Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust - Book Launch
by Dr Victoria Grace Walden
Doors 6.30pm - Event starts at 7.00pm
Tickets: £6 (£4.50 concessions)
All proceeds go to Deptford Community Cinema
This book explores the growing trend of intermediality in cinematic representations of the Holocaust. It turns to the in-betweens that characterise the cinematic experience to discover how the different elements involved in film and its viewing collaborate to produce Holocaust memory. Cinematic Intermedialities is a work of film-philosophy that places a number of different forms of screen media, such as films that reassemble archive footage, animations, digital apps and museum installations, in dialogue with the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, art critic-cum-philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman and film phenomenologies. The result is a careful and unique examination of how Holocaust memory can emerge from the relationship between different media, objects and bodies during the film experience. This work challenges the existing concentration on representation in writing about Holocaust films, turning instead to the materials of screen works and the spectatorial experience to highlight the powerful contribution of the cinematic to Holocaust memory.
“A fascinating study on mediated experiences of Holocaust representations across different platforms, formats and genres. Walden’s exploration of intermediality in appropriate case studies adeptly interweaves existing approaches from trauma theory and memory studies with an impressive range of theoretical strands from film philosophy, such as phenomenology, affect theory, Deleuzian philosophy and haptic theory, among others. A work that sheds new light on one of the darkest pages of European history, this book is required reading for any scholar with an interest in Holocaust Studies.”
“Victoria Grace Walden’s voice is one of lucidity and honesty. Her phenomenological approach to the complex position of cinema and other media in relation to memory and the Holocaust is forthright, nuanced and original. In proposing the space of the inbetween as an ethical position, Walden suggests that the intermedial nature of human life and its representations offers us some hope for a future. Walden’s book is an important contribution to both Holocaust Studies and film-philosophy. If art is possible in our world, then Victoria Grace Walden is an indispensable guide.”
Victoria Grace Walden is a teaching fellow in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. She completed her PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, and has degrees from Royal Holloway, University of London, De Montfort and The Institute of Education (now UCL). She has worked with the Holocaust Educational Trust as a freelance educator, as digital coordinator for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s ‘Seeking Protection’ blog, and as a volunteer for the Jewish Museum, London and the Wiener Library. Her work has focused on affect, film-philosophy, animation, the use of archival images, and digital Holocaust memory. She is currently developing an edited collection entitled The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age.