The representation of the Holocaust and antisemitism in British film and television has been relatively overlooked. This illustrated workshop attempts to address this gap by screening and discussing a range of texts that examine memories of the Holocaust and antisemitism in Britain in a variety of forms. Some of these texts are explicit in their representations, others are works that make no extant claim to represent it. They include the British television drama Twist of Fate (1989), the 1973 horror film, The Wicker Man and the work of director Stanley Kubrick. Taking these texts as a starting point for discussion, this workshop presents a timely intervention into current debates about the Holocaust and antisemitism within British media and culture.
Papers:
- ‘Life Functions Terminated’: Stanley Kubrick, IBM and the Holocaust, Nathan Abrams, Bangor University
- The Ghetto and the Camp: a consideration of BBC Television’s Representation of the Holocaust in the 1960s, James Jordan, University of Southampton
- The Wicker Man (1973): Film Reflecting the Holocaust, Caroline Kaye, Manchester Metropolitan University
- Twist of Fate (BBC 1989): The Holocaust Survivor Who is Really a Perpetrator, Sue Vice, University of Sheffield
Speakers:
Nathan Abrams is Professor of Film Studies at Bangor University. He is the editor of Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture (2016) and author of Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (forthcoming). He is currently working on a book about Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut.
James Jordan is a Karten Lecturer in the Parkes Institute for Jewish/non-Jewish Relations in English at the University of Southampton. He is author of From Nuremberg to Hollywood: the Holocaust in the courtroom of American fictive film (2013).
Caroline Kaye is a Liverpool Fine Art graduate who taught in the F.E. post 16 sector for over twenty years. She has an MA in Screen Studies from the University of Manchester, and a graduate certificate in Religions and Theology from the University of Wales. She recently took a second MA in Religions and Theology at Manchester for which she was awarded a distinction and the Bernard Jackson prize for the highest mark for a Jewish Studies dissertation. She is currently researching for an interdisciplinary PhD investigating the representation of Jews in Nineteenth Century Painting at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her most recent books are the co-edited volume Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013); Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era (2014); and Barry Hines: ‘Kes’, ‘Threads’ and Beyond, co-written with David Forrest, will be out in 2017.