The Perpetrator in Focus: Turn of the Century Holocaust Remembrance in "The Specialist"

In his controversial 1998 film, The Specialist, Israeli director Eyal Sivan casts the Holocaust in a new light when he represents it through the eyes of the Nazi perpetrator. Sivan and his scriptwriter, human rights activist Rony Brauman, re-assemble and manipulate footage originally filmed by Leo Hurwitz for Capital Cities Broadcasting of Adolf Eichmann’s trial by an Israeli court in Jerusalem in 1961. Specifically, Sivan recycles the video footage of the trial into a 16mm film that critiques, not the heinous nature of Eichmann’s crimes, nor the depravity of the man who committed them, but the system of regulation that constructed and judged Eichmann. While the video footage was originally filmed as a document of the trial, Sivan radically redeploys the same images in a narrative that exposes the manipulations of the court, its representations and the continued injustice of such institutions and representations today, 45 years later. According to The Specialist, Eichmann’s actions are not on trial; they are a foregone conclusion. To prove Eichmann’s guilt or innocence was not the point of the trial in the first place, and it is certainly not the goal of The Specialist. Through its careful weaving of fragments of the proceedings, over the course of its narrative, The Specialist reveals the relationship of otherness — the differences and identicalities — between Adolf Eichmann, the ‘deportation specialist’ and Attorney General Gideon Hausner for the prosecution. Simultaneously, the film considers the relationship between Eichmann and the crimes of the National Socialist Party as they were forged by the Israeli court

The Ambiguity of Amateur Photography in Modern Warfare

This article addresses a number of questions regarding the changing status and resultant interpretations of amateur photographs of war in the twentieth century. It reconsiders the photographs of the German army soldiers during World War II and the photographs taken in Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war with a view to finding a new approach to contemporary amateur photographs. This new approach shifts away from the study of the contents of the image to a focus on its ongoing reception and ideological effects. The article asks the following questions among others: Are amateur photographs of war and battlefields possible today? Or do amateur photographers and their portrayals of war belong to a bygone era? Have the provocations of amateur images that resist official versions of war been lost to the proliferation of digital possibilities, the overwhelming impact of consumer culture, and the domination of the mass media? Has the disquieting potential of the amateur vanished amid the glut of images of war and violence? If the answer to all these questions is no, then how can we identify amateur photographs of war

George Gissing--a pioneer in English realism

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1947. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Lotte Reiniger

Lotte Reiniger made over sixty films, of which eleven are considered lost and fifty to have survived. Of the surviving films for which she had full artistic responsibility, eleven were created in the silent period if the three-part Doktor Dolittle (1927-1928) is considered a single film. Reiniger is known to have worked on—or contributed silhouette sequences to—at least another seven films in the silent era, and a further nine in the sound era. Additionally, there is evidence of her involvement in a number of film projects that remained at conceptual or pre-production stages

Changing how we look at and think about the color grey

A look behind the challenging, provocative, fascinating history of the color grey

Re-presenting Histories: Documentary Film and Architectural Ruins in Brutality in Stone

This article rereads Alexander Kluge and Peter Schamoni’s short film Brutality in Stone (1961) in light of more contemporary scholarly interest in the architectural ruin. This leads to an analysis that challenges or recasts cinematic assumptions about the past. I begin my analysis through attention to Brutality in Stone’s radical strategies of montage, marriage of archival stills and newly shot documentary moving images, merging of real and imagined, past and present, sound and image. These formal strategies are observed through the lens of theories of ruin, Kluge’s own writings on cinema and history, references to the historiography of Nazi architecture, and contemporary theories of ruination in architecture. I then reveal the film as a type of counter-memory, promoting a critical awareness of, rather than espousing an ideologically motivated enthusiasm for the histories and memories of the past as they have been represented in architectural monuments, and cinematic and historical narratives. Specifically, a contemporary reconsideration of Brutality in Stone contributes to rethinking the relationship to the ongoing lessons of German history and its cinematic representation in the contemporary moment. Keeping alive the memories of the past has never been more urgent as we move into a historical moment when memories of the Nazi past are becoming ever dimmer