Polish Film And The Holocaust

Author : Marek Haltof
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : History
ISBN : 9780857453563

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Polish Film and the Holocaust by Marek Haltof Pdf

During World War II Poland lost more than six million people, including about three million Polish Jews who perished in the ghettos and extermination camps built by Nazi Germany in occupied Polish territories. This book is the first to address the representation of the Holocaust in Polish film and does so through a detailed treatment of several films, which the author frames in relation to the political, ideological, and cultural contexts of the times in which they were created. Following the chronological development of Polish Holocaust films, the book begins with two early classics: Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage (1948) and Aleksander Ford's Border Street (1949), and next explores the Polish School period, represented by Andrzej Wajda's A Generation (1955) and Andrzej Munk's The Passenger (1963). Between 1965 and 1980 there was an "organized silence" regarding sensitive Polish-Jewish relations resulting in only a few relevant films until the return of democracy in 1989 when an increasing number were made, among them Krzysztof Kieślowski's Decalogue 8 (1988), Andrzej Wajda's Korczak (1990), Jan Jakub Kolski's Keep Away from the Window (2000), and Roman Polański's The Pianist (2002). An important contribution to film studies, this book has wider relevance in addressing the issue of Poland's national memory.

Author : Glenn Kurtz
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2014-11-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780374710804

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Three Minutes in Poland by Glenn Kurtz Pdf

When Glenn Kurtz stumbles upon an old family film in his parents' closet in Florida, he has no inkling of its historical significance or of the impact it will have on his life. The film, shot long ago by his grandfather on a sightseeing trip to Europe, includes shaky footage of Paris and the Swiss Alps, with someone inevitably waving at the camera. Astonishingly, David Kurtz also captured on color 16mm film the only known moving images of the thriving, predominantly Jewish town of Nasielsk, Poland, shortly before the community's destruction. "Blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that lay just ahead," he just happened to visit his birthplace in 1938, a year before the Nazi occupation. Of the town's three thousand Jewish inhabitants, fewer than one hundred would survive. Glenn Kurtz quickly recognizes the brief footage as a crucial link in a lost history. "The longer I spent with my grandfather's film," he writes, "the richer and more fragmentary its images became." Every image, every face, was a mystery that might be solved. Soon he is swept up in a remarkable journey to learn everything he can about these people. After restoring the film, which had shrunk and propelled across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; and into archives, basements, cemeteries, and even an irrigation ditch at an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield as he looks for shards of Nasielsk's Jewish history. One day, Kurtz hears from a young woman who had watched the video on the Holocaust Museum's website. As the camera panned across the faces of children, she recognized her grandfather as a thirteen-year-old boy. Moszek Tuchendler of Nasielsk was now eighty-six-year-old Maurice Chandler of Florida, and when Kurtz meets him, the lost history of Nasielsk comes into view. Chandler's laser-sharp recollections create a bridge between two worlds, and he helps Kurtz eventually locate six more survivors, including a ninety-six-year-old woman who also appears in the film, standing next to the man she would later marry. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. "I began to catch fleeting glimpses of the living town," Kurtz writes, "a cruelly narrow sample of its relationships, contradictions, scandals." Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the most important record of a vibrant town on the brink of extinction. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a poignant yet unsentimental exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival—a monument to a lost world.

Author : Matilda Mroz
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2021-02-09
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781137461667

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Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema by Matilda Mroz Pdf

This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish cinema’s engagement with histories of Polish violence against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Moving beyond conventional studies of historical representation on screen, the book considers how cinema reframes the unwanted knowledge of violence in its aftermaths. The book draws on Derridean hauntology, Didi-Huberman’s confrontations with art images, Levinasian ethics and anamorphosis to examine cinematic reconfigurations of histories and memories that are vulnerable to evasion and formlessness. Innovative analyses of Birthplace (Łoziński, 1992), It Looks Pretty From a Distance (Sasnal, 2011), Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012), and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) explore how their rural filmic landscapes are predicated on the radical exclusion of Jewish neighbours, prompting archaeological processes of exhumation. Arguing that the distressing materiality of decomposition disturbs cinematic composition, the book examines how Poland’s aftermath cinema attempts to recompose itself through form and narrative as it faces Polish complicity in Jewish death.

