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Teaching the Holocaust Through Film

Page history last edited by Steven A Carr 13 years, 2 months ago

FrontPage | Full Presentation | Slideshow Only (no video) | Selected Slides

 

DRAFT IN PROGRESS

 

In 1994, a high school science teacher took 70 Los Angeles students to see Schindler’s List (Universal, 1993) on Martin Luther King Day.  Castlemont High School students made history when they laughed inappropriately at a violent scene from the film.  As Bernie Cook notes

 

the students were not given any contextual information to prepare them for the screening.  They were told that the film was about a historical period, but, when asked by reporters after the screening, some students were not able to define the word ‘Holocaust.’  Not only were they unfamiliar with the subject matter, but they had received no instruction in film analysis or criticism.  Their teachers sent them to see a film to receive a historical lesson without considering the particularities of film as a medium of communication (Cook 8).

 

The challenges of using media to teach the Holocaust to high school students have hardly gotten any easier.  At the very least, a teacher no longer needs to take students to see a Holocaust film.  The Holocaust film now comes to us.  By 1997, Schindler's List had premiered on network television, uncut, with limited commercial interruptions, and as the first network broadcast to earn an "M" under the newly-formed TV ratings, not without some controversy.  First released on VHS home videocassette, Universal issued the film on DVD in 2004.  It is available, legally or otherwise, for streaming, downloading, in a so-called torrent file, and the like.  Students are just as likely to see the film, or clips from the film, on a mobile device as they are to see it on a large screen.  In fact, the least likely place they are to see the film is in a theater in its entirety.

 

If educators need to start thinking of Schindler's List as now appearing to diverse audiences on a proliferation of screens with a lower case "s" as opposed to appearing on "The Screen," this thinking also needs to account for an ever-growing glut of Holocaust images in popular culture from which to choose.  As a New York Times headline opined in 2003, the number of Holocaust documentaries released since 1990 prompts a simple question: "Are too many Holocaust documentaries now being made?  Has supply outstripped demand" (Gewen)?  Using figures from Annette Insdorf's Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, the article estimated that a new Holocaust documentary comes out almost every two months.

 

At some point, perhaps after 1994, the Holocaust film lost some of its cultural power.  Watching a Holocaust movie, whether in class or during a school, now no longer holds the cultural mystique it once had, because watching any movie no longer seems unique, special, or justified.  Like an unraveling reel of film, the unpredictable and uncontrollable ways in which students encounter these images has completely outpaced and overwhelmed an earlier mindset of moviegoing.  While that mindset saw watching the Holocaust film as an experience unto itself and one to absorb with reverence, a once manageable Holocaust filmography has come unspooled, leaving an ever-cascading tangle of images wriggling beyond easy recognition.  One is just as likely to encounter the image of a concentration camp in X-Men (20th Century-Fox, 2000) as in Schindler's List.

 

What are educators to do?  Come up with new filmographies?  Stand fast to a Holocaust film canon?  Remain nostalgic for simpler times when all one had to do was thread a Holocaust film through a 16mm projector?  Film always has played an integral role for teaching the Holocaust.  Teachers have used Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Triumph of the Will to demonstrate the power of Nazi propaganda and the sheer magnitude of German obedience.  The images from that film spoke for themselves, and the classroom often was the only place where you could see a documentary with the original intent to glorify Nazism, or with the intent to expose Nazism's barbarity in graphic detail.  The graphic nature of atrocity footage in Holocaust documentaries such as the 1955 Night and Fog were many students’ first introduction to the Holocaust, and a teacher could justify showing the film as a kind of shock educational therapy.  The films were scarce and difficult to access outside an academic context; students had to go to school to see them.


Works Cited

 

Cook, Bernie.  “‘Only Idiots Would Laugh at Pain and Death’: Castlemont High Students’ Response to Schindler’s List and the Need to Teach Film Violence.”  Sites of Trauma in Public Memory.  Society for Cinema Studies Conference.  U of California, San Diego.  7 Apr. 1998.

 

Gewen, Barry.  "Holocaust Documentaries: Too Much of a Bad Thing?"  The New York Times 15 June 2003.  Accessed 3 Sep. 2010.

 

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