The Holocaust is a turning point and traumatic event in the history of the 20century
which led to a moral-ethical turmoil escaping human conceptualization.
Adorno, the philosopher said that "to write after the Holocaust is Barbaric" and opened the ongoing critical debate around the question of artistic representation and the Post-Holocaust aesthetic expression. Beside the historical research and the coping with political social and psychological levels, art and with it the cinema tried to document and also to express in aesthetic and artistic values the horrors of the Holocaust.
The course will present the different strategies that the cinema dealt with - from pre-Holocaust films, documentary films focusing on events during the Holocaust and its aftermath, films done at the end of the war and include survivors in the plots, as well as different cinema genres which have continued to deal with the subject during the second half of the 20 century and the beginning of the 21 century.
By coping and analyzing the complexity of Holocaust representation the course will deal with the strategies and approaches of Holocaust films produced in different geographical and cultural distinct spheres. From East and central Europe the USA and Israel- spheres that provided the cinema with cultural-social baggage connected to collective memory dynamics of the region and its politics of commemoration.