Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium 9781907975028, 9780367600662, 9781315092928

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction
Part I: Between Nations
1 Between National and Cosmopolitan: Twenty-First-Century Holocaust Television in Britain, France, and Italy
2 Collecting, Indexing and Digitizing Survivor Accounts: Holocaust Testimonies in the Digital Age
Part II: Between Images
3 Transits: Essayistic Thinking at the Junctures of Images in Harun Farocki’s Respite and Arnaud des Pallières’s Drancy Avenir
4 Haneke and the Camps
Part III: Between Genres
5 The Nazi Killin’ Business: A Postmodern Pastiche of the Holocaust
6 Globalizing the Holocaust: Fantasies of Annihilation in Contemporary Media Culture
Part IV: Between Media
7 Re-Imagining the Neighbour: Polish-Jewish Relations in Contemporary Polish Visual Culture
8 Performing Cultural Memory: The Holocaust in Dutch Multi-Platform Television Documentary
Part V: Between Genocides
9 Cambodian Genocide: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Cinema of Rithy Panh
10 The Afterlife of Images: Rwanda
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Holocaust Intersections Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium

leGeNda legenda , founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, english, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative literature association.

The Modern Humanities Research Association (mhra ) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including Adorno, Einstein, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, McLuhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide. www.routledge.com

MOVING IMAGE Editorial Committee Professor Emma Wilson, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (General Editor) Professor Robert Gordon, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Professor Annette Kuhn, Queen Mary, University of London Professor Jo Labanyi, New York University Legenda/Moving Image publishes cutting-edge work on any aspect of film or screen media from Europe and Latin America. Studies of European-language cinemas from other continents, and diasporic and intercultural cinemas (with some relation to Europe or its languages), are also encompassed. The series seeks to ref lect a diversity of theoretical, historical, and interdisciplinary approaches to the moving image, and includes projects comparing screen media with other art forms. Research monographs and collected volumes will be considered, but not studies of a single film. As innovation is a priority for the series, volumes should predominantly consist of previously unpublished material. Proposals should be sent with one or two sample chapters to the Editor, Professor Emma Wilson, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge cb2 1rh, UK. appearing in this series 1. Spanish Practices: Literature, Cinema, Television, by Paul Julian Smith 2. Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis, by Laura McMahon 3. Cinema’s Inter-Sensory Encounters: Krzysztof Kieślowski and Claire Denis, by Georgina Evans 4. Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium, edited by Axel Bangert, Robert S. C. Gordon and Libby Saxton 5. Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema, edited by Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson, 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK www.legendabooks.com

Holocaust Intersections Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium ❖ Edited by Axel Bangert, Robert S. C. Gordon and Libby Saxton

Moving Image 4 Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2013

First published 2013 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2013 ISBN 978-1-907975-02-8 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Contents ❖



Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors

ix x



Introduction axel bangert, robert s. c. gordon and libby saxton

1

PART I: Between Nations

1 2

Between National and Cosmopolitan: Twenty-First-Century Holocaust Television in Britain, France, and Italy emiliano perra Collecting, Indexing and Digitizing Survivor Accounts: Holocaust Testimonies in the Digital Age judith keilbach

24

46

PART II: Between Images

3 4

Transits: Essayistic Thinking at the Junctures of Images in Harun Farocki’s Respite and Arnaud des Pallières’s Drancy Avenir laura rascaroli Haneke and the Camps max silverman

66 84

PART III: Between Genres

5 6

The Nazi Killin’ Business: A Postmodern Pastiche of the Holocaust ferzina banaji Globalizing the Holocaust: Fantasies of Annihilation in Contemporary Media Culture barry langford

98

112

PART IV: Between Media

7 Re-Imagining the Neighbour: Polish-Jewish Relations in Contemporary Polish Visual Culture 132 matilda mroz 8 Performing Cultural Memory: The Holocaust in Dutch Multi-Platform Television Documentary 148 berber hagedoorn PART V: BETWEEN GENOCIDES

9 10

Cambodian Genocide: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Cinema of Rithy Panh annette hamilton The Afterlife of Images: Rwanda piotr cieplak and emma wilson Bibliography Index

170 191 206 223

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v

This publication was made possible by generous support from the Department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridge, the Department of Italian, University of Cambridge and the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University of London. The editors would like to thank Graham Nelson, Managing Editor at Legenda, for his support during the assembly of this volume and Alex Lloyd for her copy-editing. We would also like to express our gratitude towards Emma Wilson, General Editor of the Moving Image Series, as well as towards the other members of the editorial committee. We are also extremely grateful to Gil Kofman for allowing us to use a production still from his feature film The Memory Thief as cover image, and to Nan Taplin for her assistance in the assembly of the manuscript. Last but not least, the editors would like to thank their colleagues and students at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge and the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University of London for their support. a.b., r.s.c.g., l.s., January 2013

