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Each one of us comes with a history, a complex web of DNA and a library of information that shapes who we are and how we view the world. How can we use our own complexities not only to engage with one another but to build it for story content? As an artistic researcher, filmmaker and educator, Tanja Sakota has often thought how to bring this subjective experience into pedagogical practice. Using paired themes of memory and forgetting, segregation and migration, perpetrators and victims, Sakota travels along a timeline of memory as she takes us on a journey through South Africa, Germany, Poland and Bosnia/Herzegovina. Using a camera and short film techniques, she hosts several workshops focused on interacting and engaging with remembering through different memory sites. The author sits at the core but the book is an interdisciplinary work shaped around films made by different participants using the camera to access and unveil personal interpretations of space and place. Questions that underpin the uncovering of memories are: How does one use a camera to unmask invisible memories hidden within sites? How does one remember events that one hasn't necessarily experienced? How does one use film to interrogate the past from the future present? As the journey evolves, workshop participants and readers alike enter into a conversation around practice-based research, autoethnography and film. Uncovering Memory is not a handbook offering a prescriptive method. Instead, it is a pedagogical text that offers an interactive approach for students and peers to consider, adapt or react to in their own teaching and learning practices. The narrative encourages readers to self-reflect as they explore their own memory using the camera and short film format as an engaging tool for research and knowledge production.

In Reframing Trauma in Contemporary Fiction Film, Tarja Laine provides insights into how cinema engages its spectator emotionally with the pathology of memory that lies at the heart of trauma. By arguing that cinema communicates the inability to process a traumatic event by means of its aesthetic specificity, Laine demonstrates that traumatic cinema can be an important source of ethical knowledge, both within and beyond the cinematic world. The films discussed in this book do not necessarily narrate trauma but embody that aspect of trauma which resists narrativization. This is why there are modes of affective engagement beyond storytelling by which spectators can meaningfully relate to trauma. Scholars of film studies, media studies, and philosophy will find this book of particular interest.

À partir d'une histoire portant les meurtrissures d'une douleur tue, Un amour rêvé - film documentaire d'Arthur Gillet - met en scène les méandres d'une idylle tiraillée entre deux êtres d'abord, puis leurs descendances, tout en questionnant la politique coloniale belge au coeur de l'Afrique centrale. Plusieurs disciplines sont convoquées pour démêler la part de joie, de haine, de précis historico-politique de la colonisation. De la politique ségrégationniste installée au Congo par la Belgique, Un amour rêvé pointe aussi la rédemption des consciences par l'écriture filmique de la finitude de l'homme face à la mort. Pourtant de ce chaos colonial, Joseph et Léontine, ont su conjuguer l'amour bien qu'il n'était pas admissible de « voir un Européen marié à une Congolaise ».

This volume traces the distinct cultural languages in which individual and collective forms of trauma are expressed in diverse variations, including oral and written narratives, literature, comic strips, photography, theatre, and cinematic images. The central argument is that traumatic memories are frequently beyond the sphere of medical, legal, or state intervention. To address these different, often intertwined modes of language, the contributors provide a variety of disciplinary approaches to foster innovative debates and provoke new insights. Prevailing definitions of trauma can best be understood according to the cultural and historical conditions within which they exist. Languages of Trauma explores what this means in practice by scrutinizing varied historical moments from the First World War onwards and particular cultural contexts from across Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa – striving to help decolonize the traditional Western-centred history of trauma, dissolving it into multifaceted transnational histories of trauma cultures.

Reassesses the post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema from a new mnemo-political perspective.

In 1945, French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany coined the phrase'the concentrationary universe'to describe the camps as a terrible political experiment in the destruction of the human. This book shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. It asks if the concentrationary now infests our cultural imaginary, normalizing what was once considered horrific and exceptional by transforming into entertainment violations of human life.

