Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Gerd Bayer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2015-12-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231850913

In the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, a large number of films were produced in Europe, Israel, the United States, and elsewhere addressing the historical reality and the legacy of the Holocaust. Contemporary Holocaust cinema exists at the intersection of national cultural traditions, aesthetic conventions, and the inner logic of popular forms of entertainment. It also reacts to developments in both fiction and documentary films following the innovations of a postmodern aesthetic. With the number of witnesses to the atrocities of Nazi Germany dwindling, medialized representations of the Holocaust take on greater cultural significance. At the same time, visual responses to the task of keeping memories alive have to readjust their value systems and reconsider their artistic choices. Both established directors and a new generation of filmmakers have tackled the ethically difficult task of finding a visual language to represent the past that is also relatable to viewers. Both geographical and spatial principles of Holocaust memory are frequently addressed in original ways. Another development concentrates on perpetrator figures, adding questions related to guilt and memory. Covering such diverse topics, this volume brings together scholars from cultural studies, literary studies, and film studies. Their analyses of twenty-first-century Holocaust films venture across national and linguistic boundaries and make visible various formal and intertextual relationships within the substantial body of Holocaust cinema.

European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Ingrid Lewis
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2020-05-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030334368

This book rethinks the study of European Cinema in a way that centres on students and their needs, in a comprehensive volume introducing undergraduates to the main discourses, directions and genres of twenty-first-century European film. Importantly, this collection is the first of its kind to apply a transversal approach to European Cinema, bringing together the East and the West, while providing a broad picture of key trends, aesthetics, genres, national identities, and transnational concerns. Lewis and Canning’s collection effectively addresses some of the most pressing questions in contemporary European film, such as ecology, migration, industry, identity, disability, memory, auteurship, genre, small cinemas, and the national and international frameworks which underpin them. Combining accessible original research with a thorough grounding in recent histories and contexts, each chapter includes key definitions, reflective group questions, and a summative case study. Overall, this book makes a strong contribution to our understanding of recent European Cinema, making it an invaluable resource for lecturers and students across a variety of film-centred modules.

Holocaust Cinema Complete

Holocaust Cinema Complete
Author: Rich Brownstein
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2021-09-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476684162

Holocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. In fact, from 1945 through 1991, half of all American Holocaust features were nominated. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been commercially successful. This book explores these trends--and many others--with a comprehensive guide to hundreds of films and made-for-television movies. From Anne Frank to Schindler's List to Jojo Rabbit, more than 400 films are examined from a range of perspectives--historical, chronological, thematic, sociological, geographical and individual. The filmmakers are contextualized, including Charlie Chaplin, Sidney Lumet, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino and Roman Polanski. Recommendations and reviews of the 50 best Holocaust films are included, along with an educational guide, a detailed listing of all films covered and a four-part index-glossary.

East German Film and the Holocaust

East German Film and the Holocaust
Author: Elizabeth Ward
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2021-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789207487

East Germany’s ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany’s name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lügner – a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how GDR filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of Nazi persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.

A Companion to the Holocaust

A Companion to the Holocaust
Author: Simone Gigliotti
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 704
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1118970527

Provides a cutting-edge, nuanced, and multi-disciplinary picture of the Holocaust from local, transnational, continental, and global perspectives Holocaust Studies is a dynamic field that encompasses discussions on human behavior, extremity, and moral action. A diverse range of disciplines – history, philosophy, literature, social psychology, anthropology, geography, amongst others – continue to make important contributions to its scholarship. A Companion to the Holocaust provides exciting commentaries on current and emerging debates and identifies new connections for research. The text incorporates new language, geographies, and approaches to address the precursors of the Holocaust and examine its global consequences. A team of international contributors provides insightful and sophisticated analyses of current trends in Holocaust research that go far beyond common conceptions of the Holocaust’s causes, unfolding and impact. Scholars draw on their original research to interpret current, agenda-setting historical and historiographical debates on the Holocaust. Six broad sections cover wide-ranging topics such as new debates about Nazi perpetrators, arguments about the causes and places of persecution of Jews in Germany and Europe, and Jewish and non-Jewish responses to it, the use of forced labor in the German war economy, representations of the Holocaust witness, and many others. A masterful framing chapter sets the direction and tone of each section’s themes. Comprising over thirty essays, this important addition to Holocaust studies: Offers a remarkable compendium of systematic, comparative, and precise analyses Covers areas and topics not included in any other companion of its type Examines the ongoing cultural, social, and political legacies of the Holocaust Includes discussions on non-European and non-Western geographies, inter-ethnic tensions, and violence A Companion to the Holocaust is an essential resource for students and scholars of European, German, genocide, colonial and Jewish history, as well as those in the general humanities.