NOTES ON THE Contributors v

Ferzina Banaji is Project Director at BBC Media Action, an organization that works to promote media uses in the development field. She was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, in the Department of French. Her research on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, philosophy and visual culture has been published in a number of journals and edited volumes. She held a Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and a visiting lectureship at the University of Nottingham. She is presently based in New Delhi, India where she also writes for mainstream, broadsheet publications. Her book France, Film, and the Holocaust: From Genocide to Shoah, published by Palgrave Macmillan, came out in 2012. Axel Bangert is a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, and a member of the Department of German and Dutch. He has research interests in the fields of film and history, cultural memory of the Nazi past as well as transnational European cinemas. In his doctoral thesis, he examined cinema and television productions about the Third Reich since German reunification, assessing how changes in production, aesthetics and reception have impacted upon widespread images of the Nazi past. Piotr A. Cieplak is currently a senior teaching fellow in African film at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is also working for a policy think-tank, the Africa Research Institute. Prior to this, he was the 2010–11 holder of the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry and Literature at St John’s College, Cambridge. His doctoral thesis investigated the representation of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath in photography and documentary film. He has an interest in and has written about cultural memory, commemorative practices, documentary film, photography, African film festivals, Rwandan and East African cinema, and representations of Africa, especially African conf lict and its aftermath, outside the continent. Robert S. C. Gordon is Serena Professor of Italian at Cambridge University. He is the author of Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues (Oxford University Press, 2001), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti’s Auschwitz Report (Verso, 2006). His book The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 appeared with Stanford University Press in 2012. Berber Hagedoorn is a lecturer and researcher in Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She researches multi-platform television, trans-

Notes on the Contributors

xi

media storytelling, cultural memory and the reuse of archival footage in a variety of media platforms, particularly documentary and historical programming. She is conducting her doctoral research within the context of the project EUscreenXL, the pan-European audiovisual aggregator for Europeana. Her work has appeared in publications including Studies in Documentary Film and the Dutch academic journal Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis ( Journal of Media History). She has also been a guest editor, with Jérôme Bourdon, of VIEW: Journal of European Television History and Culture (2013). Annette Hamilton is a cultural anthropologist who has worked in Southeast Asia since the 1980s. She has published numerous articles on cinema, media and popular culture in Thailand. Her recent work has focused on the ‘post-socialist’ states and she is currently writing a monograph on the film materials of the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia. She is Professor in Film Studies in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Judith Keilbach is Assistant Professor of Television History in the Media and Culture Studies Department of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research foci include television history and theory, the relation between media tech­no­ logy and historiography, archives, aerial photography and animals. Her book Geschichtsbilder und Zeitzeugen (Historical Images and Witness, Lit, 2008) analyzes how German television documentaries represent the National Socialist past. She has published a number of articles in English on this topic, including pieces in New German Critique and The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook. She is co-editor, with Ralf Adelmann, Jan-Otmar Hesse, Markus Stauff and Matthias Thiele, of Grundlagentexte zur Fernsehwissenschaft (UVK (UTB), 2002) and, with Eva Hohenberger, of Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit (Vorwerk 8, 2003) and of the journal Montage AV. Barry Langford is Professor of Film Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. Major publications include Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology since 1945 (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (co-edited with Robert Eaglestone, Routledge, 2007). He has published widely on Holocaust film, urban representation, genre and film theory. He is also a screenwriter whose productions include the award-winning Holocaust short film Torte Bluma (US/UK, 2005). He is currently writing The Frankenstein Chronicles, a five-part serial for Channel 4 (UK). Matilda Mroz is Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Greenwich, the author of Temporality and Film Analysis (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity Press, 2012, with Alexander Etkind and others). Between 2008 and 2011 she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge, where she undertook research relating to cinematic engagements with war and trauma in postwar Polish cinema. During this time she was also the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge and the Research Advisor in Film for the HERA-funded Memory at War project

xii

Notes on the Contributors

based in the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge. Her current research centres upon contemporary Eastern European cinema and visual culture, particularly work which is concerned with memory, history, temporality and spatiality. Emiliano Perra is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Winchester. He is the author of Conflicts of Memory: The Reception of Holocaust Films and Television Programmes in Italy, 1945 to the Present (Peter Lang, 2010) and has published articles on Holocaust memory and visual representation in journals including Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Memory Studies and The Italianist. Laura Rascaroli is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. Her main research interest lies in European art film. She is the author of The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (Wallf lower, 2009) and, with Ewa Mazierska, of From Moscow to Madrid: European Cities, Postmodern Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2003), The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries (Wallf lower, 2004) and Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (Wallf lower, 2006). She has edited the volumes The Cause of Cosmopolitanism: Dispositions, Models, Transformations (Peter Lang, 2010), with Patrick O’Donovan, and Antonioni: Centenary Essays (British Film Institute/Palgrave, 2011) with John David Rhodes. She is a co-founder and currently general editor of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. Libby Saxton is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She is author of Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (Wallf lower, 2008), co-author, with Lisa Downing, of Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (Routledge, 2010) and co-editor, with Simon Kemp, of Seeing Things: Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French Studies (Peter Lang, 2002). Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. His most recent work is on post-Holocaust culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and cultures, and questions of memory, race and violence. He has just completed a book on connections between the Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary entitled Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Berghahn, 2013). His co-edited book with Griselda Pollock Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’ was published in 2011 (Berghahn). Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Her recent books include Alain Resnais (Manchester University Press, 2006), Atom Egoyan (Illinois University Press, 2009) and Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is currently Course Director of the MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures.

