Out Takes

2 May 2017

Queer Holocaust Films

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For this OUT TAKES program, we commemorate Yom Ha’shoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day – by turning our attention to queer holocaust films like CABARET, BENT and PARAGRAPH 175 that grapple with the persecution of homosexuals during the second world war.

Our guests were Dr Jordy Silverstein, author of “Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century”, and Dr Gerd Beyer, editor of “Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Images, Memory, and the Ethics of Representation.”

Together with Jordy and Gerd, we explored how holocaust cinema – a filmic genre unto itself – represents queer persecution. We also explored some of the ethical debates that surround films about the holocaust: are the atrocities of the holocaust capable of representation? What kind of ethical obligations do film makers have when they represent those atrocities – or their perpetrators and are there limits to what we can represent on screen?

It is clear that there is something inherently queer about the way that holocaust films – particularly films like INGLORIOUS BASTERDS and LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL – destabilise and fragment history; how they play with history by subverting its linear and patriarchal authority. But do narratives about persecution during the second world war undermine the gravitas of that persecution?

Essential viewing: Bent (Dir. Sean Matthias, 1997)

Hungry for more: Denial (Dir. Mike Jackson, 2016); The Reader (Dir Stephen Daldry, 2009).