Sunday, May 15, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Stories, stories and stories, from the perspective of a million eyes.
An article from filmreference.com is in the link below.
http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Holocaust-REPRESENTATION-AND-THE-HOLOCAUST.html
In this article, the anonymous author more or less lists a few pieces of media (mainly films and television shows) that have been created with plots and/or themes resting on the backstory of the Holocaust. It begins by contrasting Lanzmann's 1985 film Shoah with Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List. Each tells a story about the Holocaust in a different way. In Shoah, Lanzmann takes survivors of the Holocaust and has them rehash their experiences and connect their pasts to the contemporary world by placing them on the sites of where the Holocaust took place. No flashy special effects are used to recreate the experiences of the survivors, only their voices. In that way, Lanzmann tries to convey the survivors' stories as naturally as possible, from as many survivors as possible, to impose a factual rather than emotional tinge to the Holocaust itself. In Schindler's List, however, Spielberg tells the story from the opinion of predominantly one person and employs scenes that are meant to play more with the viewer's emotion than recount the past. The actors in his movie are just that: actors. His film plays mainly with the heart strings of viewers, to paint a picture of the Holocaust with melodramatic backgrounds, dialogues, and actors, rather than merely orally. The article does not take on stance as to which film is better in terms of retelling stories of the Holocaust, just describes the movies. But its list of films to follow is pretty thorough in its brevity. The author points out how other directors used the films not simply for factual sustenance, but for artistic or moralistic reasons. The author points out that in Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), a 1955 film by Alain Resnais, Resnais employs Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the Holocaust, to retell his story at the site of Auschwitz not simply to recreate the experience, but to give "haunting philosophical commentary on evil and responsibility."
Basically, although the films aren't literary sources, they present within themselves as narratives of the Holocaust and can therefore be set up alongside Maus 1 & 2 as controversial discourses created post-Holocaust.
http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Holocaust-REPRESENTATION-AND-THE-HOLOCAUST.html
In this article, the anonymous author more or less lists a few pieces of media (mainly films and television shows) that have been created with plots and/or themes resting on the backstory of the Holocaust. It begins by contrasting Lanzmann's 1985 film Shoah with Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List. Each tells a story about the Holocaust in a different way. In Shoah, Lanzmann takes survivors of the Holocaust and has them rehash their experiences and connect their pasts to the contemporary world by placing them on the sites of where the Holocaust took place. No flashy special effects are used to recreate the experiences of the survivors, only their voices. In that way, Lanzmann tries to convey the survivors' stories as naturally as possible, from as many survivors as possible, to impose a factual rather than emotional tinge to the Holocaust itself. In Schindler's List, however, Spielberg tells the story from the opinion of predominantly one person and employs scenes that are meant to play more with the viewer's emotion than recount the past. The actors in his movie are just that: actors. His film plays mainly with the heart strings of viewers, to paint a picture of the Holocaust with melodramatic backgrounds, dialogues, and actors, rather than merely orally. The article does not take on stance as to which film is better in terms of retelling stories of the Holocaust, just describes the movies. But its list of films to follow is pretty thorough in its brevity. The author points out how other directors used the films not simply for factual sustenance, but for artistic or moralistic reasons. The author points out that in Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), a 1955 film by Alain Resnais, Resnais employs Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the Holocaust, to retell his story at the site of Auschwitz not simply to recreate the experience, but to give "haunting philosophical commentary on evil and responsibility."
Basically, although the films aren't literary sources, they present within themselves as narratives of the Holocaust and can therefore be set up alongside Maus 1 & 2 as controversial discourses created post-Holocaust.
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