Environ un tiers de la population française est constitué par des citoyens d'origine étrangère : quel rapport ces sujets construisent-ils avec leur identité et leur double appartenance? Ce livre prend directement en compte pour la première fois le point de vue des individus qui ont vécu l'immigration ou qui sont issus d'une diaspora familiale en France, et qui ont décidé de faire un film sur leur vie à la frontière entre deux pays. En mettant ensemble un corpus inédit de 91 oeuvres appartenant à un nouveau genre filmique théorisé ici - le documentaire autobiographique diasporique -, l'auteur met ainsi l'accent sur un massif et véritable questionnement identitaire de la France contemporaine, concrètement multiculturelle, mais toujours réticente à reconnaître sa diversité interne.

This book addresses the preoccupation with memory in contemporary artists'moving image installations. It situates artists'moving image in relation to the transformations of digitalization as hybrid intermedial combinations of analogue film, video and digital video emerge from mid 1990s onwards. While film has always been closely associated with the process of memory, this book investigates new models of memory in artists'remediation of film with video and other intermedial aesthetics. Beginning with a chapter on the theorization of memory and the moving image and the diverse genealogies of artists'film and video, the following chapters identify five different mnemonic modes in artists'moving image: critical nostalgia, database narrative, the ‘echo-chamber', documentary fiction and mediatized memories. Stan Douglas, Steve McQueen, Runa Islam, Mark Leckey and Elizabeth Price are of a generation that has lived through the transition from analogue to digital. Their emphasis on the nuances of intermediality indicates the extent to which we remember through media.

Responding to a lack of studies on the film festival's role in the production of cultural memory, this book explores different parameters through which film festivals shape our reception and memories of films. By focusing on two Asian American film festivals, this book analyzes the frames of memory that festivals create for their films, constructed through and circulated by the various festival media. It further establishes that festival locations—both cities and screening venues—play a significant role in shaping our experience of films. Finally, it shows that festivals produce performances which help guide audiences towards certain readings and direct the film's role as a memory object. Bringing together film festival studies and memory studies,'Asian American Film Festivals'offers a mixed-methods approach with which to explore the film festival phenomenon, thus shedding light on the complex dynamics of frames, locations, and performances shaping the festival's memory practices. It also draws attention to the understudied genre of Asian American film festivals, showing how these festivals actively engage in constructing and performing a minority group's collective identity and memory.

Transitional justice and national inquiries may be the most established means for coming to terms with traumatic legacies, but it is in the more subtle social and cultural processes of “memory work” that the pitfalls and promises of reconciliation are laid bare. This book analyzes, within the realms of literature and film, recent Australian and Canadian attempts to reconcile with Indigenous populations in the wake of forced child removal. As Hanna Teichler demonstrates, their systematic emphasis on the subjectivity of the victim is problematic, reproducing simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization. Such fictions of reconciliation venture beyond simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization, offering new opportunities for confronting painful histories.

Two World Wars engulfed Europe, Asia and the United States, leaving indelible scars on the landscape and survivors. The trauma of civil wars in Spain (declared) and Latin America (tacit) spanned decades yet, contradictorily, bind parties together even today. Civil wars still haunt Africa where, in more recent years, ethnic cleansing has led to wholesale genocide. Drawing on the emerging field of Memory Studies, this book examines narrative and documentary films, made far from Hollywood, that address memory--both traumatic and nostalgic--surrounding these conflicts, despite attempts by special interests to erase or manipulate history.

Flashbacks in Film examines film flashback as a rich multimodal narrative device, analyzing the cognitive underpinnings of film flashbacks and the mechanisms that lead viewers to successfully comprehend them.Combining a cognitive film theory approach with the theoretical framework proposed by blending theory, which claims that human beings'general ability for conceptual integration underlies most of our daily activities, this book argues that flashbacks make sense to the viewer, as they are specifically designed for the viewer's cognitive understanding. Through a mixture of analysis and dozens of case studies, this book demonstrates that successful film flashbacks appeal to the spectator's natural perceptual and cognitive abilities, which spectators exercise daily.This book will serve as a valuable resource for scholars interested in film studies, media studies, and cognitive linguistics.

