Representing Perpetrators In Holocaust Literature And Film

These essays analyze representations of the Holocaust perpetrators. In doing so, they explore what has until now held critics back from this topic, including moral and emotional distaste, the dangers of confusing understanding with exculpation, and the possibility of problematic identification.

New essays by prominent scholars in German and Holocaust Studies exploring the boundaries and confluences between the fields and examining new transnational approaches to the Holocaust.

The present book aims to explore how the perpetrator of crimes against humanity is represented in recent documentary films in different sociocultural contexts around the world. In recent years the number of diverse forms of cultural productions focused on the figure of perpetrator has increased significantly, thus eliciting a turn toward this problematic figure. The originality of these narratives lies in the shift in point of view they propose: their protagonists, rather than being the victims of the atrocities, are instead their perpetrators. A significant number of documentary films examining crimes against humanity from the perpetrators’ perspective have been released in the first two decades of this century. This current tendency together with the growing scholarly interest in the explorations of the perpetrator underscore the timeliness of the present book. It aims to explore how the perpetrator is represented in recent documentary films in different sociocultural contexts around the world. The perpetrator documentary films’ objects of study in this book are contextualized in the following contexts: Indonesian, Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, Chilean and Argentine dictatorship, Spanish Civil War and its aftermaths, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nazi legacy, South Africa Apartheid and USA ́s state perpetrations. Among others, the documentary films analysed are as follows: The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, National Bird, Fahrenheit 11/9, Waltz with Bashir, Z32, El Pacto de Adriana, El Color del Camaleón, 70 y Pico, and El hijo del cazador. The Representation of Perpetrators in Global Documentary Film will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Filmmaking, Communication Studies, Media Studies, Visual Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Continuum.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature is a comprehensive reference resource including a wealth of critical material on a diverse range of topics within the literary study of Holocaust writing. At its centre is a series of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars within the field: these address genre-specific issues such as the question of biographical and historical truth in Holocaust testimony, as well as broader topics including the politics of Holocaust representation and the validity of comparative approaches to the Holocaust in literature and criticism. The volume includes a substantial section detailing new and emergent trends within the literary study of the Holocaust, a concise glossary of major critical terminology, and an annotated bibliography of relevant research material. Featuring original essays by: Victoria Aarons, Jenni Adams, Michael Bernard-Donals, Matthew Boswell, Stef Craps, Richard Crownshaw, Brett Ashley Kaplan and Fernando Herrero-Matoses, Adrienne Kertzer, Erin McGlothlin, David Miller, and Sue Vice.

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.

As we approach the end of the 'era of the witness', given the passing on of the generation of Holocaust survivors, Claude Lanzmann's archive of 220 hours of footage excluded from his ground-breaking documentary Shoah (1985) offers a remarkable opportunity to encounter previously unseen interviews with survivors and other witnesses, recorded in the late 1970s. Although the archive is all available freely to view online and includes extra footage of those who appear in Shoah, this book focuses on the interviews from which no extracts appear in the finished film or in any subsequent release. The material analysed features interviews with such significant figures as the former partisan Abba Kovner, wartime activist Hansi Brand, Kovno Ghetto leader Leib Garfunkel, rescuer Tadeusz Pankiewicz and members of Roosevelt's War Refugee Board, and focuses throughout on the efforts at rescue and resistance by those within and outside occupied Europe. Sue Vice contends that watching and analysing this wholly excluded footage gives us new insights into the making of Shoah through what was left out. Moreover, she reveals that the near-impossibility of rescue and often suicidal implications of resistance emerge through these excluded interviews as inextricable from the process of genocide. She concludes by arguing that the outtakes show the potential for new filmic forms envisaged on Lanzmann's part in order to represent the crucial topics of attempted Holocaust rescue and resistance.