The images of atrocity, either analog or digital, are always the trace of an encounter between the gaze of a photographer or a cameraman and a human being suffering from the painful effects of man-made violence. The archive images resulting from such an encounter raise some inevitable questions: who took them and for what purpose? Is it possible to retrace the process that led to these shots? What do they hide behind what the eye can see? This special issue of Cinéma & Cie will not only focus on the production of such images, but also on their persistence on the synchronic level (in the media: newspapers, magazines, cinema, television, the Internet, museums…) as well as on the diachronic level (across time: mutation, re-editing, inversion…). From propaganda to counter-propaganda, from purposes of memory to artistic aims, the circulation of these images proves that repetition always implies difference.
Alice Cati and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, Questioning the Images of Atrocity: An Introduction
Barbara Grespi, Lasting Remains: The Anesthetizing Gaze in German Postwar Cinema and Photography
Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Preserving Memory or Fabricating the Past? How Films Constitute Cinematic Archives of the Holocaust
Maria Teresa Soldani, History and Progress in Buried in Light and Empires of Tin: The Archive of Pain in the Oeuvre of Jem Cohen
Luisella Farinotti, “Wir wollen uns mit den Bildern unseres Landes befassen”: Documents, Fetishes, Icons, Relics: the Reconstruction of the German Autumn as an Image
Alice Cati, Private Images in Place of the Beloved Bodies: Relics Against the Politics of Disappearance
Sylvie Rollet, Malgré tout… l’image manque
Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, Perpetrator Images, Perpetrator Artifacts: The Nomad Archives of Tuol Sleng (S-21)
NEW STUDIES
Ilaria A. De Pascalis, Melodrama, Identity, and Community in Forbrydelsen
Elisa Mandelli, The Museum as a Cinematic Space: The Display of Moving Images in History Museums
PROJECTS & ABSTRACTS
REVIEWS / COMPTES-RENDUS