French and Francophone Cinema as Testimony
Narrating for-the-Other after Mass Trauma
Series: Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures; 111;
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54 180 Ft
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Product details:
- Publisher Liverpool University Press
- Date of Publication 28 June 2026
- ISBN 9781835538685
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages256 pages
- Size 239x163 mm
- Weight 666 g
- Language English 700
Categories
Long description:
Grappling with how to live together after mass trauma, this book argues that cinema—as philosophy and as history—can aesthetically construct each and every one of its spectators as responsible agents of a present fully informed by the traumas of the past. Inspired by Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of testimony as the expression of the subject’s responsibility for the other, this new testimonial genre of cinema, narrating for-the-other, emerges from the close analysis of a constellation of French-language films that form memories into arguments against totalitarian systems. These films include Le silence de la mer (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1949), Mr. Klein (Joseph Losey, 1976), La Noire de… (Ousmane Sembene, 1966), Moi, un Noir (Jean Rouch, 1958), Trahir (Radu Mihăileanu, 1993), and Goulag (Hélène Châtelain and Iossif Pasternak, 2000). Within contexts of extreme violence and oppression, these cinematic narratives reinscribe a unique subject who by definition bears an irreducible responsibility for the hatred, suffering, and injustice inflicted upon the other. By bringing into dialogue the Holocaust, colonialism, and the Gulag, this French and Francophone approach to memory mobilizes the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of testimony as a transnational response to 20th century trauma.
MoreTable of Contents:
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. Remembering the Holocaust
Chapter 1. Ethical Cinematic Memory in Le silence de la mer
Chapter 2. Mr. Klein and the Familiarity of a Suffering Stranger
Part II. Remembering Colonialism
Chapter 3. Narrating for the Unwitnessed in La Noire de…
Chapter 4. Decolonizing the Testimony of Moi, un Noir
Part III. Remembering the Gulag
Chapter 5. Trahir’s Poetic Testimony of Betrayal
Chapter 6. Documentary Filmmaking for-the-Other in Goulag
Conclusion
Filmography
Bibliography
More
