HAUNTED IMAGES

Haunted Images is the first book in English to examine recent key disputes between high-profile French filmmakers, philosophers and historians about the value of photographs and film footage of the Nazi camps. This important new study explores in details how the scarcity of archival images of industrialised mass murder has served as a catalyst for aesthetic innovation and ethical debate. Moving beyond rhetorics of 'ineffability' into the emerging field of ethical film criticism, this volume argues that appeals to moral limits or interdictions on representation can distract us from the ethical films ranging from Lanzmann's canonical Shoah to Elida Schoct's little-known Zyklon Portrait and from Spielberg's popular Schindler's List to Godard's experimental Histoire(s) du cinéma, this timely study offers compelling insights into the under-explored ethical dynamics into the under-explored ethical dynamics of spectatorship and the moving image.

August 2008
256 pages

978-1-905674-35-0 (pbk)	£16.99	£14.44 with 15% online discount add to basket
978-1-905674-36-7 (hbk)	£45.00	£38.25 with 15% online discount add to basket

Libby Saxton is Lecturer in French and Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the co-author of Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (2008) and co-editor of Seeing Things: Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French Studies (2002).

‘Haunted Images takes the study of Holocaust representation to new levels of theoretical sophistication ... The various arguments are presented with lucidity, depth and dramatic finesse, offering an exciting reading to complex aesthetic issues and demanding ethical considerations, ultimately suggesting how the representations of the Holocaust and their critical discourse offer insights into the future of the image as witness’
– Ilan Avisar, Tel Aviv University 

'An important, path-breaking book, and a major intervention in a dynamic field. This volume charts issues and debates around the vexed topic of the 'representability' of atrocity – specifically the forms of industrialised mass murder peculiar to the Holocaust – with extreme care and precision. On this issue, the book is beyond authoritative: it has to be seen as little short of a definitive statement. It will be required reading for any student or scholar seriously concerned with film and the Holocaust'
– Barry Langford, Royal Holloway, University of London

 

'Haunted Images takes us to the heart of vital but difficult questions in the ethics of filmic representation and spectatorship. In detailed analyses of Holocaust cinema, this volume explores with great sensitivity the role of film as witness to historical atrocity. Cogent and beautifully written, this book is an important contribution to the field. '

– Sarah Cooper, King's College London