Holocaust Documentaries Research Articles

Earth After Death: Posthumous Cinematic Ecologies in Holocaust Documentary Film

Abstract Recent environmental turns in research on the Holocaust and the moving images produced in its aftermath have suggested the potential of earth to bear “eco-witness” to atrocity and signal sites of mass burial through alterations to the topsoil and vegetation. However, the conjunction between the elemental and the human that occurs when a violated body decomposes in the earth to become ‘humus’ indicates a particularly distressing point of “trouble” for non-anthropocentric frameworks that focus on the material agencies involved in composting processes (Haraway) and trans-corporealities (Alaimo). This article examines how three documentaries (Shtetl, Neighbours and Birthplace) frame sections of Polish earth that have been re-shaped by Holocaust atrocity and human decomposition. While indicating a vaster posthumous network in which humus becomes entangled in rural soil-based activities such as cattle grazing, the article argues that human decomposition triggers attempts to cinematically recompose active earth as readable archive and fixed landscape.

“Non-sites of memory”

This article analyses some of the 30 hours of location footage excluded from Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah. Although there has been some analysis of the outtake material in Lanzmann’s archive which consists of eyewitness interviews, very little attention has been paid to the footage of landscape, urban and camp settings, from which we have drawn these examples of Polish sites. We argue that it is possible to discern the presence of a specifically spatial memory by considering this excluded material in a way that draws on its outtake status, that is, its form of 11-minute reels unaccompanied by eyewitness presence or voiceover. The filmic construction of spaces to suit Lanzmann’s concerns is revealed if we attend to this material in its unedited state, with its constituent repetitions and exclusions, as a spatial version of the director’s customary interest in the reincarnation of the past in the present.

On Steir-Livny's Remaking Holocaust Memory

On Steir-Livny's Remaking Holocaust Memory Yael Munk Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third Generation Survivors in Israel. By Liat Steir-Livny. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019. ISBN 780815 636502, $70 The Holocaust narrative has been haunting Israeli cinema for many years. Initially, it was a repressed subject, hinted at only in the few official documentaries directed in the 1960s, but later it became more visible in the feature films directed during the late 1970s and the 1980s. At the time, Israeli cinema began to display a subjective approach to the issue, first with Orna Ben-Dor Niv's Due to that War (1989), which focused on the special relationship between two second-generation Israeli singers—Ya'ackov Gilad and Yehuda Poliker—whose popularity in the Israeli public sphere certainly assisted in offering a soft introduction to the painful subject and thus enabled a new approach to Holocaust documentaries. It was followed by a number of personal films, among them Tsipi Reibenbach's excellent documentary Choice and Destiny (1993) in which she dared to tell of the post-traumatic everyday life of her survivor parents in an extremely realistic manner, or even Moshe Zimmerman's documentary, Pizza in Auschwitz (2008). These documentaries composed a series of compelling testimonies about love and pain and the way they are interwoven in many Israelis' personal lives. But this was the story of the second generation, those doomed to serve as "commemoration candles," as Dina Wardi puts it.1 Since [End Page 251] then, a number of academic studies have been published on this cinematic issue, with the historical aspect often set aside if not overlooked.2 Liat Steir-Livny's recent book, on the other hand, stems from a historiographical approach, and as such dares to address the unspoken issue of the third generation's documentaries. This generation was supposed to be freed of the previous generations' heavy burden. However, as Steir-Livny's research demonstrates, this is not the case. The increasing number of the third generation's accounts on the Holocaust reveals that time has not healed these wounds, allowing for an immense lacuna to be left open. The Making of Holocaust Memory attempts to fill the academic gap and provides a fascinating account on the subjective reminiscences of the traumatic experience that is the Jewish Holocaust. Steir-Livny's bold decision to focus only on documentary has to be praised. In the past, Israeli cinema dealing with the Holocaust most often renounced the distinction between fiction and documentary, assuming that fiction is one possible reflection of the Israeli Zeitgeist, in the spirit of Bruzzi's contention that "a documentary is an illusion of an objective film."3 Since about 2010, there is a special interest in how various documentary filmmakers chose to document their personal memories: whether through the character of an imposter as in Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's Martin (1999) or an embellished past as in Mor Kaplansky's Café Nagler (2016), these films are inscribed with the traumatic intergenerational narrative that was never really spoken of and therefore had to be imagined. Steir-Livny's book opens with a precise introduction to the characteristics and functions of documentary filmmaking. Relying on major documentary researchers such as Michael Renov, Bill Nichols, and Stella Bruzzi, Steir-Livny proposes a series of definitions that do not negate but complete each other. This results in a most relevant tool for evaluating the vast and comprehensive corpus presented in Steir-Livny's research. The book is composed of five chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, and it discusses a wide variety of Israeli documentary productions, all dealing with the issue of the third generation's possible narrations of Holocaust memories. The first chapter, "Depicting Women's Gendered Experiences in the Holocaust," deals with an aspect that was neglected in the past, due to the assumption that the Holocaust had the same influence on all Jews, men and women alike. Steir-Livny demonstrates that this was not so and provides a [End Page 252] gendered chronological perspective on the representation of this issue, from the late 1990s to today (of particular interest is her analysis of Noa Maiman's Oy Mama [2010...

