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Taking early 21st century Britain as a case study, Rethinking Holocaust Film Reception: A British Case Study presents an intervention into the scholarship on the representation of the Holocaust on film. Based on a study of audience responses to select films, Stefanie Rauch demonstrates that the reception of films about the Holocaust is a complex process that we cannot understand through textual analysis alone, but by also paying attention to individual reception processes. This book restores the agency of viewers and takes seriously their diverse responses to representations of the Holocaust. It demonstrates that viewers' interpretative resources play an important role in film reception. Viewers regard Holocaust films as a separate genre that they encounter with a set of expectations. The author highlights the implications of Britain's lessons-focused approach to Holocaust education and commemoration and addresses debates around the supposed globalization of Holocaust memory by unpacking the peculiar Britishness of viewers' responses to films about the Holocaust. A sense of emotional connection or its absence to the Holocaust and its memory speaks to divisions along ethnic, generational, and national lines.
List of contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Holocaust Film Reception: A Microstudy from Britain
Chapter 2 Encountering the Holocaust in Britain
Chapter 3 True Stories: Conspiracy, The Grey Zone, and Defiance
Chapter 4 Fiction: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Reader
Chapter 5 Engaging with Films: Holocaust Film as Genre
Chapter 6 Ambiguous Narratives: British Perspectives on Perpetrators and Victims
Chapter 7 Universal Discourses and National Narratives
Chapter 8 Rethinking Holocaust Film Reception: History, Film and Memory
Bibliography
About the Author
About the author
Stefanie Rauch is research associate at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London.
