Night Will Fall (2014; HBO, 2015) and the Holocaust simulacrum

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Steven Alan Carr is Professor and Graduate Program Director of Communication and directs the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Purdue University Fort Wayne. He has written many essays on film history addressing Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. He is the author of Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II (2001), and served as a Fellow in residence at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Center for Advanced Holocaust Study in 2002–2003. Most recently, he co-authored Teaching History With Message Movies with Jennifer Frost (2018). His current project explores the American film industry’s response to Nazi anti-Semitism, and eventually, the Holocaust.

Notes

1

Out of the whole world, we see almost nothing, and all the things that are out there show how unexpected and finally how uncontrollably frightening the world can be – how much like an apparition it is, and how its objects surround us and stare back at us with thousands of eyes. (Elkins 1997, 51)

I am forever indebted to my good friend, artist, mentor, and kindred spirit Jeanne Tessier who, before she passed away in 2018, introduced me to Elkins, and to so much more that since 1994 has enriched my personal and professional life.