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"'We Have No Right to Assert That This Is Reality Precisely Because It Is a True Story': Michael Verhoeven and the Taste Politics of the Late Foreign Holocaust Art Film."  The Nasty Past: Memory and History in the Holocaust Films of Michael Verhoeven.  Eleventh Annual Cultural Studies Conference.  Cultural Studies Association. Chicago IL.  24 May 2013.

Not new, issues of classification and interpretation of Holocaust and anti-Nazi film have persisted, at least since the 1930s.  All genres are in a sense globalized, but the globalized nature of anti-Nazi film and eventually the Holocaust film may pose a greater challenge to genre scholarship because these films synthesized so early and so completely both mainstream and European film.  While most film genres emerge from some kind of globalized context, audiences have more readily recognized the Holocaust film as global hybrid.  From its globalized narrative diegetic elements indicating a certain highbrow foreignness of its subject matter, to its formation amid the emergence of the postwar foreign art film consumed by American audiences in urban centers, to the complexity of its origins within national cinemas designated for a world market, to later concerns over an "Americanization" of the Holocaust, to the genre's more recent incarnation as a blockbuster international co-production, the genre of the Holocaust film and popular perception of this genre have never been anything but globalized.  As Michael Chanan has noted, "the difference between the Fordist studio system in Hollywood and auteurist cinema in Europe is not that one is generic and the other not, but rather that the genres have become differently aligned" (Chanan).  The history of the Holocaust film not only points to asymmetrical alignments of globalized genres, but that globalization can facilitate new generic hybrids and convergences amid ever-shifting cultural forms that were once distinct and differently aligned, but that now combine and recombine into new texts reflecting new shifts in the material conditions of their production.

A product of the New German Cinema that most American audiences encountered in the urban art house theater, Michael Verhoeven's anti-Nazi and Holocaust films provide a useful entry point to understand how the Holocaust film as genre exists as a chronotope operating along a space-time continuum.  Understanding the globalized nature of Verhoeven's titles - particularly The White Rose (1982); The Nasty Girl (1990); My Mother's Courage (1995); The Unknown Soldier (2006); and Human Failure (2008) - yields particular insight into the distinctive taste politics of the foreign Holocaust art film.  As Bakhtin observed, "time... thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history," fusing and intersecting along axes in meaningful ways (84).  Verhoeven's films themselves deploy a representational chronotope of history and memory, literally eliding past and present in continuous spaces.  As Chanan observed, the quasi-documentary style of a film like The Nasty Girl creates a surreal effect of using monotone back-projection exteriors of the town where the past appears to visually intrude on the present in ways that are incomplete, contradictory, repressed, and deeply consequential (Chanan).

In terms of genre, however, one also can view The Nasty Girl as part of a larger globalized chronotope comprising the late foreign Holocaust art film. What Verhoeven can accomplish self-reflexively and ironically in his films also characterizes a larger set of relationships establishing the postwar Holocaust film genre.  Verhoeven's body of work reveals the globalized dimension of this genre as it operates within a time-space continuum and amid the varied and contradictory relationships that exist between authorship, text, and audience.  Its own chronotope evolving over time and consumed by audiences within changing public spaces, the Holocaust film first emerged as a foreign art film hybrid screened for American urban audiences at the end of World War II and then stretched to its current status as a recognized and even mainstream globalized cultural commodity.

As I have argued elsewhere (Carr), Shyon Baumann's three-part framework involving an application of Paul DiMaggio's "opportunity space," "institutionalized resources and activities," and discursive practice ultimately can explain how foreign films established the representational framework for the Holocaust art film, within which Verhoeven's anti-Nazi and Holocaust films operated.  Just as the art film represented an "opportunity space" offering the possibility for aesthetic mobility outside the realm of the Hollywood film, the foreign Holocaust film presented a new context to challenge the pre-existing space of the Hollywood film. Because of its attendant "discursive and organizational resources" (14), Hollywood film was widely perceived as incapable of forthrightly addressing Nazi anti-Semitism.  Also similar to the emergence of the art film, the Holocaust film relied upon a complex network of "institutionalized resources and activities" where small, independent theaters exhibited these films; and where audiences sought to patronize them as a superior cultural taste alternative to "the assembly line of big studio productions" (16).  Finally, the foreign Holocaust film had, in Baumann's words, "grounding of value and legitimacy in critical discourse" (16).  In that before the 1960s the Holocaust film was essentially a foreign film, it functioned as a "field" of cultural production in which its networks between cultural producers, exhibitors, critics, and consumers produced what Bourdieu identified as cultural capital (Baumann 16-17).

