Holocaust movies are now a genre. It makes one more than a little queasy to acknowledge this. We’re talking about art that seeks to recreate an atrocity of such devastating scale and magnitude; to imagine the unimaginable. You can say the phrase “Holocaust movie” and a number of images and scenarios, conventions and clichés immediately spring to mind. Some of these feature films have been extraordinary. Several have been borderline exploitative. A few have been outright offensive. German philosopher Theodor Adorno is often misquoted as saying, “There’s no poetry after Auschwitz”; his actual statement was that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism.” And while these films may collectively help us to never forget what happened, they’ve also risked making us insensitive to such horrors. Barbarism is reduced to Oscar-clip fodder.
Jonathan Glazer’s The…