Introduction v Axel Bangert, Robert S. C. Gordon and Libby Saxton Testimony, Memory, Ownership In trying to chart how visual culture at the new millennium has engaged with the Holocaust, this volume intervenes in an immensely — perhaps impossibly — vast field. Without pretending to offer an exhaustive account of the topic, its contributions provide insight into a number of significant trends in the production, distribution and reception of recent works about the Nazi genocide. They ask how visual culture has shaped and transformed memory of the event, and they widen this perspective by looking beyond the Holocaust, by now an established and f lexible reference point in Western culture, and towards other histories of genocide. What unites these different strands of enquiry is the realization that the ways in which visual culture since the 1990s has approached the Holocaust require us to rethink traditional paradigms of analysis. This affects not only the concept of nation, as ref lected in the growing body of works examining the memory of genocide from a transnational vantage point. It also affects how we conceptualize visual media as such and their role in memory culture in particular. Crucial aspects in this regard are the status of the image, both as historical index and agent of memory, as well as its semantics, from the palimpsest of the essay film to the pastiche of genre cinema. On a broader scale, the increase in multi-platform productions about the Holocaust exemplifies how visual culture today is also redefining the boundaries of and between media. The aim of this introduction is to sketch the movement of thought which guided the assembly of this volume. By conducting three brief case studies, it illustrates how the performance of memory through the visual prompts us to rethink the categories of nation and history, medium and genre, and indeed of memory itself. As a starting point, our introductory survey will take up the cover image of this book, a production still from American writer and director Gil Kofman’s feature film, The Memory Thief (2008). The film’s inciting incident is a chance encounter with a survivor of Auschwitz, which causes its protagonist Lukas to feel increasingly attracted by the Holocaust as a history of suffering. It is an attraction which leads to an excessive consumption of Holocaust testimonies, as if in an attempt to absorb the enormity of suffering, and it is this moment in Lukas’s transformation which is powerfully conveyed in the still image on the cover of this book. Ultimately, Lukas’s encounter with the suffering of the Holocaust results in its appropriation: he begins to identify with a history that is not his own, to the point where he sees himself as the true witness of the event. At one and the same time individual drama and social commentary, the premise of The Memory Thief makes an important statement about

2

Introduction

the situation in which visual culture about the Holocaust at the new millennium finds itself. It is a moment in which, arguably even more so than previously, the ownership of history is contested and renegotiated. The Holocaust forms part of a global culture of remembrance in which the event, its meanings and implications, are re-defined and re-contextualized for the most heterogeneous purposes.1 The question which Lukas is confronted with — to whom does the Holocaust, to whom does its memory belong? — is one which underlies and indeed structures several of the contributions united in this volume. Essentially a tale of social alienation, in which isolation spurs the desire to join a community of victims, The Memory Thief sets Lukas’s immersion into Holocaust testimony against the anonymity of the urban. Lacking familial ties, the Holocaust appears to present an ideal foil for his projection of a self-image of victimhood. Unlike the neo-Nazis who eventually victimize him for his artificial identity, Lukas is attracted not by the hatred and violence of the perpetrators, but by those whom he sees as ‘purified by intense suffering’. Of course, the film is quick to show the acute dangers and inevitable failure of this act. Lukas not only loses the last residues of his already frail identity, but his obsession also poses a threat to the actual victims, as, in his thirst for testimony, he urges them to excavate memories which they buried for the sake of being able to live on. The power of media to provide audiovisual experiences of the past, and to undermine ‘claims of authenticity [...] and ownership’, is here presented in its negative effects, as it fails to recognize ‘the alterity of the other’.2 The theme of victimhood thus addressed by The Memory Thief, its construction and appropriation in visual culture, also runs like a thread through this volume. While contemporary media have continued to produce and remediate countless images of victimhood, the question as to how suffering and testimony are adequately conveyed is by no means conclusively answered. This book investigates how different media are used to give different answers to this question, from the domestic interests of national television, which at the same time need to accommodate the demands of memory culture at large, to the in principle world-wide accessibility of digital testimony archives. The Memory Thief repeatedly highlights the power of the cinema in the appro­ priation of memory: its episode about the invented Holocaust film The Selection by fictitious Hollywood director Victor Horowitz is a grotesquely distorted yet easily decipherable allusion to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). In fact, as several of the chapters in this volume illustrate, the impact of this global film event continues to resonate in audiovisual Holocaust memory at the new millennium. The scene of Lukas watching The Selection in the cinema might be seen as a comment on how Schindler’s List achieved this impact: similarly to the logic of visual archives of atrocity described by Susan Sontag, it organizes horror and pain into familiar tropes causing a calculated response.3 While not a single image of The Selection is shown, as the camera focuses on Lukas’s almost ceremonial reception of the film, a few sound bites and dialogue bits suffice to tell the story. Presented as the work of a genius of the horror film, The Selection denounces Holocaust cinema as having become subsumed into genre film. Kofman here points at a process of ‘genrefication’ which, if the structure and success of the NBC series Holocaust (1978) is taken into

