Staging Nuremberg

Sylvie Lindeperg offers a pioneering account of the cinematic stagecraft, storytelling, and imagery of the Nuremberg trials, revealing how film was used both as legal evidence and as a propaganda tool.

Lindeperg’s magisterial history of the International Military Tribunal demonstrates how justice and cinema emerge from the push and pull of documentary proof and dramatic stagecraft. Gripping, deftly constructed, and meticulously researched, Staging Nuremberg provides a much-needed analysis of the complex ways moving images give form to evidence.

Staging Nuremberg presents a pathbreaking account of the struggle between American jurists and their Soviet counterparts over the use of film at Nuremberg. In so doing, it offers a fascinating meditation on how film serves both as documentary evidence in landmark prosecutions and as a vehicle through which conceptions of justice and memories of historic trials are constructed.

With narrative flair, rigorous research, and unwavering focus, Lindeperg fleshes out in detail the Allies’ decision process—their steps and missteps—in staging the Nuremberg Trials. An essential work on the role of documentary in writing contemporary history, this book reconstructs the minute fragility and sense of opportunity felt by Americans and Soviets as they exerted their national and historical mission through film on the cusp of the Cold War.

Sylvie Lindeperg is professor of history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne. She is the author of prizewinning books in French and the codirector or cowriter of documentary films. Her books in English translation include “Night and Fog”: A Film in History (2014).

Claudia Gorbman is professor emerita of film studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and has translated several books by Michel Chion.