Victoria University of Wellington History Programme invites you to a seminar by Giacomo Lichtner, Voices from the threshold: cinematic aesthetics of the gas chambers
The representation of the Holocaust rotates around a black hole: the gas chamber. Although millions of Holocaust victims were murdered elsewhere, in fields, forests, and ghettos, the gas chamber has emerged as a symbolic site of genocide that presents a seemingly unresolvable paradox. It is at one time both the centre of the genocide and its least relatable passage: perhaps the only one we have no first-hand account of.
This paper examines cinematic attempts to represent the gas chambers, placing it in the historical context of attempts to document and convey the scale of the genocide. It reflects in particular on the recurrent use of the threshold, intended both as a physical and a symbolic liminal space: a double-edged boundary that can and has been used to evoke the lost on the one hand, and to titillate audiences on the other.
Analysing multiple perspectives and attempts, from Marvin Chomsky’s 1978 mini-series Holocaust to Lajos Koltai’s Son of Saul (2015), the paper argues that these sequences trace the contours of a key faultline in the doomed search for the missing voices of the dead, and thus in the endless search for meaning in Holocaust experiences.
[N.B:This presentation contains distressing images.]
Giacomo Lichtner is Associate Professor of History at Victoria University of Wellington. He is Associate Editor of the journal Modern Italy and serves on the board of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand. His research focuses on the long Second World War and on the politics of its commemoration and representation in film. Lichtner is the author of Film and the Shoah in France and Italy (2008, 2015) and Fascism in Italian Cinema Since 1945: the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory (2013). His latest project is entitled The Search for Meaning in Holocaust Cinema.
Venue: Old Kirk 406 (F L W Wood Seminar Room)
Date: Friday, 18 October 2019
Time: 12:10pm
For more information: Contact Dr Cybele Locke (cybele.locke@vuw.ac.nz; 04 463 6774).
