Giacomo Lichtner

Qualifications

BA Hons, PhD Reading

Profile

Giacomo Lichtner is Associate Professor of History and Film in the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations. He teaches Modern European History, Italian history, the history and representation of the Holocaust, propaganda, and modules on the representation of history in cinema. Because of his interdisciplinary expertise, he has also guest-lectured in courses in Italian Studies, Film Studies and Anthropology.

Having joined Victoria University of Wellington as a Lecturer in 2003, Giacomo was Deputy Head of School between 2014 and 2016, and Associate Dean (Students) of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences from 2016 to 2019.

Since 2015, Lichtner is also Associate Editor of the journal Modern Italy (CUP), which he guest-edited in 2018 with Sally Hill, Giuliana Minghelli and Alan O’Leary.

Giacomo has contributed commentary and expert opinion to RNZ, Stuff, Newsroom and the New Zealand Herald, Overland and LitHub. In 2016, he was elected onto the board of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, where he has coordinated the Events and Cultural Outreach portfolio.

Research interests

Giacomo’s research focuses on the relationship between History and Cinema. He posits that historical cinema simultaneously engages with the past it seeks to represent, and with the present in which the film is produced. This double engagement (the ‘double historicity’) makes cinema a wonderful resource to study both how history can be represented, and how a society chooses to see itself and its history.

Giacomo has applied this theoretical approach primarily to ‘the long Second World War’, fascism and the Holocaust, publishing extensively around their representation and the politics of their commemoration. Giacomo’s first book, Film and the Shoah in France and Italy (2008, 2015pb), assessed the role of cinema in the development of a national memory of the Holocaust in these countries, demonstrating how artistic and commercial choices reflected or challenged dominant ideas about the Holocaust. His second monograph, Fascism in Italian Cinema Since 1945: the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory (2013), was a study of filmic representations of Italian fascism since 1945, which demonstrated significant continuities in both what was consistently represented, and what was consistently ignored about Italy’s fascist history. Fascism in Italian Cinema was reviewed across historical, film studies and Italian studies journals in English, Italian and German: widely acclaimed, it has been described as ‘a lively and memorable work […] likely to become a standard account’ (H-Italy), ‘nuanced’ and ‘innovative’ (JMIS), ‘compelling’ and ‘impeccable in its key arguments’ (Senses of Cinema), and its argument has been called ‘trenchant’, ‘considered’ and ‘difficult to dismiss’.

Giacomo was awarded the 2012 Christopher Seton-Watson prize for his article ‘The Age of Innocence: Child Narratives and Italian Holocaust Films’ (2012).

Current research projects

Giacomo’s current research project is entitled The Search for Meaning in Holocaust Cinema (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021). This new book considers the history of Holocaust cinema, investigating models for the representation of particularly challenging aspects of the Holocaust’s history, such as dehumanisation, the gas chambers, the liberation of the death camps and the long-term efforts to understand and remember what occurred.

Thesis supervision

Giacomo has supervised and co-supervised theses in History, Film Studies and Italian Studies, on different aspects of History and Film, Propaganda and Memory Studies, including theses on the cinematography of Ramai Te Miha Hayward, propaganda about airmen in WWII Britain and the biopic.

He is interested in supervising Honours, Master’s and doctoral research projects on the following subjects:

Theoretical approaches to Film and History
Topics in Modern European History/Cinema, especially around the memory and representation of the 'long second world war'
Topics in the History, Representation or Memory of the Holocaust
Topics in Modern Italian History/Cinema
Propaganda, especially in interwar Europe
Postcolonial Cinema, especially constructions of national identity in Indian, Australian and New Zealand historical film.

Selection of publications

Giacomo Lichtner, ‘That latent sense of otherness: old and new antisemitisms in postwar Italy’, Modern Italy Vol. 23, no. 4 (2018).
Giacomo Lichtner, ‘ “Io so”: the absence of resolution as resolution in Italian historical cinema’, Modern Italy, Vol. 22, no. 2 (2017).
Giacomo Lichtner, Sarah P. Hill and Alan O’Leary (eds), ‘Cinema and the Construction of the Nation: Italian Identities Between History and Memory’, Special Issue, Modern Italy Vol. 22, no. 2 (2017).
Giacomo Lichtner, ‘And they lived happily ever after? The fable as search for meaning in Holocaust cinema’, in Maartje Abbenhuis and Sara Buttsworth eds, Warfare, myths and fairy tales (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).
Giacomo Lichtner, Italian subtitles for German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey DVD (British Film Institute, 2017).
Giacomo Lichtner, ‘Italian Cinema and the Fascist Past: Tracing Memory and Amnesia’, Fascism: Interdisciplinary Journal of Fascist Studies, Vol. 4, no. 1 (2015) 25-47.
Giacomo Lichtner, Abbenhuis, M., Gigliotti, S. and Seymour, M. (eds), ‘Faultlines: Cohesion and Division in Modern European History’, Special Issue, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 60, no. 3 (2014).
‘La Vita è Bella ad Auschwitz: luogo della memoria e dell’amnesia’, Cinema e Storia no. 2 (2013).
Fascism in Italian Cinema Since 1945: the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
‘The Age of Innocence: Child Narratives and Italian Holocaust Films’, Special Issue: Italy and the Emotions, Modern Italy, Vol. 17, no. 2 (2012) 197-208.
‘Allegory, Applicability or Alibi? Historicising Intolerance in Ettore Scola’s Concorrenza Sleale’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Vol. 17, no. 1 (2012) 99-105.
‘Fascism in Italian Cinema: Notes Towards a Historical Reconsideration’, ‘Special Issue: Italian Studies in New Zealand’, Studi d’italianistica nell’Africa australe, Vol. 24, no. 1 (2011).
‘Kaddish’, in Marco Sonzogni ed., This Way: Covering/Uncovering Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, Dunmore Publishing, Wellington, 2011.
With Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Indian Cinema and the politics of history: Earth and Lagaan’, Asian Survey Vol. 48 no.:3 (2008) 431-452.
Film and the Shoah in France and Italy (Vallentine Mitchell, 2008 and 2015 p-b).