Abstract

Edward Zwick's 2009 film "Defiance", an adaptation of a historical study by Nechama Tec, recounts the story of a group of Jewish Byelorussian fugitives who survived the Nazi occupation, hiding out in local forests and mounting an effective campaign of resistance. Despite its use of genre conventions, the film presents geographical space of resistance as a "smoothing out of space," as theorised by Deleuze and Guattari in "A Thousand Plateaus". This essay considers how a nomadic occupation of the forest and the smoothing out of space as integral to survival are articulated in the film.