From “Holocaust” (1978) to “Chernobyl” (2019)

Can audiovisual face a traumatic past and a threatened future?

Abstract

Retracing the cultural history of the reception of the TV series “Holocaust” (1978) as it redefined the politics of the State and put the testimony for the first time at the centre of the cultural field, undermining how the Jewish genocide was perceived until then, the article aims at discuss, through a comparison with the HBO series  “Chernobyl” (2019) and other cinematographic productions, what audio-visual is capable of in front of different forms of State violence, of a traumatic past and of a threatened future. We will thus explore, helped, among others, by the contributions of the historian Annette Wieviorka, of the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, of the indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak and of the writer Svetlana Aleksiévitch, the relations between politics of memory, pedagogy and imagination, in a context of environmental catastrophes and global pandemics.