398. Rome, Open City
Rome Open City began filming as Auschwitz was liberated and Roberto Rossellini’s film marks a crucial step in the creation of art in the wake of the Holocaust.
Tag Archives: Holocaust
367. Kind Hearts and Coronets
How do you make a film about a sociopath who murders his entire extended family and still get the audience to root for him?
364. Das Boot
How did Wolfgang Petersen manage to get audiences to care about a bunch of Nazi sailors trying to destroy the British fleet in the North Atlantic?
360. Waltz with Bashir
Ari Folman’s animated documentary is different from many other films about trauma. But it is only in its final moments that it reveal its most telling truth.
350. The Lives of Others
An exposé of life in East Germany under the Stasi, The Lives of Others still frustrated survivors of the totalitarian regime.
346. Au revoir les enfants
Most films about childhood are often nostalgic. Louis Malle’s masterful auto-biopic is about loss of an unfathomable kind.
294. Ida
In ancient Greece, all violence took place off stage. How can filmmakers show the violence of the Holocaust without exploiting the memory of the victims?
286. The Battle of Algiers
The impact of Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece is so great that it extends far beyond cinema and into terrorist organisations, as well as the US Pentagon.
255. Cabaret
Before it was adapted into a film, Cabaret was a memoir, a short story, a play and a Broadway musical. Released in 1972, it now serves as a history lesson.
241. The Man in the High Castle
Philip K Dick was haunted by many dark visions of the future. None more frightening than his alternate-history from 1962.
235. Persona
In a career that spanned over sixty years, forty films and a dozen masterpieces, Persona is the most unusual film in Ingmar Bergman’s canon.
225. Diva
Like many other cult classics, the French thriller Diva was almost still born. Rejected by the French critics and public, it only got a second lease of life in the US.
203. Son of Saul
While cinema has a moral duty to bear witness to history, the problem is that to witness something you have to see it. How can you show the Holocaust?
197. Reel Space/Time – Part One
In his Poetics, Aristotle wrote that drama needs a unity of space, time and action. How does cinema deal with such restrictions?
189. Genocide in Cinema
Blighted with massacres since Biblical times, the word genocide was not coined until 1944. How has cinema faired in depicting it?
Spielberg’s Techniques
This video-essay examines Steven Spielberg’s career, from his days in television up until War Horse, and shows how he uses the disciplines of cinema to secure specific emotional responses.
29. Barton Fink
The Coen Brothers won the Palme d’Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival with this sardonic look at Hollywood. But is that what it is really about?
