Documentary Film and the Holocaust

Suite (212)

This month’s episode, coinciding with Holocaust Remembrance Day 2021, looks at the specific role that documentary film played in recording, relaying and representing the horrors of the genocide. Juliet talks to Dr Libby Saxton, Reader in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, about how the Nazis coerced directors into making propaganda films at Terezin and Westerbork to show the concentration camps in a positive light; the importance of newsreels in exposing the atrocities at the end of World War II; how filmmakers moved from short-form to long-form documentary, and why it took years for such films to focus specifically on anti-Semitism and Jewish suffering; the importance of testimony from survivors, perpetrators and witnesses in the epic films The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) and Shoah (1985), and the limits that Claude Lanzmann placed on representation of the extermination camps; the complicity of cinema in the Holocaust; and what future documentaries, and visual culture, of the Holocaust might look like as the last of the survivors die out. For a full list of references with links, please subscribe to Suite (212) at https://www.patreon.com/suite212. Our theme music is 'Aus' by Fennesz.