Introduction

3

account, stands at the very beginning of the popularization of Holocaust memory. The new forms which this process has taken in recent years are a further recurrent theme throughout this book. At the same time, its contributions also examine other, sometimes less prominent forms of image-making about genocide, such as essay films, art projects and video installations, with the aim of achieving a more balanced account of public memory culture. The fact that Lukas responds to visual Holocaust memory, be it recorded or fictionalized, by reinventing himself as a Jewish survivor might be taken as indicative of Kofman’s view that much of present-day Holocaust memory amounts to a cult of the victim. It caters for a culture which yearns for tales of redemption and survival, but which, in the act of consuming these, denies the reality of victimhood, thus effectively, to reuse Barbie Zelizer’s memorable phrase, ‘remembering to forget’.4 Images of victimhood, their (re-)mediation and (re-)appropriation are also a major focus of this volume, which tries to illustrate some of the forms which the cult of the victim has taken at the new millennium. Some of its contributions deal with attempts within nationally networked media to define one’s ‘own’ victims as well as to engage with the ‘other’ as victim, the latter being a particularly difficult undertaking where that other used to be a neighbour but is now virtually absent. Other contributions demonstrate how, at the same time, images of Holocaust victimhood have become stock elements of a globally distributed genre cinema, constituting a visual reservoir for diverse, often economically driven appropriations and elaborations. As part of this process, the image of the Holocaust victim can change not only context but also status, turning from a passive object of grief into an agent of revenge, and thus on the level of a self-conscious, post-modern counter history subvert the iconography of victimhood critically refracted by Kofman. Finally, it was of great importance to the editors to extend this discussion beyond the Holocaust by considering the victims of subsequent acts of state-sponsored mass murder in Rwanda and Cambodia. In this regard, the volume raises questions about the witnessing, reporting and remembering of these events within and between cultures, asking how traditions of testimony and memory inf lect each other through visual culture. Regarding the work of Rithy Panh, for instance, and its complex project of interrelating the experiences and perspectives of victims and perpetrators, this mode of enquiry might also open up new ways of thinking about Holocaust memory. As the talking heads on the multiple screens on the cover image indicate, the conf lict about memory and ownership in The Memory Thief is largely played out through the mediation of testimony. Throughout, the film looks at the ethical problems involved in the act of recording, archiving and disseminating testimony, its conditions and consequences, uses and misuses. It shows how testimony turns from lived experience and embodied memory into a record which can be repeated and distributed beyond the generational turn. The Memory Thief thus illustrates how the passing on of testimony, a fundamental concern of Holocaust memory during the 1990s, continues to be of intense relevance. As Lukas starts to work for a Holocaust testimony archive, keen to record interviews with survivors, he gradually comes to think of himself as a living medium of testimony, and eventually

4

Introduction

as ‘the last survivor’. While he first participates in the archiving of testimony, he soon comes to resist the generational turn and its effects. Given his excessive identification with the victims, one might see The Memory Thief as putting forward a rather sceptical view of mediated testimony, as necessarily entailing an illegitimate appropriation. Yet, perhaps one could also see Lukas’s excessive identification as a (necessarily unsuccessful) experiment of re-embodying testimony, as a — for us viewers — productive misunderstanding highlighting some of the problems which the mediation of testimony involves. For instance, although during an interview recording, Lukas offends a Holocaust survivor with an undoubtedly insensitive question, it is hard to dismiss his unease about how such video testimonies are staged. However, in the end it is precisely Lukas’s insistence on the irreducibility of suffering and his search for absolute testimony which lead him to disrespect the victims: urging a survivor to tell his true story, Lukas not only produces a record of hitherto concealed events, but also drives the survivor into suicide. With its use of VHS tapes, despite the fact that the film was released in 2008, when digital technology was already profoundly changing memory culture, The Memory Thief foregrounds forcefully the medium in which many early Holocaust testimonies were recorded. Kofman’s film thus reminds us of the extent to which the history of Holocaust testimony is also that of its media of storage. By what means Holocaust testimony is produced, provided and received is an issue which this book explores in various ways, most importantly in terms of the transition from analogue to digital and its far-reaching effects on remembrance. At times, this transition has been analyzed in terms of a loss of indexicality, putting into crisis the notion of the filmic image as a visual imprint of a specific time and place. It is a strand of thought which informs several of the contributions assembled here, be it in terms of the use of historical footage in essay or documentary film, or our — not only ethical and aesthetic, but also emotional and affective — rapport with more recent images of genocide, being recorded in magnetic or digital formats. The Memory Thief also incites us to ref lect on how different media for archiving testimony create different reception experiences: depending on VHS tapes, Lukas still consumes Holocaust testimony in the linear fashion which the medium prescribes. Arguably, it is not least this close following of the words of the survivor accounts which facilitates his immersion within testimony and eventually his identification with the victims. What is at first an image on a screen, surrounded by a plastic frame, is later shown as if it formed part of Lukas’s world, as a direct encounter. With its capacity for non-linear viewing and indexing, digital technology has created new ways of organizing survivor accounts, and part of the rationale of this volume is to examine this and other ways in which the digital is changing our approach to testimony and the memory of genocide more generally. From the post-production of images to production formats across traditional platforms, digital technology has profoundly transformed our engagement with and experience of the past. Towards the end of The Memory Thief, Lukas not only seeks to assume the status of a Jewish victim, but also comes to see the Holocaust as an event or a condition which goes beyond the community of its victims: ‘Auschwitz isn’t just for the Jews anymore’. In what we might again regard as a productive misunderstanding, Lukas

