THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY
JEWISH STUDIES PROGRAMcordially invites you to a lecture by

Jessie Labov

(Central European University)

Depth of Focus: Ida, Son of Saul and the refraction of Jewish memory in recent Central European cinema

This presentation will offer a telescopic view of two landmark films: Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida (2013) and László Nemes's Saul fia (2015). We will start with a close analysis of their aesthetic and narrative strategies before moving to the spatial and temporal middle-ground, i.e., the complex pre-histories, genealogies, and migrations of the films and filmmakers. At this distance we can also glimpse flows of capital: initially in the material support behind each film's production, and later in the symbolic terrain of the film festival circuit, global media circulation, and of course, Academy Awards for each film in 2015 and 2016, respectively. For the greatest depth of field, we will look at these films in the political and cultural context of the Central European Jewish "revival," contemporary debates over the representation of World War II in public memory, and the decidedly awkward embrace of the Polish and Hungarian state.

Tuesday, November 8 at 6 p.m.

Room 201, Monument Building

Jessie Labov is a Resident Fellow in the Center for Media, Data and Society, and a member of the Digital Humanities Initiative. Before coming to CEU she was Associate Professor in the Slavic Department at Ohio State University. Current publishing projects include a monograph entitled Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture Beyond the Nation (forthcoming, CEU Press 2017), and a co-edited volume with Karen Underhill, Doikeyt, Diaspora, Borderlands: Imagining Polish-Jewish Territories. In addition to her ongoing projects in the digital humanities, she has written on Polish and Hungarian film, Central European Jewish identity, and the Jedwabne debates in Poland.