The Ethics of Narrative in Film: The Great Buddha+and Its Self-Reflexive Devices

This book explores how different forms of narrative maintain and extend our knowledge of the Holocaust at this critical moment in history, when the last survivors are passing away. It develops and uses an original approach that combines key aspects of narrative studies, memory studies, narrative ethics, narrative hermeneutics, and narrative psychology. The book shows that testimony, narrative fiction, and film play a key role in forming our individual and collective memory of Nazi Germany’s mass murder of six million Jews. Inspired by narrative hermeneutics, these narrative analyses are linked to and supplement one another in a historicizing movement. After having discussed testimonies given by four Jewish women in Chapter 1, Chapters 2 and 3 analyze three nonfiction films, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956), and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). Chapters 4–7 discuss four novels and one film that, albeit in different ways and more or less directly, are framed and characterized by the historical event of the Holocaust: Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2006), Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), James Ivory’s film adaptation The Remains of the Day (1993), W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), and Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (2012). The interpretations demonstrate that written narratives and film narratives can be constructive responses to the ethical challenge of remembering the Holocaust.

Beyond Nature: Posthuman Ecologies and the Ethics of Environmental Narratives in Literature and Film

Inspired by narrative hermeneutics, this chapter discusses three texts that not only illustrate but also dramatize and interpret significant aspects of memory, self-understanding, and narrative identity. Appropriating Hanna Meretoja’s understanding of narrative hermeneutics as a form and practice of interpretation, the chapter starts from the premise that not only do human beings interpret narratives but that narratives themselves are forms of interpretation. A linked premise for the discussion is that, as Hans-Georg Gadamer has shown, interpretation is not just a reproductive but also a productive activity. Seen from the perspective of narrative hermeneutics, both narratives and readers (or viewers) of narratives are engaged in interpretative activities. While neither of these is ethically neutral, both activities, and particularly the dialogue between them furthered through reading or viewing, lend support to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of storytelling as a way of exchanging experiences. Giving a narrative analysis that aims to contribute to narrative ethics as well as narrative psychology, the chapter discusses one verbal and two film narratives, all of which present the reader or viewer with interpretations of human possibilities: novelist Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), film director Jo Wright’s Atonement (2007), and film director Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012).

Narrative Time

Concentrating on the narrative ethics of documentary film, chapter 2 discusses two films inspired by memories of historical events. The chapter first considers Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary film that chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nürnberg. It shows that, in spite of Riefenstahl’s claims to the contrary, Triumph of the Will is thoroughly and knowingly complicit in Nazi ideology. The chapter then turns to the French director’s Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956), one of the first attempts to document, and remember, the Nazi concentration camps by activating and exploring the resources of film narrative. There is, the chapter argues, a problematic tension in Night and Fog between the voiceover commentary, which hardly mentions that most of the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, and Resnais’s use of film footage from the concentration and extermination camps to which Jews were deported.

Public as a whole have different abilities in interpretation on the text media. Therefore, each issue necessary documentary media texts especially true delivery so as not to cause confusion in the interpretation of the message. In line with the rapid pace of information technology to make all information more easily accessible lead the audience (especially teenagers) became more confused in making the interpretation of the meaning of the documentary primarily oriented history. The importance of media literacy should be considered in the process of meaning construction. This paper explores the interpretation of the meaning of the constructs of the teenagers at the Institute of Higher Learning on the independent documentary ‘The Last Communist (2004)’ work of Amir Muhammad. An experiment was conducted on 60 selected respondents. Every aspect of the show that visualized in the independent documentary film narrative ethics support a symbolic meaning to the delivery of meaning that have been produced in the real situation. A string of social, technological constraints and the influence of foreign cultures that influence the construction of meaning, an independent documentary have given rise to different interpretations among real teenage community now about the communists as saviors. As a result, the interpretation of narrative and presentation techniques used in independent documentary is influenced by the combination of mutual understanding (in technological community groups) and education plus the uniqueness factor prevalence of individual cultures. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s3p102