Holocaust and Film

This paper analyses a corpus of Italian films produced in the last 15 years which, in various ways, have dealt with the Holocaust theme. All of these films were recognised as 'film d'interesse culturale e nazionale' (films of cultural and national interest). Starting from this assumption, the article will trace the connections between didactical purposes, quality claims and the concept of 'impegno' (political and cultural commitment), which all come to light from these films. After a brief overview, based mainly on quantitative data, the paper focuses on a specific case study, which is also the last Italian Holocaust film to be exhibited in movie theatres: Anita B. (2014, R. Faenza). Through a deepened analysis of both the critical reception and the distributive plan of actions, the article illustrates how, on the one hand, the production of the film seems to adhere to several precise cultural and memorial paradigms; on the other, how the marketing strategy distances the film from all the preceding cases.

FILMING RETURN TO THE SITES OF THE HOLOCAUST

Documentary films about return to the places of the Holocaust, persecution and survival belong to manifestations of dark tourism. The film director and the main protagonist (a survivor and/or his descendants) return to Poland or Ukraine seeking to retrace the enigma of the death of family members, or of their own rescue or that of relatives. The quest often becomes a road movie, a criminal inquiry, and even a thriller where the protagonist interviews local witnesses and tries to reconstruct the complex relationships between the Jews and their neighbors during the Holocaust, including betrayal, rescue, and sometimes murder. He is confronted with the void and the absence of traces of history, finding only inadvertently places and objects (tombstones, former synagogues, places of life and death, houses appropriated by neighbors). In these documentaries which run from 1979 to 2015 and in which the personality of the survivor plays a major role, one confronts the spatial dimension of traumatic memory and the complex imbrication of the effects of time passing, obfuscation and glimpses of human tragedy and courage.

Key words : film, documentary, Holocaust , rescue, Jews, Poland, Ukraine, dark tourism, memory.

https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/film/entsetzliche-kaum-auszuhaltende-bilder


Der Holocaust in der Fernsehserie "Am grünen Strand der Spree" im März 1960 Am 22. März 1960 sendete die ARD die erste der fünf Folgen der Mini-Serie "Am grünen Strand der Spree". An diesem Abend wurden die Zuschauer*innen mit einer zweiundzwanzigminütigen Szene konfrontiert, die einen Massenmord an der jüdischen Bevölkerung Orschas in der von den Deutschen besetzten Sowjetunion zeigt. Die Ausstrahlung der Mini-Serie bezeichnen einige Forscher*innen als einen "Bruch des kollektiven Schweigens". Die Produktion der Serie hat eine lange Vorgeschichte und basiert auf dem gleichnamigen Roman von Hans Scholz. Anlässlich des 60. Jubiläums der Sendung soll diese Vorgeschichte in Erinnerung gebracht werden.

In The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Outtakes, editors Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger gather contributions on how Shoah (1985) fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians regard and understand the history of the Holocaust. Critics have taken long note of Shoah’s innovative style and its place in the history of documentary film and in cultural memory, but few scholars have touched on its extensive outtakes and the reams of documentation archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem, or the release of five feature-length documentaries based on the material in those outtakes.

The Construction of Testimony, which contains thirteen essays by some of the most notable scholars in Holocaust film studies, reexamines Lanzmann’s body of work, his film, and the impact of Shoah through this trove—over 220 hours—of previously unavailable and unexplored footage. Responding to the need for a sustained examination of Lanzmann’s impact on historical and filmic approaches to testimony, this volume inaugurates a new era of scholarship, one that takes a critical position vis-à-vis the filmmaker’s posturing, stylization, and editorial sleight-of-hand. The volume’s contributors engage with a range of dimensions central to Lanzmann’s filmography and the outtakes, including the dynamics of gender in his work, his representation of Nazi perpetrators, and complex issues of language and translation.

In light of Lanzmann’s invention of a radically new form of witnessing and remembrance, Shoah laid the framework for the ways in which subsequent filmmakers have represented the Holocaust cinematically; at the same time, the outtakes complicate this framework by revealing new details about the filmmaker’s complex editorial choices. Scholars and students of film studies and Holocaust studies will value this close analysis.

Vortrag bei Filmschau/Vortragsreihe A TRIBUTE TO KIRK DOUGLAS ZUM 100. GEBURTSTAG
Gartenbau Kino, Wien, 10. Dezember 2016
(6 Tage nach dem endgültigen Wahlsieg von Alexander Van der Bellen über FPÖ-Kandidat Norbert Hofer bei der Wiederholung der Bundespräsidentenwahl in Österrreich 2016)

Abraham Ravett in his numerous experimental documentary films touches upon familial dynamics of Holocaust memory, exploring the nature of time and qualities of the audiovisual medium. Both of his parents were Holocaust survivors but displayed markedly different attitudes towards the traumatic past: his father silenced it while his mother proved a powerful speaker and on-camera presence.

