Spring 2008 Advance Course Information

This information effective for spring 2008. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

History

[ HIS-5A ] [ HIS-75 ] [ HIS-196J ]

5A. Early Muslim World.

For information about course 5A, please see:

• http://reg.ucsc.edu/soc/aci/spring2008/HIS5AEarlyMuslimWorldS08Syllabus.pdf

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Please note: This is the 2005 version of the course. There will be some changes in the 2008 syllabus, including a slightly different set of required readings.

Instructor: Bruce Thompson
Office: 276 Stevenson
Hours: Monday and Wednesday, 2:00-4:00 and by appointment
Phone: 9--3467 (office), 9-2555 (messages)
E-mail: brucet@ucsc.edu

Course Description

For Winston Churchill, it was the "crime without a name"—a deliberate and almost incredible attempt by the rulers of a powerful state to annihilate an entire people and their centuries-old culture.  Now the name of the crime—genocide—is all too familiar.  We have a vast and burgeoning scholarship on every aspect of the Nazis' attack on the Jews of Europe.  There is also a large body of testimony by survivors, and an extensive literature of commentary and reflection on that testimony.  And finally we have a rapidly growing number of documentary and narrative films about the Jewish catastrophe. 

But the attempt of filmmakers to deal with the Holocaust suggests a number of problems.  Is there, for example, an inverse relationship between historical accuracy and popular appeal?  Are certain kinds of images of atrocities obscene?  Are narratives of survival inherently unrepresentative?  Is the subject of the Holocaust incompatible with traditional narrative cinema, as the great director Claude Lanzmann thinks?  On the other hand, hasn’t narrative cinema (Schindler’s List, The Pianist) made an enormous contribution to popular understanding of this terrible subject?  And haven’t the documentaries, of which there have been so many powerful and moving examples in recent years, made a considerable contribution not only to popular memory but also to historical understanding as well?  These are some of the issues we’ll consider in a course that aims to combine the methods of historical study with the techniques of film criticism.

1. THE HOLOCAUST AND THE CINEMA (September 26-September 28)

Reading: Robert Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, chapters 1-2
Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, introduction
Films: Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (France, 1955)
Jon Blair, Anne Frank Remembered (England, 1995)

2. HITLER AND HIS HENCHMEN (October 3-5)
Reading: Robert Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, chapters 3-4
Films: Oliver Hirschbiegel, Downfall (Germany, 2004)
Frank Pierson, Conspiracy (United States, 2003)

Reading: Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, chapters 1, 16
Yosefa Loshitzky (ed.), Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, introduction, essays by Barbie Zelizer, Omer Bartov, Geoffrey Hartman, Sara Horowitz, Judith Doneson, and Jeffrey Shandler, chapters 1-3, 6-8
Claude Lanzmann, statement on Schindler’s List ("Why Spielberg has distorted the truth"), from The Guardian, March 3, 1994
Films: Jon Blair, Schindler (England, 1991)
Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List (USA, 1993)

4. THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH  (October 17-19)
Reading:  Haim Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann
Film: Eyal Sivan, The Specialist (Israel, 1999)

5. POLAND AND HUNGARY (October 24-26)
Reading: Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, chapter 19
Bela Szolt, Nine Suitcases, chapters 1-23
Films: James Moll, The Last Days (United States, 1998)
Oren Rudewsky and Menachem Daum, Hiding and Seeking (United States, 2004)
Joshua Waletzky, Partisans of Vilna (United States, 1986)

6. THE SURVIVOR’S TALE I (October 31-November 2)

Reading: Solomon Perel, Europa, Europa: A Memoir of World War II
Film: Agnieszka Holland, Europa, Europa (France/Germany 1991)

7. THE SURVIVOR’S TALE II (November 7-9)
Reading: Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist
Michael Oren, "Schindler's Liszt: Roman Polanski's Mistake About the Holocaust," review of The Pianist, from The New Republic, March 17, 2003
Film: Roman Polanski, The Pianist (France/Poland, 2002)

8. SHOAH (November 14-16)
Reading: Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, chapter 13
Miriam Hansen, “Schindler’s List Is Not Shoah: Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory” and Yosefa Loshitzky, “Holocaust Others: Spielberg’s Schindler’s List Versus Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in Spielberg’s Holocaust, chapters 4-5
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text
Film: Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (France, 1986)

9. CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST (November 21-23)
Reading: Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, chapter 5
Robert Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, chapters 5-7
Films: Mark Jonathan Harris, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (United States, 2000)
Matej Minac, All My Loved Ones (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, 2000)

10. THE CAMERA AND THE CATASTROPHE  (November 28-30)
Reading: Robert Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, chapter 8
Films: Stuart Sender and Malcolm Clarke, Prisoner of Paradise (United States, 2004)
Dariusz Jablonski, Photographer (Poland, 2002)

SUGGESTIONS FOR THE FIRST PAPER (6 pages, due November 2)

• "The most widely seen films about the Holocaust tend to focus on the mystery of goodness rather than the horror of mass murder."  Discuss with reference to two or more of the following: Anne Frank Remembered, Schindler's List, The Last Days.

