Screening Auschwitz

This book about the early screen representation of Auschwitz-Birkenau deals with the classic Holocaust film made in 1948 in Poland by Auschwitz survivor, director Wanda Jakubowska. The Last Stage (or The Last Stop) is a pioneering work – the first narrative film to portray the former Nazi German camp. Haltof discusses Jakubowska’s life and career before World War II, her imprisonment during the war, the prominent role that she played in the nationalized postwar Polish cinema, and problems she faced during the script stage. The monograph also discusses the unusual circumstances that surrounded the production of the film at Auschwitz-Birkenau and summarizes critical debates surrounding its release. Screening Auschwitz is the first detailed monograph on this classic Holocaust film. The book incorporates new materials and sources obtained through extensive archival research, and examines the impact of the film on other Holocaust narratives

Grieving, Therapy, Cinema and Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs: Rouge

Cultural associations with red are potent. They include blood and intense passion, injury and death, love and life; and all these are authentic indications of Kieslowski’s themes. Yet in this film the connotations of the colour are not exclusively traditional because the heroine, a model, will have her image displayed on a gigantic scarlet billboard to promote bubble gum. The model’s glamorous, colour-saturated but transient world and the grey existence of an emotionally constipated senex come into contact. The initially hostile contact between this ill-matched pair brings them not into each other’s arms – this is no romantic comedy – but, through discovery of each other’s weaknesses and strengths, to a degree of completion (not perfection) in which conscious and unconscious are better aligned. In part they are moved by synchronicities in which the life of a young advocate begins to echo the judge’s past. Not only this factor (which extends the reach of the drama beyond the odd couple) but the ever present cultural socio-cultural background of advertising and judicial morality generalise the issues of the main protagonists across the European collective. Eventually the unforgettable calamity with which the film ends brings into focus the characteristics of the main protagonists from the entire trilogy that renders them psychologically convincing survivors

Transcultural engagement with Polish memory of the Holocaust while watching Leszek Wosiewicz's Kornblumenblau

Kornblumenblau (Leszek Wosiewicz 1989) is a film that explores the experience of a Polish political prisoner interned at Auschwitz I. It particularly foregrounds issues related to Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust in its diegesis. Holocaust films are often discussed in relation to representation and the cultural specificity of their production context. However, this paper suggests thinking about film and topographies, the theme of this issue, not in relation to where a work is produced but in regards to the spectatorial space. It adopts a phenomenological approach to consider how, despite Kornblumenblau's particularly Polish themes, it might address the transcultural spectator and draw attention to the broader difficulties one faces when attempting to remember the Holocaust. Influenced particularly by the writing of Jennifer M. Barker and Laura U. Marks, this paper suggests that film possesses a body ¬¬- a display of intentionality, beyond those presented within the diegesis, which engages in dialogue with the spectator. During the experience of viewing Kornblumenblau, this filmic corporeality draws attention to the difficulties of confronting the Holocaust in particularly haptic ways, as the film points to the unreliability of visual historical sources, relates abject sensations to concentrationary spaces and breaks down as it confronts the scene of the gas chamber

Screening Auschwitz

This book about the early screen representation of Auschwitz-Birkenau deals with the classic Holocaust film made in 1948 in Poland by Auschwitz survivor, director Wanda Jakubowska. The Last Stage (or The Last Stop) is a pioneering work – the first narrative film to portray the former Nazi German camp. Haltof discusses Jakubowska’s life and career before World War II, her imprisonment during the war, the prominent role that she played in the nationalized postwar Polish cinema, and problems she faced during the script stage. The monograph also discusses the unusual circumstances that surrounded the production of the film at Auschwitz-Birkenau and summarizes critical debates surrounding its release. Screening Auschwitz is the first detailed monograph on this classic Holocaust film. The book incorporates new materials and sources obtained through extensive archival research, and examines the impact of the film on other Holocaust narratives

Photographing People’s Feelings: The Patient Eye of Kieślowski and Karabasz

This article focuses on the mutual interest of Krzysztof Kieślowski and his mentor Kazimierz Karabasz in undistinguished characters captured “in depth rather than breadth.” Faces shown in close-ups tell the story of “irreparable injustice that so visibly scars the human face