Introduction

5

treats the Holocaust as a reference point for his present condition, ref lecting the degree to which memory of the event has been institutionalized and universalized. And, again, Lukas acts out this fact in an excessive and compulsive way, for instance, when he places the slogan ‘Arbeit macht frei’ inside the highway tollgate where he works, or when he separates German from American cars. The Holocaust, not least in terms of the organization and selection of the masses, becomes a prism through which Lukas begins to see his work as well as his alienation from the urban environment. What is at face value an unjustified and cynical projection at the same time raises fundamental questions about the legacy of the Holocaust in contemporary society and media. Following this line of enquiry, this volume also seeks to trace the indirect reverberations of the event in present-day visual culture. It asks how forms of image-production which are on the surface concerned with present predicaments, such as the cinema of Michael Haneke, nevertheless contain the past as a trace or an implicit logic. This draws attention to another dimension of the image not as a historical record or digital simulation, but as a site of overlap between different times and places, a dimension which this volume explores as a decisive feature of audiovisual Holocaust memory at the new millennium. Archive, Lacunae, Montage If some discussions in this book deal with the palimpsestic overlapping of different histories and frames of reference within images, others foreground transitions or intersections between images. A number of the documentaries and film and video essays referred to by our contributors propose new interpretations of photographs or footage that have survived from genocides by re-editing these visuals and/or bringing them into contact with images, sounds or texts that originate elsewhere. In works such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) and Harun Farocki’s Aufschub (Respite, 2007), lens-based records from Second World War concentration camps are transformed through rearrangement and/or juxtaposition with material from other sources. These films raise questions about the kinds of knowledge that can be gleaned from Holocaust footage and about the gaps and ambiguities that reside in those images. In this respect, Godard’s and Farocki’s works of montage tap into broader concerns about the nature of the image, its referentiality, materiality and boundaries, that persistently inf lect a range of debates and screen practices related to the Holocaust today. One of the necessary tasks faced by the contributors to this volume is that of engaging with past patterns in Holocaust representation and testimony in order to highlight the specificity of twenty-first-century developments. The attempt to contextualize and make sense of imagery of the Nazi genocide cinematically of course dates back to the compilations produced in the immediate aftermath of the war from documentary footage of the recently liberated camps. A decade later, Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) famously reorganized images of the camps into a dialectical form. Pre-empting our interest in boundarytraversals in present-day Holocaust culture, recent readings have paid special attention to Night and Fog’s appositional placement of material from disparate sites

6

Introduction

and eras and concurrent disturbance of multiple borderlines — between present and past, here and there, the living and the dead.5 For Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, Night and Fog is the paradigmatic example of ‘concentrationary cinema’, a poetics which unsettles ‘comforting dichotomies’ through ‘shocking montage’, ‘estranging juxtapositions’ and ‘in-betweens’.6 However, the later reworkings of the archive considered in this book ref lect shifts in the way that Holocaust images are displayed and understood that have occurred in the intervening decades. As Zelizer notes, the eclectic array of ‘atrocity photos’ that circulated in the postwar period was quickly replaced by a more limited but incessantly recycled ‘Holocaust iconography’, which persisted in imbuing images with an aura of universality.7 The past twenty years or so have seen a proliferation of corrective research into the production and reproduction histories of this repertoire of icons.8 This has been complemented by studies of images that have received less exposure, work fuelled in part by the increased accessibility of archives in former Communist countries since the end of the Cold War.9 Misgivings about the repeated showing and ebbing power of a narrow set of icons of the genocide also informed the well-known critique of the value of archive images elaborated by Claude Lanzmann implicitly in his film Shoah (1985) and explicitly in essays and interviews.10 As well as drawing on recent historical investigations into the lives of specific images, contemporary visual culture of the Holocaust continues to negotiate the legacy of such attacks on the archive. This inheritance is discernible in the intensified concern with the mutable meanings and fragmentary status of surviving images that shapes certain boundarytroubling practices of compilation and juxtaposition in the present. In his much-discussed book Images malgré tout (Images in Spite of All, 2003), Georges Didi-Huberman intervenes in the post-Lanzmannian debate about the status of the lens-based Holocaust archive by proposing a mode of analysis that is particularly attentive to the borders of and junctures between images. Eschewing understandings of the image as unable to render the Holocaust in its entirety and thus liable to screen us from that event’s reality, he posits the concept of the ‘imagelacune’ (lacuna-image), a site of singularities, differences and gaps, where presence and absence, residue and loss, intermingle. He explains: ‘The lacuna-image is a traceimage and a disappearance-image at the same time. Something remains that is not the thing, but a scrap of its resemblance.’11 The primary examples of such mimetic remnants which Didi-Huberman offers are the only four known photographs of the process of mass murder by gas (taken by members of a Sonderkommando in the environs of Crematorium V at Auschwitz in August 1944). Rather than examining the photographs as documents, mere information carriers, he approaches them phenomenologically as events, exploring what at first glance apparently uninformative blurry shapes and areas of shadow betray about the perilous circumstances in which the images were captured. For instance, he observes that the cropped form in which three of the photographs have been exhibited excizes the marginal marks that confirm that the photographer was forced to work secretly and thus, by extension, excludes the indices of the photographs’ ‘condition of existence’.12 In a move indebted to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘dialectical image’ and to Godard’s treatment of Holocaust footage in Histoire(s) du cinéma,

