Language:
English
Year of publication:
2022
Titel der Quelle:
Geschichtsoptimismus und Katastrophenbewusstsein
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2022) 107-125
Keywords:
Pontecorvo, Gillo,
;
Kapò (Motion picture : 1960)
;
Motion pictures
;
Jewish motion picture producers and directors
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in motion pictures
Abstract:
This paper examines the perception of the Holocaust in Gillo Pontecorvo’s narrative film Kapò (1960), situating it within the director’s political and artistic encounter with the postwar Italian left. Being one of the first fictional attempts in world cinema, and the first in Italian, to represent the Nazi concentrationary universe and the Jewish experience thereof, Kapò was primarily aimed at the Italian left, passing on a collective anti-Fascist memory that embraced amnesia concerning the fate of Italian Jewry. While the focus on moral conflicts of individuals, as depicted in the role of a Kapo (prison functionary), fitted the neo-realist zeitgeist, it could not correspond to the particularity of the Holocaust, which ultimately defied individuality. Yet, while Pontecorvo refused to make another film about the National Socialists
DOI:
10.13109/9783666317361.107
URL:
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