Son of Saul and the Ethics of Representation: Troubling the Figure of the Child

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Author(s)
Gibson, Margaret
Howell, Amanda
Year published
2018
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Taking László Nemes’ film Son of Saul (2015) as both an aesthetic intervention into the public remembering of the Holocaust and as a critical/creative essay on representations of the horrors of war and violence more generally, this paper considers its use of the image and idea of the dead child—the child victim—and its ability to move, to communicate, to galvanise action, to seemingly cut through the chaos of communication. A figure presented as tangible and mournable in a way that the many anonymous, barely-glimpsed and largely ignored dead of the film are not, we consider it in relation to previous representations of the ...
View more >Taking László Nemes’ film Son of Saul (2015) as both an aesthetic intervention into the public remembering of the Holocaust and as a critical/creative essay on representations of the horrors of war and violence more generally, this paper considers its use of the image and idea of the dead child—the child victim—and its ability to move, to communicate, to galvanise action, to seemingly cut through the chaos of communication. A figure presented as tangible and mournable in a way that the many anonymous, barely-glimpsed and largely ignored dead of the film are not, we consider it in relation to previous representations of the child in Holocaust film, but also, importantly, in relation to contemporary photographic examples of the child victim-as-icon, whose images seemingly require no caption to communicate and which inspire deeply-felt responses across cultures, organising structures of public feeling. As Nemes’ film makes clear, the claim of the child victim on the witness is profound, immediate, and potentially transformative. We will consider how the image of the child operates as a fluid signifier of both hope and despair, shared desires and fears, a not-unproblematic image through which the obscene and the unthinkable are mediated and made visible.
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View more >Taking László Nemes’ film Son of Saul (2015) as both an aesthetic intervention into the public remembering of the Holocaust and as a critical/creative essay on representations of the horrors of war and violence more generally, this paper considers its use of the image and idea of the dead child—the child victim—and its ability to move, to communicate, to galvanise action, to seemingly cut through the chaos of communication. A figure presented as tangible and mournable in a way that the many anonymous, barely-glimpsed and largely ignored dead of the film are not, we consider it in relation to previous representations of the child in Holocaust film, but also, importantly, in relation to contemporary photographic examples of the child victim-as-icon, whose images seemingly require no caption to communicate and which inspire deeply-felt responses across cultures, organising structures of public feeling. As Nemes’ film makes clear, the claim of the child victim on the witness is profound, immediate, and potentially transformative. We will consider how the image of the child operates as a fluid signifier of both hope and despair, shared desires and fears, a not-unproblematic image through which the obscene and the unthinkable are mediated and made visible.
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Journal Title
Cultural Studies Review
Volume
24
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© 2018 by the author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.
Subject
Cultural studies
Cinema studies
Screen and digital media