Women in European Holocaust Films: Perpetrators, Victims and Resisters

By Ingrid Lewis.

This book considers how women’s experiences have been treated in films dealing with Nazi persecution. Focusing on fiction films made in Europe between 1945 and the present, this study explores dominant discourses on and cinematic representation of women as perpetrators, victims and resisters. Ingrid Lewis contends that European Holocaust Cinema underwent a rich and complex trajectory of change with regard to the representation of women. This change both reflects and responds to key socio-cultural developments in the intervening decades as well as to new directions in cinema, historical research and politics of remembrance. The book will appeal to international scholars, students and educators within the fields of Holocaust Studies, Film Studies, European Cinema and Women’s Studies.

This book:

• Is the first study to address the representation and discursive construction of women in European Holocaust films;
• Provides a unique multidisciplinary perspective that contributes to European Film Studies, Holocaust Studies and Women’s Studies;
• Examines how and why the portrayal of women in European Holocaust films has changed since the end of the war;
• Casts new light on cinema’s function as a discursive intervention into cultural memory and the politics of remembrance;Offers a significantly more inclusive account of Holocaust representation of women than has been attempted before.

Dr Ingrid Lewis is Assistant Lecturer in Film and Theatre Studies at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland. She is author of the book chapter ‘Ordinary Women’ as Perpetrators in European Holocaust Films (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and has taught within the discipline of Film Studies at Universities in Croatia, Ireland and Italy.

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