FILMMAKERS FOR THE PROSECUTION retraces the hunt for film evidence that could convict the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trial. The searchers were two sons of Hollywood – brothers Budd (What Makes Sammy Run) and Stuart Schulberg – serving under the command of OSS film chief John Ford.

The Nuremberg Trials were the first time a cinema screen appeared in a courtroom, and the footage the Schulbergs compiled – mostly shot by the Nazis themselves – became part of the official record. These images shape our understanding of the Holocaust to this day.

Seventy-five years after the trial, the French journalist and filmmaker Jean-Christophe Klotz returns to the German salt mine where films lay burning, uncovers never-before-seen footage and interviews key figures to unravel why the resulting film about the trial – Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today by Stuart Schulberg – was intentionally buried by the U.S. Department of War.

Klotz’s riveting film fills in the gaps of how these groundbreaking materials were sourced, and poses still-pertinent questions about documentarians’ obligations to posterity. It is a story of the power of cinema in the pursuit of justice but also raises questions of the power of media in the world today.

Harvard University’s Professor Eric Rentschler will join us for a Zoom discussion about propaganda in German cinema during the Nazi era.

MEET ERIC RENTSCHLER, Ph.D.

Eric Rentschler, professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, is a faculty member of Harvard University’s Film and Visual Studies Program and the convener of the monthly Film and Visual Studies Colloquium. He has served as director of the annual Berlin Film Program offered by the Harvard Summer School (in cooperation with the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin). He is also  co-director of the German Film Institute held most recently at the University of Michigan.

Professor Rentschler is the author of many books including German Film and Literature (Methuen, 1986), West German Filmmakers on Film (Holmes & Meier, 1988), The Ministry of Illusion (Harvard UP, 1996), ), and The Use and Abuse of Cinema: German Legacies from the Weimar Era to the Present (Columbia UP, 2015).  He is also the recipient of the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize for Senior Faculty at Harvard (2001) and the Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship (2003).