Introduction

7

Didi-Huberman goes on to argue that the ‘lacuna-image’ becomes interpretable only when dialecticized within montage. He contends: ‘the “readability” of [the Sonderkommando] images [...] can only be constructed by making them resonate with, and showing their difference from, other sources, other images, and other testimonies’.13 For Didi-Huberman, then, the visible content of the singular, decontextualized image can conduce merely partial knowledge of the real from which it is wrested. To gain a fuller understanding of this history we must also attend to the image’s intersections with other material. A handful of the recent visual works discussed in this volume take up the con­ versation about the legibility of lens-based traces of organized terror. Juan Reina’s documentary Iseta: Behind the Roadblock (2008) probes the evidentiary and affective functions of the only known piece of footage of killing in progress in the Rwandan genocide. Farocki’s short silent essay film Respite draws attention to the multiple lacunae that riddle footage of the Westerbork camp captured in 1944 by the inmate Rudolf Breslauer on the orders of camp commander Albert Gemmeker. Both works recontextualize iconic film associated with genocide in ways that prompt consideration of visual ellipses and inter-image relations. The boundaries of and between images also emerge as charged sites in Yael Hersonski’s critically divisive documentary A Film Unfinished (2010), another production that attests to persistent contemporary hesitancies about the transparency and completeness of the photographed or filmed image. As its title f lags up, Hersonski’s film deals, like Respite, with a remnant cinematic part-object: a silent copy of just over an hour of roughly edited black and white 35mm footage, which was shot by a Nazicommissioned crew in the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942, two months before the start of mass deportations to Treblinka, and lay forgotten in a GDR film archive until 1954. A Film Unfinished directs attention to borders and interfaces in two principal senses. First, it encourages conjecture about the spatial and temporal limits — the framings, beginnings and ends — of the shots of the ghetto and about the editing of the perpetrator film. Second, like Didi-Huberman, it prompts ref lection on the specific heuristic role that montage can play in contemporary re-evaluations of images spawned by genocide. Discovered in canisters labelled simply ‘Ghetto’, the film of Warsaw lacks potentially disambiguating elements such as sound, intertitles or a paper trail which might vouch for its original intention.14 Its depictions of street life, housing conditions, commerce, leisure and religious customs have sometimes been presented as windows on daily existence in the walled-in zone, perhaps most notoriously in the BBC programme Warsaw Ghetto (Alexander Bernfes, 1966).15 As Lucy Dawidowicz and others have pointed out, however, such uses disavow the film’s antisemitic orientation — which is discernible, for example, in its insistence on the supposed indifference of an ostensibly wealthy minority of ghetto residents toward the suffering of the poor majority — thus naturalizing distorted images that were themselves part of the genocidal project.16 For some reviewers, Hersonski’s reworking of the Nazis’ images also fails sufficiently to problematize or interrogate them. Several commentators are sceptical of the generic techniques that she borrows from mainstream documentary, such as dramatic reconstructions and the overlaying

8

Introduction

of archive footage with newly created sound effects, which are condemned as at best redundant, at worst manipulative in this context.17 Other reviews are critical of lapses in precision in the information the film provides. As Sue Vice points out (in an otherwise largely approving reading), it is not ‘absolutely clear if we see the entirety of the Nazis’ footage or representative samples’, a significant obfuscation in a film that explicitly investigates the editing process.18 More damning is Dirk Rupnow’s verdict that A Film Unfinished proves unable to puncture the disturbing allure of the propaganda images, which are ‘ultimately read after all as a ref lection of ghetto life’.19 Nevertheless, A Film Unfinished throws light on a wider preoccupation with the readability and partiality of the visual archives of genocides that is an insistent feature of recent memory culture. The status of the Nazis’ film as purveyor of knowledge about the ghetto is recurrently questioned by Hersonski’s montage. Ref lecting in an interview on the conceptual origins of her project, Hersonski refers to the public polemics between Lanzmann and Godard about the import of archive images of the Holocaust.20 In his own response to this debate, Didi-Huberman dwells on the fragmentary status of two photograms from George Stevens’s footage of the dead at Dachau, which appear in the audiovisual palimpsest of Histoire(s) du cinéma. Whereas these and other ‘lacuna-images’ analyzed by Didi-Huberman were created to bear witness to atrocities, the film investigated by Hersonski was intended to construct a selective and skewed account of ghetto life; it is lacunary in this crucial additional sense. A Film Unfinished encourages us to view this artefact, with its proliferation of gaps, not as a bearer of comprehensive information but as an incomplete leftover of one facet of the genocide or, in Didi-Huberman’s terms, as a ‘scrap [...] of an aspect of the real’.21 Like Didi-Huberman, Hersonski reminds us that lens-based Holocaust images are material objects, inherently fragile pieces of the past. A Film Unfinished opens with historical footage of stacks of film reels in an archive and is punctuated by images of film strips being handled and the sounds of a projector. The material dimensions of the original image carrier are also highlighted by marks of decay in the digital copy of the ghetto footage; we are witnessing traces under erasure. Furthermore, the photographic basis of film is repeatedly foregrounded as Hersonski slows and pauses the archive images, giving us time to contemplate individual faces, looks and gestures. This oscillation between motion and stillness speaks of a desire to bridge the ever-widening abyss between present and past which, as several chapters of this book point out, persistently inf lects our relation to visual remnants of the Holocaust at the new millennium. A Film Unfinished presents the propaganda footage not only as a fragment of one dimension of the real but also as an event in its own right, by investigating how it was made. Hersonski juxtaposes the perpetrator images with material that draws attention to their constructed nature and points to what was happening outside the frame. Our suspicions about the ghetto footage are confirmed by a multi-vocal commentary which includes readings from diaries and testimonies by people who appeared in, witnessed the making of or belonged to the crew of the film. Over shots of Judenrat ( Jewish Council) leader Adam Czierniaków meeting a group of rabbis, for example, we hear an extract from his journal describing how his office

