Afterimage: Film, Trauma And The HolocaustThe appearance of Alain Resnais' 1955 French documentary Night and Fog heralded the beginning of a new form of cinema, one that used the narrative techniques of modernism to provoke a new historical consciousness. Afterimage presents a theory of posttraumatic film based on the encounter between cinema and the Holocaust. Locating its origin in the vivid shock of wartime footage, Afterimage focuses on a group of crucial documentary and fiction films that were pivotal to the spread of this cinematic form across different nations and genres. Joshua Hirsch explores the changes in documentary brought about by cinema verite, culminating in Shoah. He then turns to teh appearance of a fictional posttraumatic cinema, tracing its development through the vivid flashbacks in Resnais' Hiroshima, mon amour to the portrayal of pain and memory in Pawnbroker. He excavates a posttraumatic autobiography in three early films by the Hungarian Istvan Szabo. Finally, Hirsch examines the effects of postmodernism on posttraumatic cinema, looking at Schindler's List and a work about a different form of historical trauma, History and Memory, a videotape dealing with the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Sweeping in its scope, Afterimage presents a new way of thinking about film and history, trauma and its representation. |
Contents
Introduction to Film Trauma and the Holocaust | 1 |
Night and Fog and the Origins of Posttraumatic Cinema | 28 |
Shoah and the Posttraumatic Documentary after Cinema Vérité | 63 |
The Pawnbroker and the Posttraumatic Flashback | 85 |
István Szabó and Posttraumatic Autobiography | 111 |
Postmodernism the Second Generation and CrossCultural Posttraumatic Cinema | 140 |
Notes | 163 |
193 | |
205 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Alain Resnais amour archival footage argue atrocity Auschwitz autobiographical Budapest camera Cayrol chapter cinéma vérité classical flashback Claude Lanzmann commentary compilation film concentration camp cultural Death Camps deportation discourse of trauma Elie Wiesel experience extermination father fiction films film's filmmaker flash flashback formal French Freud gassing gaze genocide German ghetto Hiroshima historical documentary historical trauma History and Memory Holocaust Holocaust films Hungarian Hungary interview István Szabó Jáncsi Jews Kampf LaCapra Lanzmann Love Film Marceline's Mein Kampf modernist narration narrative Nazi Night and Fog past Pawnbroker photographs point of view postmodern posttraumatic cinema posttraumatic flashback posttraumatic memory present psychological PTSD question reality reenactment remember represent representation Resnais's scene Schindler's List segments self-consciousness sequence Shoah shock shot significant Sol's Sophie's Sophie's Choice spectator Spielberg's Srebnik story survivors symptoms Tajiri's Takó Takó's temporal tense testimony tion trans trilogy Turim victims visual Wiener Wiesel witness World York