Shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Prize as the best book on the MOVING IMAGE 2011

Edited by Professors Griselda Pollock (Art History and Cultural Analysis) and Max Silverman (French Literature and Cultural Studies) Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s  Night and Fog (London and New York: Berghahn) has been shortlisted for the prestigious Kraszna-Krausz Prize for the best book of 2011 on the moving image.  The announcement of the winner will take place on 26 April in London at the award ceremony for the SONY awards.

Pollock and Silverman have introduced into English-language film and cultural studies the French term ‘concentrationary’, coined in 1945 by French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany. In an innovative re-reading of Alain Resnais’s iconic commemorative film Night and Fog (1955), the editors and the contributors to the collection reframe the film as an attempt to represent ‘the concentrationary universe’ not as a closed chapter in history, but as the political beginning of a new menace that stalks contemporary society in new guises and spaces.

Based on an eighteen-month seminar at the University of Leeds in which leading scholars on Night and Fog were invited to reappraise the film in the light of theories of the concentrationary universe and concentrationary art, this book is the first interdisciplinary critical study of a film made for the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Widely exhibited as a documentary about what has become known as the Holocaust, the film has often been criticized for failing to recognize the racist genocide at its heart. This new book reframes Night and Fog as concentrationary cinema, a self-consciously aesthetic and political formulation of memory as vigilant resistance to novel totalitarian terror.  The ten thousand concentration camps were the totalitarian regime’s experimental site not of mass annihilation (which was largely carried out in the five specialized extermination camps) but of the systematic destruction and total domination of the human. The legacy of this experiment lives on after the destruction of the physical sites of the camps, and has become a new political possibility, not only in new dictatorships but also within democratic societies. The perspective offered by this new book thus embraces other sites of dehumanization and their cultural representation.,

Since 2007 Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman have co-directed a research project on Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.  Two doctoral theses have been completed by Benjamin Hannavy Couzen (2011) and Matthew John (2012).  Three more volumes are in preparation: Concentrationary Memories, Concentrationary Imaginaries, Concentrationary Art.