Screening: Filmmakers for the Prosecution (Jean-Christophe Klotz, France, 2022, 60 min.)
Introduction: Sandra Schulberg, co-producer; President, Indie Collect, with author Sylvie Lindeperg
In the summer of 1945 Navy Commander John Ford, head of the Field Photographic Branch of OSS (Office of Strategic Services), sent officers Budd and Stuart Schulberg and a small group of their OSS colleagues overseas to gather visual evidence attesting to war crimes and crimes against humanity by 24 Nazi officials and military leaders. Filmmakers for the Prosecution retraces the Schulberg brothers’ steps as they search for incriminating film evidence to be presented by U.S. Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson at the first Nuremberg trial. In four months of high-risk investigation across devastated Europe, the Schulbergs manage to locate hundreds of hours of footage (much of it filmed by the Nazis themselves) before the opening of the trial on November 21, 1945. The OSS editors compiled two films for the courtroom, The Nazi Plan and Nazi Concentration Camps, exposing Nazi atrocities from the first pogroms through creation of the concentration camp system. Members of the U.S. Army Signal Corps filmed only about 35 hours of trial proceedings during the ten months of the trial. But that abbreviated footage, combined with sound recordings of the entire proceedings, allowed Stuart Schulberg to produce the documentary Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (1948). Suppressed for political reasons in the U.S., Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today [The Schulberg/Waletzky Restoration] was released for the first time in American theaters in 2010.
The screening is presented in conjunction with Staging Nuremberg: How the United States and the Soviet Union Fought Over the Portrayal of Nazi Crimes, a conversation with Sylvie Lindeperg and Annette Insdorf, on Monday, October 19, at the Maison Française.
This event is presented by the School of the Arts Film and Media Studies Program and the Maison Française, and is featured in the Maison Française film series History on Trial. It is made possible by support from the Knapp Family Foundation. Additional support is provided by Columbia University Press, the Dean of Humanities, Alliance Program, Department of History, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, and Department of Germanic Languages. It is held in cooperation with the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.