ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a number of mostly mainstream, commercial fiction film and television productions released in the United States and Europe. It outlines the 'institutionalization' of the Holocaust, through a survey of its increasingly inescapable presence in screen portrayals of World War II. The chapter also discusses the ways in which the narratives of genocide and either direct allusions to the historical Shoah or the appropriation of readily recognizable Holocaust tropes reconstitute the Holocaust as a reservoir of fungible imagery for exploitation across a wide range of narrative and thematic contexts. It argues that, by making the Holocaust generally 'available' as a cultural touchstone and/or trope, this institutionalization has created the conditions for the supersession of the very canons of Holocaust art on which it relies. The chapter considers the consequences of a new vehicle of the 'traumatic sublime' - the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 for the Holocaust's privileged place in contemporary cultural debates about the meanings, values and limits of civilization.
