The Nazi Killin' Business: A Postmodern Pastiche of the Holocaust (original) (raw)
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Holocaust Film: The Political Aesthetics of Ideology
2007
"What Norman Finkelstein has done in exposing the political foregrounding of the Holocaust Industry, what Giorgio Agamben has done in extrapolating the contemporary implications of homo sacer from the horrors of the concentration camps, Terri Ginsberg is doing with astonishing command and competence about Holocaust cinema. Ginsberg s voice is clear, concise, liberating, and the harbinger of an entire new generation of scholarship in cinema studies. Groundbreaking, challenging, judicious, theoretically ambitious, and analytically lucid, HOLOCAUST FILM: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF IDEOLOGY begins from the ground zero of the unspeakable and works its way meticulously up towards the long shot of a take that will remain definitive to generations of scholarship it anticipates." -- Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University; Editor, DREAMS OF A NATION: ON PALESTINIAN CINEMA "Terri Ginsberg's HOLOCAUST FILM: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF IDEOLOGY is a much needed intervention in the field of Holocaust Studies in general and in Holocaust Cinema Studies in particular. What Ginsberg has fashioned is a reading of the Holocaust that is both immanent and materialist and much needed in these times when Holocaust scholarship is being shanghaighed by both ends of the political spectrum. It is Ginsberg's achievement that Holocaust cinematic texts are here restored to their historical moment in a way that must be accomplished if there is ever to be an understanding of how these texts might grasp the original moment of the tragedy. Her painstakingly thorough scholarship and theoretical rigor ensures that her work at least will not serve to promote the type of easy, knee-jerk response that simply adds flame to the fire and in the name of scholarship contributes to the perpetuation of other tragedies in the present Israeli-Palestinian situation." -- Dennis Broe, Graduate Program Coordinator, Media Arts Department, Long Island University "Ginsberg ably demonstrates how the subgenre known as Holocaust cinema has been co-opted by the culture industry. Bypassing the usual Hollywood touchstones, she focuses on four relatively neglected films that illuminate several key motifs that permeate many films on the subject: the 'Christianization' of Jewish oppression, the commodification of genocide by both commercial and art house cinema, and the ethnocentric appropriation of the Holocaust by filmmakers with reactionary agendas. Eschewing the conformist platitudes of previous studies, Ginsberg s book is a salutary and necessary provocation." -- Richard Porton, Co-editor, CINEASTE; Author, FILM AND THE ANARCHIST IMAGINATION "Hollywood has produced more than 175 films on the Holocaust since the1980s, and in fact by now the category is considered by some to constitute a virtual genre. Ginsberg challenges the under-examined status of these films and analyzes the work they perform to construct a revisionist discourse. Ginsberg's astute understanding of cinematic strategies in addition to her confidence in distilling and unpacking even the most fraught of ideological discourses promise a groundbreaking and eminently useful study. Hers are important contributions which we very much need." -- B. Ruby Rich, University of California-Santa Cruz; Author, CHICK FLICKS: THEORIES AND MEMORIES OF THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT "The importance of the Holocaust is beyond doubt. The importance of continuing the analysis and wide-ranging discussion of it is, at least in some circles. Here, in response, is an extremely scholarly andinsightful treatment of Holocaust films and the aesthetic ideology that informs them. Sheds much light on several controversial problems connected to these horrific events. Highly Recommended." -- Bertell Ollman, New York University; Author, DANCE OF THE DIALECTIC This timely monograph takes as its starting point the provocative contention that Holocaust film scholarship has been marginalized academically despite the crucial role Holocaust film has played in fostering international awareness of the Nazi genocide and scholarly understandings of cinematic power. The book suggests political and economic motivations for this seeming paradox, the ideological parameters of which are evident in debates and controversies over Holocaust films themselves, and around Holocaust culture in general. Lending particular attention to four exemplary Holocaust “art” films (KORCZAK [Poland, 1990], THE QUARREL [Canada, 1990], ENTRE NOUS [France, 1983], and BALAGAN [Germany, 1994]), this book breaks disciplinary ground by drawing critical connections between public and scholarly debates over Holocaust representation, and the often sophisticated cinematic structures lending aesthetic shape to them in today’s global arena.
