Across seventy years, most famously with the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the courtroom has been the forum for an increasingly nuanced, often intentionally pedagogic, examination of the Holocaust’s history and its legacy for an American audience. Analogous to this sequence of trials, Hollywood and American film more generally have also consistently turned to the law and the dialectic of the courtroom in order to represent and engage with the Holocaust and its memory.

In this talk, Dr Jordan will provide a cultural history of these films and how they have confronted the challenges of representation which beset all Holocaust films. In particular, he will consider how the films in question present and represent evidence, focussing on key scenes to discuss not only what is depicted but also how. In so doing, this brings together the law, the Holocaust and the cinema, asking questions of the act of ‘witnessing’ and our relationship to an event which is now in the final stages of its transition from being an event in living memory to one beyond it.

Dr James Jordan is based at the University of Southampton where he holds the position of Karten Lecturer in the Parkes Institute for Jewish/non-Jewish Relations.