Jean-Michel Frodon, ed. Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century. Translated by Anna Harrison and Tom Mes. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. xiii + 399 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4384-3027-0; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4384-3026-3.

Reviewed by Anke Pinkert (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Published on H-Judaic (August, 2011)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman (Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion)

Auschwitz and Visual Language

Cinema and the Shoah contributes to the growing field of Holocaust studies and visual culture. The book of collected essays, originally published in French in 2007, examines interconnections between the modern cinematic medium and the extermination of Europe’s Jews by Nazi Germany. Emphasizing the filtration between film and the real world, the book aims to show how cinema has been worked, transformed, and challenged to its very depths by the Shoah. While overall the volume reconstructs and historicizes familiar discussions about the limits of representation, it also opens up new avenues with regard to the insistence on Auschwitz as blind spot, as absolute negativity, and its impact on visual language.

The volume, edited by Jean-Michel Frodon, the former managing editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, elaborates the relationship between cinema and the Shoah within the context of modernity and, here specifically, around the notion of what is visible. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) serves as a recurring reference point throughout the volume. Developing a critical inquiry that expands on the modernist trajectory itself, Frodon wishes to expose the link between corporeality and cinematic representation, between the Shoah as imageless event and modern cinema as the (artistic/structural) medium concerned with loss and absence. Within this context, cinema is viewed as a device that makes real bodies appear in time and the Shoah as an operation in which real bodies are annihilated and every trace is erased.

To varying degrees this approach resonates throughout the volume and it becomes most productive in historically nuanced contributions, such as Sylvie Lindeperg’s careful tracing of remediated images and footage in Night and Fog (1955) or Annette Wieviorka’s discussion of selectively (re)circulated witness accounts. The approach is less compelling in those essays that rely on an aestheticized correlation between medium and catastrophic history. In fact, readers might find it most challenging to follow the book’s conception, where cinema and Shoah appear in such close proximity that the boundaries begin to blur. If the Shoah indeed needs to be understood as a tragedy that in its relationship to the visible fundamentally concerns the cinema and if, more specifically, “the Holocaust can be seen at the roots of cinematographic modernity” (see back cover), readers will need a more rigorous introductory analysis than the essays individually provide. This seems especially pressing, given that the volume adopts the concept of the Shoah with its specific emphasis on the Jewish victims and the uniqueness of the event rather than the Holocaust to elaborate the interrelations between cinematic medium and history. The substantial body of English-language scholarship concerned with the Holocaust and issues of (visual) representation lies outside of the scope of this book. In particular, the reader will find few references to the notion of trauma that has dominated the studies in the United States. With the exception of Stuart Liebman’s essay on the historiography of Holocaust cinema--and, to a certain degree, Ariel Schweitzer’s and Annette Wieviorka’s pieces--a sustained engagement with this concept is largely absent from this volume.

The fourteen chapters in Cinema and Shoah are grouped together into six parts, including a philosophical/aesthetic section, cinematic case studies, a roundtable conversation, nationally specific analyses, methodological considerations, and a comprehensive resource guide. The volume brings together filmmakers, historians, journalists, philosophers, and researchers. Although this “deliberately heterogeneous” (p. x) compilation creates important connections between distinct areas of inquiry, these links remain largely implicit and it is left to the reader to parcel out the more consistent arguments, variations, and stakes throughout the volume. The first section, “Milestones,” provides three reflective essays that refocus questions of representation around the ability of art cinema to mark gestures of erasure (Jacques Mandelbaum) and to ethically engage the viewer in this process (Marie-José Mondzain, Hubert Damisch). The authors draw from a wide range of material that exceeds the narrower scope of Holocaust film, highlighting the structural proximity of cinema and Shoah. The second section, “Three Films,” provides a closer analysis of two documentaries, Memory of the Camps (1945), which uses footage shot by the Allies (Jean-Louis Comolli), and Alain Resnais’s well-known Night and Fog (1955) (Sylvie Lindeperg). It also includes a 2006 interview with Lanzmann on the technical and artistic choices made in Shoah. Lindeperg’s contribution, the strongest in this volume, concerns the ways in which Resnais’s use of disparate archival footage and the subsequent re-editing and absorption of those materials into other films has historically shaped our image of the camps.

The subsequent section, “Conversations at the Mill,” a discussion between five participants with varying professional backgrounds and approaches to film, gives insight into collaborative construction of cinematic and historical meaning. This more informal part is followed by the section “Cinematography Put to the Test,” which examines questions of representation and film within the context of three different historical-national contexts, i.e., U.S. (Bill Krohn), German (Ronny Loewy), and Israeli cinema (Ariel Schweitzer). Loewy’s essay provides a compelling account of Artur Brauner’s mass-market productions, which challenges the notion of a pervasive silence about the Holocaust in West German postwar society. Incidentally, the essay reinforces monolithic notions of East German film as antifascist productions in which Jewish victims did not appear. In “Tools for History,” Annette Wieviorka thoughtfully places the Shoah as event without images in relation to the vast corpus of images produced of witnesses and survivors since the Eichmann trial. Stuart Liebman makes the much-needed case for the inclusion of early postwar documentary and fictional material (especially from communist Eastern Europe) into the historiography of Holocaust cinema. The book concludes with an impressive resource section, which makes up almost half of the book, and consists of a selective image index, an extensive, thematically organized filmography, and an essay by Ronny Loewy on the audiovisual archival project “Cinematography of the Holocaust,” established at the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt.

Cinema and Shoah is aimed at a broad audience with an interest in film and the Holocaust. Given the book’s diverse exploration of the interrelation between visual representation and historical catastrophe and the substantial reference guide, the book will be a valuable resource for students, teachers, and researchers of Jewish and modern history, of visual culture and the Holocaust.

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Citation: Anke Pinkert. Review of Frodon, Jean-Michel, ed., Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. August, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30225

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