Bajo la visión de diversos actores clave —documentalistas mexicanos y miembros de la comunidad pa ipai de Santa Catarina, B. C. —, se ofrecen referentes y reflexiones sobre las aportaciones y el potencial del cine documental en la investigación sociocultural en general, y de la memoria en particular.

​This book examines the role of memory in animation, as well as the ways in which the medium of animation can function as a technology of remembering and forgetting. By doing so, it establishes a platform for the cross-fertilization between the burgeoning fields of animation studies and memory studies. By analyzing a wide range of different animation types, from stop motion to computer animation, and from cell animated cartoons to painted animation, this book explores the ways in which animation can function as a representational medium. The five parts of the book discuss the interrelation of animation and memory through the lens of materiality, corporeality, animation techniques, the city, and animated documentaries. These discussions raise a number of questions: how do animation films bring forth personal and collective pasts? What is the role of found footage, objects, and sound in the material and affective dimensions of animation? How does animation serve political ends? The essays in this volume offer answers to these questions through a wide variety of case studies and contexts. The book will appeal to both a broad academic and a more general readership with an interest in animation studies, memory studies, cultural studies, comparative visual arts, and media studies.Chapter “Introduction” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Film itself is an artifact of memory. A blend of all the other fine arts, film portrays and preserves human memory, someone's memory, faulty or not, dramatically or comically, in a documentary, feature film or short. Hollywood may dominate 80 percent of cinema production but it is not the only voice. World cinema is about those other voices. Drawn initially from presentations from a series of film conferences held at the University of Texas at San Antonio, this collection of essays covers multiple geographical, linguistic, and cultural areas worldwide, emphasizing the historical and cultural interpretation of films. Appendices list films focusing on memory and invite readers to explore the films and issues raised.

Film has shaped modern society in part by changing its cultures of memory. Film, Music, Memory reveals that this change has rested in no small measure on the mnemonic powers of music. As films were consumed by growing American and European audiences, their soundtracks became an integral part of individual and collective memory. Berthold Hoeckner analyzes three critical processes through which music influenced this new culture of memory: storage, retrieval, and affect. Films store memory through an archive of cinematic scores. In turn, a few bars from a soundtrack instantly recall the image that accompanied them, and along with it, the affective experience of the movie. Hoeckner examines films that reflect directly on memory, whether by featuring an amnesic character, a traumatic event, or a surge of nostalgia. As the history of cinema unfolded, movies even began to recall their own history through quotations, remakes, and stories about how cinema contributed to the soundtrack of people's lives. Ultimately, Film, Music, Memory demonstrates that music has transformed not only what we remember about the cinematic experience, but also how we relate to memory itself.

Cinema archives memories, conserves the past, and rewrites histories. As much as the Sinophone embodies differences, contemporary Sinophone cinemas in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People's Republic of China invest various images of contested politics in order to assert different histories and self-consciousness. As such, Sinophone cinemas and image production function as archives, with the capability of reinterpreting the multiple dimensions of past and present. The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture investigates Sinophone films and art projects that express this desire for archiving and reconfiguring the past. Comprising ten chapters, this book brings together contributors from an array of disciplines - artists, filmmakers, curators, film critics, and literary scholars - to grapple with the creative ambiguities of Sinophone cinemas and image culture. Blending eclectic methods of scholarly research, knowledge-making, and art-making into a new discursive space, the chapters address the diverse complexities of the cinematic culture and image production in Sinitic language regions.This book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of film studies, China studies, East Asian studies, Taiwan studies, and Sinophone studies, as well as professionals who work in the film industry.

