Rauch, S; (2019) "I honestly felt sick:" Affect and Pain in Viewers' Responses to Holocaust Films. In: Jung, B and Bruzzi, S, (eds.) Beyond the Rhetorics of Pain. Routledge: New York, NY, USA and Abingdon, UK.

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Abstract

In this chapter, the author draws on a series of qualitative interviews as part of an exploratory study she conducted between 2011 and 2012 with 68 people, most of them British, about their interpretation of select films. The author focuses on laypeople’s responses to representations of violence, and to both the suffering and the inflicting of pain in Holocaust films. She explores affective engagement with Holocaust films by viewers, the relationship between affect and cognition in the reception of such films, and an ethical dimension to watching films about the Holocaust, and to watching pain, in particular. The author describes British Cultural Studies approaches, recasting viewers as actively engaged participants in a non-linear communication process of making sense and meaning. She argues that while Holocaust films are recognised as representations, they are regarded as representations of something real. Holocaust films and documentaries represent some of the most horrific violence and pain inflicted on human beings in twentieth-century Europe.

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