A practical gaze at the Warsaw Ghetto: revealing excess & lack in A Film Unfinished

ABSTRACT Yael Hersonski’s Holocaust documentary A Film Unfinished has been read as an exercise in empathic unsettlement that destabilizes the propagandistic intentions of a Nazi gaze that produced footage of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, this paper argues that Hersonski also shows that a practical gaze that incorporates the gazes of those both inside and outside of the footage can more effectively reveal the contours of regime-made atrocity while humanizing victims of the Holocaust as agents involved in the construction of the footage’s meaning.

Multidirectional Sites of Memory in Italian Holocaust Documentaries

Dieser Artikel untersucht die Moglichkeiten, wie Film den Akt der Zeugenschaft und die Erforschung signifikanter Orte nutzen kann, um Erinnerungen an die Deportation italienischer Juden nach Auschwitz in den Jahren 1943-1944 wachzurufen. Er konzentriert sich auf das vernachlassigte Studiengebiet italienischer Dokumentarfilme uber den Holocaust. Insbesondere behandelt der Artikel zwei Dokumentarfilme, in denen Zeugenschaftsakte und topographische Untersuchungen anhand der Konzeptualisierung des Erinnerungsortes und des multidirektionalen Gedachtnisses analysiert werden.

Journeys to the past: Hungarian Holocaust documentaries in the Kádár regime

In this article I explore two Hungarian Holocaust documentaries made under János Kádár’s regime, László Nádasy’s Eva A 5116 (1964) and Gyula Gazdag’s Package Tour (1985) focusing on their representation of personal and collective trauma. I examine the psychological consequences of time elapsed since the traumatic event, and the changing representational strategies of filmmaking affected by the actual politics of memory and the dominant documentary paradigm. The main motif of both films is travel, which serves as the medium of remembrance. The journeys into the past after 20 and 40 years since the deportations resulted in different cultural interpretations of the trauma of the Holocaust. Whereas in the 1960s travel stood for a haunting return of the traumatic event, in the 1980s it induces a deliberate confrontation with the past.

Representing the Truth of the Body in Holocaust Documentaries - Reviewing Shoah and The Act of Killing -

Representing the Truth of the Body in Holocaust Documentaries - Reviewing Shoah and The Act of Killing -

Shame on me? Shame on you! Emotional reactions to cinematic portrayals of the Holocaust

The media are playing an increasingly important role in teaching the public about the history of the Holocaust. In Germany, however, Holocaust documentaries have been criticized for eliciting unintended, adverse reactions among the viewers, such as distancing from the victims or calling for closing the books on the past. This criticism stems from the concern that such reactions pose an obstacle to critical-constructive engagement and coming to terms with history. This study examines the interplay between cinematic representation of the Holocaust, film-induced defensive strategies, and group-based emotions of shame. Based on a content analysis of six different film excerpts, we investigated the mediating effects of four defensiveness strategies (distancing from victims, victim blaming, closeness to perpetrators, and rejection of the relevance of the Holocaust) on group-based shame in a sample of 224 pupils from Germany’s third post-war generation in a quasi-experimental field study. The results reveal the complexity of film-portrayals which can foster as well as hinder group-based shame and thus, a constructive dealing with past injustice.

Corpo/Realities in Times of Educational Crisis: Trauma, Consumption and Dialogue in Au Revoir Les Enfants