• The theme of denial—the inability or refusal to comprehend the terrible truth and magnitude of the Jewish catastrophe—is pervasive in Holocaust literature and cinema.  Choose two examples from the films we have encountered and compare and contrast their treatments of this theme.

• How have filmmakers represented the Nazis?  What problems are involved in using actors to represent Hitler, Heydrich, Goebbels, and the other leading Nazis?  Are the filmmakers aware of those problems, and have they solved them?  Or compare one of the docudramas about the Nazis (Downfall, Conspiracy) with the use of documentary footage of Eichmann in The Specialist.  Which strategy seems to be more effective?

• Bela Szolt’s Nine Suitcases was one of the first memoirs of the Holocaust, and along with Primo Levi’s contemporaneous Survival in Auschwitz, it is certainly one of the greatest.  Yet it’s unlikely that Nine Suitcases will ever be the basis of a film.  Why?  Alternatively, compare Szolt’s memoir, written in the immediate postwar period, with James Moll’s great film about the Holocaust in Hungary, made toward the end of the twentieth century.

• As we have noted in class, Hannah Arendt’s controversial text Eichmann in Jerusalem has a powerful influence on Eyal Sivan’s film about the Eichmann trial, The Specialist.  Does Haim Gouri’s eyewitness account of the trial offer a different perspective?  Compare Sivan’s film with Gouri’s book. 

• Analyze in detail representations of Jews in the most important American film about the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.

 
SUGGESTIONS FOR THE SECOND PAPER (6 pages, due November 30)  

• "In the end, all the debates [about film and the Holocaust] could always be reduced to one essential question: 'How can the unspeakable horror, the memories of total evil and complete degradation that the survivors themselves feel cannot be communicated, be forced back into collective awareness, into the conscience of mankind?'  No archival footage of bulldozers and mass graves, no expert testimony, no fictional transposition has ever provided a satisfactory answer" (Marcel Ophuls, "Closely Watched Trains," American Film, Nov. 1985).  Discuss with reference to Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.

• Two of the most powerful documentary films about the Holocaust are Resnais's Night and Fog (1955) and Lanzmann's Shoah (1985). The most obvious difference between them is one of length: 30 minutes against 9 hours.  What are some of the other differences?  If you were teaching a course entitled "Film and the Holocaust" and could use only one of these films, which would you choose and why?  Alternatively, compare one of these films with any of the other documentaries we have encountered so far. 

• One of the most poignant images of the Holocaust: a photograph of a young Jewish boy in Poland with his hands up, surrendering to the Nazis.  Filmmakers too have created unforgettable images of Jewish children in the Nazi era.  Compare and contrast images of children, and their historical contexts, in any two films we have seen thus far.

• Compare our two survivor's narratives, The Pianist and Europa, Europa, with each other.  What elements do the two films share in common, and where do they differ from each other?  To what extent do these films depart from the memoirs on which they are based?  Is either of these films more successful than Schindler’s List in combining popular appeal with historical accuracy?    

• Claude Lanzmann has argued that any narrative (fictional) film about the Holocaust, or any documentary film that recycles now-familiar images of Nazi atrocities, will necessarily be inadequate or obscene.   Do you agree?  Use two examples to support your case.

 
NOTES ON THE FINAL EXAMINATION:

Part One (40 points) of the final examination will consist of five clips from films we have seen over the course of the quarter.  You will be asked to write commentaries about four of them.  Each commentary should address the following issues:

• What is the principal theme or subject of the film? What particular aspect of the Holocaust does the film address?

• What strategy or strategies has the director used to illuminate that subject or theme? In other words, beyond the question of subject, what are the most significant choices the director has made in constructing the film, and what is your assessment of those choices?

• How does this particular scene or excerpt make its point or achieve its impact?  What do you find most striking, moving, or disturbing about this selection from the film?

• To what genre does the film belong, and, in the context of the Holocaust and the problems of representation that we have discussed over the course of the quarter, what are the principal problems associated with that genre?

Part Two (20 points) will consist of 12 short questions designed to test your comprehensive knowledge of all the major films we have studied in this course.  You will be asked to answer ten of them.

Part Three (40 points): The year is 2025 and you are now a Professor of History and Provost of College XVII at UC-Santa Cruz.  You are teaching History 30C, a survey of 20th-century European history, to students who were born in the 21st century.  You decide to incorporate two 20th-century films about the Holocaust in your curriculum.  Which of the films we have seen in this course would you choose, and what pedagogical criteria would inform your decision?  Analyze the two films in detail, highlighting both their strengths and the problems they suggest.

A NOTE ON ATTENDANCE:

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196J. Autobiography and History.

For information about course 196J, please go to the following address and click "Syllabus":

• http://ic.ucsc.edu/~traugott/hist196j/ 

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