Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust

Abstract

Haunted Images takes a close look at a range of treatments of the Holocaust in film, using sustained textual analysis to radically rethink film as a witness to history. Questioning the legitimacy of persistent claims that the Holocaust remains unrepresentable, this volume seeks to redefine the singular challenges this event presents to filmmakers, suggesting that filmic representations address the Holocaust as much through what they leave unseen -- through silences and ellipses - - as through what they visualize directly. Discussing films such as Kapo (1960), Shoah (1985) and "Histoire(s) du cinA(c)ma" (1997), this important new study provides a compelling reading of how European cinema has responded to the particular problems that the Holocaust presents to filmmakers, and suggests compelling fresh insights into the relationship between visual art, cultural trauma and the power of the image.