Los films analizados en este libro constituyen un campo de análisis con el que los'momentos de memoria'guardan una estrecha relación con las políticas memorísticas, ya que se vinculan con los diferentes modos de representación de esa memoria. A partir de ello, se avanza sobre la elección en el tratamiento del tema y sus representaciones, muchas de ellas en consonancia con la estrategia política de cada período; otras, en cambio, conforman una suerte de excepción. Todas son útiles para avanzar los alcances y las limitaciones de los vínculos entre cine, política y memoria en la Argentina.

Mnemocine untersucht das spezifische Gedächtniswissen des Films und seine Erinnerungseffekte. Der Ausgangspunkt ist denkbar paradox: Ausgerechnet das Kameraauge, das dafür gepriesen wurde, ohne Störung durch Erinnerung sehen zu können, ist im Kino auf das Wechselspiel von Erinnern und Vergessen angewiesen, um in Form kommen zu können. Das Kino wird so zu einem Ort, an dem Erinnerungen und komplexe Zeiterfahrungen nicht nur dargestellt und simuliert, sondern auch hergestellt und stimuliert werden. Mnemocine rekonstruiert diese Experimentalisierung des Gedächtnisses am Ort des Kinos und untersucht die spezifisch filmische Psychogenese. Das Buch bringt das Kino auf die Spur der Erinnerung und die Erinnerung auf die Spur des Kinos. In konsequenter Verschränkung von Innen und Außen, Mentalität und Medialität, Psyche und Technik wird eine filmbasierte Morphologie, Phänomenologie und Pragrammatologie der Erinnerung erarbeitet.

Haunted Landscapes offers a fresh and innovative approach to contemporary debates about landscape and the supernatural. Landscapes are often uncanny spaces embroiled in the past; associated with absence, memory and nostalgia. Yet experiences of haunting must in some way always belong to the present: they must be felt. This collection of essays opens up new and compelling areas of debate around the concepts of haunting, affect and landscape. Landscape studies, supernatural studies, haunting and memory are all rapidly growing fields of enquiry and this book synthesises ideas from several critical approaches – spectral, affective and spatial – to provide a new route into these subjects. Examining urban and rural landscapes, haunted domestic spaces, landscapes of trauma, and borderlands, this collection of essays is designed to cross disciplines and combine seemingly disparate academic approaches under the coherent locus of landscape and haunting. Presenting a timely intervention in some of the most pressing scholarly debates of our time, Haunted Landscapes offers an attractive array of essays that cover topics from Victorian times to the present.

The links between cinema and war machines have long been established. This book explores the range, form, and valences of trauma narratives that permeate the most notable narrative films about the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Eclectique, fragmentaire et multi/intermédiaire, la production filmique d'Atom Egoyan incarne l'esprit diasporique par excellence. Cet ouvrage propose d'examiner la culture survivante, en l'occurrence arménienne post-génocidaire, à travers sa transmission discontinue que donne à voir Egoyan. L'auteure se limite à l'analyse de quatre longs-métrages (Next of Kin, Family viewing, Calendar et Ararat) dans lesquels on retrouve les diverses représentations des identités de la diaspora arménienne, mais toujours dans un Canada multi/interculturel.

The book explores representations of the Holocaust in contemporary art practices. Through carefully selected art projects, the author illuminates the specific historical, cultural, and political circumstances that influence the way we speak—or do not speak—about the Holocaust. The book's international focus brings into view film projects made by key artists reflecting critically upon forms of Holocaust memory in a variety of geographical contexts. Kékesi connects the ethical implications of the memory of the Holocaust with a critical analysis of contemporary societies, focusing upon artists who are deeply engaged in doing both of the above within three regions: Eastern Europe (especially Poland), Germany, and Israel. The case studies apply current methods of contemporary art theory, unfolding their implications in terms of memory politics and social critique.

