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Lawrence Baron has held the Abraham Nasatir Chair in Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University since 1988. He received his PhD in Modern European History from the University of Wisconsin/Madison in 1974 and taught at St. Lawrence University from 1975 until 1988. He is the advisor to the Graduate Program in History at San Diego State University. Specializing in modern German and Jewish history, he has authored Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (2005) and The Eclectic Anarchism of Erich Muehsam (1976) and served the historian for Sam and Pearl Oliner's The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (1988). He has co-edited three anthologies including Martin Buber and the Human Sciences (1996) and Embracing the Other: Historical, Philosophical, Psychological, and Historical Perspectives on Altruism (1992). He is the founder and current president of the Western Jewish Studies Association and a member of the Advisory Board of the Association for Jewish Studies.
Panel speaker on Sunday, April 29, 2007 at 3:15 p.m.
“Genres of Genocide: Depicting the Armenian and Jewish Genocides on Film”
Although scholars and survivors of the Armenian genocide and Jewish Holocaust have despaired over the "unrepresentability" of each event, the dramatic scenarios arising from such extreme situations and the moral imperative to keep the memory of them alive has prompted filmmakers to portray these mass murders and their repercussions ever since they were committed. This lecture will compare and contrast cinematic narrative strategies and techniques like the heroic rebellion, the immigrant stories of survivors, the insertion of original photographs and film footage, the pilgrimage to sites where the atrocities occurred, courtroom dramas, and traumatic flashbacks to depict the two genocides in feature films. It also will examine how the campaign of Turkish governments since World War One to deny the Armenian genocide ever happened eventually enabled motion pictures about the Holocaust to establish the cinematic iconography of genocide. Consequently, films produced about the Armenian genocide often have invoked the Holocaust and referenced its images to demonstrate the magnitude of the Armenian ordeal and counter Turkish obliteration of its memory.
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