Cinematic Reflections on The Legacy of the Holocaust: Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Description

An international group of psychoanalysts and film scholars address the enduring emotional legacy of the Holocaust in Cinematic Reflections on the Legacy of the Holocaust: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Particular focus is given to how second and third generation survivors have explored and confronted the psychic reverberations of Holocaust trauma in cinema. This book focuses on how film is particularly suited to depict Holocaust experiences with vividness and immediacy. The similarity of moving images and sound to our dream experience allows access to unconscious processing. Film has the potential to reveal the vast panorama of Holocaust history as well as its intrapsychic reverberations. Yet despite the recent prominence of Holocaust films, documentaries, and TV series as well as scholarly books and memoirs, these works lack a psychoanalytic optic that elucidates themes such as the repetition compulsion, survival guilt, disturbances in identity, and disruption of mourning that are underlying leitmotifs. Cinematic Reflections on the Legacy of the Holocaust will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and therapists as well as to scholars in trauma, film, and Jewish studies. It is also of interest to those concerned with the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities and their long-term effects. Cover Half Title Book Title Copyright Dedication Table of Contents List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Introduction Representation of the Holocaust in film Overview of chapters Psychoanalytic themes in Holocaust film The meaning and variants of survival and survivor guilt The repetition compulsion Mourning: impeded and reinstated Identity: fragmentation, recovery, and integration Testimony, witnessing, transitional phenomena, and the psychoanalytic process Notes References 1 The art and angst of viewing Holocaust films References 2 Six Million and One: a documentary Introduction The place and the times The impact of the trip on the Fisher siblings References 3 Between forgetting and remembering: two films of Alain Resnais Introduction Conclusion References 4 The Pawnbroker Introduction Hollywood and the Holocaust The film References 5 Multiplicity, dissociation, and mentalization in Hannah Arendt by Pam Katz and Margarethe von Trotta Introduction Thinking without bannisters The multiple selves of Hannah Arendt Multiplicity and dissociation Eichmann in Jerusalem: the trial Arendt thinking about thinking Thinking as action Summary and conclusion Notes References Bibliography 6 From Shoah to Son of Saul: cinematic traces and intergenerational dialogues Holocaust films and Hollywood Claude Lanzmann and Shoah Out of the past: transgenerational fictional representations Cinema/psychoanalysis/Shoah Transference and documentary filmmaking The third generation Found images: Péter Forgács and the archaeological palimpsest Counter-narratives and transferential dialogues Conclusion: spectres of the Shoah Notes References 7 Son of Saul: the remains of civilization Overture Porter to the gate of Hell: Saul as the hero of liminality Burying the dead: “connectedness” and cultural community as the remains of civilization in the place of annihilation Beyond Auschwitz, or what is left of Oedipus (and Antigone) at the end of civilization A world beyond God at Auschwitz, or the legacy of Antigone for us No name left: the erasure of language and burial as testimony Coda: rebirth by water, memory and/or redemption for the subject through femininity? Notes References 8 Sadomasochistic regression in The Night Porter References 9 To know or not to know? Common themes in Ida and The Flat Introduction The Jewish nun: Pawlikowski’s film Ida Unheimat: Arnon Goldfinger’s film The Flat Trauma and its aftermath: victims and their offspring Perpetrators and their descendants The reception of the films and their significance Notes References 10 Inheriting Nazisim: reflections on the film Two or Three Things I Know About Him Introduction A typical German story The encounter between personal and collective history Film credits as genesis Family loyalties and defense strategies Do the questions themselves bear guilt? The contribution of cinema to history and to psychoanalysis The future of a generation Conclusion References 11 Discussion The language of film Cinematographic techniques used to convey traumatic experience Psychodynamic interpretations Defense and the repetition compulsion Intrusive memories that circle, bespeak, and cover over an absence Trauma as identity Levels of remembering and knowing Screens and fetishes: the case of Son of Saul Annihilation anxiety and transitional objects: wherein lies hope? References Index