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.
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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.
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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
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