, the event we now call the Holocaust. In this important book, Jeremy Hicks shows how the filmmakers documented their horrible subject and then how the Soviet government used this frightening footage to galvanize a population. A fusion of film analysis and history, this book will be a must-have for anyone interested in filmic representations of the Holocaust.”—David Shneer, University of Colorado Most early Western perceptions of the Holocaust were based on newsreels filmed during the Allied liberation of Germany in 1945. Little, however, was reported of the initial wave of material from Soviet filmmakers, who were in fact the first to document these horrors. In First Films of the Holocaust, Jeremy Hicks presents a pioneering study of Soviet contributions to the growing public awareness of Nazi atrocities. Even before the war, the Soviet film Professor Mamlock, which premiered in the United States in 1938 and coincided with the Kristallnacht pogrom, helped reinforce anti-Nazi sentiment. Yet Soviet films were often dismissed or even banned in the West as Communist propaganda. Jeremy Hicks recovers much of the major film work in Soviet depictions of the Holocaust and views them within their political context, both locally and internationally. Overwhelmingly , wartime films were skewed to depict Soviet resistance, “Red funerals,” and calls for vengeance, rather than the singling out of Jewish victims by the Nazis. Almost no personal testimony of victims or synchronous sound was recorded, furthering the disconnection of the viewer to the victims. Hicks examines correspondence, scripts, reviews, and compares edited with unedited film to unearth the deliberately hidden Jewish aspects of Soviet depictions of the German invasion and occupation. To Hicks, it’s in the silences, gaps, and ellipses that the films speak most clearly. Additionally, he details the reasons why Soviet Holocaust films have been subsequently erased from collective memory in the West and the Soviet Union: their graphic horror, their use as propaganda tools, and the postwar rise of the Red Scare in the United States and anti-Semitic campaigns in the Soviet Union. Jeremy Hicks is senior lecturer in the School of Languages, Linguistics, and Film at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz and Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film. Pit t Series in Russian and East European Studies University of Pittsburgh Press www.upress.pitt.edu Cover photograph: From The Unvanquished (Nepokorennye), 1945. Cover design: Ann Walston ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6224-3 ISBN 10: 0-8229-6224-1 9 7 8 0 8 2 2 9 6 2 2 4 3 Hicks First Films of the Holocaust Pit tsburgh ...