Silences and Perspectives

Peri Langdale & Corinna Peniston-Bird:Silences and Perspectives: the Director's Take'

In 2000 Peri Langdale directed and produced 'Lest We Forget', her response to the silence she perceived in the failure to acknowledge the multiplicity of roles undertaken by British women in the Second World War. 'Sisters in Arms' (2005) brought the tale to a happy ending, telling the story of the campaign for recognition, culminating in the erection of the memorial to The Women of World War II in Whitehall. This session brings the director together with an historian who has published on the controversies surrounding this memorial: together they will discuss the challenges of commemoration and representation of women at war, both in film and bronze.

Jeffrey Richards: 'The Films We Forgot to Remember'

There is nothing more misleading than the retrospective recollection of films' significance and popularity. There is a received version of the significant British films of World War Two which comprises a canon of quality productions characterized by semi-documentary realism. But this canon does not conform with the box office returns which suggest an entirely different list of titles. Nor does it take account of a whole range of films (code-breaking, conscientious objection, the persecution of Jews, concentration camps) which the conventional wisdom suggests cinema steered clear of.

Thomas Rohkrämer: 'La Mer à l'aube / Das Meer am Morgen / Calm at Sea (2011): a transnationalperspective on the Nazi Occupation of France'

La Mer à l'aube / Das Meer am Morgen / Calm at Sea (2011) is an emotionally powerful, tear-provoking film which is at the same time morally uplifting. It is about a Nazi mass execution of innocent people including a 17-year-old adolescent, yet it does not raise disturbing ethical questions. It thematises an atrocity, but it only invites the audience to identify with good French citizens and decent German occupiers. The paper will discuss the reasons for this feel-good effect.

Agata Fijalkowski & Ewa Mazierska: 'Silences and Perspectives: Film, Memories and Representations of Katyn'

Over a three-month period in 1940, some 26,000 Polish prisoners-of-war were killed on Stalin's orders. The executions were carried out by the Soviet secret police in Russia, Belarus, and western Ukraine at undisclosed sites and the dead buried in a clandestine manner. It was at Smolensk, Russia that the Germans unearthed the first victims of the massacre, some 4,500 bodies. The blame was placed on the Soviets, who retaliated by launching their own inquest into the matter that pointed the blame at the Germans. Because the Allies were committed in their alliance with Stalin, efforts were made to censor information, making it a suppressed subject for half a century. Any closure on Katyn has been protracted and wearisome. Our paper examines the manner in which silence has been represented in film, such as Andrzej Wajda's "Katyn " and Dusan Makavejev's "Sweet Movie". In light of the long absence of Katyn in law, film can fill in gaps. The silences have had an impact on the discourses concerning Polish and Russian relations and their entangled identities that share a long history. We argue that these discourses reveal significant questions concerning justice, memory and historical narratives. A closer look at Katyn also reveals the degree of its effect both internally (in Poland) and externally (in the post-Communist region, former Soviet republics, and wider Europe).