This study is the result of an interview with Edith Bruck which took place on June 3, 2006, in her apartment in Rome. The purpose of my paper is, in part, to expose and discuss in detail a series of conditions that created a new ghetto for the novelist who survived Auschwitz; this time a thematic ghetto. Focusing on the author’s recent statements, this essay will begin by discussing some of the difficulties encountered by Primo Levi in his dealings with the Einaudi publishing house; moving on to Edith Bruck’s experiences as a Holocaust witness who, eventually, found herself blocked in this role, in part because of pressures she felt from the Italian publishing industry. Analyzing her experiences in the world of cinema, I will then transition to a discussion of some stormy events which took place in the former Yugoslavian republic, and later in Italy, during the shooting of two films on the holocaust: KAPÒ by Gillo Pontecorvo for which the author worked as a consultant (without ever appearing in the credits), and ANDREMO IN CITTÀ by her husband Nelo Risi, based on Bruck’s story contained in the homonymous book. In particular, the author’s difficult relationship with director Pontecorvo will be brought to bear, and the surprising behavior of Italian newspapers (from the political right and left) following an unfortunate incident when the writer was assaulted by a Bosnian man who hated Hungarians.

KEYWORDS
Edith Bruck, Holocaust literature, Italian cinema, censorship, Primo Levi

In this paper, I trace the history of the disabled holocaust, from its broader social and political beginnings to it aftermath, and I explore its contemporary impact. Describing the development of the Resistance project, I examine the lessons it holds for the future of a more inclusive holocaust education and of our capacity to act for social justice. Finally, I ask what we might learn from past and present in order to shape a future that can delight in diversity. Copy available at: http://www.roaring-girl.com/work/resistance-the-art-of-change/

It has been perceived by critics as a significant work and traslated into seven languages. Despite this positive response, it is my belief that the novel is not an outstanding work. The construction of the text is full of stereotypes. It uses well-worn narrative procedures, conventional images and symbols as well as banal metaphors. That is why the credibility of the characters and situations presented in Peníze od Hitlera disappears very often. There is also a preexisting model of this novel, the play Der Besuch der alten Dame (1956, The Visit of the Old Lady), written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Unlike Dürrenmat, Denemarková emphasizes the dark scenes and the melodramatic emotionality of her novel. Therefore, the work is close to conventional clichés.

To accompany my Sept. 2003 German Studies Association presentation on Georg Leibbrandt:  This is a pdf document supplied to me by UK journalist Nick Donovan, former Campaign Director of Global Witness and recipient of the Fetisov Journalism Awards 2020 First Prize in the category Outstanding Contribution to Peace. This is a copy of a United States Department of Justice document dated 5 November 1979 that details Georg Leibbrandt's crimes against humanity relating to the Holocaust. Without access to this document, my earlier work on Leibbrandt resulted in a picture in all essential respects identical to what we read in the DOJ document.

Wannsee Conference participant Georg Leibbrandt lied his way out of execution at Nuremberg by cleverly constructing an image of having been a moderate Nazi, not a rabidly ideological one. I exposed this deception in 2003 on the basis of archival evidence I uncovered. Some Holocaust scholars bought into Leibbrandt’s narrative and their influence led to the false moderate image of Leibbrandt at Wannsee seen in the two movies made so far about the conference, Die Wannseekonferenz (Infafilm GmbH Manfred Korytowski Munich, Austrian Television-O.R.F., Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation, 1984) with Jochen Busse as Leibbrandt, and Conspiracy (BBC/HBO, 2001), with Ewan Stewart as Leibbrandt. My work on Leibbrandt is listed in the recently published diary of Alfred Rosenberg edited by Jürgen Matthäus and Frank Bajohr in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s series Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context.

Amazon’s new series Hunters, starring Al Pacino, has made headlines for its controversial decisions. Historian Bill Niven considers the scenes in the “Holocaust revenge saga” that might be inspired by real events – and explores the choices behind those that are not…

