Since its completion in 1955, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political and aesthetic response to what David Rousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, identified on his return in 1945 as the ‘concentrationary universe’ which, now actualized, might release its totalitarian plague any time and anywhere? What kind of memory does the film create to warn us of the continued presence of this concentrationary universe? This international collection re-examines Resnais’s benchmark film in terms of both its political and historical context of representation of the camps and of other instances of the concentrationary in contemporary cinema. Through a range of critical readings, Concentrationary Cinema explores the cinematic aesthetics of political resistance not to the Holocaust as such but to the political novelty of absolute power represented by the concentrationary system and its assault on the human condition.
Tabella dei contenuti
List of Illustrations
Preface
Richard Raskin
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Concentrationary Cinema
Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman
Chapter 1. Night and Fog: A History of Gazes
Sylvie Lindeperg
Chapter 2. Memory of the Camps
Kay Gladstone
Chapter 3. Opening the camps, closing the eyes: image, history, readability
Georges Didi-Huberman
Chapter 4. Resnais and the Dead
Emma Wilson
Chapter 5. Night and Fog and the Concentrationary Gaze
Libby Saxton
Chapter 6. Auschwitz as Allegory in Night and Fog
Deborati Sanyal
Chapter 7. Night and Fog and Posttraumatic Cinema
Joshua Hirsch
Chapter 8. Fearful imagination: Night and Fog and concentrationary memory
Max Silverman
Chapter 9. Disruptive Histories: Toward a Radical Politics of Remembrance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog
Andrew Hebard
Chapter 10. Cinema as a Slaughter bench of History: Night and Fog
John Mowitt
Chapter 11. Death in the Image: The Responsibility of Aesthetics in Night and Fog (1955) and Kapo (1959)
Griselda Pollock
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
Circa l’autore
Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. He has written on cultural memory, representations of the Holocaust, post-colonial theory and cultures, and immigration, race and nation in France. He has recently published a book on the connections between the Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary entitled Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Berghahn, 2013).
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