Surviving Images explores the prominent role of cinema in the development of cultural memory around war and conflict in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It does so through a study of three historical eras: the colonial period, the national-independence struggle, and the postcolonial. Beginning with a study of British colonial cinema on the Sudan, then exploring anti-colonial cinema in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, followed by case studies of films emerging from postcolonial contexts in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel, this work aims to fill a gap in the critical literature on both Middle Eastern cinemas, and to contribute more broadly to scholarship on social trauma and cultural memory in colonial and postcolonial contexts. This work treats the concept of trauma critically, however, and posits that social trauma must be understood as a framework for producing social and political meaning out of these historical events. Social trauma thus sets out a productive process of historical interpretation, and cultural texts such as cinematic works both illuminate and contribute to this process. Through these discussions, Surviving Images illustrates cinema's productive role in contributing to the changing dynamics of cultural memory of war and social conflict in the modern world.

Von Anfang an war Kino nicht nur Speicher und damit Form des Gedächtnisses, sondern zugleich eine sichtbare Apparatur des Erinnerns und eine differentielle Anordnung, die Erinnerungstheorien generierte. Die konstitutiv und vielfältig auf Fragmentierung beruhende Wahrnehmung im Kino ist auf unser re-membering angewiesen. Als Ort der Herstellung und Darstellung von Erinnerung hat das Kino nicht nur ein Heer von Gedächtnismetaphern, sondern auch ein ganz spezifisches Gedächtniswissen hervorgebracht. Dieser Band untersucht die Kinematographie als Mnemographie. Gefragt wird nach filmischen Formen und Formungen des Erinnerns, nach Erinnerungseffekten und -defekten, nach Dispositiven und Phantomen, Gesten und Anamorphosen der Erinnerung, nach der spezifischen Gedächtnispolitik des Kinos, den filmischen Oberflächen des Unbewussten, nach körperlosen und verkörperten Erinnerungen, Wieder-Sehen und Wieder-Hören, traumatisierten Memoryscapes.

Inspired by Baudelaire's art criticism and contemporary theories of emotions, and developing a new aesthetic approach based on the idea that memory and imagination are strongly connected, Lombardo analyzes films by Scorsese, Lynch, Jarmusch and Van Sant as imaginative uses of the history of cinema as well as of other media.

Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema provides a historically informed examination of independent moving image works made between 1990 and 2010 in China. Showcasing an evolving personal mode of narrating memory, documenting reality, and inscribing subjectivity in over sixteen selected works that range from narrative film and documentary to experimental video and digital media (even including a multimedia avant-garde play), this book presents a provocative portrait of the independent filmmakers as a peculiarly pained yet active group of historical subjects of the transitional, post-socialist era. Through a connected investigation of cultural and cinematic concepts including historical consciousness, personal memory, narrative, performance, subjectivity, spatiality, and the body, Wang weaves a critical narrative of the formation of a unique post-socialist cultural consciousness that enables independent cinema and media to become a highly significant and effective conduit for historical thinking in contemporary China. Covering directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Meng Jinghui, Wang Bing, Wang Guangli, Duan Jinchuan, Cui Zi'en, Shi Tou, and Tang Danhong, this book is essential reading for all students and scholars in Chinese film.

This study argues that neorealism's visual genius is inseparable from its almost invisible relation to the Fascist past: a connection inscribed in cinematic landscapes. While largely a silent narrative, neorealism's complex visual processing of two decades of Fascism remains the greatest cultural production in the service of memorialization and comprehension for a nation that had neither a Nuremberg nor a formal process of reconciliation. Through her readings of canonical neorealist films, Minghelli unearths the memorial strata of the neorealist image and investigates the complex historical charge that invests this cinema. This book is both a formal analysis of the new conception of the cinematic image born from a crisis of memory, and a reflection on the relation between cinema and memory. Films discussed include Ossessione (1943) Paisà (1946), Ladri di biciclette (1948), and Cronaca di un amore (1950).

