Language:
English
Year of publication:
2021
Titel der Quelle:
Holocaust Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
27,2 (2021) 218-234
Keywords:
Egoyan, Atom, Criticism and interpretation
;
Remember (Motion picture)
;
Motion pictures
;
Holocaust survivors in motion pictures
;
Memory in motion pictures
;
Nazis in motion pictures
;
Holocaust survivor impostors
Abstract:
Recent trials of elderly Holocaust perpetrators have foregrounded an epistemological problem with consequences for future prosecutions: what status do witness testimonies, survivor memoirs, and blurry photographs have as the Holocaust’s final witnesses die off? This article interprets Atom Egoyan’s Remember (2015), a Holocaust revenge fantasy whose geriatric protagonist suffers from dementia. Dementia becomes a metaphor for memory’s unreliability and its challenges for Holocaust jurisprudence. Through plot twists predicated upon viewers’ willingness to misperceive familiar tropes of Holocaust cinema as fact, Remember thematizes the need for a jurisprudence based on expertise, not witness testimony, even in an age skeptical of expertise.
DOI:
10.1080/17504902.2019.1637494
URL:
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