Border Crossings: Two Installations by Chantal Akerman

Images ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Significant Shift ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Monitor Display ◽  
Interdisciplinary Practice ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Chantal Akerman ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
Film And Video

AbstractBruce Jenkins' essay examines the critical and theoretical grounds for artist and filmmaker Chantal Akerman's interventions both within the cinema and within the space of the gallery. The curatorial perspective posed by Documenta 11 and its focus on "diasporic consciousness" forms the basis for examining Akerman's work through the lens of her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors—displaced Polish Jews who ended up in Belgium. Part of what she has called the generation for which the repressed returns, Akerman began to focus on this past in her 1989 feature film Histoires d'Amérique, a loose adaptation of the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer.Central to the analysis is her 1995 installation Bordering on Fiction, a work noted for its distinctive mode of interdisciplinary practice bridging film and video, projection and monitor display, the darkened hall of the cinema and the white cube of the gallery. Akerman's concerns with finding "other strategies" for dealing with the Holocaust are examined, as is the lucid analysis of her work by the artist Christian Boltanski.The essay lastly examines Akerman's recent film and installation From the Other Side (shown at Documenta 11), which represents a significant shift in perspective and tense. While Bordering on Fiction was a retrospective work searching for a lost past that could be captured only through absences and silence, From the Other Side, by contrast, focuses on the present and unfolds in a manner bordering on reportage.

A Polish Weininger? The Case of Julian Unszlicht (1883–1953)

2010 ◽  
pp. 227-243
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Krzywiec
Keyword(s):  
The Holocaust ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
Religious Reasons

The life of Julian Unszlicht (1883–1953) illustrates the case and process of the assimilation of Polish Jews. However, Unszlicht’s case is special as it shows that holding anti-Semitic views, which were to be a ticket to a Catholic society, guaranteed neither putting the roots down permanently nor gaining a new identity. The biography of a priest-convert allows to look closer at the processes of effacement and convergence of anti-Jewish rhetoric. The modern one, of the turn of 19th and 20th centuries, with Catholic anti-Judaism, which was constantly excused by religious reasons and at the same time, it often spread to the ethnic-racial mental grounds. Contrary to common definitions and distinctions, those two ways of thinking perfectly complemented and strengthened each other, both living using the other’s reasoning. The Holocaust added a tragic punch line to the embroiled story of the priest-convert

scholarly journals God Below: A Faith Born in Hell—Life and Fate and the Otherwise Than Being

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Karl Shankar SenGupta
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Other ◽  
French Army ◽  
Holy Fool ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Utopian Thought ◽  
Primary Focus

This essay examines the idea of kenosis and holy folly in the years before, during, and after the Holocaust. The primary focus will be Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, though it also will touch upon Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons and the ethics of the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, speaking to their intersecting ideas. Dostoevsky, true enough, predates the Shoah, whereas Grossman was a Soviet Jew who served as a journalist (most famously at the Battle of Stalingrad), and Levinas was a soldier in the French army, captured by the Nazis and placed in a POW camp. Each of these writers wrestles with the problem of evil in various ways, Dostoevsky and Levinas as theists—one Christian, the other Jewish—and Grossman as an atheist; yet, despite their differences, there are ever deeper resonances in that all are drawn to the idea of kenosis and the holy fool, and each writer employs variations of this idea in their respective answers to the problem of evil. Each argues, more or less, that evil arises in totalizing utopian thought which reifies individual humans to abstractions—to The Human, and goodness to The Good. Each looks to kenosis as the “antidote” to this utopian reification.

Reformation and Judaism

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-30
Author(s):  
Gerbern S. Oegema
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Zionism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The One ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Initial Focus

The topic of this paper is the complex and ambivalent relationship between the Reformed Churches and Judaism, moving from a kind of Philo-Semitism to Christian Zionism and support for the State of Israel on the one hand, to missionary movements among Jews to anti-Judaism, and the contribution to the horrors of the Holocaust on the other hand. In between the two extremes stands the respect for the Old Testament and the neglect of the Apocrypha and other early Jewish writings. The initial focus of this article will be on what Martin Luther and Jean Calvin wrote about Judaism at the beginning of the Reformation over 500 years ago. Secondly, the article will deal with the influence of mission activity toward Jews and the emergence of Liberal Judaism as both scholarship and theology in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Lastly, the article will address the question of how the Holocaust and subsequent Jewish-Christian dialogue have changed the course of this relationship.

scholarly journals Plaintive Survival under Panoptical Surveillance: A Reading of Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear.

