France, Film, and the Holocaust From génocide to shoah

by Banaji, Ferzina

• ISBN13: 9781137008831
• ISBN10: 1137008830
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-09-04
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

France, Film, and the Holocaust traces how representations of the Holocaust in French cinema have shaped the memory of the event in France. Through examining French films of the War, Banaji demonstrates the dual processes of films shaping our past and present contexts shaping our films. The book falls into chronological sections reflecting the major shifts in French Holocaust memory, as charted by and reflected in film. Films are treated in distinct periods: 1945 to 1970, 1971 to 1980, 1980 to 2000, and 2000-the present, each corresponding to critical phases in Holocaust memory in France and to technological and aesthetic shifts in French cinema more generally. In addition, the analysis of these films is supplemented by an examination of related events, such as war crimes trials and the establishment of memorial sites that have grounded Holocaust memory in contemporary French culture. The concluding chapter of the book surveys the field at the start of the twenty first century, tracing possible futures of Holocaust memory in France.

Author Biography

Ferzina Banaji is project director of BBC Media Action, an organization that uses media in socially relevant, development fields. Previously, she has been a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Cambridge, held a Revson Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and held multiple visiting lectureships in the UK and India.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Representing the "Unrepresentable"	p. 1
Introduction	p. 1
Film	p. 9
France and Film	p. 15
France, Film, and the Holocaust	p. 19
Resistance and Repression, 1940-1960	p. 25
Introduction	p. 25
Film during the Occupation	p. 26
Liberation and the Postwar Era	p. 36
Alain Resnais's Nuit et brouillard (1955)	p. 46
Revisiting Collaboration: Vichy and the Holocaust, 1960-1980	p. 53
Introduction	p. 53
The 1960s	p. 54
Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969)	p. 64
La mode rétro and the 1970s Shift	p. 70
The Rise of the Holocaust in Global Memory	p. 82
From Lanzmann's Shoah to la Shoah, 1980-2000	p. 87
Introduction	p. 87
Mixed Narratives of the Early 1980s	p. 90
Shoah (1985)	p. 93
The Shoah after Shoah: History, Politics, and the Visual Text	p. 101
Klaus Barbie and Ophüls's Hôtel Terminus (1987)	p. 109
The War for Memory	p. 114
The Holocaust at the End of the Century	p. 127
The "Century of Genocide" and beyond, 2000-	p. 133
Introduction	p. 133
The Holocaust in France: Survival as Resistance	p. 134
Resistance and the Last Call to Action	p. 147
Conclusion	p. 159
Notes	p. 161
Bibliography	p. 177
Film Index	p. 185
Index	p. 189
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