Margaret Iversen
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226370026
- eISBN:
- 9780226370330
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226370330.003.0006
- Subject:
- Art, Photography
This chapter is concerned with issues surrounding documentary photography of atrocities and art based on such images. It begins with a critical account of the controversy surrounding the 2001 ...
More
This chapter is concerned with issues surrounding documentary photography of atrocities and art based on such images. It begins with a critical account of the controversy surrounding the 2001 exhibition in Paris of photographs of Nazi concentration and death camps. Some critics condemned the exhibition for compromising the “unimaginability of the horror of the death camps.” Didi-Huberman’s subsequent book, Images in Spite of All: Four Images from Auschwitz, is an eloquent plea for the exercise our imagination in an effort to represent the ‘unrepresentable’. The horrors of Holocaust and other historical atrocities are imaginable, he argues, if only in a fragmentary way. Critical debates surrounding the work of Gerhard Richter and Christian Boltanski are reassessed in this context.Less
This chapter is concerned with issues surrounding documentary photography of atrocities and art based on such images. It begins with a critical account of the controversy surrounding the 2001 exhibition in Paris of photographs of Nazi concentration and death camps. Some critics condemned the exhibition for compromising the “unimaginability of the horror of the death camps.” Didi-Huberman’s subsequent book, Images in Spite of All: Four Images from Auschwitz, is an eloquent plea for the exercise our imagination in an effort to represent the ‘unrepresentable’. The horrors of Holocaust and other historical atrocities are imaginable, he argues, if only in a fragmentary way. Critical debates surrounding the work of Gerhard Richter and Christian Boltanski are reassessed in this context.
Jennifer Friedlander
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- August 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190676124
- eISBN:
- 9780190676162
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190676124.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter considers two recent films, Catfish (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joust) and This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi), with a view to arguing how the most prized indicators of filmic realism can ...
More
This chapter considers two recent films, Catfish (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joust) and This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi), with a view to arguing how the most prized indicators of filmic realism can function as signs of lapses in the realist edifice. It argues that such signs function as pointers to the elusive truth characteristic of what will be called “Real-ism” — that is, hints of the Real that emerge precisely when the symbolic framework governing reality becomes imperiled. In particular, these films exploit the realist conventions that lend credibility to the documentary form in a way that not only demonstrates the commonplace expectation that what is presented as truth might turn out to be a fiction but also shows the more radical possibility that fiction may pave the pathway for arriving at truth.Less
This chapter considers two recent films, Catfish (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joust) and This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi), with a view to arguing how the most prized indicators of filmic realism can function as signs of lapses in the realist edifice. It argues that such signs function as pointers to the elusive truth characteristic of what will be called “Real-ism” — that is, hints of the Real that emerge precisely when the symbolic framework governing reality becomes imperiled. In particular, these films exploit the realist conventions that lend credibility to the documentary form in a way that not only demonstrates the commonplace expectation that what is presented as truth might turn out to be a fiction but also shows the more radical possibility that fiction may pave the pathway for arriving at truth.
