Spatial Memory on Screen

This talk will trace the conceptual and geographical journey we have taken in considering the location outtakes held in Claude Lanzmann’s archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. These 30 hours of excluded location footage consist of carefully constructed film of landscapes, roads and buildings in a wide variety of national settings. The footage was shot during the making of Lanzmann’s Shoah in the late 1970s but was not used in the film’s final version. The fact that Lanzmann never returned to these location outtakes suggests that they, unlike the excluded interviews on which he drew for later releases, seemed anachronistic in the post-Cold War era.

We will conclude by asking whether these location outtakes, and the significance we have perceived in them which goes beyond the status of a backdrop, require a new methodological approach, and whether it is possible to envisage editing them into the form of a series of short essay-films.

Online-Lecture by Sue Vice (University of Sheffield, UK) and Dominic Williams is (Northumbria University, UK).

The Research Colloquium ‘The Holocaust and its Contexts’ is co-hosted by the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at LMU Munich and the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ). The Colloquium is held in cooperation with the Oberseminar ‘New Research in Contemporary History’.

LOCATION
You are invited to join the lecture and discussion via Zoom.

REGISTRATION
In order to receive the link, please register for the event by sending an email to zfhs[at]ifz-muenchen.de until 16th July 2022.