In her analysis of Lanzmann’s Shoah, Shoshana Felman asks, ‘what would it mean […] for the witness to reopen his own grave […] to testify from inside the witness’s empty grave’? These questions are salient for thinking about two recent films concerned with Holocaust memory, Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013) and Petzold’s Phoenix (2014). Both feature women who return from their intended graves: Ida from a grave dug for her murdered family, and Phoenix’s Nelly from a mass grave at a Nazi death camp. This fraught process of returning is cinematically rendered as an encounter with the possibility of the erasure of one’s identity. The primacy of the face as the site of identity features heavily in both films, as the women’s faces become a site of the blindness of others (Ida’s Jewish identity has been ‘effaced’ and is disguised by her Catholic nun’s habit, but her face mirrors her Jewish mother’s, while Nelly is initially faceless due to a gunshot wound, and then unrecognised by her former husband). This paper seeks to create a critical juncture between two ways of thinking about mortality which both hinge on the question of blindness and visibility. Firstly, Derrida’s writing on haunting and the ‘visor effect’, in which the spectral (something which, like Ida and Nelly, returns from a grave) is conceptualised as that which looks at us before and beyond our own look at its face, and Lacan’s and Silverman’s writing on anamorphosis in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, in which the skull that irrupts onto the visual field dramatizes our ‘blind spot’. The paper will trace how these networks of blindness and misrecognition shape the formal elements (framing, sound) of both films.

This book explores the growing trend of intermediality in cinematic representations of the Holocaust. It considers how the juxtaposition of different media, materialities, bodies and image in these works encourages us to turn to the space in-between these features in order to discover how they collaborate to produce Holocaust memory. Cinematic Intermedialities is a work of film-philosophy that places a number of different forms of screen media, such as archive appropriation works, animation, apps and museum installations, in dialogue with the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, art critic-cum-philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman and film phenomenologies. The result is a careful and unique examination of how Holocaust memory can emerge from the relationship between different media, objects and bodies during the film experience. This work challenges the existing concentration on representation in writing about Holocaust films, turning instead to the materials of screen works and the spectatorial experience to highlight the powerful contribution of the cinematic to Holocaust memory.

Montag, 12. März 2018, 19.00 – Depot, Breite Gasse 13, Wien / Eintritt frei – – –

Ein Abend der Kritik, Analyse, Diagnose am Material zu aktuellem Geschichtsfernsehen im (Rück)Blick auf Nationalsozialismus. Was für Inszenierungen, Anredeweisen, IdeoLogiken dienen nach dem History-TV-Boom, zumal im ORF, zur Erschließung zukunftsträchtiger Nazi-Vergangenheit – bis hin zu "Anschluss" (vorm. "Anschluß")-Produktionen im nationalkonservativ regierten Gedenkjahr und burschigen Verrenkjahr?
Ein Abend der Versprecher und Geheimnisse: Welche Sinnangebote werden schlagend, wenn Nazis als Geheimnis-Träger (bzw. "Kenner der Szene") erscheinen, von denen das Fernsehen etwas wissen möchte? Welche Erzählungen sind demgegenüber nicht rätselhaft genug, von wem möchte das Fernsehen also nichts wissen? Und wie sind rezente, mehr konzentrierte denn zerstreute, wört- und bildliche Versprecher – von Kanzler Kurzens März '38-"Jubiläum" abwärts – zu verstehen? Weniger als Defekt denn Projekt, als Wendung/Investment, Aussprechen von Versprechen und Vorhaben. Intention als Television: Vorsehen in die Ferne...
Mit Präsentationen von
– Renée Winter, Historikerin und Kulturwissenschafterin, Uni Wien
– Drehli Robnik, Theoretiker in Sachen Film und Politik, Wien
– Moderation: Monika Bernold, Dozentin für Medien- und Zeitgeschichte,     
        Uni Wien

Konzipiert von Drehli Robnik
für "PolitikProjektionen–>Viel*im*Film"
und das Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien (VWI)

The collective official memory of the Holocaust in Israel was and is imbued with pathos and agony, and generates clear links between the Holocaust and its Zionist lesson. From the 1980's onward, a new unofficial path of remembrance began taking shape in tandem. It is an alternative path - some might say subversive - that seeks to remember, but differently. This book focuses on the new cultural memory of the Holocaust. By analyzing films, literature, journalism, theatre, plastic art, and poetry, from the 1980's onward, the book presents the new aspects of representation: the politicization of the Holocaust; the combination of Holocaust and Humor and the new perspectives on the Holocaust by Mizrahi (Jews from Asia and North Africa, and their descendants) artists.

