World War II and Holocaust Films

As I mentioned in class, there have been quite a few films on World War II and the Holocaust lately--Defiance, Valkyrie, The Reader.

Here's a lengthy New York Times article on why that would be the case. It's interesting, because A. O. Scott (the author) uses some Kracauer-like vocabulary to talk about the way that a community's heart and mind uses cinema to respond to "collective tragedy."

Jacob Heilbrunn has another piece in the Times called "Telling the Holocaust Like It Wasn't" arguing that these representations are too comforting to us.