‘You cannot look at this’: Thresholds of Unrepresentability in Holocaust film

The debate over Holocaust representations in (especially popular) film and television is persistently conducted within the terms of a high culture-low culture opposition in which Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List are canonical antagonists. A central element of this debate is the question of how, or indeed if, the Holocaust can be adequately encountered within mainstream artistic practices. Popular films like Schindler’s List or TV series like Holocaust, which are heavily generic, are almost by definition committed to bringing the Holocaust within conventional representational parameters, an approach which can be defended in ethical terms as a refusal to render the Holocaust ineffable and thus ultimately incomprehensible. Shoah can be seen, in its outright refusal of conventional form, as arguing the opposite case. Yet at one crucial point in their representations, these positions are reversed – the experience of the gas chambers themselves, a sight that Spielberg (ambivalently) withholds but that Lanzmann, surprisingly, chooses to visualise for the viewer. The impossible space of the death chamber thus becomes a critical textual site at which the desire for and the meaning of (in)sight is interrogated.