The Holocaust on Film: The Feature Films: Introduction

Larry Wilcox | Special In-Depth Section The Holocaust on Film: The Feature Films Introduction Larry Wilcox The first issue of this Film & History special focus on the Holocaust presented recent research on non-fiction approaches to visual representation of that topic, save one exception. Those essays discussed well-known documentaries, most notably Night and Fog and Shoah, as well as lesser-known examples, such as Partisans of Vilna and The Photographer. However, even the exception, Steven Spielberg's 1993 Schindlern List, drew on a published account of a German rescuer's story in the midst of the horrors we associate with the Holocaust, raising the difficult issue of the visual reconstruction of Holocaust memory.1 Spielberg's recreation ofThomas Keneally's version ofOscar Schindlern story certainly helped increase public awareness of, and interest in, the Holocaust in the United States, as did the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC that same year. It is not coincidental that this Holocaust museum features significant film footage, as do most of its counterparts elsewhere, most notably the Holocaust installation at London's Imperial War Museum which opened in 2000. The images presented in such museums on television monitors invariably influence our viewing and evaluation of the numerous attempts to recreate elements of the Holocaust in feature films, the types of films featured in this issue of Film & History. Those readers with long enough memories can think back to the many film depictions ofWorld War II that appeared in their local theaters, or if their family owned one, on their television sets. However, most would be hard pressed to recall any movies before more recent times that have focused in any significant fashion on the issues we now associate with the Holocaust.2 Though some wartime and postwar feature films may have starred Hitler and his Nazis, one of the earliest being Charlie Chaplin's 1940 film, The GreatDictator, very few focused on issues related to antisemitism and Nazi persecution ofthe Jews in Europe before more recent decades. The real beginning ofmore serious popular interest in the visual representation of the Holocaust in feature films, or in television recreations, dates from the 1978 NBC television miniseries, Holocaust. This television production has been widely discussed in popular and the scholarly media, and it has been widely criticized for its trivializing ofthe Holocaust. As one recent study oftelevision's treatment of the Holocaust notes, "the premiere broadcast of the miniseries Holocaust: The Story ofthe Family Weiss on NBC constitutes the most significant event in the presentation of the Holocaust on American television."3 Whateverthe scholarly criticism ofthis television event, this NBC mini-series did raise public consciousness about Nazi genocide against the Jews, and not only in the United States, for example by making the term "Holocaust" the most widely used name for Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe.4 The Holocaust-related films discussed in the six essays in this issue ofFilm & History illustrate a wide range of approaches to the visual representation of the Holocaust in dramatized form, from Paul Wegener's The Golem and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and Roberto Begnigni's Life Is Beautiful, via the notorious Md Süss by Viet Harlan and the much less well-known From a German Life by Theodor Kotulla. The first three essays presented in this issue illustrate a broader approach to the analysis of visual representations ofthe Holocaust in feature films, essays in which the authors attempt to identify and document themes: Christian ideology and Jewish identity, representation of the Holocaust in West German cinema, and Neo-Nazism in American films. The nexttwo essays approach issues relatedto the visual representation of the Holocaust through a focus on a single film, while the final contribution attempts to compare two humorous approaches from two quite different eras of history. In her opening essay, Nancy Brown focuses "on the transmission and consequences of Christian antisemitism" to "demonstrate how the stereotypical identity of the Jew was preserved through the films oftheWeimarera and theThird Reich, and how this negative image persists in the popular culture of the post-Holocaust world." In three quite different...