Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema
Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema

Author: Matilda Mroz

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-02-09

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1137461667

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish cinema’s engagement with histories of Polish violence against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Moving beyond conventional studies of historical representation on screen, the book considers how cinema reframes the unwanted knowledge of violence in its aftermaths. The book draws on Derridean hauntology, Didi-Huberman’s confrontations with art images, Levinasian ethics and anamorphosis to examine cinematic reconfigurations of histories and memories that are vulnerable to evasion and formlessness. Innovative analyses of Birthplace (Łoziński, 1992), It Looks Pretty From a Distance (Sasnal, 2011), Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012), and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) explore how their rural filmic landscapes are predicated on the radical exclusion of Jewish neighbours, prompting archaeological processes of exhumation. Arguing that the distressing materiality of decomposition disturbs cinematic composition, the book examines how Poland’s aftermath cinema attempts to recompose itself through form and narrative as it faces Polish complicity in Jewish death.

Space in Holocaust Research
Space in Holocaust Research

Author: Janine Fubel

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-05-20

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 3111078949

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In recent years, the issue of space has sparked debates in the field of Holocaust Studies. The book demonstrates the transdisciplinary potential of space-related approaches. The editors suggest that “spatial thinking” can foster a dialogue on the history, aftermath, and memory of the Holocaust that transcends disciplinary boundaries. Artworks by Yael Atzmony serve as a prologue to the volume, inviting us to reflect on the complicated relation of the actual crime site of the Sobibor extermination camp to (family) memory, archival sources, and material traces. In the first part of the book, renowned scholars introduce readers to the relevance of space for key aspects of Holocaust Studies. In the second part, nine original case studies demonstrate how and to what ends spatial thinking in Holocaust research can be put into practice. In four introductory essays, the editors identify spatial configurations that transcend conventional disciplinary, chronological, or geographical systematizations: Fleeting Spaces; Institutionalized Spaces; Border/ing Spaces; Spatial Relations. Drawing on a host of theoretical concepts and addressing various historical contexts as well as different types of media, this book offers scholars and students valuable insights into cutting-edge, international scholarly debates.

Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century
Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Gerd Bayer

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-12-01

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0231850913

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, a large number of films were produced in Europe, Israel, the United States, and elsewhere addressing the historical reality and the legacy of the Holocaust. Contemporary Holocaust cinema exists at the intersection of national cultural traditions, aesthetic conventions, and the inner logic of popular forms of entertainment. It also reacts to developments in both fiction and documentary films following the innovations of a postmodern aesthetic. With the number of witnesses to the atrocities of Nazi Germany dwindling, medialized representations of the Holocaust take on greater cultural significance. At the same time, visual responses to the task of keeping memories alive have to readjust their value systems and reconsider their artistic choices. Both established directors and a new generation of filmmakers have tackled the ethically difficult task of finding a visual language to represent the past that is also relatable to viewers. Both geographical and spatial principles of Holocaust memory are frequently addressed in original ways. Another development concentrates on perpetrator figures, adding questions related to guilt and memory. Covering such diverse topics, this volume brings together scholars from cultural studies, literary studies, and film studies. Their analyses of twenty-first-century Holocaust films venture across national and linguistic boundaries and make visible various formal and intertextual relationships within the substantial body of Holocaust cinema.

Polish Cinema Today
Polish Cinema Today

Author: Helena Goscilo

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-08-19

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1793641668

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A 2022 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Structured according to key themes, Polish Cinema Today analyzes the remarkable innovations in Polish cinema emerging a decade after the 1989 dissolution of the Soviet bloc, once its film industry had evolved from a socialist state enterprise into a much more accessible system of film production, with growing expertise in distribution and marketing. By the early 2000s, an impressive, diverse cohort of filmmakers broke through the gridlock of a small set of esteemed, aging auteurs as well as the glut of imported Hollywood blockbusters, empowered by the digital revolution and domestic audience appetite for independent work. Polish directors today challenge sacrosanct bromides about national and gender identity, Poland’s historical martyrdom, the status of the influential Catholic Church, and the benevolent family, while investigating the phenomena of migration and sexuality in their full complexity. Each thematic chapter places these recent films within a historical/cultural context nationally and transnationally, and designs its analyses of specific works to engage general audiences of film scholars, students, and cinephiles.

