The aim of the article is to present the way in which new forms of film narratives (that emerged in the 1960s) influenced the development of cultural images concerning the Holocaust. The author’s opinion is that the development of film poetics and popularization of psychoanalysis in public consciousness contributed in that period to shaping new forms of expression in the cinema, such as post-traumatic retrospective. Since then, cinematic depiction of the Holocaust is characterized by deepened portrait of the inner life of a character and an attempt to picture individual techniques to cope with the trauma of past events. Andrzej Munk’s Pasażerka and Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, due to their inventive use of retrospection, will serve as ideal types of the phenomenon in question.