Belonging to this field of cultural production, Verhoeven's films pointed to larger issues concerning the hybridity of the Holocaust film as genre in its own right, both drawing from documentary iconographies as well as operating according to its own unique set of conventions and practices.  Verhoeven's 1982 White Rose, which Katrin Paehler identified as the first in "an accidental but coherent trilogy" including the 1990 The Nasty Girl and the 1995 My Mother's Courage, exemplified the kind of political filmmaking that potentially could inspire and even catalyze social change.  As Paehler noted, Verhoeven saw his film about student resistance to Nazism in the 1940s as a call to civic action in the 1980s on contemporary issues such as the environment and the arms race.  In addition, the release of the film resulted in rescinding the verdicts of the Nazi "People's Court" against the student activists, which still stood at the time of the film's release.  Both The Nasty Girl, a bio-pic detailing a student writer who exposes her hometown's Nazi past, and My Mother's Courage, which profiled a woman's surreal odyssey on a train headed to Auschwitz and then back, continued this thread of political intervention, distinctively articulating these films' profiles of resistance and activism with deeply ironic comedy, self-reflexive textual strategies, and Brechtian distanciation techniques (Paehler).

Part of the difficulty in defining the Holocaust film as film genre results from just how much the genre draws from other genres to create a distinct hybrid.  Debates over which of Verhoeven's films constituted a Holocaust film - Paehler noted that only My Mother's Courage with its depictions of a deportation treated the Holocaust directly - reveal the tenuous and shifting nature of what a Holocaust film genre might mean.  The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's guidelines for teaching the Holocaust have identified the topic areas of both resistance as well as German complicity in the persecution and murder of Jews as topic areas for teaching the Holocaust (USHMM).  Such guidelines would suggest a more expansive definition of Holocaust film.  Without rehashing familiar debates over which films are Holocaust ones and which are anti-Nazi or about German resistance, though, one might consider the shifting nature of the genre as an inclusive synthesis of other film genres.  In this light, Verhoeven's films reveal important shifts taking place within the inherently globalized nature of the Holocaust art film as hybrid genre.  The question then, is not one of defining or categorizing Verhoeven's films as Holocaust film, but rather, how audiences have made sense of his films in the context of the Holocaust art film.  Related to that, how did American "opportunity spaces" interpret the German sensibility of Verhoeven's films into a distinct set of taste politics meant for American audiences?

Publicity for The White Rose, which helped German audiences recover a history of German resistance, suggested a complex set of relationships at work to help American audiences make sense of the film.  One of the earliest accounts in the American press described the film as a "Costa-Gavras-style political melodrama," a designation that would return in the marketing of Verhoeven's film, recalling recent thrillers such as 1969 Z or Costa-Gavra's 1982 Hollywood film Missing.  Verhoeven's arthouse political thriller could serve as an apt conduit to address the Holocaust, with the director relating to the Los Angeles Times how the film meant to prod German memory :

People always said after the war, "We didn't know what happened to the Jews."  But already in spring, 1942, the White Rose wrote in their second pamphlet that 300,000 Polish Jews were put in concentration camps.  People could have known it (Peary; orig. emph.).

In addition to the film making sense as a political thriller, display ads for the film reinforced the taste politics of the White Rose as an arthouse film.  Positioned alongside ads for mainstream as well as other middle- or high-brow independent and foreign films of the time - a Jacques Tati film festival, Local Hero, Tender Mercies, and Invitation au Voyage, the ad for White Rose invited audiences to connect it not only to another crossover German arthouse hit of the time, Das Boot, but also to think of The White Rose in terms of what The Village Voice described as "life under the Third Reich in the style of a Costa-Gavras political thriller."

In addition to Verhoeven's films making sense to American audiences as political arthouse films, The White Rose, The Nasty Girl and My Mother's Courage also made sense to American audiences as part of the New German Cinema.  Emerging from the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, the New German cinema rejected what it deemed the old cinema - papa's kino - and instead aligned itself with the auteurist and even self-reflexive visual and textual strategies of the French New Wave.  Verhoeven himself affiliated with other directors of the New German cinema, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Margarethe von Trotta, and Wim Wenders.  Indeed, many of the distinctive formal strategies of The Nasty Girl and My Mother's Courage first appeared in Verhoeven's controversial 1970 war drama O.K.  The latter film, based on a true story later recounted in Brian de Palma's Casualties of War (1989), transposed a violent gang rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl by U.S. soldiers to German-speaking actors playing American GIs in the Bavarian forest.  Using Brechtian distanciation techniques, pseudo-documentary black and white footage, and low production values, the film allegory shared its art house lineage with a French New Wave film like Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers as well as auguring similar stylistic devices that appeared in The Nasty Girl and My Mother's Courage.