The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen
The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen

Author: Rebecca Margolis

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2024-02-27

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1666910880

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As a linguistic carrier of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization, the Yiddish language is closely tied to immigrant pasts and sites of Holocaust memory. In The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen, Rebecca Margolis investigates how translated and subtitled Yiddish dialogue reimagines Jewish lore and tells new stories where the supernatural looms over the narrative. The book traces the transformation of the figure of the dybbuk—a soul of the dead possessing the living—from folklore to 1930s Polish Yiddish cinema and on to global contemporary media. Margolis examines the association of spoken Yiddish with spectral elements adapted from Jewish legends within the horror genre. She explores how all-Yiddish prologues to comedy film and television depict magic located in an immigrant or pre-immigrant past that informs the present. Framing spoken Yiddish on screen as an ancestral language associated with trauma and dispossession, Margolis shows how it reconstructs haunted and mystical elements of the Jewish experience.

Peace at All Costs
Peace at All Costs

Author: Annika Elisabet Frieberg

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2019-07-11

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1805394258

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Although it was characterized by simmering international tensions, the early Cold War also witnessed dramatic instances of reconciliation between states, as former antagonists rebuilt political, economic, and cultural ties in the wake of the Second World War. And such efforts were not confined to official diplomacy, as this study of postwar rapprochement between Poland and West Germany demonstrates. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Peace at All Costs follows Polish and German non-state activists who attempted to establish dialogue in the 1950s and 1960s, showing how they achieved modest successes and media attention at the cost of more nuanced approaches to their national histories and identities.

Studying Ida
Studying Ida

Author: Sheila Skaff

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 101

ISBN-13: 9781800342378

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Pawel Pawlikowski's 2013 film 'Ida' was exceptionally warmly received in the United States, culminating in the Academy Award for Film Not in the English Language, but it was not without controversy. This book's introduction to the film explains the historical setting, including the violence that took place in the Polish countryside during World War II and was not exposed for sixty years, and provides political and cultural analysis to aid the reader in understanding the film's setting and narrative. The book also touches on the influence of the film on current events in Poland, where censorship of it by an increasingly nationalist government has polarized the country. It also situates Ida within the contexts of Polish and world film history. Scene-by-scene analysis is accompanied in each chapter by background information that gives context to the aesthetic and narrative choices made by the director.

The Crime and the Silence
The Crime and the Silence

Author: Anna Bikont

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2015-09-15

Total Pages: 557

ISBN-13: 0374710325

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category A monumental work of nonfiction on a wartime atrocity, its sixty-year denial, and the impact of its truth Jan Gross's hugely controversial Neighbors was a historian's disclosure of the events in the small Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, when the citizens rounded up the Jewish population and burned them alive in a barn. The massacre was a shocking secret that had been suppressed for more than sixty years, and it provoked the most important public debate in Poland since 1989. From the outset, Anna Bikont reported on the town, combing through archives and interviewing residents who survived the war period. Her writing became a crucial part of the debate and she herself an actor in a national drama. Part history, part memoir, The Crime and the Silence is the journalist's account of these events: both the story of the massacre told through oral histories of survivors and witnesses, and a portrait of a Polish town coming to terms with its dark past. Including the perspectives of both heroes and perpetrators, Bikont chronicles the sources of the hatred that exploded against Jews and asks what myths grow on hidden memories, what destruction they cause, and what happens to a society that refuses to accept a horrific truth. A profoundly moving exploration of being Jewish in modern Poland that Julian Barnes called "one of the most chilling books," The Crime and the Silence is a vital contribution to Holocaust history and a fascinating story of a town coming to terms with its dark past.

Being Poland
Being Poland

Author: Tamara Trojanowska

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2018-11-05

Total Pages: 853

ISBN-13: 1442622520

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland’s return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland’s cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland’s modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.

Folktales and Fairy Tales [4 volumes]
Folktales and Fairy Tales [4 volumes]

Author: Anne E. Duggan Ph.D.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-02-12

Total Pages: 1751

ISBN-13: 1610692543

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Encyclopedic in its coverage, this one-of-a-kind reference is ideal for students, scholars, and others who need reliable, up-to-date information on folk and fairy tales, past and present. Folktales and fairy tales have long played an important role in cultures around the world. They pass customs and lore from generation to generation, provide insights into the peoples who created them, and offer inspiration to creative artists working in media that now include television, film, manga, photography, and computer games. This second, expanded edition of an award-winning reference will help students and teachers as well as storytellers, writers, and creative artists delve into this enchanting world and keep pace with its past and its many new facets. Alphabetically organized and global in scope, the work is the only multivolume reference in English to offer encyclopedic coverage of this subject matter. The four-volume collection covers national, cultural, regional, and linguistic traditions from around the world as well as motifs, themes, characters, and tale types. Writers and illustrators are included as are filmmakers and composers—and, of course, the tales themselves. The expert entries within volumes 1 through 3 are based on the latest research and developments while the contents of volume 4 comprises tales and texts. While most books either present readers with tales from certain countries or cultures or with thematic entries, this encyclopedia stands alone in that it does both, making it a truly unique, one-stop resource.