Holocaust Films

Indelible Shadows investigates questions raised by films about the Holocaust. How does one make a movie that is both morally just and marketable? Film scholar Annette Insdorf provides sensitive readings of individual films and analyzes theoretical issues such as the "truth claims" of the cinematic medium. The third edition of Indelible Shadows includes five new chapters that cover recent trends, as well as rediscoveries of motion pictures made during and just after World War II. It addresses the treatment of rescuers, as in Schindler's List; the controversial use of humor, as in Life is Beautiful; the distorted image of survivors, and the growing genre of documentaries that return to the scene of the crime or rescue. The annotated filmography offers capsule summaries and information about another hundred Holocaust films from around the world, making this edition the most comprehensive and up to date discussion of films about the Holocaust, and an invaluable resource for film programmers and educators. Annette Insdorf is Director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia University, and a Professor in the Graduate Film Division of the School of the Arts. She is the author of Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kielowski (Hyperion, 1999) and Francois Truffaut (Cambridge, 1995). She served as a jury member at the Berlin Film Festival and the Locarno Film Festival, and is the panel moderator at the Telluride Film Festival. Insdorf co-hosts (with Roger Ebert) Cannes Film Festival coverage for BRAVo/IFC.

The Holocaust holds a unique place in American public culture, and, as Jeffrey Shandler argues in While America Watches, it is television, more than any other medium, that has brought the Holocaust into our homes, our hearts, and our minds. Much has been written about Holocaust film and literature, and yet the medium that brings the subject to most people--television--has been largely neglected. Now Shandler provides the first account of how television has familiarized the American people with the Holocaust. He starts with wartime newsreels of liberated concentration camps, showing how they set the moral tone for viewing scenes of genocide, and then moves to television to explain how the Holocaust and the Holocaust survivor have gained stature as moral symbols in American culture. From early teleplays to coverage of the Eichmann trial and the Holocaust miniseries, as well as documentaries, popular series such as All in the Family and Star Trek, and news reports of recent interethnic violence in Bosnia, Shandler offers an enlightening tour of television history. Shandler also examines the many controversies that televised presentations of the Holocaust have sparked, demonstrating how their impact extends well beyond the broadcasts themselves. While America Watches is sure to continue this discussion--and possibly the controversies--among many readers.

This resource guide will help readers locate over 800 first-person accounts, fiction, poetry, art interpretations, and music by Holocaust victims and survivors, as well as videos relating the testimony and experiences of Holocaust survivors. In addition to the few well-known writers, artists, and musicians whose work so eloquently captures their experience during the Holocaust, this guide will introduce the reader to the lives and work of more than 250 lesser known or unrecognized writers, artists, and musicians from many countries who documented their experience of persecution at the hands of the Nazis. This guide will help students gain firsthand knowledge of what it was like to experience the Holocaust and how ordinary people coped and created art and meaning from the ashes of their lives.

Film and television have been accepted as having a pervasive influence on how people understand the world. An important aspect of this is the relationship of history and film. The different views of the past created by film, television, and video are only now attracting closer attention from historians, cultural critics, and filmmakers. This volume seeks to advance the critical exploration scholars have recently begun.