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Aparna Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Phones ◽  
English Language ◽  
New World ◽  
Power Relation ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
The People ◽  
Identity Privacy

This paper is an attempt to explore how the powerful gaze of the panoptical power relation through the  technological aids of this neocolonial era which forms the ‘Self,’ distorts the identity, privacy and liberty of the  lives under this surveillance who becomes the ‘other’. The study is based on the reading of Rituparno Ghosh’s 2007 English–language film The Last Lear. The  film which won the National Award of India for the best feature film in English in 2007  is based on a 1985 Bengali play, Ajker Shajahan ( Today’s Shakespeare) written by Utpala  Dutt. The film unfolds the story of an aging Shakespearean actor persuaded by a young ambitious director to take up acting again. But the retired actor is unwilling to adjust the new world of cinema and its complex technical tricks. The film also expose how the powerful camera gaze and mobile phones turn as the new colonizer who distorts truth and induce fears in the minds of the people under surveillance. This study is carried out based on the Post-Panoptical theories of Surveillance.

scholarly journals Conceptual model of the ferry que management system in ferry ports in the Republic of Croatia

Pomorstvo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 354-362
Author(s):  
Dino Županović ◽  
Luka Grbić ◽  
Marijan Cukrov
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Management System ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
The Other ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Local Approach ◽  
Traffic Demand ◽  
Macroscopic Level ◽  
The Republic

This paper proposes a model for optimizing the ferry traffic and the traffic demand at the macroscopic level by using information technology (IT) and the existing tourist amenities as a key element for achieving harmonization of supply and demand, i.e. optimization of the assessed system. Proposed approach differs from the other/present models because it includes the application of the macroscopic, instead of the microscopic (local) approach, i.e. harmonization of the ferry infrastructure demand from the place of its origin (road border crossings) to the place of its operation, i.e. the ferry infrastructure, and not solely in particular segments of the ferry infrastructure.

scholarly journals The Language of Cruelty of the Holocaust on the Example of “The Ringelblum Archive. Annihilation – Day by Day”

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Izabela Olszewska
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
Day By Day

The Language of Cruelty of the Holocaust on the Example of The Ringelblum Archive. Annihilation – Day by DayThe Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto is one of the most significant testimonies of the annihilation of Polish Jews to be preserved in social life documents, mainly written reports and photographs. The founder of the Archive, Emanuel Ringelblum, described the purpose of the collected materials as follows: “We wanted the events in every town, the experiences of every Jew – and every Jew during this war is a world unto himself – to be conveyed in the simplest, most faithful manner. Every redundant word, every literary addition or embellishment, stood out, causing a sense of dissonance and distaste. The life of Jews during this war is so tragic that not a single extra word is needed”. The aim of the paper is a linguistic analysis of the drastic language of the Holocaust on the basis of The Ringelblum Archive: Annihilation - Day by Day. Język okrucieństwa Holokaustu na przykładzie Archiwum Ringelbluma. Dzień po dniu ZagładyPodziemne Archiwum Getta Warszawskiego jest jednym z najważniejszych świadectw zagłady polskich Żydów zachowanych w dokumentach życia społecznego, głównie w reportażach i fotografiach. Założyciel Archiwum, Emanuel Ringelblum, następująco opisał cel zebranych materiałów: „Chcieliśmy, aby wydarzenia w każdym mieście, doświadczenia każdego Żyda – a każdy Żyd w czasie tej wojny jest światem dla siebie – były przekazywane w najprostszy, najwierniejszy sposób. Każde zbędne słowo, każdy dodatek literacki czy ozdoba wyróżniały się, powodując poczucie dysonansu i niesmaku. Życie Żydów w czasie tej wojny jest tak tragiczne, że nie potrzeba ani jednego dodatkowego słowa”. Celem artykułu jest analiza lingwistyczna drastycznego języka Holokaustu na podstawie książki Archiwum Ringelbluma. Dzień po dniu Zagłady.

scholarly journals Epistemic Disobedience and Decolonial Healing in Norma Elía Cantú’s Canícula

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Poks
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Other ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Border Community ◽  
Line Splitting ◽  
Southern Side ◽  
The One ◽  
The U.S