Many reasons make Il grido della terra, by the Italian director Duilio Coletti an outstanding and exceptional film. First of all, its subject. The plot describes the illegal immigration from a displaced persons camp in Southern Italy to the coasts of Palestine of a group of holocaust survivors and the struggle between the Haganah and the Irgun on the background of Israel’s Independence war.
The similarities between Coletti’s film and Otto Preminger’s more famous Exodus are striking, from the main characters to the narrative structure of the plot, although it is difficult to ascertain if the makers of Exodus were aware of the existence of this forgotten forerunner. In fact, Il grido della terra went barely unnoticed when it was released in September 1948 and since its recent rediscovery in Cinecittà’s archives in Rome, it has almost never been recorded in the main histories of Italian cinema.
Il grido della terra, together with The Illegals by Meyer Levin of 1947 and Sword in the Desert by George Sherman of 1949, is one of the very few films made outside Israel about the illegal immigration to Palestine and the intestine conflicts within the Yishuv. It is noteworthy that, while being a fictional film, it describes, almost in real time, the episodes that preceded the creation of the state of Israel, such as the trial and hanging of Dov Gruner and the subsequent Sergeants affair.
Secondly because of the biography of its director. Duilio Coletti (1906-1999) was one the main filmmakers in Fascist Italy. Making a film clearly inspired by Zionist ideals such as Il grido della terra, served Coletti at least in two goals. The first to expiate his past involvement with Mussolini’s regime cinematography, the second to vent his none too repressed resentment against the victorious Anglo-American allies. This is why the film assigns a pivotal role to the Italian rough and good-natured captain from Genoa, directly inspired to the figure immortalized by Nathan Alterman’s poem “In Praise of an Italian Captain”. Also the choice, for the main roles of the Jews fighting the British, of two comedians such as Andrea Checchi e Carlo Ninchi, the heroic faces of Italian propaganda films during the war against the allies, is therefore not completely innocent.
Lastly mention must be done of the outstanding cast that took part in the making of Il grido della terra: Alessandro Fersen (born Fajrajzen in Lodz) one of the major figures of Italian Theatre in the second half of the 20th century for the costumes, the painter and genial animator Lele Luzzati for the stage design, the musicologist Leo Levi for the sound track and the choice of Israeli pioneer songs and an unexpected Carlo Levi, the author of Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, and here co-scenarist of the only entirely Jewish text in his career, together with Tullio Pinelli the legendary script-writer of many of Fellini’s films. The collaboration to the film of these personalities identified with the Italian left and the Jewish intelligentsia is the reason for an unusual, at least for an Italian film, truthfulness in the rituals, the music and the Jewish backgrounds.
Therefore Il grido della terra is worthy to be studied in depth as an interesting example of an Italian visual identification with Israeli civil war and state of exception and an early portrayal of the refugee problem in Europe in the immediate aftermath of WWII.

Il saggio mira ad analizzare l'evoluzione dell'icona della bambina col cappottino rosso, resa celebre dal film di Steven Spielberg, nell'ambito dell'immaginario culturale della Shoah. Essa, infatti, è diventata subito una sineddoche narrativa, immagine paradigmatica di tutte le innocenze che si contrappongono, nel presente e nella storia, alla violenza di massa. Al fine di scomporre questo paradigma, il saggio rintraccerà una serie di riferimenti, aggiornamenti, riutilizzi metaforici e iconologici del cappottino rosso, sia all'interno del contesto della rappresentazione mediatica della Shoah, sia in relazione a una serie di espressioni della cultura pop che si distanziano apertamente dal nesso del cosiddetto "male assoluto".

This paper delineates the ways in which landscape and matter is woven into, or fails to become encompassed by, narratives of memory, particularly where remembering is haunted by grief and lacunae, and threatens to lapse into amnesia. The paper will focus on ways of configuring absence (the absence of a person in death and the absence of narratives that would commemorate that death) through visual representations of landscape and matter. Three types of environment surface in this study as particularly bound to issues of difficult memory, as represented in film, photography, digital art and installation: swamps and polluted water (in the films of Lucrecia Martel and works of Joanna Rajkowska), earth and decomposing matter (in Pawlikowski’s Ida and Resnais’ Night and Fog) and the cinematic and photographic landscapes of former concentration camps that have been ‘reclaimed’ by nature. The works considered in this paper differ in their specific political engagements, just as each type of environment represented in them forms a unique ecosystem. While tracing these differences, the paper will also suggest shared preoccupations with matter as a way of giving expression to the vanishing points of memory, or what cultural geographer John Wylie has called an ‘absence at the heart of the point-of-view’. Wylie’s writing on landscape will be considered alongside texts by Dylan Trigg, Jean-Luc Nancy, Eugenie Brinkema and Jane Bennett, among others.

It has long been recognized that the Holocaust poses special challenges. On the one hand, historical research has accumulated a detailed and penetrating account of the events. On the other hand, efforts at understanding and commemorating these events transcend professional history and take shape in the public sphere. In the public sphere, however, memory of the Holocaust is shaped just as much by art and by fiction as by history. The influence of films on the Holocaust is especially important in this context to the extent that audiences take them to be, if not true, ultimately realistic depictions of past experience. This article challenges the notion that the memory of the Holocaust is best served by the effort to recreate experience, and argues that there are deeply moral implications of how the present uses its past.