Abstract
Lewis signals a representational shift in twenty-first-century Holocaust cinema that breaks with previous, stereotyped, imagery of women and assigns them a central, privileged, authorial position from which to tell their stories. The chapter discusses some of the most relevant examples of this cycle of films, namely, Nina’s Journey (Lena Einhorn, 2005) and Remembrance (Anna Justice, 2011) and The Birch-Tree Meadow (Marceline Loridan-Ivens, 2003), among others. In particular, it explains how recent films engage with concepts of trauma and vicarious witnessing, while recovering women’s voices and memories in their diversity and uniqueness. As the chapter contends, these contemporary counter-narratives demonstrate that films are much more than (re)presentations of history: they can function as important interventions in their own right, which challenge and re-interrogate history’s gender biases.
Ingrid Lewis, The Trauma of (Post)Memory: Women’s Memories in the Holocaust Cinema of the New Millennium, published in: Women in European Holocaust Films: Perpetrators, Victims and Resisters, 2017, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
According to Suleiman, the 1.5 generation represents the “child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews”, Susan Rubin Suleiman. 2002. The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust. American Imago 59, no. 3: 277–295.
- 2.
The film Retrace (2011) by the Hungarian filmmaker Judit Elek had a limited release in the cinemas of Eastern Europe, and it is not available in DVD format. Because of the unsuccessful attempts to source this film for viewing, it will be taken into account in my research only for numerical purposes, without being analysed.
- 3.
In the Croatian film Lea and Darija, the Jewish female character does not survive, but she is present as ghostly voice that haunts her best friend from childhood who, now at old age, is immersed into oblivion.
- 4.
- 5.
In the 2000s, there are other Holocaust films by women filmmakers that do not fit in the topic discussed here.
- 6.
See also the interviews with Martine Dugowson (http://www.objectif-cinema.com/interviews/030.php), Marceline Loridan-Ivens (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdXZisN0EXg); Chantal Akerman (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDCjAjYDasw); and Diane Kurys (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bp6IqAznXQ). (Accessed 3 September 2014).
- 7.
Niedan, Christian. 2014. Pamela Katz on Hannah Arendt. Camera in the Sun. http://camerainthesun.com/?p=24233. Accessed 3 September 2014.
- 8.
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. 2009. Marceline Loridan-Ivens. Jewish Women’s Archive. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/loridan-ivens-marceline. Accessed 3 September 2014.
References
Akerman, Chantal. 2012. Chantal Akerman raconte Un Divan à New York. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww14Mn7fUuo. Accessed 3 September 2014.
Baron, Lawrence. 2005. Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Bos, Pascale Rachel. 2003. Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Difference. In Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, ed. Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, 23–50. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Cook, Pam. 2007a. Auteur Study After Structuralism. In The Cinema Book, ed. Pam Cook, 460–466. London: British Film Institute.
———. 2007b. Auteurism and Women Directors. In The Cinema Book, ed. Pam Cook, 468–473. London: British Film Institute.
Doane, Mary Ann. 1985. The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space. In Movies and Methods: An Anthology, Vol. II, ed. Bill Nichols, 565–576. Berkeley; Los Angeles; and London: University of California Press.
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. 2009. Marceline Loridan-Ivens. Jewish Women’s Archive. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/loridan-ivens-marceline. Accessed 3 September 2014.
Fuchs, Esther. 1999. Images of Women in Holocaust Films. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 17 (2): 49–56.
Goldenberg, Myrna. 2003. Food Talk: Gendered Responses to Hunger in the Concentration Camps. In Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, ed. Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, 161–179. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Hirsch, Joshua. 2004. After Image: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.
Johnston, Claire. 1973. Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema. In Notes on Women’s Cinema, ed. Claire Johnston, 24–31. London: Society for Education of Film and Television.
Kremer, Lillian S. 1999. Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Kurys, Diane with Judy Gelman Myers. 2014. New Jewish Cinema. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bp6IqAznXQ. Accessed 3 September 2014.
Landsberg, Alison. 2003. Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture. In Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge, 144–161. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Langer, Lawrence L. 1995. Introduction. In Auschwitz and After, ed. Charlotte Delbo, ix–xviii. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Lentin, Ronit. 2000. Expected to Live: Women Shoah Survivors’ Testimonials of Silence. Women’s Studies International 23 (6): 689–700.
Lewis, Ingrid. 2017. Women in European Holocaust Films: Perpetrators, Victims and Resisters. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Loridan-Ivens, Marceline. 2013. Dialogues de cinéastes: Marceline Loridan-Ivens parle de La Petite Prairie aux Bouleaux. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdXZisN0EXg. Accessed 3 September 2014.
Meflah, Nadia, and Bernard Payen. 2001. Interview with Martine Dugowson. Objectif Cinema. http://www.objectif-cinema.com/interviews/030.php. Accessed 3 September 2014.
Niedan, Christian. 2014. Pamela Katz on Hannah Arendt. Camera in the Sun. http://camerainthesun.com/?p=24233. Accessed 3 September 2014.
Raczymow, Henri. 1995. Writing the Book of Esther. New York: Holmes & Meier.
Reading, Anna. 2002. The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ringelheim, Joan. 1990. Thoughts About Women and the Holocaust. In Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb, 141–149. Mahwah: Paulist Press.
Rymkiewicz, Jarosław Marek. 1994. The Final Station: Umschlagplatz. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 2002. The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust. American Imago 59 (3): 277–295.
Traverso, Antonio, and Mick Broderick. 2010. Interrogating Trauma: Towards a Critical Trauma Studies. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24 (1): 3–15.
Vitiello, Guido. 2011. Il testimone immaginario: Auschwitz, cinema e la cultura pop. Santa Maria Capua Vetere: Ipermedium libri.
Walker, Janet. 2005. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Weitzman, Lenore J., and Dalia Ofer. 1998. The Role of Gender in the Holocaust. In Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, 1–18. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Zeitlin, Froma I. 1998. The Vicarious Witness: Belated Memory and Authorial Presence in Recent Holocaust Literature. History and Memory 20 (2): 5–42.
Zelizer, Barbie. 1998. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through Camera’s Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lewis, I. (2020). The Trauma of (Post)Memory: Women’s Memories in Holocaust Cinema. In: Lewis, I., Canning, L. (eds) European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33435-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33436-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)