This special issue aspires to open up the corpus to a broader scholarly context and thus enable closer cooperation between film scholars and historians (including art historians). By interweaving multiple perspectives into studies of audiovisual materials, it opens up new questions that cut across various bodies of documentary knowledge of the Holocaust. One major dividing line in several of the essays concerns the opening up of documents to the general public. The risks entailed by publishing and exposing during the war and in the immediate post-war period are one variable that can account for the myriad forms these documents have taken.
The issue forms part of a broader collective discussion on war crimes based on the textual, visual, quantitative and material traces that those crimes left behind. That discussion combines a wide variety of perspectives – spanning social, visual and political history, linguistic and spatial approaches and critical reflections on sources produced by perpetrators, victims or liberators. This interdisciplinary, international dialogue is more necessary than ever at a time of multiple wars and rising populism.
Table of Contents:
Irina Tcherneva, Marie Moutier-Bitan, Valérie Pozner
Editorial
Irina Tcherneva
Soviet Film Footage and Professional Practices
Valérie Pozner
Towards A History Of Soviet Film Records (Kinoletopis’)
Fabian Schmidt, Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann
A Travelling Archive
Glib Vysheslavsky
Zinovii Tolkachov’s Graphics From The Auschwitz-Birkenau And Majdanek Death Camps
Irina Rebrova
People With Disabilities As Nazi Victims On Screen And Paper
Babette Quinkert
Forgotten: Film Documents From The Liberated Camps For Soviet POWs
Anna Högner, Fabian Schmidt
Depicting Atrocities
Marie Moutier-Bitan
Reflections On The Geography Of The Holocaust Based On Soviet Film Footage
Karel Berkhoff
Soviet Footage From The 1940s And The Holocaust At Babyn Yar, Kyiv
Tal Bruttmann
Filming Auschwitz In 1945: Osventsim
