Archie Wolfman presents Intermediality and Holocaust memory in the road movie Tlmočník (“The Interpreter”, Martin Šulík, 2018)

6pm Wednesday the 23rd February

Zoom link to follow

This paper examines Slovakian-Austrian narrative fiction film Tlmočník (“The Interpreter”, Martin Šulík, 2018), as a case-study for the transmedial negotiation of Holocaust memory. In this road movie narrative, the second-generation descendants of both Holocaust victims and perpetrators travel through Austria and Slovakia in an attempt to understand their traumatic memories. Claude Lanzmann famously argued in debates about the cinematic representation of the Holocaust against the use of archival footage, as well as the mimetic reconstruction of the past in fiction film. In common with Lanzmann’s Shoah, Tlmočník is set contemporarily, in present-day Europe. However, it does in some sense use archival images—within its diegesis the film’s characters interact with historical documents, celluloid photographs and video witness testimonies. Therefore, Tlmočník’s intermedial negotiation of the archive allows a dialogue between Lanzmann’s Shoah and contemporary Holocaust cinema and, with it, a renewed perspective on debates about the (un)representability of the Holocaust and violent pasts.