The Parkes Institute: Robert Vas and the documentary as witness: The Issue Should Be Avoided

About

Join us for the annual Karten Lecture, this year delivered by our Director, Professor James Jordan.

Robert Vas (1931-1978) is one of the great forgotten directors of British television documentary. Across twenty years he made over thirty films which covered topics from Laurel and Hardy to Alexander Korda, Hiroshima to Thomas Edison. Born into a Jewish family in Hungary he came to the UK after the Hungarian uprising in 1956, gaining his reputation for two important and relatively well-known short films Refuge England (1958) and The Vanishing Street (1962). But the majority of his films have never been commercially released. 

Across 2026 I have been working with colleagues Eleni Liarou (Birkbeck) and John Wyver (Westminster) on drawing attention to Vas and his work. This talk will be an expanded version of a paper given at the symposium on Vas we held at Birkbeck earlier this year. Its focus will be The Issue Should Be Avoided (1971) Vas’s ‘documentary investigation’ into the Katyn Massacre of the early 1940s. At the heart of the film is a tribunal formed of men whose testimony evidences the crimes of thirty years before. ‘These men,’ to quote from Vas’s script, ‘are not survivors or eye-witnesses, but actors.’ The setting is not Katyn but Black Park, Bucks. This complicated form of representation will be discussed with reference to the surviving production files and contemporary reviews. 

Speaker

James Jordan is Professor of English and Director of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton. He has written widely on the representation of the Holocaust and the image of ‘the Jew’ in British film and television. 

Event information

This event will be held in-person and online.

If you have any questions about this event please contact parkes@soton.ac.uk

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