The many realisms of Marceline Loridan-Ivens’s life and art

Marceline Loridan-Ivens (19 March 1928–18 September 2018), an activist of memory and the human heart, was a writer, filmmaker, producer and actress whose experience of the Shoah as a 15-year-old girl in the Nazi death camp of Birkenau marked the rest of her extraordinary life and work. As one of the most eloquent advocates for humanity and the power of memory, her reflections on her identity as a Jewish woman and the sacred responsibility to heal the world are everywhere apparent, from her documentary work with the pioneering Jean Rouch and, later, with her husband Joris Ivens, to her writing of philosophical memoirs, to her creation (at age 75) of a classic of Jewish cinema, La Petite Prairie aux Bouleaux (2003). Its deceptive title – in English, The Little Birch Tree Meadow – is a literal translation of Birkenau. The title’s irony encapsulates one of Marceline’s life strategies, meeting corrosive horror with unexpected humour. These texts tell us that her public life is framed, start to finish, by the intimate, searing memory of loss, a yearning to survive and a commitment to remember. Loridan-Ivens is a vital example of strength and resilience amidst devastating life experiences. She became an icon of indomitable courage and compassion and, at the same time, of friendship and humour. From the standpoint of theories of cinematic and narrative realism, Marceline’s different textual interventions into the public realms of memory and forgetfulness, responsibility and its negation, community and isolation, are all discussed within different categories of realism.