Author : Maurizio Cinquegrani
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2018-06-30
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781474403597

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Journey to Poland by Maurizio Cinquegrani Pdf

Explores the representation of revenge from Classical to early modern literature

Author : Marek Haltof
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2015-02-02
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781442244726

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Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema by Marek Haltof Pdf

In 1902, scientist and inventor Kazimierz Prószyński made the first Polish narrative film, The Return of a Merry Fellow. Since then, the Polish film industry has produced a diverse body of work, ranging from patriotic melodramas and epic adaptations of the national literary canon to Yiddish cinema and films portraying the corrupt side of communism. Poland has produced several internationally known films, including Andrzej Wajda’s war trilogy, A Generation (1955), Kanal (1957), and Ashes and Diamonds (1958); Roman Polański’s Knife in the Water (1962); and Andrzej Munk’s The Passenger (1963). Often performing specific political and cultural duties for their nation, Polish filmmakers were well aware of their role as educators, entertainers, social activists, and political leaders. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema fills the gap in film scholarship, presenting an extensive factual survey of Polish film. Through a chronology; an introductory essay; appendixes, a bibliography; and over 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries on films, directors, actors, producers, and film institutions, a balanced picture of the richness of Polish cinema is presented. Readers with professional interest in cinema will welcome this new work, which will enhance senior undergraduate or postgraduate courses in film studies.

Author : Elizabeth Ward
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2021-04-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781789207484

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East German Film and the Holocaust by Elizabeth Ward Pdf

East Germany’s ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany’s name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lügner – a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how GDR filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of Nazi persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.

Author : Antony Polonsky
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2002-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781134952113

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My Brother's Keeper by Antony Polonsky Pdf

What responsibility do the Poles share for the mass murder of the Jews, which took place largely on Polish soil? In a major contribution to the history of the Holocaust Polonsky gathers together the most important arguments in this debate.

Author : Marek Haltof
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2018-01-15
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0810136082

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Screening Auschwitz by Marek Haltof Pdf

Screening Auschwitz examines the classic Polish Holocaust film The Last Stage (Ostatni etap), directed by the Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska (1907–1998). Released in 1948, The Last Stage was a pioneering work and the first narrative film to portray the Nazi concentration and extermination camp complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Marek Haltof’s fascinating book offers English-speaking readers a wealth of new materials, mostly from original Polish sources obtained through extensive archival research. With its powerful dramatization of the camp experience, The Last Stage established several quasi-documentary themes easily discernible in later film narratives of the Shoah: dark, realistic images of the camp, a passionate moral appeal, and clear divisions between victims and perpetrators. Jakubowska’s film introduced images that are now archetypal—for example, morning and evening roll calls on the Appelplatz, the arrival of transport trains at Birkenau, the separation of families upon arrival, and tracking shots over the belongings left behind by those who were gassed. These and other images are taken up by a number of subsequent American films, including George Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Alan Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice (1982), and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). Haltof discusses the unusual circumstances that surrounded the film's production on location at Auschwitz-Birkenau and summarizes critical debates surrounding the film’s release. The book offers much of interest to film historians and readers interested in the Holocaust.

Author : Dorota Glowacka,Joanna Zylinska
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2007-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780803205994

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Imaginary Neighbors by Dorota Glowacka,Joanna Zylinska Pdf

Imaginary Neighbors offers a unique and significant contribution to the contemporary debate concerning Holocaust memory by exploring the most important current political topic in Poland: Jewish-Polish relations during and after World War II.

Author : Toby Haggith,Joanna Newman
Publisher : Wallflower Press
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 1904764517

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Holocaust and the Moving Image by Toby Haggith,Joanna Newman Pdf

Based on an event held at the Imperial War Museum in 2001, this book is a blend of voices and perspectives - archivists, curators, filmmakers, scholars, and Holocaust survivors. Each section examines films and how they have contributed to wider awareness and understanding of the Holocaust since the war.

