ABSTRACT
For more than 70 years following the liberation of the camps at the end of WW II, films of every genre and national origin have addressed the Holocaust and its multilayered sequelae. As scholars, psychoanalysts, and spectators continue to debate the ethics and aesthetics of representing and memorializing the Shoah, younger generations of filmmakers are inspired by documentaries and fiction features produced in earlier decades from diverse cinematic traditions. In a Central European landscape where topographies have been redrawn, political alliances renegotiated, and once-sealed archives made accessible, the need to work through the silences and suppression that have characterized Holocaust memorialization in the region has been emerging with particular urgency, in contrast to prevailing Cold War practices of “organized forgetting” that subsumed the expression of ethnic and religious identities. Departing from classic Hollywood interpretations, recent international co-productions have drawn attention to auto-fictional and archival modalities as a critical source for understanding the past. As the contested terrain of personal, familial, and collective experience is inscribed in the interplay among filmmakers and their subjects, new visual, textual, and emotional discoveries emerge.
This chapter compares international postwar Holocaust representations from an intergenerational perspective, framed by Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary masterpiece, Shoah (1985) and concluding with Hungary’s Oscar-winning narrative feature, László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015). Exploring issues of memorialization and reenactment, questions of transference in the filmmaking process are analyzed to suggest ways in which transgenerational cinema reckons with the traumas of history.
