Brad Prager's After the Fact is brilliantly iconoclastic. Focusing on post-millennial Holocaust documentaries, Prager reflects on contemporary documentaries made under the shadow of Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955), and Claude Lanzmann's epic Shoah (1985). Rightly, Prager pays deference to the history of cinematic treatments of the Holocaust. At the same time though, he challenges conventional views, and the veritable "commandments" handed down by figures like Lanzmann on the "proper" way to represent the Holocaust. This is a welcomed nuanced discussion of post-millennial Holocaust documentaries-fully appreciating the specificity of cinematic narration. Hardly a "transparent window" on to the past, documentaries are narratives that frame a subject, and Prager productively problematizes what documentaries can and cannot tell us. As spectators, Prager invites us to (re)consider the certainty of our moral footing-which is precisely what many of the films he discusses do. After the Fact challenges sentimental and fetishistic visions of the Holocaust-whether as images of abject suffering, or the idealization of survivors-and refuses to function as a platform for platitudes.

What Prager so vividly highlights is the degree to which post-millennial Holocaust documentaries are aware of the Holocaust as rendered in cinematic history. Whether a reader comes to this book from film studies, Holocaust/genocide studies, history, or some other disciplinary tradition what they will assuredly take away from it is this: a much deeper appreciation of contemporary documentaries, and the complexities of representing a catastrophic event that is quickly receding beyond the reach of living-memory.