The recipient of the Polish Studies Article Prize, Dr Matilda Mroz from the University of Sydney, will deliver a masterclass during the annual PSG Norther Workshop on Friday, 21 June, 12.00 – 13.00 GMT. This hybrid event will be broadcast online as part of the BASEES Talks 2024 cycle.

TITLE: Polish Aftermath Cinema and Holocaust Landscapes: Tracing Posthumous Environments in Film

This lecture considers the intersection of two developments in academic and artistic practice: first, the recent environmental turns in Holocaust scholarship (particularly theory influenced by the posthumanities and non-anthropocentric approaches to human and non-human materiality); secondly, Polish cinema engaging with Polish perpetration of violence against their Jewish neighbours in rural and small-town areas in WWII. This conjunction can produce a particularly disturbing filmic vision of sites where Jewish victims were dumped or buried: fields, forests and meadows emerge not as static spaces but as evolving networks of contestation and exploitation in which everyday rural activities such as cattle grazing (as in Birthplace/Miejsce Urodzenia, Paweł Łoziński, 1992) and trash dumping (as in Neighbours/Sąsiedzi, Agnieszka Arnold, 2001) become entangled with Holocaust violence. The lecture traces the affective disturbances evoked by framing posthumous environments in Polish ‘aftermath’ cinema (that is, those films produced after the millennial debates on the 1941 Jedwabne massacre, for which Birthplace was a significant precursor), as these filmed sites become a shifting ground of human decomposition and landscape composition, witnessing and silence, reliquary and archive. 

Dr Matilda Mroz is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Previously, she was a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex, and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (2019-2020). She held a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2008-2011). She is the author of Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema: Posthumous Materiality and Unwanted Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Temporality and Film Analysis (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), the co-editor of The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia: Between Pain and Pleasure (EUP, 2016), co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity Press, 2012) and Deputy Editor of the Film-Philosophy journal.

To register email Dr Ewa Ochman (ewa.ochman@manchester.ac.uk) by 19/06/2024.