Bearing witness to the Holocaust in the courtroom of American fictive film

Abstract

From the first post-war trials to the recent libel trial in the London High Court broughtby Holocaust denier David Irving against Penguin Books and American academicDeborah Lipstadt the real-life courtroom has provided more than a legal judgment inrespect of the Holocaust. As legal scholar Lawrence Douglas has shown in TheMemory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (2001),this formal, institutionalised and controlled setting has also been the forum for anincreasingly nuanced, often intentionally pedagogic, examination of the Holocaust.After nearly sixty years of trials there is a corpus of judicial proceedings that chroniclesnot only society's desire for justice but also the changing understanding of theHolocaust, how it is remembered and how that memory is to be safeguarded.Analogous to this sequence of trials, American film has consistently utilised the law andthe dialectic of the courtroom in its own attempts to represent, understand and explainthe horror of the Holocaust, hi this thesis I provide a cultural history of these films (ageneric term that encompasses both cinema releases and television movies/miniseries)to examine how the depiction, pertinence and understanding of the Holocaust inAmerican life have altered since the 1940s. It is a thesis grounded in the tensionbetween film and history as it explores how the fictive courtroom has represented thereal-life trials as well as the Holocaust. This explores how the cinema has used differentstrategies of representation to bear witness in the cinematic courtroom to an eventwhich is said to defy representation. In conclusion it argues that the courtroom is asetting with its limitations in respect of Holocaust representation, but it is these verylimitations which are the reason for the courtroom genre's continued appeal.