Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony, and the Holocaust

by Libby Saxton

Haunted Images takes a close look at a range of treatments of the Holocaust in film, using sustained textual analysis to radically rethink film as a witness to history. Questioning the legitimacy of persistent claims that the Holocaust remains 'unrepresentable', this volume seeks to redefine the singular challenges this event presents to filmmakers, suggesting that filmic representations address the Holocaust as much through what they leave unseen – through silences and ellipses – as through what they visualise directly. Discussing films such as Kapo (1960), Shoah (1985) and Histoire(s) du cinéma (1997), this important new study provides a compelling reading of how European cinema has responded to the particular problems that the Holocaust presents to filmmakers, and suggests compelling fresh insights into the relationship between visual art, cultural trauma and the power of the image.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2008

About the author

Dr Libby Saxton, BA, MPhil, PhD is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film.

Her research focuses on legacies of genocide and atrocity, philosophical ethics and critiques and defences of the image through the medium of cinema. Her first book, Haunted Images (Wallflower, 2008), reconsiders filmic and video responses to the Holocaust, including Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) and a section of Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988-98), in the light of recent new debate in France about photographs and pieces of footage as witnesses to the camps.

Her published articles cover aftermaths of the Holocaust and other instances of political violence in contemporary cinema, and she co-edited Holocaust Intersections (Legenda, 2013), on genocide in twenty-first-century visual culture, with Axel Bangert and Robert Gordon.

Film and Ethics (Routledge, 2010), co-authored with Lisa Downing, teases out the implicit ethics of canonical strands of film theory, reviews specific films through poststructuralist philosophical lenses, and covers her work on the ethico-politics of gesture.