There are numerous Holocaust documentaries, novels, memoirs, and movies depicting the endangered lives of Jewish children during World War II. As viewers and readers, flipping the pages or watching the images onscreen forces us to consider our place in relation to those individuals who have seen the unthinkable. We consume their stories, their testimonies – their vivid remembrances which transcend the place and space of fading-memories to become re-imagined, and lived-again through the painful acts of telling. We become witnesses to the stories told by these witnesses of true horrors (Felman & Laub, 1992). Louis Malle's (1987) film Au Revoir Les Enfants forces us, as viewers, to undertake this difficult task through the eyes of a nearly-silent protagonist – a Jewish boy named Jean Kippelstein, hidden in a private Catholic school in Vichy France by the school's headmaster, Father Jean, in 1944. The relations between Father Jean and his pupils are all complex and unravel over the course of the narrative, culminating in a final tragic scene with fatal consequences.I contend that for filmic testimonies such as Au Revoir Les Enfants, the body of the endangered Jewish child is the operational and educational site of trauma. The narrative is fully able to “make the suffering body the small, focused universe of the tormented and a vehicle for rendering unimaginable experience tangible to readers” (Vickroy, 2002, p. 33) as it stands-in for an immeasurable collective experience. Describing acts of consumption signposted throughout the film, I assert that Au Revoir Les Enfants stands in as a social and bodily topography of education in times of crisis. The film works subtly to remind us that the trauma of the Holocaust is a collective as much as personal experience; it forces viewers to construct an ethical and critical consciousness about events otherwise washed away through time, dangerously finding redemption through history's fading memory.Taking place in a school where bodies are literally made uniform by dressing alike, the body of the Jewish child stands out as the site of displacement, dysfunction, perhaps even dys-embodiment –embodiment that is not quite right, that is called into view and put into harm's way. Bodies in this film are writ large in the classroom and become the site/sight of education about the im/possibilities of universalizing the bodily experience. Treatments of the body become visceral narratives that tie together layers of national and personal trauma. Employing Leder's (1990) argument about the dis-appearing/dys-appearing body, I interrogate the filmic signposting the body as simultaneously consumer and consumed, excessive and grotesque, and ultimately, wholly transgressive.However, I also suggest that films such as Au Revoir Les Enfants remind us about the possibility of opening up the educational dialogic (Buber, 1947/2002) on account of the body's powerful, central place. This is not to say that the transgressive body can be saved; rather, that the film forces a reflection about the possibilities of learning about alternate life experiences – including danger, death, and disability – through the bodily conditions inseparable from those who experience them. To that end, the relationships in the film illustrate both the possibilities and failures of the dialogic within education at its most vulnerable times and in its most endangered spaces.

Narratives of Judgement: Representations of “Privileged” Jews in Holocaust Documentaries

Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s highly influential essay, “The Grey Zone”, explores the taboo issue of “privileged” Jews, those prisoners who were forced to cooperate with their Nazi captors in order to prolong their lives or the lives of their families. Levi argues that moral evaluations of privileged Jews should be suspended; however, judgements of these liminal figures have permeated representations of victims’ experiences. Taking Levi’s reflections on the “grey zone” as a point of departure, I analyse the ways in which a number of Holocaust documentary narratives construct problematic judgements of privileged Jews; nonetheless, it will be shown that some films engage with the issue in a nuanced manner. While Levi singles out the medium of film as particularly predisposed to simplistic judgements, I argue that documentary film has considerable potential to offer a complex representation of the extreme ethical dilemmas that privileged Jews faced.

After testimony: the ethics and aesthetics of Holocaust narrative for the future

Imre Kertesz's fatelessness : fiction as testimony / J. Hillis Miller ; Challenges for successor generations of German-Jewish authors in Germany / Beatrice Sandberg ; Recent literature confronting past : France and beyond / Philippe Mesnard, translated by Terence Cave ; Performing a perpetrator as witness : Jonathan Littell's Les bienveillantes / Susan Rubin Suleiman ; The ethics and aesthetics of backward narration in Martin Amis's Time's arrow / James Phelan ; The face-to-face encounter in Holocaust narrative / Jeremy Hawthorn ; Knowing little, adding nothing : ethics and aesthetics of remembering in Espen Sobye's Kathe, always lived in Norway / Anniken Greve ; When facts are scarce : authenticating strategies in writing by children of survivors / Irene Kacandes ; Objects of return / Marianne Hirsch ; Narrative, memory, and visual image : W.G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur and Austerlitz / Jakob Lothe ; Which narrative of Auschwitz? A narrative analysis of Laurence Rees's documentary Auschwitz : Nazis and the final solution / Anette H. Storeide ; Moving testimonies : unhomed geography and Holocaust documentary of return / Janet Walker ; From Auschwitz to Temple Mount : binding and unbinding Israeli narrative / Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi ; The melancholy generation : Grossman's Book of interior grammar / Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan ; Fractured relations : multidirectional Holocaust memory of Caryl Phillips / Michael Rothberg ; Hiroshima and Holocaust : tales of war and defeat in Japan and Germany-a contrastive perspective / Anne Thelle.

Contemporary French cinema: an introduction

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements 1 French cinema from 1895 to 1968, a brief survey 2 Holocaust documentary, the war film and national identity 3 Representations of sexuality 4 Women film-makers in France 5 The 'polar' 6 The 'cinema du look' and fantasy film 7 The heritage film 8 Comedy 9 'Le jeune cinema' and the new realism Filmography Index -- .

Posttraumatic Cinema and the Holocaust Documentary

Posttraumatic Cinema and the Holocaust Documentary

Review: Shoah by Claude Lanzmann

Claude Lanzmann's hypnotic, obsessional Holocaust documentary focuses for 9½ hours on the desire to forget, the need to remember.