The Memory Effect is a collection of essays on the status of memory—individual and collective, cultural and transcultural—in contemporary literature, film, and other visual media. Contributors look at memory's representation, adaptation, translation, and appropriation, as well as its mediation and remediation. Memory's irreducibly constructed nature is explored, even as its status is reaffirmed as the basis of both individual and collective identity. The book begins with an overview of the field, with an emphasis on the question of subjectivity. Under the section title Memory Studies: Theories, Changes, and Challenges, these chapters lay the theoretical groundwork for the volume. Section 2, Literature and the Power of Cultural Memory/Memorializing, focuses on the relation between literature and cultural memory. Section 3, Recuperating Lives: Memory and Life Writing, shifts the focus from literature to autobiography and life writing, especially those lives shaped by trauma and forgotten by history. Section 4, Cinematic Remediations: Memory and History, examines specific films in an effort to account for cinema's intimate and mutually constitutive relationship with memory and history. The final section, Multi-Media Interventions: Television, Video, and Collective Memory, considers individual and collective memory in the context of contemporary visual texts, at the crossroads of popular and avant-garde cultures.

Este libro evalúa la aportación del documental cinematográfico y televisivo producido en España a partir de los años 90 al debate en torno a la memoria de la represión franquista.This book examines how a selected group of documentaries made since 1995 for both film and television inform the debate centered on the so-called'recuperation of memory'of the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship.Este libro evalúa la aportación del documental cinematográfico y televisivo producido en España a partir de los años 90 al debate en torno a la memoria de la represión franquista, por un lado, así como a la construccitidad democrática, en términos más generales. Propongo que tanto los documentales con un enfoque histórico explícito como aquellos cuya mirada retrospectiva se realiza sin referentes tan concretos cuestionan el proyecto políteleológico concebido durante la Transición. La primera parte de mi estudio trata de la memoria histórica de la guerra civil específicamente y, la segunda, de la memoria en un sentido socioeconómico para apuntar el déficitencia del sujeto en la democracia neoliberal. En última instancia se reivindica la marginalidad social de la víctima a la vez que se deja al descubierto su obliteración de los procesos democráticos. Isabel M. Estrada is Visiting Assistant Professor, Franklin & Marshall College. ENGLISH VERSION This book examines how a selected group of documentaries made since 1995 for both film and television inform the debate centered on the so-called'recuperation of memory'of the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship. Estrada contends that these documentaries modify Spanish identity as it was conceived by the teleological historical project of the transition. The narrativeof mass media should be examined in order to comprehend the process of the'recovery of memory'that culminated in the Law of Historical Memory (2007). She carries out a comparative analysis of the visual discourse of the documentary and the narrative discourses of history and testimony, paying special attention to the relations of power among them. Using theoretical frameworks provided by Badiou, Adorno, Renov, and Ricoeur, this study ultimately sheds light on the status of the victim in the context of Spain's neoliberal democracy. Isabel M. Estrada is Visiting Assistant Professor, Franklin & Marshall College.

In this collection, leading scholars in both film studies and Israeli studies show that beyond representing familiar historical accounts or striving to offer a more complete and accurate depiction of the past, Israeli cinema has innovatively used trauma and memory to offer insights about Israeli society and to engage with cinematic experimentation and invention.Tracing a long line of films from the 1940s up to the 2000s, the contributors use close readings of these films not only to reconstruct the past, but also to actively engage with it. Addressing both high-profile and lesser known fiction and non-fiction Israeli films, Deeper than Oblivion underlines the unique aesthetic choices many of these films make in their attempt to confront the difficulties, perhaps even impossibility, of representing trauma. By looking at recent and classic examples of Israeli films that turn to memory and trauma, this book addresses the pressing issues and disputes in the field today.

