[Commlist] CFP: 40 + 40 = 80 Years of Images about the Shoah (1945-1985-2025)

*40 + 40 = 80 Years of Images about the Shoah (1945-1985-2025)*
*November 17-18, 2025*
**
A conference organized by Ivelise Perniola (Università degli Studi Roma 
Tre) and Francesco Pitassio (Università degli Studi di Udine)
Venues: DAMS Università degli Studi di Roma Tre and Fondazione Museo 
della Shoah
Confirmed Keynote speakers:
Laura Fontana (Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris)
Sylvie Lindeperg (Université Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne)
***
2025 marks two important anniversaries.
Firstly, the end of the Second World War, that is the deadliest conflict 
in the history of humankind, whose conclusion laid the foundations of 
our world, until recently. The Liberation and the discovery of the camps 
by Allied and Soviet armies generated also the first images of 
concentration and extermination camps. These latter started circulating 
among the population, on newspapers and magazines, at exhibitions and 
within movie venues, and as an evidence in trials. It was no longer 
possible denying the crimes perpetrated, as long as photography and 
cinema testified for it.
Secondly, the release of Claude Lanzmann’s /Shoah/, whose premiere took 
place on the 30th of April, 1985, in Paris, being just the latest step 
of a twelve years relentless work.
Eighty years after the Liberation and fourty from Lanzmann’s movie we 
wonder and ask what’s left of those images: how to read them, pass their 
deepest meaning, preserve their materiality, and enhance their value.
The conference revolves (not exclusively) around three main dates, and 
aims at situating historically reflections on the production, 
transmission, and value of the images of the destruction of European Jewry.
*1945 – The revelation of the camps*
This strand of reflections is articulated as follows:

  * Situating historically the iconography of the Holocaust.
  * The use and functions of the images Allies produced (1944-1947).
  * The iconographic impact of the Liberation on contemporary media and
    narratives.
  * The fate of the images of the Liberation in ensuing non-fiction
    cinema: compilation, re-use, re-configuration.

*1985 – The /Shoah/ moment*
Claude Lanzmann’s film is unquestionably a turning point, both 
aesthetically and historically. Fourty years after its premiere in Paris 
and following three distinct waves of close readings and encompassing 
studies about and around this titanic endeavour, we believe we can take 
stock of its importance, along the following lines:

  * Claude Lanzmann as an intellectual, public figure, journalist,
    filmmaker.
  * The relation between /Shoah/ and Claude Lanzmann’s work.
  * Shoah as a template. Epigones, imitators, detractors, and the
    anxiety of influence.
  * Iconoclasm, iconofilia, feticism in the images of the Holocaust.
  * Documentary filmmaking and the Holocaust: forms, strategies,
    imperatives.
  * Claude Lanzmann and the archives: sources, materials, problems.

*2025 – What’s left*
What’s left, today? The digital turn, the outburst of dynamic web, the 
opportunities to share, reconfigure, manipulate the moving images, as 
much as recent and unpredictable development of the AI reshaped the 
status of the images, as a source for History. Before us are major 
epistemic and educational challenges. Never before media literacy has 
been as valuable as today, at every level.
This strand of reflections is articulated as follows:

  * Teaching the Shoah today: media literacy, education, and shared
    strategies.
  * AI, archives of the moving images, history-making and historical
    thinking.
  * Archives of the moving images, access, education.
  * Populism, negationism, images.
  * Institutional policies, media cultures, historical knowledge.

The official languages of the conference are Italian and English.
Abstracts should not exceed 300 words, with up to 5 keywords.
*Submission deadline*: August 15, 2025.
*Notification of acceptance*: August 30, 2025.
Abstracts to be addressed at: (ivelise.perniola /at/ uniroma3.it); 
(francesco.pitassio /at/ uniud.it)


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