Leeds Humanities Research Institute - Research Bites

Concentrationary Cinema explores the cinematic aesthetics of political resistance not to the Holocaust as such but to the political novelty of absolute power represented by the concentrationary system and its assault on the human condition. Professor Max Silverman (School of Modern Languages and Cultures) discusses Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais's "Night and Fog" (Berghahn Books, 2012), which he co-edited with Griselda Pollock. The book won the 2012 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Award for Best Moving Image Book. In this interview, Max discusses issues including the importance of the idea of the "concentrationary", the way in which the film "Night and Fog" develops the idea, and the significance of the film in contemporary French culture and society.

Professor Greg Radick (School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science) discusses his book The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which won the Suzanne J Levinson prize from the History of Science Society for the best book in the life sciences and natural history in 2010. In this interview, Greg discusses some of the key ideas which shaped the debate about animal language following Darwin, and some of the experiments which caught the popular imagination from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s.