Films that depict a character's memory of a horrific past – and that character's enslavement by it – can have more consistency and integrity than a movie that purports to show the past in an objective way. A fictional reconstruction of a concentration camp is not quite as “truthful” as one person's subjective memory of it, for the latter acknowledges the partiality of the recollection. Most effective are films like The Pawnbroker, which move us by alternating the present – marked by indifference to the Holocaust – with the past. This is a cinema of flashbacks: a filmic device that permits the visible, palpable past to surface into the present. Editing in this cinema is not merely continuity, or the smooth linear transition from one shot to the next; the rhythms and juxtapositions of the cutting can create varied effects upon the viewer, from heightened suspense to an awareness of contraries. The montage of such films as The Pawnbroker, High Street, Sophie's Choice, Night and Fog, Les Violons du Bal, and La Passante du Sans Souci expresses the degree to which the relatively calm present is informed by the turbulent Holocaust.

The Pawnbroker is one of the rare “Hollywood” films (shot entirely in New York!) to take on the Holocaust and its legacy with both thematic and formal vigor. Directed in 1965 by Sidney Lumet, this chiseled black-and-white portrait of a survivor living in New York City is structured through sophisticated editing. Lumet and editor Ralph Rosenblum use montage as a complex visual analogue for mental processes.