Cinema and the Holocaust

 

 Schindler bargains for lives at Auschwitz in Schindler's List:

Hoss (commandant at Auschwitz concentration camp): Why do you think I can help you if I cannot help IG Farben?
Schindler: Allow me to express the reason . . . [places diamonds on the table between them]
 

An essay on how the cinema has engaged with the facts of the Holocaust and how to depict them, and where films have succeeded and where they have fallen short. If you would like to read this, send me an email at cawkwell200@gmail.com, and I'll send you a copy.

Length: 14,500 words

Here is a summary:

How the Greeks imagined eternal torment in Hades –Dante’s ‘Inferno’ – repetition – Primo Levi’s memory of the daily command in Auschwitz: ‘get up!’ 

After the war, the death camps in the memory – is it the cinema that imagines the Holocaust for future generations? – the importance of literature – Elie Wiesel’s criticism of the NBC-TV Holocaust mini-series, yet an audience of 120 million in the USA.

Brief history of Holocaust and cinema:

  • Newsreels of liberation of camps
  • Levi, Szpilman and Szolt publish memoirs (1945-7), quickly forgotten or suppressed
  • Wiesenthal, Yad Vashem: the beginning of memorialisation
  • Eichmann’s trial in 1961: testimony of witnesses, Lumet’s The Pawnbroker 1965)
  • The historians: Reitlinger, Hilberg, Dawidowicz
  • TV: The Holocaust mini-series (1977), British TV documentaries
  • Cinema: Shoah (1985), Schindler’s List (1993), The Pianist (2002)

Discussion of particular films:

1)       Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955): an exercise in memory

2)       Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) and his 300 hours of film: use of physical location, the importance of testimony, of words over re-created images, Abram Bomba’s ‘aposiopesis’

3)       Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and his commitment to fictional re-creation – the historical Schindler and the creation of a ‘fictional’ Schindler (Steinhouse, Kenneally, Spielberg) – commercial success – the pluses of ‘Hollywoodisation’: the black-and-white cinematography, Allan Starski’s sets, the little girl’s red coat, the epic dimension – the minuses of Hollywoodisation: archetypes become stereotypes, Itzhak Stern’s role underwritten (link to Chaim Rumkowski’s role in Lodz ghetto), the episode in Auschwitz – Schindler’s List as ‘printing the legend’ and as critique of capitalist enterprise.

4)       Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) – Szpilman’s life, his memoirs, the decision to film – the story’s subtlety, and its climax – Polanski’s genius: Ronald Harwood’s script, the role of chance, Chopin, Szpilman (who survived) and Goldfeder (who did not) – closeness of book and film, differences of book and film – pluses: the film’s colour, Brody’s performance, Allan Starski’s sets, depiction of Warsaw in ruins.

Imagining the devastated city: Berlin in Downfall (2004) – Berlin in Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1946): the ethical hell of a young boy – German war guilt:

Edgar Reitz’s Die Zweite Heimat: ‘like a palimpsest’ – 5 characters: Frau Cerphal, Esther Goldbaum, Reinhard Dörr, Herr Gattinger, Juan – the Fuchsbau house expropriated from the Jewish Goldbaum – role of Mamangakis’ music; Reitz’s gift both for story-telling through characters and for visual story-telling – the ironies of Frau Cerphal’s position as a survivor in an expropriated villa – Reitz seeking an understanding through fiction.

What happened? Why did it happen? -- Primo Levi’s reticence and depth compared to Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (film, not book) – the untold stories, e.g. of escape from Auschwitz – can a film be made from the massacre at Babi Yar? -- Plato’s theory of art and the question of inauthenticity – Zvi Kolitz’s ‘Yosl Rakover talks to God’, Levinas and Wieseltier – the metaphysical dimension of the Holocaust: how to film? -- four barriers [i) depicting interior grimness; ii)only survivors can speak; iii) Jewish prohibition on images in the second commandment; iv) films inadequate as history] but there are ways to overcome them – WG Sebald’s Austerlitz: displacement, memory, German/non-Jewish authorship, his radical imagining of a Theresienstadt film.

“Understanding of the past is a journey from a little knowledge and a little learning to a stage where we realise that we have learnt much but still know very little, yet that the less we know, the wiser we get.”