Trial / Observer
Filmed Images and Tele-Vision: Nazi Crimes in Court

 

October 1, 2006 sees the 60th anniversary of the verdicts at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. The 11-month-long trials became a media icon, and were already staged in full awareness of the processes of mediatisation. Clear evidence for this can be seen in the headphones (for simultaneous interpretation) and the sunglasses worn by Göring, Speer and the other defendants (due to the lighting in the courtroom required by the cameras). The conference Trial / Observer is devoted to the role of film in observing the trials and a trial of the observation process itself. It is concerned with staging, the use and reception of cinema (and later on, TV) images, which both examine the Nuremberg Trials and look back on them. It is concerned with the viewpoints and tele-vision over a distance in time, as for example in the propagation of verdicts in documentary films, the dramatization of truth-finding via courtroom dramas (such as Judgement at Nuremberg, 1961), and the decoding of political problems, as for example in the film essays of Marcel Ophuls.

 

Contributing to the discussion of making visible and imaginable the National Socialist crimes against humanity will be a panel of film historians, media historians and history scholars who will present a wealth of illustrative material and offer ample opportunity for debate. To start off the conference there will be a programme with documentary films from the era: Nuremberg(1946-48) and Frank Capra's instructional film for American soldiers in occupied Germany: Your Job in Germany (1945).