The appearance of Alain Resnais' 1955 French documentary "Night anda Fog" heralded the beginning of a new form of cinema, one that used the narrative techniques of modernism to provoke a new historical consciousness. "Afterimage" presents a theory of posttraumatic film based on the encounter between cinema and the Holocaust. Locating its origin in the vivid shock of wartime footage, " Afterimage" focuses on a group of crucial documentary and fiction films that were pivotal to the spread of this cinematic form across different nations and genres.
Joshua Hirsch explores the changes in...