Anat Zanger examines several Israeli fictional and non-fictional films, and how their portrayal of landscape and territory provides a unique perspective on Jewish and Israeli identity. She demonstrates how space in film is not only a ‘container'for events in the plot but an event in and of itself, since space and place are significant elements in the on-going negotiations regarding Jewish and Israeli identity. Films capture more than just the outward appearance of a place: they also record a web of unruly traces of economic, social and political systems. Almost 2,000 years of Jewish exile created a gap between the idea of ‘the Israeli place'and how the modern State of Israel has actualized that idea. Israeli cinema contains layered expressions of this issue, and place and space function in this book both as the subject matter of the analysis and as a theoretical tool. This innovative perspective enables us to discern themes significant both to contemporary culture (maps, borders, checkpoints and military zones) and Jewish mythology (garden, dessert, water, Jerusalem and sacred space). The author includes references to Israeli literature and art, and interweaves observations from the fields of visual studies, cultural studies, mythology and Jewish thought, as well as cinema studies, to create a thought provoking analysis.

When a filmmaker makes a film with herself as a subject, she is already divided as both the subject matter of the film and the subject making the film. The two senses of the word are immediately in play – the matter and the maker—thus the two ways of being subjectified as both subject and object. Subjectivity finds its filmic expression, not surprisingly, in very personal ways, yet it is nonetheless shaped by and in relation to collective expressions of identity that can transform the cinema of'me'into the cinema of'we'. Leading scholars and practitioners of first-person film are brought together in this groundbreaking collection to consider the theoretical, ideological, and aesthetic challenges wrought by this form of filmmaking in its diverse cultural, geographical, and political contexts.

In spite of the overwhelming interest in the study of memory and trauma, no single volume has yet explored the centrality of memory to films of this era in a global context; this volume is the first anthology devoted exclusively to the study of memory in twenty-first-century cinema. Combining individual readings and interdisciplinary methodologies, this book offers new analyses of memory and trauma in some of the most discussed and debated films of the new millennium: Pan's Labyrinth (2006), The Namesake (2006), Hidden (2005), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Oldboy (2003), City of God (2002), Irréversible (2002), Mulholland Drive (2001), Memento (2000), and In the Mood for Love (2000).

Since its completion 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 film 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.

Employing innovations in media studies, southern cultural studies, and approaches to the global South, this collection of essays examines aspects of the southern imaginary in American cinema and offers fresh insight into the evolving field of southern film studies.In their introduction, Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee argue that the southern imaginary in film is not contained by the boundaries of geography and genre; it is not an offshoot or subgenre of mainstream American film but is integral to the history and the development of American cinema.Ranging from the silent era to the present and considering Hollywood movies, documentaries, and independent films, the contributors incorporate the latest scholarship in a range of disciplines. The volume is divided into three sections: “Rereading the South” uses new critical perspectives to reassess classic Hollywood films; “Viewing the Civil Rights South” examines changing approaches to viewing race and class in the post–civil rights era; and “Crossing Borders” considers the influence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and media studies on recent southern films.The contributors to American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary complicate the foundational term “southern,” in some places stretching the traditional boundaries of regional identification until they all but disappear and in others limning a persistent and sometimes self-conscious performance of place that intensifies its power.

Since its inception, cinema has evolved into not merely a ‘reflection'but an indispensable index of human experience – especially our experience of time's passage, of the present moment, and, most importantly perhaps, of the past, in both collective and individual terms. In this volume, Kilbourn provides a comparative theorization of the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. Focusing on European, North and South American, and Asian films, Kilbourn reads cinema as providing the viewer with not only the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use: the required codes and conventions for understanding and implementing this crucial prosthetic technology — an art of memory for the twentieth-century and beyond.

A vital rethinking of memory and the moving image for the digital age, Isabelle McNeill investigates the role of the moving image in cultural memory, considering the impact of digital technologies on visual culture. Drawing on an interdisciplinary range of theoretical resources and an unusual body of films and moving image works, the author examines the ways in which recent French filmmaking conceptualises both the past and the workings of memory. Ultimately the author argues that memory is an intersubjective process, in which filmic forms continue to play a crucial role even as new media come to dominate our contemporary experience.