Focus on Holocaust film
In its first project year (2025), the Critical Film & Image Hub will focus on a topic of significance for memory culture: research, transfer and events, including an international and interdisciplinary conference, will focus on the representation of Sinti and Roma in Holocaust films. Even though Holocaust-film can now claim the status of a genre in its own right, the history of this minority has long been excluded from visual representations of the Nazi genocide, whether fictional or documentary.
Where relevant characters and historical references did appear, they remained subject to narrative patterns that tied in with traditional, even antigypsyist imagery and aesthetics. Against the backdrop of the recognition of the genocide, a cinematic change began: the spectrum has increasingly expanded to include stories ranging from victim narratives to heroic tales, telling of resistance and transgenerational trauma, while innovative formats such as short films and animated films attempt to convey the essentially unrepresentable nature of the Holocaust in new artistic ways.
Research on the Holocaust in film initially focused on the question of whether it was permissible to fictionalise the mass murder committed by the Nazis and on the imperative of authenticity. A particular area of research in this field is the portrayal of Sinti and Roma and other ‘forgotten victims’ of the Nazi era. The few contributions that deal with this topic usually do not go beyond the idea of representation.
In the first year of funding, the Film Hub has already compiled a broad collection of visual documentary and fictional testimonies of the Holocaust. Sinti and Roma are portrayed as marginal figures or mirror images, so that their history remains a narrative subplot. The staging mechanisms that promote this ‘othering’ are also aesthetic in nature; through editing, lighting and colour, the minority remains on the margins of remembrance. Nevertheless, individual film productions initially showed a change and an opening up of Holocaust cinema towards other narratives, with testimonies from Sinti and Roma now increasingly being at least co-narrated. More recent documentaries pursue their own ‘agency’ more strongly, reflect on essentialisations and develop alternative forms of integrating a history that is still largely underrepresented. The engagement with the topic by filmmakers who themselves come from minority backgrounds is also gaining in importance.
The aim of this focus is to open up this field of research for the first time, providing both a historical cross-section against the backdrop of a changing culture of remembrance and exposing the deeper layers of individual films, which are also examined in a comparative manner with regard to elements such as ethnicity, class and gender. In doing so, different disciplinary perspectives will be brought together and research will be linked to its transfer into educational formats.
