Zamanın Sanat Eseri Üzerindeki Etkisi: Holocaust Filmlerinin Hermenötik Bir Okuması

Abstract

This article’s aim is to focus on the close relationship that exists between the notions ofprejudice and historicity and the time in which a film director of genocide lives and the extent towhich their temporality unavoidably colors their artistic response to a historical event, such as theHolocaust. In this regard, depending on such an event, a categorization of people will be offered:victims and survivors, survivors’ children who born after genocide, witnesses of victims and survivors,and, finally, people born after the genocide. In this way, according to the main argumentof this essay, the time period the film director lives in relative to the event is one of the criteriafor evaluating their artwork in virtue of the formation of their prejudices and of their approach tothe Holocaust as a historical event. But it must be noted that this essay will not argue that filmsof the directors belonging to any of the particular categories are better representations of theHolocaust than the films of the others. Instead, it will be stated that there appears a two-stagelinguistic gap among human beings when directors narrate their own experience or highlight thesignificance of the event per se.