Concentrationary Cinema

Since its release in 1955, AlainResnais'sNightand Fog (NuitetBrouillard)has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political andaestheticresponse to what DavidRousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, identified on his returnin 1945as the'concentrationaryuniverse' which, now actualized, might release its totalitarian plague any time and anywhere. What kind of memory does the film create to warn us of the continued presence of thisconcentrationaryuniverse? This international collection re-examinesResnais'sbenchmark film in terms of both its political and historical context of representation of the camps and of other instances of theconcentrationaryin contemporary cinema. Through a range of critical readings,ConcentrationaryCinemaexplores the cinematicaestheticsof political resistance not to the Holocaust as such but to the political novelty of absolute power represented by theconcentrationarysystem and its assault on the human condition.