Tarantino's Approach to the Notorious Nazi Past
izlazi u samo elektroničkom izdanju: DA
article analyzes Quentin Tarantion's recent grotesque postmodernist reconstruction of military operations at the end of WWII. His bad Jewish boys take revenge on the Nazis in the manner of the Apache. The analysis deals with the film director, the two main actors (Brad Pitt and Christoph Waltz), the film message, five interesting film issues, the interaction with theater and drama conventions in the film and finally with meta-filmic dimensions of this Oscar winning movie.
Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-first Century: Memory, Images, and the Ethics of Representation
2017
In recent yearssince the turn of the twenty-first century, to be precisewe have witnessed an undeniable proliferation of Holocaust films in Europe. At the same time, several academic disciplines, such as Holocaust studies and memory studies, have given a lot of scholarly attention to Holocaust films. This new volume, edited by Oleksandr Kobrynksyy and Gerd Bayer, both at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg, represents one of the latest books within this trend.
Beyond representation?: Hollywood, the holocaust and the image of history in Schindler's list
Screen education, 2013
Despite its Academy Award for Best Picture and its substantial commercial success, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) remains a critically contested film. This essay looks at a number of its stylistic and dramatic strategies, as well as a number of the critical arguments against them, not in order to pass judgement on the film one way or the other, but rather to consider some of the problems inherent in cinematic representations of the Holocaust in particular and history in general. At a time when filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino are content to rewrite history at will - as in Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012) - regarding it as mutable content to be shaped in the service of a cinematic vision as opposed to an inheritance that comes with certain responsibilities, it is important that we should again turn to the questions posed in this essay.
Holocaust Cinema: Agency, Authenticity, and the limits of Representation
International Journal of Arts andHumanities, 2017
This article explores the genre of cinema bearing the name, Holocaust Cinema. Historical considerations of authenticity are examined "Vis a Vis" the ethics and morality associated with a uniquely tragic event. The agency of victims, places and events are given consideration, as are the producers, directors and target audiences. The article suggests a necessary target set whereby an ethical product, and a successful movie are the formative achievement.
Holocaust Film Beyond Representation
Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory, 2019
This chapter offers a theoretical introduction to my central argument, which is followed by three analytical chapters that each concentrate on a particular type of cinematic experience. Here, I explore what is at stake when we decide to look beyond representation and attend to the inbetweens that characterise intermedial cinematic experiences that confront the Holocaust through a review of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard 1956). This chapter starts by positioning this approach in contrast to much of the extensive writing about Holocaust representation before moving onto define a philosophy of the inbetween influenced by the work of Didi-Huberman, film phenomenologists, and Deleuze and Guattari. These different and sometimes conflicting methodologies are carefully unpacked in order to consider how they can work together to help identify ways in which intermedial screen works can encourage the production of Holocaust memory. In the final section of the chapter, I then...
The Maimed Body and the Tortured Soul: Holocaust Survivors in American Film
This paper identifies different techniques filmmakers use to bring the Holocaust to American audiences and illuminates the role of cinema in the production and dissemination of new meanings associated with the event itself. Focusing on "Judgement at Nuremberg" and "The Pawnbroker," it argues that the history of Holocaust representation on film can be charted as a movement from a focus on the wounded body to the wounded psyche. The key to this development is the development of new approaches to the flashback to mimic the effects of traumatic memory.
Historiografías, revista de historia y teoría (Universidad de Zaragoza) , 2024
ABSTRACT: Almost all the voices of the six million Jewish men, women, and children who perished in the Shoah were shuttered in the massacres of the Einsatzgruppen and inside the gas chambers (and vans) of the six German extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka II, Bełżec, Sobibór, Chełmno, and Majdanek). Some of the victims' accounts and chronicles have survived, and these testimonies remain today a fraction of the millions of voices that were lost forever. In this paper, I argue that the (reconstructed and often fictionalized) voices that can be found in Holocaust feature films represent a homage to the victims, and that these films (independently of their commercial success or their minor historical errors) bring the victims' suffering, antisemitism, the ghettos, the transports, the massacres, the Vernichtungslager (VL) and the Konzentrationslager (KZ) to the attention of the vast public, and represent a glimpse into the shuttered voices of the Shoah. I also argue that, approached with caution, Holocaust films (antisemitic German propaganda films, post-war documentaries and post-war feature films) can be a valuable contribution to the historiography of the Shoah.