Documentary films and their representations of the Holocaust have served not only to speak their truth' of the atrocities but also to document changing paradigms of social thought concerning Holocaust truth'.
Holocaust History and its documentation:
Theodor Adorno's famous 1949 injunction that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' is indicative of the initial approaches of documentary to the subject matter.
The first documentary footage of the Holocaust was shot as Allied troops entered the camps of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, but this footage was archived by British Ministry of Information, wary of the political and social repercussions of such explicit imagery in a war-torn and divided Germany. These censorious tendencies, leading to what is often phrased as a voluntary and collective social amnesia' have traditionally followed such culturally cataclysmic events as the Holocaust. As Todorov examines in his seminal work Facing the Extreme this cultural will......
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