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Poster

Programme

“Screening Atrocity: Cinema, Decolonisation and the Holocaust”

A free, one-day postgraduate workshop taking place at Culture Lab, Newcastle University, 10^th January 2013

PROGRAMME

10:30-11:00     Registration and welcome

11:00-12:00     Panel 1: Audience and Affect (Chair: Joe Barton)

                        Matt Lawson (Edge Hill): ‘Hearing Atrocity: Film Music and the Holocaust'

Gareth McAreavey (Liverpool): ‘Winning Hearts and Minds and Eyes: Recognizing Terrorism in Bouchareb’s Hors La Loi’

12:00-12:15     Break

12:15-1:15       Panel 2: Testimony and Complicity (Chair: Claire Peters)

                        Alex Adams (Newcastle): ‘Torquemada, Vichy, Paratroopers: La Question’

Iain Mossman (Cardiff): ‘Constructing the war without a name through the men without a voice: Multidirectional memory and the Algerian War Appelés in La Guerre Sans Nom’ (1992)

1:15-2:15         Lunch

2:15-3:15         Keynote Speaker: Professor Maxim Silverman

3:15-4:15         Panel 3: Presence and Absence (Chair: Alex Adams)

Claire Peters (Birmingham): “There is no present”: Cityspace, Memory, Representation and ‘Reality’ in Caché (Haneke 2005)

Kierran Horner (Kings College London): Presence and Absence: the Revelation of War in Le Joli Mai and La Jetée

4:15-4:40         Screening of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962)

4:40-5:00         Close

Max Silverman Quote

'My purpose is not simply to seek out narratives which deal with colonialism and the Holocaust together. It is rather an attempt to unearth an overlapping vocabulary, lexicon, imagery, aesthetic and ultimately history shared by representations of colonialism and the Holocaust'  (Silverman 2008: 420)

In relation to Chris Marker's La jetée (1962)

'While the tolls of France's colonial wars in Indochina (1948-1954) and more
immediately in Algeria (1954-1962) are not as evident as in Marker's biography, La jetée's
bleak, post-apocalyptic setting attests to World War II's enduring malaise' (Bravo 2009: 2)

Night and Fog/The Battle of Algiers/Kapò

From top: Night and Fog (Resnais 1955), The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo 1966), Kapò (Pontecorvo 1960)

Although ostensibly about the Algerian War, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) simultaneously makes reference to earlier films about the Holocaust, including Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955) and his own work Kapò (1960), both of which display similar representational and formal patterns . . .

Charles Jones Quote

'It may be true that a curious empathy arising out of their experience of irregular Resistance operations against the German occupying forces in the 1940s affected many of the officers who were to serve in Algeria' (Jones 2007: 451)

Neil Macmaster Quote

'The argument developed in 2000–02 was that French society could only come to terms with, and lance the abcess of, systematic colonial violence through a travail de verite and by formal government recognition of responsibility for past war crimes, just as the state had for its participation in the Holocaust under the Vichy regime' (Macmaster 2004: 9)

In relation to Micheal Haneke's Hidden (2005)

'The store of interconnecting and superimposed images that returns is thus composed of different
sites of horror in which, perhaps inevitably, echoes of the Holocaust invade the memory of a
Franco-Algerian past' (Maxim Silverman 2010: 59)

In relation to Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat (1960)

In its ethics and aesthetics of ambiguity, Jean-LucGodard's narrative simultaneously  bears witness to a moment of multidirectional memory, in which discourses surrounding the Holocaust and the Algerian War appear to converge. In particular, the film's antihero Bruno forms a complex composite of O.A.S. agent and the French Resistance hero Pierre Brossolette; his torture thus emerging as a means to unite two forms of collective trauma traditionally regarded as distinct . .

In relation to Alain Resnais's Muriel ou le temps d'un retour (1963)

'Resnais's films bear witness not only to the long reach of "global" memories but also to those stemming from some of the darkest and most repressed zones of the national past. It is not only the "monstrous historical spectacles" of the camps and the bomb that provoke the pain and melancholy felt in Resnais's cinema. It is also the bitter memory of the Algerian War and especially that of the Occupation' (Naomi Greene 1999: 34)

In relation to Chronique d' un été (Rouch 1961)



'The emergence of the survivor from silence and the private sphere of intimate associations- indeed the emergence of that very private sphere- into the public space of articulation parallels the process of the Eichmann trial, but derives its impetus at least in part from the intense, ongoing struggles of decolonization which were forcing a new recognition of racialized state violence' (Rothberg 2009: 195)  



Michael Rothberg Quote

'The greatest hope for a new comparatism lies in opening up the seperate containers of memory and identity that buttress competitive thinking and becoming aware of the mutual constitution and ongoing transformation of the objects of comparison. Too often comparison is understood as "equation" - the Holocaust cannot be compared to any other history, the story goes, because it is unlike them all. This project takes dissimilarity for granted, since no two events are ever alike, and then focuses its intellectual energy on investigating what it means to invoke connotations nonetheless' (Rothberg 2009: 18)

CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS: SCREENING ATROCITY: CINEMA, DECOLONISATION AND THE HOLOCAUST

A one-day postgraduate workshop at Culture Lab, Newcastle University, 10 January 2013

Keynote speaker: Professor Maxim Silverman

 

Traditionally, the fields of postcolonial, cultural, and memory studies have tended to regard the discourses of the Holocaust and the Algerian War of decolonisation (1954-1962) as separated by an invisible ‘colour line’- propagating a notion of collective memory as competitive and Nazi genocide as a paradigmatic, sui generis (singular) event which ‘differs from every case said to compare to it’ (Steven Katz). On the other hand, a comparatively nuanced approach to collective memory and discourse has recently emerged through the work of Michel Rothberg (2009), whose close analysis of cultural artefacts as sites of palimpsestic, ‘multidirectional memory’ has had profound ramifications for the fields of Holocaust and postcolonial studies. Applying Rothberg’s theories exclusively  to the discourse of cinema, this postgraduate workshop will thus discuss the extent to which filmic representations of the Holocaust can be said to parallel (and diverge from) representations of France’s colonial legacy, through a structured, comparative exploration of cinematic themes and visual tropes (see below). This one-day event will ultimately involve the aim of re-inscribing both discourses within a dialogical space of intercultural convergence as opposed to inassimilable difference and alterity.

 

Twenty minute papers may address any style of filmmaking including; classical/hegemonic Hollywood cinema, American ‘Jewish Revenge cinema,’ Israeli Second Generation Cinema, East/West German cinema, the French New Wave, Left Bank, cinéma vérité, Algerian cinéma moudjahid (freedom-fighter cinema) and Third/Fourth Cinema (although this list is far from exhaustive). Participants are encouraged to focus upon either representations of the Holocaust or the Algerian War, whilst possible papers could focus upon the themes of;

 

·       Gender and atrocity

·       Concentrationary spaces

·       ‘Screen memories’

·       Torture

·       Trauma

·       The concept of truth (la vérité)

·       The notion of home/homeland/Heimat

·       Nostalgia

·       The figure of the child

·       The figure of the ‘resistant’

·       The figure of the ‘survivor’

·       Fragmentations of identity

·       Testimonial narratives

·       Concepts of arriving and returning

·       Repression- ‘Vichy/Algeria Syndrome’

 

Please send abstracts of 250 words to either Mani Sharpe m.sharpe@newcastle.ac.uk or Gary Jenkins g.jenkins@newcastle.ac.uk by the 31st of October 2012