1,720,964 research outputs found
It looks pretty from a distance : eco-memory and the vitality of Holocaust landscapes in Poland
No full textHolocaust scholarship of the post-witness era has turned increasingly to environmental histories of the event as a means of implicating ecological sites and more-than-human lifeforms as powerful agents of memory. In this context, emergent concepts such as ecological memory and witnessing become useful paradigms for representing and remembering the Holocaust in places marked by the absence or erasure of human voices in particular. This article examines the role and representation of these concepts in Polish directors Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal's film It Looks Pretty from a Distance ( Z daleka widok jest piekny, 2011), in which ecological sites and landscapes bring the repressed local history of wartime Jewish murder and Catholic Polish collaboration to the surface of a provincial Polish community
Roberto Frankenberg’s Traces: Locating the Holocaust in the Landscapes of Central-Eastern Europe
No full textConcentrationary art: Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the everyday in post-war film, literature, music and the visual arts
No full textMatilda Mroz (2020). Framing the Holocaust in Polish aftermath cinema: posthumous materiality and unwanted knowledge
No full textMemorialising the (Un)Dead Jewish Other in Poland: Spectrality, Embodiment and Polish Holocaust Horror in Władysław Pasikowski’s Aftermath (2012)
No full textThis article analyses the function and symbolic currency of Poland’s recent literary and artistic motif of the returning Jew, which brings the nation’s Jewish Holocaust victims back to their homes as ghosts, spectres and reanimated corpses. It explores the ability of this trope—the defining feature of what I call ‘Polish Holocaust horror’—to cultivate the memory of complicitous and collaborative Polish behaviour during the Holocaust years, and to promote renewed Polish-Jewish relations based upon a working-through of this difficult history. In the article I explore Władysław Pasikowski’s 2012 film Aftermath as a self-reflexive product of this experimental genre, which has been considered ethically ambiguous for its necropolitical treatment of Jews and politically controversial for its depiction of Poles as perpetrators. My analysis examines haunting as central to these popular cultural constructions of Holocaust memory—a device that has been used within the genre to mourn but also expel guilt for the previously forgotten or supressed dispossession and murder of Jews by some of their Polish neighbours
Surrealism and creaturely Holocaust killing in Juraj Herz's <i>The Cremator</i>
No full textLiterary and artistic depictions of the Holocaust have long been shaped by a strictly humanising impulse; that is to say, they have been produced by and for the human, and have aimed to emphasise the loss of six million Jewish victims as humans. Situating itself within emerging scholarship on the recent turn to the nonhuman within Holocaust representation and memorialisation, this chapter examines the unusual depiction of Jewish murder in Ravensbrück survivor and Czech Jew Juraj Herz’s macabre comedy horror The Cremator (Spalovač Mrtvol, 1969) as a distinctly nonhuman undertaking which complicates the abiding divisions characterising Holocaust studies: those of victim and perpetrator, but also of human and animal. Combining Holocaust scholarship with perspectives from art criticism and animal studies, it traces the film’s production of what Carrie Rohman has called a “creatural consciousness” or aesthetic, in which the on-screen presence of animals in addition to formally non-anthropocentric elements and aesthetics comes to express the “uncanny animality” of the Holocaust
Invisible wounds: Negotiating post-traumatic landscapes
No full textInvisible Wounds: Negotiating Post-Traumatic Landscapes emerges from a long-standing collaboration between researchers from
the University of Sheffield and Museums Sheffield. It demonstrates how perspectives from creative practice and disciplines in the Arts
and Humanities bring something distinctive to our understanding of places that have experienced and been shaped by trauma, as
well as approaches to recovery, rebuilding and repair.
Bringing together a collection of writing by researchers and their academic and artistic collaborators, each contribution explores
places with difficult and violent histories, where the trauma that occurred there remains unresolved and persists in the present. By focusing on the cultural representations of such sites – in photography, art, literature and film – the book offers critical insight into how we might interpret and respond to post-traumatic landscapes beyond the traditional approaches of construction, development and infrastructure
Living and Resisting Intersectional Oppression Through Ballroom: Dreams and the Dreamlike in Pose
No full textThis chapter reads the second season of US TV series Pose (2019) through the lens of dreams and the dreamlike in order to underline how the series deals with intersectional oppression; the experience of harm and marginalisation by colluding structures of subjugation such as racism and heterosexism. Following the lives of queer Black and Latinx characters, the series centres marginalised communities living at the precarious interstices of structural violence for whom intersectional oppression functions as a source of substantial trauma. This chapter argues that Pose makes use of dream sequences and dreamlike aesthetics to comment on this trauma as it foregrounds the complex ways in which marginalised communities strategically and creatively navigate hostile environments. The first part draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, proposing queer heterotopias as dreamlike spaces in and of themselves. The second part moves to consider the explicit use of dream sequences in the series and borrows from Achille Mbembe’s vocabulary of necropower to specifically examine the ways in which the sequences address the precarity and death which haunt queer communities of colour. Thinking through the ways in which Pose employs the use of dreams and the dreamlike, we thus see the oneiric employed in the series as both a celebratory aesthetic and a critical allegory which exposes the traumatic gap between the ballroom and the world beyond its walls
Dreaming the Unthinkable: The Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos
Full text linkTwo considerations frame this chapter’s conceptualisation of Yorgos Lanthimos’ so-called ‘weird’ cinema: Walter Benjamin’s assertion that a totalitarian ‘state of emergency’ is now a perennial condition of political-juridical life in the west, and Todd McGowan’s observation that cinema is ‘a form of public dreaming’ shaped by the social imaginary. Comprised of six feature films - Kinetta (1995), Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011), The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), and The Favourite (2018) – Lanthimos’ cinema stages a series of dramas of familial and group conflicts that revolve around violent, often abusive power relations. Psychoanalytically, these films can be understood in terms of the Subject’s submissive attachment to the authority of the super-ego. At the same time, they can be seen as re-enactments of the excesses associated with the violent exercise of totalitarian power, the traumatic effects of which have their roots in Greece’s experience of a series of dictatorships dating back to the period of the Holocaust. Analogous to a sequence of dreams, the films can be seen to oscillate between, on the one hand, the representation of an enduring sense of psychic and ideological repression and, on the other hand, a wish to overcome such repression. The staging of this wish in the films reveals with a dramatic sense of force the co-dependency between the construction of the Subject I and the reproduction of ideology. If, as Lanthimos’ cinema implies, the Subject’s identity is virtual, then it follows that Benjamin’s conception of the ‘state of emergency’ is an historically contingent phenomenon rather than an ontological condition
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