Earth After Death: Posthumous Cinematic Ecologies in Holocaust Documentary Film

What is it about?

Recent research on Holocaust cinema has suggested the potential of filmed earth to bear “eco-witness” to atrocity. However, the conjunction between the elemental and the human that occurs when a violated body decomposes in the earth indicates a particularly distressing point of “trouble” for non-anthropocentric frameworks. This article examines how three documentaries (Shtetl, Neighbours and Birthplace) frame sections of Polish earth that have been re-shaped by Holocaust atrocity and human decomposition, suggesting that human decomposition triggers attempts to cinematically recompose active earth as readable archive and fixed landscape.

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