Author : Jan Grabowski
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2013-10-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9780253010872

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Hunt for the Jews by Jan Grabowski Pdf

A revealing account of Polish cooperation with Nazis in WWII—a “grim, compelling [and] significant scholarly study” (Kirkus Reviews). Between 1942 and 1943, thousands of Jews escaped the fate of German death camps in Poland. As they sought refuge in the Polish countryside, the Nazi death machine organized what they called Judenjagd, meaning hunt for the Jews. As a result of the Judenjagd, few of those who escaped the death camps would survive to see liberation. As Jan Grabowski’s penetrating microhistory reveals, the majority of the Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal by their Polish neighbors. Hunt for the Jews tells the story of the Judenjagd in Dabrowa, Tarnowska, a rural county in southeastern Poland. Drawing on materials from Polish, Jewish, and German sources created during and after the war, Grabowski documents the involvement of the local Polish population in the process of detecting and killing the Jews who sought their aid. Through detailed reconstruction of events, “Grabowski offers incredible insight into how Poles in rural Poland reacted to and, not infrequently, were complicit with, the German practice of genocide. Grabowski also, implicitly, challenges us to confront our own myths and to rethink how we narrate British (and American) history of responding to the Holocaust” (European History Quarterly).

Author : Wladyslaw Szpilman
Publisher : Hachette UK
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2011-12-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781780222684

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The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman Pdf

The bestselling memoir of a Jewish pianist who survived the war in Warsaw against all odds. 'We are drawn in to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress of events, all conveyed with an understated intimacy and dailiness that render them painfully close... riveting' OBSERVER On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside - so loudly that he couldn't hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air. Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, THE PIANIST is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling. 'The images drawn are unusually sharp and clear... but its moral tone is even more striking: Szpilman refuses to make a hero or a demon out of anyone' LITERARY REVIEW

Author : Ewa Mazierska,Michael Goddard
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : History
ISBN : 9781580464680

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Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context by Ewa Mazierska,Michael Goddard Pdf

This volume introduces a novel treatment of Polish cinema by discussing its international reception, performance, co-productions, and subversive émigré auteurs, such as Andrzej Zulawski and Walerian Borowczyk. The opening up of Poland economically and politically to global influences after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, coupled with the rise of transnational approaches to the study of film, presents ideal conditions for examiningPolish cinema from a transnational vantage point. Yet not only have studies of Polish cinema remained largely within a national framework but Polish cinema, as well as many other Eastern European cinemas, has been virtually excluded from new research in transnational cinema. Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context addresses this lacuna in film studies, offering extended analysis of this national cinema's global influence. Contributors assess the reception of Polish films in Europe and North America, Polish international coproductions, the presence of Polish performers in foreign films, and the works of subversive émigré auteurs like Andrzej Zulawski and Walerian Borowczyk. The collection presents familiar films and filmmakers in a new and revealing light, while also focusing on lesser-known filmmakers and aspects of Polish cinema. The resulting volume moves the discussion beyond the border of Polish national belonging. Contributors: Peter Hames, Darragh O'Donoghue, Helena Goscilo, Dorota Ostrowska, Charlotte Govaert, Eva Näripea, Izabela Kalinowska, Ewa Mazierska, Alison Smith, Lars Kristensen, Jonathan Owen, Michael Goddard, Robert Murphy, Kamila Kuc, Elzbieta Ostrowska Ewa Mazierska is professor of film studies at the University of Central Lancashire. Michael Goddard is senior lecturer in media at the University of Salford.

Author : Saul Rubinek
Publisher : Markham, Ont. : Viking
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : STANFORD:36105034338231

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So Many Miracles by Saul Rubinek Pdf

Author : Maurizio Cinquegrani
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2018-07-02
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781474403580

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Journey to Poland by Maurizio Cinquegrani Pdf

Journey to Poland addresses crucial issues of memory and history in relation to the Holocaust as it unfolded in the territories of the Second Polish Republic.