Voyeurs upon History: Stephen Dwoskin, Marc Karlin, and For Memory

This article discusses the collaboration of Stephen Dwoskin and Marc Karlin, both Jewish filmmakers based in London in the 1970s, drawing in particular on evidence in the Dwoskin archive at the University of Reading that reveals Dwoskin's hitherto unacknowledged contribution to Karlin's film For Memory (1984). I demonstrate that this erasure is symptomatic of Dwoskin's treatment by historians of British film culture, and argue that Dwoskin and Karlin's collaboration, although it did not come to fruition, is revealing of the two filmmakers' differing relationships with Britishness and Jewishness, and prompted a new and significant engagement on Dwoskin's part with questions of diaspora, displacement, and integration.