Introduction

9

was redecorated for the scene on the filmmakers’ orders. The deceptiveness of other images is highlighted by survivors of the ghetto as they view the film in the present.22 For instance, shots of emaciated corpses lying on pavements and apparently indifferent passers-by prompt one survivor to recall seeing residents who still looked human being forced to walk past the dead in front of the camera, a memory which alters our perception of and emotional response to the images. Another type of interpolated matter which transforms our understanding of the Nazis’ film is footage that was discarded by its original editors. Drawn from separate reels unearthed in the Library of Congress archives in 1998, these outtakes include glimpses of the film crew at work and multiple takes of several scenes. Hersonski supplies evidence of the staged nature of events in the film and insights into the crew’s agenda by repositioning in sequence plural renditions of a shot — malnourished children gazing at meat in a shop window as a well-dressed woman bustles past them to make her purchase, or men struggling to clear a pavement of bodies — distinguished by variations in the protagonists’ movements and in camera angle. In reuniting the rejected takes with the roughly cut film, Hersonski heightens awareness of and, so to speak, undoes the camera operator’s work of framing and the editor’s labour of selection and arrangement. The juxtaposition of differently framed and choreographed takes introduces repetitions and discontinuities which call attention to the frame-line, the cut and, by extension, the artifice of the Nazis’ film. Both the voice-overs and the outtakes, then, encourage speculation about the realms outside the confines of the perpetrator images and the moments before and after those captured. A Film Unfinished intersects with other recent treatments of genocide footage considered in this volume by foregrounding the bounded, fragmentary and partial nature of surviving images and the importance of repositioning them in their production contexts. In Hersonski’s film, further transformations occur at the junctures between images of past and present. A Film Unfinished cuts between the ghetto footage and facial close-ups of the survivors watching it, their varied reactions illuminated by f lickering bluish ref lections of the screen. One survivor leans closer to the visuals as street scenes unfold, wondering nervously if she will see someone she recognizes. At moments, moreover, Hersonski’s editing alludes to the classical shot/reverseshot pattern, creating the tantalizing illusion that figures in the archive footage are returning the look of those in the on-screen projection room. By contrast, towards the end of the film, hauntingly prescient footage of piles of bodies and mass graves in the ghetto cemetery is intercut with intimate shots of survivors closing or covering their eyes. For Didi-Huberman, ‘to place an image of the camps — or of Nazi barbarity in general — in a montage’ is to show its ‘difference from and link with that which surrounds it in this particular case’.23 On the one hand, the old and new visuals juxtaposed in these sequences are closely correlated: both the aging footage and the on-screen audience are survivors of the ghetto and, as such, they seem to bring the past within reach. On the other hand, the two sets of images, and the viewing process that they stage, point up distinctions and incommensurabilities: between dying and living on, the anonymous mass and the individual, facial blankness and expressivity, the loss and retrieval of humanity. Here, the film self-

10

Introduction

consciously enjoins us to consider the temporal gulf between now and then and the different kinds of information transmitted by the archive and the witness. In probing knowledge that is not intrinsic to any single image but generated at the borders of and between shots, A Film Unfinished throws light on significant kinds of boundary-disturbance that are examined in this volume as characteristic of audiovisual engagements with the Holocaust today. Journeying Between This book is interested in exploring how the visual culture of the Holocaust at the turn of the millennium seemed persistently to inhabit border sites and transitional forms, between different geographies, histories, genres and more. One remarkable single work that traverses multiple intersections of these kinds, staging a series of convergences and oblique or hybrid explorations, all subtended in some strange way by the Holocaust, is a 2006 Italian documentary film called La strada di Levi (Primo Levi’s Journey, or more literally, ‘Levi’s Road’). A brief account and analysis of it can serve as a useful template and guide to some of the persistent concerns of the present volume. Conceived by director Davide Ferrario together with writer and cultural critic Marco Belpoliti, the film is a central- and eastern-European travelogue. Its journeying charts the disconcerting diversity of the new states and societies of the former-Communist bloc in Eastern Europe — rubbing up against a spectrum of social and political realities, ranging from explosively new forms of capitalism to retro­g rade hangovers of the state socialist system — more than a decade after the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. As the film’s title obliquely de­clares, however, it is built on a textual palimpsest which links the journey to — and indeed allows us to explain and experience the journey through — the Holocaust. Primo Levi, one of the most powerful voices of Holocaust survivor testimony to emerge in postwar Europe, published his second book, The Truce (La tregua), in 1963.24 The book narrates Levi’s compelling, picaresque and protracted eightmonth journey home, following his unlikely survival of nearly a year in the concentration camp at Auschwitz III-Monowitz and his subsequent liberation in a state of desperate weakness and confusion in January 1945. Thrust out into the ‘primeval Chaos’ of postwar central Europe,25 with communications and infrastructures shattered and vast populations of ‘displaced persons’ migrating homewards, if their homes still stood, or instead in search of some barely imagined new home, Levi and his varied bands of companions were shunted around roads and train-tracks, holding camps and station halls, navigating a tortuous route between Poland and Italy, passing through eight countries and thousands of kilometres, as set out by Levi in a meandering line on a map at the start of The Truce.26 As Tony Judt’s magisterial Postwar has shown, the chaos of the zone Levi traversed in those months was both the residual refraction of the chaos of the war itself — and the genocidal violence that had occurred within it — and also the seedbed of the national, ethnic, geopolitical and ideological fissures of Europe’s long postwar era.27 For Levi himself, the journey was a strange, unreal, extended pause, ‘a truce’

