Overview
- Provides an innovative account of how Polish cinema is responding to new histories of the Holocaust, as Polish perpetration, bystanding and witnessing in rural and provincial spaces is being reconceived.
- Conducts original close readings of key Polish films via theoretical and film-philosophical frameworks to reconsider ethical and epistemological questions arising from film form, narrative and genre.
- Forges a new approach to a ‘posthumous ecology’, interconnecting the material remains of Jewish victims, the natural environment, archaeological processes of exhumation, and their aesthetic rendering through cinema.
Part of the book series: Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy (PFSP)
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About this book
This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish cinema’s engagement with histories of Polish violence against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Moving beyond conventional studies of historical representation on screen, the book considers how cinema reframes the unwanted knowledge of violence in its aftermaths. The book draws on Derridean hauntology, Didi-Huberman’s confrontations with art images, Levinasian ethics and anamorphosis to examine cinematic reconfigurations of histories and memories that are vulnerable to evasion and formlessness. Innovative analyses of Birthplace (Łoziński, 1992), It Looks Pretty From a Distance (Sasnal, 2011), Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012), and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) explore how their rural filmic landscapes are predicated on the radical exclusion of Jewish neighbours, prompting archaeological processes of exhumation. Arguing that the distressing materiality of decomposition disturbs cinematic composition, the book examines how Poland’s aftermath cinema attempts to recompose itself through form and narrative as it faces Polish complicity in Jewish death.
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Keywords
Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“The book is an original and important contribution to the field of Holocaust cinema studies that have developed so far ... . Due to its broad scope and comprehensive film analyses, the book will be useful for advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars working in the fields of film studies, Holocaust studies, Slavic studies, and Jewish studies. ... Mroz’s book is an important step on this path towards accepting ‘unwanted knowledge.’” (Elżbieta Ostrowska, The Polish Review, Vol. 69 (2), 2024)
“This trenchant book looks with great sensitivity and candour at the ‘unwanted knowledge’ of Polish perpetration during the Holocaust. Engaging brilliantly with theorists of the imagination and the image, and broader discussions of film and violence, Mroz closes in on four contemporary Polish films which contend in different ways with hidden acts of torture and murder. Her vital and illuminating readings make a case for the importance of film as medium for reflection on history, knowledge, and the psyche. This is crucial reading for anyone interested in genocide and film.” (Emma Wilson, Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts, University of Cambridge)Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Matilda Mroz is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to this she was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow and Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of several works on cinema, including Temporality and Film Analysis (2012).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema
Book Subtitle: Posthumous Materiality and Unwanted Knowledge
Authors: Matilda Mroz
Series Title: Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46166-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-46165-0Published: 10 February 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-69013-8Due: 13 March 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-46166-7Published: 09 February 2021
Series ISSN: 2946-5435
Series E-ISSN: 2946-5443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 298
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations, 17 illustrations in colour
Topics: Screen Studies, European Cinema and TV, Memory Studies, History of World War II and the Holocaust