ABSTRACT
The topic of this chapter is prompted in part by my experience as the Hollywood-born and raised daughter of a Hungarian father and an Austrian mother who had fled Hitler’s Europe for the heart of the movie colony founded by Jews from the former shtetls and cities of East-Central Europe. These intersections of European memory, history and complicated, often repressed, identity are worth revisiting today, in the shadow of the 60-year commemorations of the end of the Second World War. But, as I later came to discover in Vienna and Budapest, my own Jewish heritage had been kept silent within the family, and so it was not until my first trip to Hungary in the mid-1980s that I discovered that I, too, had relatives who had disappeared during the Holocaust. Since then, my research has taken me throughout Eastern and Central Europe, screening and writing about films that seek in different ways to come to terms with the complex and ongoing issues of postHolocaust Jewish identity, and its transmission from one generation to another in first-person narratives, whether documentary, experimental or fiction. Contrary to earlier ideas of documentary that tended to be fixated on the notion of objectivity, I want to propose that a hallmark of contemporary non-fiction and fiction filmmaking is the undisguised, deeply personal and passionate interests of filmmakers: indeed, over the past 20 years, the best of these productions often take a strong stand, expressing the filmmaker’s own voice, positionality and point of view – staking a claim, unapologetically claiming a self, yet engaging openly with the world beyond that framed on screen. When the Holocaust is the subject, how, then, does this subjectivity make itself felt?
