Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (review)

Lawrence Baron concludes his study of Holocaust-related cinema by stating, “We should cease posing the outdated question, Can the Holocaust be represented in feature films? and ask instead, Which cinematic genres and themes will be used to represent it and render it to future audiences?” (p. 263).

The answer is at least implied in this review of six decades of creative (non-documentary) films intended for theatre, on-air television, and cable. Baron’s well-researched, heavily annotated but still quite readable volume offers statistical analyses to indicate trends and genres which are then exemplified by detailed synopses and analyses of selected films within each category and decade, complete with reactions from critics, box office receipts, and awards bestowed.

Key to his arguments is the assertion that the Holocaust as a topic has become familiar and acceptable to American (and other) audiences, permitting recent film-makers to skip over background information in order to concentrate upon the individual stories—of love, action, survival and rescue—that audiences most desire and that lead to the greatest box office returns.

Baron provides a statistical portrait of Holocaust films as a growth industry via a “Holocaust Movie Database” which rises from forty-four films made prior to 1950, to more than 220 films produced in each of the decades of the 1980s and ’90s, as well as the increasingly international nature of such films. From the earliest productions, differing motivations lay behind many films; he notes that in early post-war Germany films made in the western zones of occupation tended to portray the majority of the German population as innocent victims of their former government, while films produced in the future East Germany “confronted the guilt for Nazi crimes against humanity more candidly because the German Communist Party and the Soviet Union had been Hitler’s archenemies” (p. 27). He also comments upon the universalizing tendency of American films throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Films such as The Diary of Anne Frank and Judgment at Nuremberg downplayed the primacy of Jews as victims of the Third Reich, an attitude which reflected the “melting pot” ideal of the post-war decades, avoided latent antisemitism while making the films more appealing to a wider audience. The graphic horrors of the death camps were left to the documentary makers, while commercial films in both the United States and Europe chose to hint at mass death without showing camps or corpses, a practice maintained in films ranging from Czechoslovakia’s The Shop on Main Street to France’s “Au Revoir Les Enfants to Italy’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

Baron divides Holocaust films into a series of genres—biographical, loving couples torn apart, satirical or comedic films, films for children, and, most recently, films involving neo-Nazis—and offers detailed descriptions of several within each category along with responses to them by a series of critics, who were often in disagreement. Perhaps the most controversial of these genres is that of films including large measures of comedy, most notable, of course, Life is Beautiful, in which the Shoah was the “hook” for a love story which ranged from the farcical to the sweet, while retaining great measures of improbability throughout. The loving deeds and derring-do of Guido, Dora, and Giosue Orefice make Life is Beautiful a favorite among my students, even while they agree on the misleading nature of the portrait of the past the film provides.

Had Baron leaned too heavily upon quantification and statistical analyses of genres, his work would be helpful but generally unappealing to most readers; however, the examples he uses to illustrate each film variety open his argument to Holocaust scholars, film buffs, and general interest readers. As the list of Holocaust-related films continues to expand and begins to include the works of the third generation, the varieties of offerings will, no doubt, also continue to grow, providing Baron with grist...