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Witness through Fiction: Holocaust, Conflict and Genocide in Cinema and Literature

Witness through Fiction: Holocaust, Conflict and Genocide in Cinema and Literature

Publié le par Perrine Coudurier (Source : Till Kuhnle, Limoges)

Witness through Fiction: Holocaust, Conflict and Genocide in Cinema and Literature

At  Université de Limoges (FLSH)

(Languages: English and French)

9 -11 April 2015

The Holocaust represents an historical occurrence seemingly beyond comprehension. Literature and film help us remember and make sense of this tragedy. Their works inform, teach, and serve as a moral lesson. Writers and filmmakers intend that these events are truly “never again.” Yet despite George Santayana’s warning about the consequences of forgetting the past and Martin Niemöller’s about indifference and lack of empathy, abuses of human rights and dignity continue. The murder of millions of Jews and lesser numbers of Gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, because of who they were and not because they were an external threat continue to shock us. The collective murder of millions by a criminal government may even have created an awareness that encourages people to condemn other atrocities, those that preceded the Holocaust, those that came after and those that continue to occur. Yet abuse of human rights persists. In spite of an apparent inability of humans to learn from history, artists continue to bear witness to the past in hopes of influencing the present and the future.

The colloquium on Witness through Fiction will explore the role of the fictional narrative and feature film in helping readers/filmgoers discover, understand, and come to terms with crimes of horror committed against members of a collective ethnic or cultural community. On the one hand, stories organize and give a sense of connectedness to events, thereby clarifying relationships and cause and effect. On the other hand, the process of creating story distorts. Factual material is dropped, abbreviated, and conflated. Dramatic tension is added in the form of close escapes, espionage, or love affairs. More troubling perhaps is the changing of factual material.  Events, persons, and outcomes are distorted. Fictional counterparts are invented, in order to control how a story is received or understood. It is open to debate whether the deviation from history or received history in these works hides the truth or helps reveal it.

In line with the above, the Colloquium on Witness through Fiction is calling for twenty minute original papers that address the issue of the relationship between ethics and the aesthetics of artistic creation. News reports, documentaries, photo exhibits and eye witness accounts relate the reality of atrocity. What, however, is the role of fiction in acting as witness to the atrocities of history? How does the passing of time affect presentation of content and form of the work? Eli Wiesel’s novel Night, although a fictionalized telling of his experiences in Auschwitz, is accepted as truth because of the author’s status as an eye witness. Whereas the concentration camp memoires of Benjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, published in 1995, and first praised by critics, who thought it based on first hand experiences, was then condemned by the same critics, when they discovered the memories were a fabrication. Other critics, however, contended the words were the same before and after the revelation. Controversy befell Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (1996) for different reasons. The book’s narrator, a Nazi war criminal, justifies his crimes through rationalizing and relativizing them.

Cinema in particular is subject to how time remembers. Ostatni Etap (1948), by Polish director and camp survivor Wanda Jakubowska, reconstructed Auschwitz barracks near the actual site to film her story of camp life. J. Morgenstern set his short film Ambulance (1969), about children gassed in a van, in a barren landscape. Twenty five years later, Roberto Bengini set La vita è bella, in a fairy tale like camp, which generated debate about the appropriateness of such a light approach to tragedy. A decade later, without generating much controversy, Quentin Tarrantino gave his epic an essentially happy end by setting it in an alternate historical world.

The above examples focus on the Holocaust. Yet other genocides and abuses of human rights and dignity have occurred, for example in the republics of the former Yugoslavia and in the African countries of Uganda and Rwanda. Contributions on how literature and cinema have treated these tragedies and other historical transgressions against the other are therefore very much encouraged.

Papers addressing the topic of the colloquium may be presented in English or French. Please send a ½ page abstract to rcreimer@uncc.edu and till.kuhnle@unilimfrDeadline for the abstract is 15 Jan 2015.  

Participants wishing to have their paper published should send a finalized essay conforming to the Chicago or MLA style manual to Professors Till Kuhnle and Robert Reimer by May 31, 2015, who will distribute the essays for review to the colloquium’s committee. A published volume will depend on funding.

Organization. Robert Reimer and Till Kuhnle