Holocausto y Cine. Music Box: las fotografías de lo inefable

Abstract

At the end of the 1980s, the memory of the Holocaust went through the anamnesis stage, according to the periodization formulated by Henry Rousso (2015) and is characterized by the activation of the memory of the traumatic past, the resumption of trials of criminals and they charge a unusual importance the testimonies of the survivors, documents, material evidence, photographic and moving images. The past returns, locating itself in a central place in the culture and politics of the West. The victims and their claims, ignored and forgotten for a long time, now find those who are willing to listen to them. They recover the ability to narrate and denounce the perpetrators. In this context of resurgence of memory and the demand for justice, the film Music Box (1989) appears, by the Franco-Greek director Costa Gavras, a film that manages to capture on the screen the multiple features of that particular moment of memory of the Shoah and the gestation of a new regime of historicity that begins to take shape.