The "opportunity space" created through film festivals, newspaper coverage, interviews with the director, and advertising for these films established a fundamental interpretive framework through which audiences could understand these films as something different from or even superior to how mainstream films treated Nazism and the Holocaust.  In "New Visions of Familiar Movie Genres," for example, a 1990 New York Times article covering the New York Film Festival identified The Nasty Girl as a "merciless dark comedy" that already had created "a sensation" at the Berlin Film Festival and which succeeded in taking "a familiar subject - the legacy of Germany's Nazi past - and treats it in a way that is savagely original" (Collins).  Also appearing in The New York Times, a 1997 essay by Annette Insdorff specifically cited My Mother's Courage as "part of a now-established international genre, the Holocaust film," that had emerged from both Chaplin's 1940 anti-fascist comedy The Great Dictator as well as Claude Lanzmann's 1985 landmark documentary Shoah, both films to which My Mother's Courage makes intertextual reference.  Yet it also is the very texture of Verhoeven's films, one that critically distances the viewer from its own docudrama through a variety of self-reflexive and self-conscious strategies, that itself becomes a marker of the Holocaust art film as genre.  "While I admire the intentions and effects of films such as Schindler's List," Verhoeven told Insdorff, "I have to find my own way - a more European, German way - of depicting these events."  In explaining why the beginning of My Mother's Courage reminded audiences of its own fabrication, Verhoeven observed "we have no right to assert that this is reality... precisely because it is a true story" (Insdorff).

Verhoeven's later Holocaust documentaries, most notably the 2006 The Unknown Soldier and the 2008 Human Failure, appeared to return to a more conventional and straightforward documentary style coming out of the direct cinema and cinema verité movements of the 1960s.  The Unknown Soldier detailed controversy over a 1997 Munich exhibition that called into question the myth that military rank and file in the Wehrmacht had no direct involvement or awareness of Nazi extermination committed by the SS.  Human Failure, which has yet to receive a general release in the U.S., documented the massive German bureaucracy in place, and the complicity of ordinary Germans with it, in order to confiscate Jewish property.  Although both films establish a number of distanciation effects such abrupt and ironic cuts to archival footage, slow motion speeds, optical zooms, and other digital effects, some reviews expressed disappointment in the seeming lack of visual style marking Verhoeven's earlier docudramas.  Although a laudatory New York Times review recalled a thematic connection to Verhoeven's earlier Nasty Girl, it also complained that The Unknown Soldier "may be hard going for viewers not already familiar with the German intellectual scene," and that as "a succession of talking-head interviews, and without some narration it is hard to understand the context of their arguments" (Scott).

Nonetheless, the intertextual connection to the visually innovative The Nasty Girl helped audiences make sense of The Unknown Soldier.  Like the review, an ad for the film in The New York Times also reminded viewers that the film was from the same director of both films.  The ad also appeared prominently alongside another Holocaust documentary, Primo Levi's Journey, also playing at this combination art house-second run urban multiplex.  Unlike The White Rose, The Nasty Girl, or even My Mother's Courage, however, neither Human Failure nor The Unknown Soldier achieved the kind of press coverage of Verhoeven's earlier films.  Perhaps the opportunity space for film festivals and for public exhibition of foreign and independent art house films have since dwindled.  Perhaps too, cultural tastes and interests in the globalized Holocaust film have gone mainstream, continuing to shift to the point where foreign films no longer hold exclusive genre claims on what a Holocaust film can be, or at least not enough of a claim to warrant extensive coverage from print journalism.  But let us also be mindful that both The Nasty Girl and The Unknown Soldier currently remain available through Netflix streaming.  Perhaps the opportunity spaces for viewers have simply shifted from public space to private and domestic space.  Audiences can continue to make sense of Verhoeven's Holocaust films amid a larger and shifting complex of taste politics articulating an ever-changing genre, but perhaps not in the same way they made sense of his films in the 80s and 90s.

Primary Works Cited

Collins, Glenn.  "New Visions of Familiar Movie Genres."  The New York Times 21 Sep. 1990: C20.

Insdorff, Annette.  "The Moral Minefield That Won't Go Away."  The New York Times 31 Aug. 1997: H9.

Peary, Gerald.  "50th Anniversary of Nazi Takeover: Berlin Fest Honors 6 Exiles."  Los Angeles Times 6 Mar. 1983: S24.

Scott, A. O.  Review of The Unknown Soldier.  "Disturbing the Guilty Archives of the Wehrmacht."  The New York Times 7 Sep. 2007: E6.

Secondary Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich.  "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics."  The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.  Michael Holquist, ed.  Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans.  Austin TX: U of Texas P, 1981.  84-258.

Baumann, Shyon.  Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art.  Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology.  Princeton NJ: Princeton U P, 2007.

Carr, Steven Alan.  "'To Encompass the Unseeable': The Last Stage (1949) and Auschwitz in Cold War America."  Transatlantic Representations of Holocaust Cinema in the 1940s.  44th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies.  Sheraton Chicago, Chicago IL.  26 Dec. 2012.

Chanan, Michael.  "The Documentary Chronotope."  Jump Cut 43 (July 2000): 56-61.  ejumpcut.org.  Accessed 16 May 2013.

Paehler, Katrin.  "Breaking the Post-War Goose-Step: Three Films by Michael Verhoeven."  Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.  28.4 (2010): 41-56.

United States.  U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.  "An Overview of the Holocaust: Topics to Teach."  Holocaust History.  http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007262.  Accessed 20 May 2013.