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Joshua Hirsch has given me one more reason to explain why I hate Schindler's List. In his new book, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust, he makes a significant contribution to the debate surrounding the value and effects of Holocaust films through a discussion of a group of films that are both symptoms and expressions of the personal and historical trauma wrought by Nazi Germany. Hirsch claims that the well-known documentaries Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955) and Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985) first established certain features of a post-traumatic cinema that were then adopted and developed in less well-known fictional movies such as The Pawnbroker (Lumet, 1965) and three by the Hungarian filmmaker István Szabó: Father (1966), Love Film (1970), and 25 Fireman Street (1973). These are distinguished from more contemporary Holocaust movies such as Schindler's List and Life is Beautiful, both for their rejection of classical realism (the intent to portray the way “it really was”) and for their ability to transmit the structure of trauma - the impossibility of assuming a past that invades and fractures the present - through their form and content.
Hirsch provides a fascinating analysis of how these films adopt symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder into the structure of cinematography, perhaps most evident through the use of the flashback as a device to interrupt rather than explain the narrative of a film. These films “formally repeat the traumatic structure of the experience of witnessing the events themselves” (p 3), as they all take place after the trauma of Nazism, which nevertheless invades their narratives and interrupts their linear continuity (in these films the present and the past always converge and obscure one another). Further, akin to traumatic recollection, which forces an individual to bear witness to the failure of memory and the inability to master the past, Hirsch draws attention to the fact that these films are self-conscious about the limits of repr