Abstract Using the U.S.-Mexican border as the place of enunciation, Cantú’s autoethnobiographical novel insists on the materiality of the border, especially for those living on its southern side, while simultaneously deconstructing it as artificial - a line splitting families and assigning nationalities on an arbitrary basis. Being a collage of photographs from the time the writer was growing up in southern Texas and the cuentos inspired by these visuals, Cantú’s Canícula documents how border crossings and re-crossings become symptomatic of living in a liminal space and how they destabilize the concept of nationality as bi-national families must learn to live with ambiguity. On the one hand, there is the undeniable materiality of the border, with its pain, fear, deportations, and other discriminatory practices; on the other, there is a growing border community of resistance cultivating the memory that they are not immigrants, that they lived in Texas before the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty. The paper examines the community’s strategies of survival in the contested cultural and social space and advances the thesis that, giving her community an awareness of its homogeneity and reclaiming its place within the larger socio-political context, Cantú becomes an agent of empowerment and change. She helps decolonize knowledge and being.

Specters of Heidegger

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Chaouat
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Literature ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Postmodern Thought ◽  
The U.S

My first chapter is dedicated to post-Heideggerian thought, and to the unbearable legacy of Heidegger in France and beyond. The decentering of the subject, the recoding of Heideggerian ontology as an ethics of the other, the idealization of the Jews as diasporic beings and ontological strangers (grounded in an operation of Judaization of Dasein), the metaphysical reading of the Holocaust as an event outside of history, the celebration of nomadism and deterritorialization—all that have made it difficult if not downright impossible to think of Jewish national sovereignty and Jewish normalcy. Likewise, French postmodern thought has not been able or willing to engage with the resurgence of antisemitism—an antisemitism that does not fit its theoretical, ideological and metaphysical framework. Derrida's disciples continue to speak the language of existential ontology, albeit with a critical distance, or with serious distortions—a language that is no longer in use except in national literature and cultural studies departments in the U.S. and is now employed to nurture the new antisemitism.

The Only Tone for Terror: Tony Harrison and the Gorgon’s Gaze

2019 ◽  
pp. 205-220
Author(s):  
Henry Stead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
European History ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Experimental Medium ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Current Affairs ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Film And Video

This chapter introduces the reader to Tony Harrison’s audiovisual poetry, composed for and broadcast on British television through the late 1980s and 1990s. Harrison has to date made twelve full documentary film-poems, and one film-poem feature, entitled Prometheus (1998). They all brim with the darker side of European history, current affairs and class politics, and explore what limits of what poetry might do, and how it might do it, in the televisual age. The chapter sets Harrison’s film poetry in its cultural context by paying attention to the poet’s major influences in the experimental medium (John Grierson’s GPO film unit and early Soviet filmmaking), before homing in on his 1992 film-poem The Gaze of the Gorgon as a species of social psychotherapy. The act of gazing at the Medusa-like and thus usually petrifying image of twentieth-century atrocity is offered here not as a ‘dope’ to mankind, but a stimulant towards its cure. The film-poem draws explicitly on Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Dionysiac art’ and Simone Weil’s pacifist notion of ‘force’, and Robert Jay Lifton’s work on trauma and the holocaust. Harrison’s hugely ambitious and uniquely accessible film-poems are currently publically unavailable. Are they the ‘missing link’ in the evolution of contemporary film and video poetry?

The Artful Politics of Trauma: Rancière’s Critique of Lyotard

2018 ◽  
pp. 121-141
Author(s):  
Tina Chanter
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Absolute Difference ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Singular Event ◽  
Privileged Status ◽  
Specific Meaning ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The Absolute

Just as Rancière challenges the absolute difference between politics and art, he resists the absolutization of the other that he sees as characteristic of the ethical turn in contemporary aesthetics. The tendency of Lyotard, however, remains turning alterity into the unrepresentable, the unassimilable, and the unthinkable. Its consequences are precisely what Rancière forebodes with the appropriation of the sublime: For all its talk of art witnessing that which is unrepresentable—and the holocaust as the unrepresentable per se—the ethical turn only manages to rejoin a discourse of purism. If everyone is traumatised, what specific meaning remains for trauma? This chapter explores the context of Rancière’s critique of Lyotard, particularly regarding the attenuation of any sense to trauma that accumulates a privileged status for its singular event; it subsequently interrogates the generalization of trauma to such an extent that one evacuates it of any significance.

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