The Questions That Return: Shoah, Testimony and the Ethics of Images in Cinema

Abstract

This article reflects on cinema as a means of transmitting the memory of the Shoah to new generations, taking Shoah (1985), by Claude Lanzmann, as its central axis, in dialogue with Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956), A Day in Warsaw (Saul and Yitzhak Goskind, 1939), and How Saba Kept Singing (Sara Taksler, 2022). Drawing on a classroom experience understood as an exercise in re-editing and critical reflection among images from different historical moments, the text discusses the limits and potentials of representation in the face of genocide. By articulating the ethics of testimony, the pedagogy of memory, and listening as an ethical gesture, the article proposes thinking of cinema not as an explanatory instance, but as a space of questioning. In dialogue with authors such as Georges Didi-Huberman and Marianne Hirsch, it investigates how images – and also their absences – may reinscribe the memory of catastrophe in the present and challenge the contemporary banalization of the term “genocide.”