The Representation of History in Four Holocaust films: Night and Fog, Schindler’s List, Son of Saul, and The Zone of Interest
Lecture by Russell J.A. Kilbourn
Abstract
In this talk I invoke the Holocaust as a limit-case for investigating what a meaningful posthumanist aesthetic ideology might look like: an aesthetic in response to a world ready to do without the human, while the human propensity to treat other humans as less-than-human allows for the emergence of a properly posthumanist subject, however negatively defined. This begs the question at the core of a meaningful posthumanist critique of the Enlightenment tradition: What do we ever mean by ‘human’? By its very nature as a historical event, the Holocaust crystallizes all the issues and debates around the representation, mediation, transmission, distortion, or misrepresentation of anti-human atrocity on an unimaginable scale.
Eighty years on, the Holocaust moves from the embrace of living memory and firsthand recollection into the realm of collective cultural memory. In the 21st century, cultural producers with no direct or lived connection to the Holocaust continue to address the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Through close comparison of four key texts—Night and Fog (Alain Resnais 1956), Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg 1993), Son of Saul (László Nemes 2015), and The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer 2023)—I explore the possibility of ‘bearing witness’ through fiction film. Rather than seeing the Holocaust as unrepresentable because it is unimaginable or unspeakable (see e.g. Adorno 1949; Wiesel 1989), we must continue to tell stories about the Holocaust “because it is unspeakable” (Bruck 2007). The further away in time, the more an event is subject to the shared memory schemata of fictional narrative: memory as remediation or ‘rememoration’. This aligns with the concomitant shift in Holocaust studies, away from a privileging of individual and collective memory grounded in lived experience, toward an expanded recognition that even such seemingly authentic memorial-testimonial bearing-witness is itself always already determined by the medium in which it is captured, preserved and, hopefully, passed on.
Bionote
Russell J. A. Kilbourn is Professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. His books include: Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media: From Annihilation to High Life and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2023); The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino: Commitment to Style (Columbia UP, 2020); W.G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption: Catastrophe with Spectator (Northwestern UP, 2018); The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film (co-ed. Eleanor Ty; WLU Press, 2013); Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema (Routledge 2010). Forthcoming publications include Framing Ferrante: Adaptation and Intermediality from Troubling Love to The Lying Life of Adults (co-ed. Roberta Cauchi-Santoro; La Società Editrice Fiorentina, Fall 2025), and a special issue of Quaderni d’Italianistica on Critical Posthumanism in Italian Cinema and Media Studies.
Practical information
When? October 27, 15h30
Where? Malpertuis: UFO, third floor, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 35, 9000 Ghent.
If you wish to join us, please send us an e-mail at tapas@Ugent.be so that we can reserve you a seat.
If you wish to join online, you can do so through this link.