Chapter 8: For Better or Worse: Using Film in a Study of the Holocaust

To use or not to use film in teaching of the Holocaust? The facile reference to Hamlet’s quandary is merely rhetorical, as film is rapidly supplanting both literature and academic texts as the main purveyor of historical knowledge for the general public. In Mystic Chords of Memory, Cornell historian Michael Kammen’s (1991) superb meditation on how Americans remember the past, Kämmen concludes that “for better and for worse, the media convey a fair amount of what passes for history and memory” (p. 667). “For better” is the reality that film makes history accessible and meaningful to a public that more often than not remains ignorant of past events. The debates engendered by the highly criticized NBC/TV docudrama Holocaust (1978) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), both in the United States and Europe, have indeed situated the Holocaust into our collective memory thereby better securing its place for posterity.¹ “For worse” suggests the implicit obstacles in a society that is influenced by film, teachers included, yet is not media-literate. Utilizing film in a classroom situation requires an added degree of sophistication both about the history involved, for our purpose, the Holocaust, and the methodology of “reading” film.