Alan R. Marcus: “In the Birch Grove” and “The Forgotten Jew in the City of Youth” film screenings (1/11/2018)

Screening of two 30-min. research films that adopt a contemporary perspective to exploring the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau (In the Birch Grove, 2012) and the town where Hitler was imprisoned in 1924, Landsberg-am-Lech (The Forgotten Jew in the City of Youth, 2016). The films pose questions about the discomforting mismatch of beauty and trauma, the banal and the sacred, and contrasting testimonies involving an unlikely perpetrator and an unlikely survivor of the Holocaust. Ultimately, they ask: What does it mean to confront the atrocities of the past in the memorial spaces of the present?

ALAN R. MARCUS (University of Aberdeen)

Alan Marcus is a cultural historian and filmmaker and Chair in Film and Visual Culture at King’s College, University of Aberdeen in Scotland. His recent research focuses on themes associated with memory and the representation of iconic post-traumatic sites. His 10 research film projects completed since 2006, examine sites associated with Jewish identity, the Diaspora, and the Holocaust. His experimental film, In Place of Death (2008), set in Dachau and held in the USHMM, is one of five films that comprise the Carnegie Trust-funded research project, In Time of Place.

Moderator: Todd Presner

Sponsored by the
UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
Cosponsored by the
UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
UCLA Department of Germanic Languages
UCLA Department of History