The Holocaust in Popular Culture - Film

Film

The Holocaust has also been the subject of many films, including The Pawnbroker, Schindler's List, Voyage of the Damned, The Pianist, The Sorrow and the Pity, Night and Fog, Shoah, Sophie's Choice, Life Is Beautiful, Korczak. A list of hundreds of Holocaust movies is available at the University of South Florida and the fullest Holocaust-related film database, comprising thousands of films, is available at the Yad Vashem visual center.

With the aging population of Holocaust survivors, there has also been increasing attention in recent years to preserving the memory of the Holocaust through documentaries. The most influential of these is Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, which attempts to tell the story in as literal a manner as possible, without dramatization of any kind.

Arguably, the most highly acclaimed Holocaust film by critics and historians alike is Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, which is harrowingly brutal in its graphic depiction of the events at the camps (one of the more notable scenes shows Jewish fat being carved into soap). Many historians and critics have noted its realistic portrayal of the camps and that it lacks the histrionics present in so many other Holocaust films. Indeed, renowned film historian Peter Cowie states “It's a tribute to the clarity and cogency of Night and Fog that Resnais’ masterpiece has not been diminished by time, or displaced by longer and more ambitious films on the Holocaust, such as Shoah (film) and Schindler's List.”