You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Combining the practical knowledge of a renowned director with the perspective of a historian and media specialist, Christian Delage explores the conditions and consequences of using film for the purposes of justice and memory by examining archival footage from war crime trials from Nuremberg to the present.
Since its completion in 1955, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political and aesthetic response to what David Rousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, identified on his return in 1945 as the ‘concentrationary universe’ which, now actualized, might release its totalitarian plague any time and anywhere? What kind of memory does the film create to warn us of the continued presence of this concentrat...
The Scene of the Mass Crime takes up the unwritten history of the peculiar yet highly visible form of war crimes trials. These trials are the first and continuing site of the interface of law, history and film. From Nuremberg to the contemporary trials in Cambodia, film, in particular, has been crucial both as evidence of atrocity and as the means of publicizing the proceedings. But what does film bring to justice? Can law successfully address war crimes, atrocities, genocide? What do the trials actually show? What form of justice is done, and how does it relate to ordinary courts and proceedings? What lessons can be drawn from this history for the very topical political issue of filming civ...
Originally released as a videographic experiment in film history, Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma has pioneered how we think about and narrate cinema history, and in how history is taught through cinema. In this stunningly illustrated volume, Michael Witt explores Godard's landmark work as both a specimen of an artist's vision and a philosophical statement on the history of film. Witt contextualizes Godard's theories and approaches to historiography and provides a guide to the wide-ranging cinematic, aesthetic, and cultural forces that shaped Godard's groundbreaking ideas on the history of cinema.
Recent decades have seen photography’s privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place. Photography and Doubt reflects on this interest in photography’s referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of photographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipulated photography reveal about that realism’s hold on audiences across the medium’s history? Have doubts about photography’s testimo...
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV aims to provide as much basic information as possible about individual camps and other detention facilities. Why were they established? Who ran them? What kinds of prisoners did they hold? What kinds of work did the prisoners do, and for whom? What were the conditions like? The entries detail the sources from which the authors drew their material, so future scholars can expand upon the work. Finally, and perhaps most important, this is a work of memorialization: it preserves the histories of places where people suffered and died. Volume IV examines an under-researched segment of the larger N...
The use of image-based evidence in international criminal prosecutions is at a tipping point. In his pioneering book on the topic, Jonathan W. Hak, KC provides critical insight into the authentication and interpretation of images, setting out how images can be effectively used in the search for the truth. While images can convey vital information more efficiently and effectively than words alone, the biases of photographers, the use of image-altering technology, and the generation of images with artificial intelligence can lead to mischief and injustice. In this context, images must be effectively authenticated and interpreted to establish their true meaning. Addressing the growing need for ...
Il n’est sans doute pas de problème plus actif chez Ford que la naissance de la nation américaine, problème dont le genre Western s’est emparé avec constance, ce dont témoigne une littérature critique déjà abondante. L’originalité de l’œuvre fordien, de Young Mister Lincoln à Cheyenne Autumn, tient à la manière dont elle en a repensé l’histoire. Sans renoncer au légendaire de la conquête qui donne à ses films une matière et une forme communes, John Ford a patiemment constitué une hypothèse politique qui a trouvé avec La Prisonnière du désert sa plus poignante démonstration. L’objet de cet essai est de revenir sur la communauté fordienne pour mettre en lumière la violence originelle qui la fonde. Il n’est pas, de ce point de vue, de grands films fordiens qui n’aient tenté de reprendre le récit de l’institution d’un sujet de l’histoire au lieu d’une séparation des vivants et des morts, de la mémoire et de l’innocence. Il n’est pas non plus de fiction politique qui ne soit en même temps un récit généalogique à partir duquel se joue l’identité de la communauté fordienne et de la nation américaine.
Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh is an unconventional book about an unconventional filmmaker. Rithy Panh survived the Cambodian genocide and found refuge in France where he discovered in film a language that allowed him to tell what happened to the two million souls who suffered hunger, overwork, disease, and death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. His innovative cinema is made with people, not about them—even those guilty of crimes against humanity. Whether he is directing Isabelle Huppert in The Sea Wall, following laborers digging trenches, or interrogating the infamous director of S-21 prison, aesthetics and ethics inform all he does. With remarkable access to the director and his work, Deirdre Boyle introduces readers to Panh’s groundbreaking approach to perpetrator cinema and dazzling critique of colonialism, globalization, and the refugee crisis. Ferryman of Memories reveals the art of one of the masters of world cinema today, focusing on nineteen of his award-winning films, including Rice People, The Land of Wandering Souls, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, and The Missing Picture.
Karin Tilmans is an historian, and academic coordinator of the Max Weber Programme at the European University Institute, Florence. Frank van Vree is an historian and professor of journalism at the University of Amsterdam. Jay M. Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale. --