Perpetrator Cinema

Perpetrator Cinema
Author: Raya Morag
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231851170

Perpetrator Cinema explores a new trend in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While past films documenting the Holocaust and genocides in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere have focused on collecting and foregrounding the testimony of survivors and victims, the intimate horror of the autogenocide enables post–Khmer Rouge Cambodian documentarians to propose a direct confrontation between the first-generation survivor and the perpetrator of genocide. These films break with Western tradition and disrupt the political view that reconciliation is the only legitimate response to atrocities of the past. Rather, transcending the perpetrator’s typical denial or partial confession, this extraordinary form of “duel” documentary creates confrontational tension and opens up the possibility of a transformation in power relations, allowing viewers to access feelings of moral resentment. Raya Morag examines works by Rithy Panh, Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, and Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon, among others, to uncover the ways in which filmmakers endeavor to allow the survivors’ moral status and courage to guide viewers to a new, more complete understanding of the processes of coming to terms with the past. These documentaries show how moral resentment becomes a way to experience, symbolize, judge, and finally incorporate evil into a system of ethics. Morag’s analysis reveals how perpetrator cinema provides new epistemic tools and propels the recent social-cultural-psychological shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator.

The Pianist

The Pianist
Author: Wladyslaw Szpilman
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2000-09-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1466837624

The memoir that inspired Roman Polanski's Oscar-winning film, which won the Cannes Film Festival's most prestigious prize—the Palme d'Or. Named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside—so loudly that he couldn't hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air. Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.

Women in European Holocaust Films

Women in European Holocaust Films
Author: Ingrid Lewis
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2018-01-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319650610

This book considers how women’s experiences have been treated in films dealing with Nazi persecution. Focusing on fiction films made in Europe between 1945 and the present, this study explores dominant discourses on and cinematic representation of women as perpetrators, victims and resisters. Ingrid Lewis contends that European Holocaust Cinema underwent a rich and complex trajectory of change with regard to the representation of women. This change both reflects and responds to key socio-cultural developments in the intervening decades as well as to new directions in cinema, historical research and politics of remembrance. The book will appeal to international scholars, students and educators within the fields of Holocaust Studies, Film Studies, European Cinema and Women’s Studies.

The "Jew" in Cinema

The
Author: Omer Bartov
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2005-01-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780253217455

Explores cinematic representations of the "Jew" from film's early days to the present.

Center and periphery: Twenty-first-century literature, cinema, media from Spain

Center and periphery: Twenty-first-century literature, cinema, media from Spain
Author: Amparo Alpañés
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2025-01-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

In a country where the richness of diverse cultures is often overshadowed by historical conflicts, this book delves into the complex relationship between the so-called “center” and “periphery” within Spain’s borders. Traditionally, the center has symbolized Castilian identity, while the periphery encompassed other regional cultures. But in today’s rapidly evolving social landscape, what do these terms really mean? This groundbreaking work reexamines the “center vs. periphery” paradigm through the lens of contemporary Spanish literature, cinema, and media. It poses critical questions about the existence and nature of a unified Spanish identity and investigates whether the tension between these cultural spheres persists. The book also challenges readers to consider which aspects—linguistic, gender, or other forms of identity—play the most significant role in this dynamic. Furthermore, it scrutinizes whether marginalized groups such as BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and differently-abled communities are relegated to the periphery in modern Spain. With no other published work focusing on these issues in 21st-century Spain, this book offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on cultural tensions that have shaped and continue to shape the nation. Its innovative approach makes it an indispensable reference for researchers and students in gender and women’s studies, Queer studies, media studies, Spanish literature, and language, as well as those exploring nationalism, separatism, race, and Blackness.