Dr. Maurizio Cinquegrani, a lecturer from Britian’s University of Kent, gave a lecture at TNUA recently on his latest research project, “The Cinematic Geographies of the Holocaust.”
The project focuses on film archives from the 1940s and post-war documentaries and feature films. Dr. Cinquegrani has conducted field studies in Poland where the German Nazis executed their “Final Solution” plan. He has conducted interviews analyzed how people preserve the memories of the Holocaust through images, narratives, and landscaping.
Dr. Cinquegrani showed clips from many films during his talk, disclosing to the audience the otherwise hidden details of the images, as well as the characteristics of Jewish shtetls, in a portrayal of the historical trauma inflicted by the war.
In making “Shoah,” the director, Claude Lanzmann, took a Holocaust survivor back to the church at the Chelmno extermination camp where he was forced to sing before Nazi officers when he was then only 13 years old.The revisiting of Polish shtetls by survivors or their offsprings allowed Dr. Cinquegrani to explore the marks that history carved in space, and to study effect of the historical trauma on individuals and communities.
Dr. C i nquegran i c ited Mar ianne Hi r s ch’s “postmemory” concept, which argues that the later generations “remember” the historical traumas through their familial upbringing.
While there are multiple layers and rich textures in the documentaries, Dr. Cinquegrani noted that there is an absence of “Jewishness” in feature films about the Holocaust.