Concentrationary Cinema

Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog

Edited by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman

Since its release in 1955, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political and aesthetic response to what David Rousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, identified on his return in 1945 as the ‘concentrationary universe’ which, now actualized, might release its totalitarian plague any time and anywhere?

What kind of memory does the film create to warn us of the continued presence of this concentrationary universe? This international collection re-examines Resnais’s benchmark fi lm in terms of both its political and historical context of representation of the camps and of other instances of the concentrationary in contemporary cinema. Through a range of critical readings, Concentrationary Cinema explores the cinematic aesthetics of political resistance not to the Holocaust as such but to the political novelty of absolute power represented by the concentrationary system and its assault on the human condition.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds.From 2004–7 she directed a research project on Holocaust Survivors and Migratory Subjectivity. She works on difference, trauma and aesthetics in relation to art,cinema and visual culture in the 20th century. Forthcoming is After-Affect/After- Image: Trauma and Aesthetic Inscription in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester University Press, 2011).

Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds.He has written on cultural memory, representations of the Holocaust, post-colonial theory and cultures, and immigration, race and nation in France. He is currently writing a book on the connections between the Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary entitled Palimpsestic Memory.

Concentrationary Cinema was recently mentioned on Jewish Ideas Daily.