To represent or not to represent: that is the question that filmmakers dealing with the Holocaust face. Atom Egoyan’s new film Ararat also seems to be wrestling with this question; he’s not the first filmmaker to be stymied by it.

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List embody the two answers to the question of representation. Lanzmann’s documentary is uncompromising, refusing to use any archival footage and checking in at 9 1/2 hours. Schindler’s List, for whatever moments of brutality it may contain, was a high-gloss, star-studded production, as clear and straightforwardly narrative as any Hollywood film. But despite whatever contributions Schindler’s List may have made to discussions around the Holocaust, I could never shake the sense that the contours of an unspeakable moment in history were being massaged to fit into a Hollywood film.

The best and worst of both worlds is still Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film From Germany (1977). Championed by Susan Sontag and released in the United States by Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, the film was just as uncompromising and anti-commercial as Shoah, checking in at 7 1/2 hours. Indeed, if Shoah epitomised a moral, intense, and vaguely detached examination of the Holocaust, then Hitler: A Film From Germany epitomised an avant-garde, excessive, and vaguely insane attempt to deal with it. As we see because of his use of Nazi kitsch, his obsession with seemingly irrelevant bits of history, and his highly self-conscious minimalism (the film is all shot on a bare sound stage), Syberberg’s ideas about how to achieve the kind of visceral impact that only cinema can provide are actually as far from Schindler’s List as from Shoah.

A different dynamic is shaping up in representations of the Armenian Genocide. Until Ararat, the only sustained cinematic engagement with this moment that I knew of were Don Askarian’s films. Askarian, working in Berlin – he was exiled in the ’70s, after spending time in jail in Soviet Armenia – has made films where the Genocide was always vaguely present. But while his films can’t get away from the events, they can’t quite evoke them either. The most haunting moment in Komitas (1988) comes when we see an image of a mysterious figure wandering the countryside with a flame-thrower; you know what’s going on, even if you never really see it. His 1992 film Avetik is filled with images of an exiled filmmaker sitting in his Berlin apartment, projecting film onto his face, looking haunted.

There’s a similar tension at work in Ararat, which seldom visualises the Genocide that is ostensibly its topic; he only places moments of violence in scenes from the epic film-within-the-film. This need to shield yourself from the horror and from the fear of blaspheming the horror with meta-cinematic flourishes, is something Egoyan shares with Askarian. While the former is much more narrative and the latter much more avant garde, they both need to represent, to visualise, at the same time that they need to back away.

Their films are conflicted, but I don’t get the sense that the conflict short-circuits attempts at interpretation in the same way as in Hitler: A Film from Germany or Schindler’s List. When I consider the formal strategies of Syberberg and Spielberg, I mostly sense frustration; when I consider the strategies of Egoyan and Askarian, I sense cautious hope.

Don Askarian’s films are available on video from www.don-askarian.am. Hitler: A Film From Germany is available from the British Film Institute, at www.bfi.co.uk. All of this is PAL format only.