Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century

From The Great Dictator to Schindler’s List, the extermination of the Jews of Europe has driven the cinema, more than any other form of artistic expression, to question its methods, techniques, and ethics. It is with reference to the Shoah that a decisive part of the thought behind modern cinema has been constructed, and, consciously or not, many of the greatest films of the past sixty years bear the mark of this event. To give an account of these phenomena, Cinema and the Shoah brings together filmmakers, historians, journalists, philosophers, and researchers to explore how the Shoah, as a historical event, implicated and mobilized the cinema by profoundly questioning its modes of recounting and storytelling, of putting visions onscreen. The book also includes a filmography (compiled with the assistance of the Fritz Bauer Institute of Frankfurt) that lists over three hundred feature-length films, short films, and documentaries about the Shoah, produced between 1945 and the present.

Jean-Michel Frodon is a former managing editor of Cahiers du cinma. His previous books include La critique de cinma and Le cinma chinois.