Introduction

11

between deportation and post-Holocaust return to ‘normality’, a ‘re-awakening’28 to the variety of human life and freedom, as well as a first moment to ref lect back on the depths of the horrors he had seen at Auschwitz. In early 2005, Ferrario and Belpoliti set out, exactly sixty years after Levi’s liberation from Auschwitz, to follow the precise journey Levi had taken in 1945, to retrace the line and redraw the map that frames The Truce and in so doing to follow the traces of the world that framed Europe’s ‘postwar’ and the ‘after’ of the Holocaust. The film Primo Levi’s Journey is the documentary chronicle of that journey. The film is even dated, in an end credit, to the exact months of Levi’s journey: ‘filmed in Europe, January to October 2005’, just as Levi’s journey had lasted from January to October 1945. This doggedly literal retracing taps into a late-millennium trend for psychogeographical pilgrimages across sites of lost or hidden history — there are echoes of Sebald, here, for example.29 In this case, the journey builds on a sense of the Holocaust — and its residues — as something akin to a substratum or a palimpsest for our contemplation and understanding of all the intersecting histories that followed on from it, including those that occluded it and those that never escaped from it. The presence of the palimpsest takes several forms in Primo Levi’s Journey. First it uses the map itself from its source text, The Truce — and the map’s shifting history — to give order to its studiedly eclectic geographical wanderings. Each episode of the film is introduced by an intertitle (typically a country-name and an emblematic phrase; for example, ‘Ukraine. Identity’ or ‘Romania. New Horizons’), set against the on-screen background of the map, with the line of Levi’s and Ferrario/ Belpoliti’s journeys within the borders of that single country or area set out in red. The dramatic geopolitical transformation of the region since 1989, however, means that Ferrario, Belpoliti and their small crew of technicians and interpreters crisscross a series of old and new borders, and old and new nations, several of which did not exist in 1945, either because they never had existed or because they had been suppressed in the Soviet era, a confusing and f luid remapping of regions, nations, cultures and economies. The film also uses as another palimpsest Levi’s own words in The Truce30 — recited at intervals by sonorously voiced actor Umberto Orsini and glimpsed in the book itself, held in the filmmakers’ hands in several shots — in order to hint at or tease out the temporal slippages and connections between testimonial text and third-millennium Europe. The film is, in other words, in part a re-reading, and glossing through the image-track, of Levi’s Holocaust memoir or rather postHolocaust, survival memoir. Furthermore, Ferrario and Belpoliti complemented this already self-conscious operation of the film with a cluster of further newspaper articles, book publications, essays, photographs and drawings, creating an elaborate matrix of ref lective artefacts emanating out of the film, the source text and their temporal-historical slippages.31 On top of this literal work of reading and intermedial glossing, however, are laid other image-tracks, other source-texts and ideas of palimpsests and archives, in a way which is highly indicative of the complex layering and intersection within the recent visual culture of the Holocaust that this book sets out to explore.

12

Introduction

The opening sequence of the film is a significant case in point. Entitled ‘Auschwitz. Memory’, it explores restlessly and multiply the sites of the concentration and extermination camp network at Auschwitz. Levi’s words are read out, from his first book If This is a Man, set almost entirely within the site of the Auschwitz camps, as well as from The Truce. Images of Levi himself are shown, taken from an Italian television documentary which followed his own journey (another filmed journey of retraced return) back to Poland to visit Auschwitz in 1982.32 Then, from contemporary 2005 footage, we see variously in intermingling sequence on the ground at Auschwitz: the Ferrario / Belpoliti crew, on occasion accompanied on the sound-track by older documentary sounds; present-day tourist groups spread across the camp site and its museum spaces, jostling and contemplating; eerily silent snowy shots of the camp barracks and barbed wire; and finally also a series of shots and scenes of the memorial events of 27 January 2005, the international civic ceremonies of the sixtieth-anniversary commemorations of the liberation by the Soviet army (narrated at the very start of The Truce). The ceremony section includes, tellingly, footage of the vast, globally connected, high-tech media centre set up for the entourage of the commemorative event, which Ferrario / Belpoliti’s crew wander around in strange isolation — theirs is a suspended, slow-film project, whereas all around them is the bustle of instant, globalized news response, the Holocaust now one of dozens of daily, global media events. At this point, Primo Levi’s Journey and its spectators are already cast as melancholic, wry observers of history and of the imbrication of history with its legacies: in some trace or presence, the Auschwitz episode has visited and revisited the camp site, whether in words or images, in 1944, 1945, 1982, various postwar moments recorded in documentary form, and multiple sites of and perspectives in / on 2005. It has also projected a patchwork of intermedial sources — Levi’s text, original documentary film, television footage, contemporary tourist imagery, multi-media transmissions, and so on — in order to hint at the hyper-mediated processes we currently need to undertake, even to begin to trawl back through the histories and geographies of the Holocaust now. The intermedial principle at work here is also declared at the start of the film as a synaesthetic one, in the mixture of text and image, glossed in a voice-over as follows: ‘with our eyes and with his [Levi’s] words, we set out on a journey to follow Levi’s road [sulla strada di Levi]’. It is, though, also crucial to the field we are exploring to note that Primo Levi’s Journey is, overwhelmingly, not a ‘Holocaust film’, much to the disconcerted dis­ appointment of sectors of its audience at special screenings and film festivals around the world, many of whom were drawn to it by Levi’s name in the title and its promise of a ‘life-and-works’ biopic account of his achievements. In fact, a bricolage of other histories and other hauntings or survivals pushes to the fore and comes to dominate the film, even if the map, the source-text, the palimpsest, come from Levi and from the Holocaust. The camera — and also the music sound-track — of Primo Levi’s Journey is constantly, restlessly in movement, in search of emblems of these other histories and their residues, the mediated, at times mournful, at times hysterical mixtures of old and new. Most prominently, these other histories are Soviet-era histories, lying hidden or none-too-hidden beneath the uneasy post-

Introduction

13

Fig. 0.1. ‘Chernobyl. Contaminated Machinery Storage’. La strada di Levi (Primo Levi’s Journey), dir. Davide Ferrario (2006). DVD capture.

Soviet structures and personal stories that have been built on top of them, often literally on top of their physical remains, since 1989. The film is peppered, for example, with graveyards and ruins, both literal and metaphorical. Of course, Auschwitz itself is a vast funerary site, but the film also visits and contemplates ruined factories and museums containing Communist-era icons and emblems (often reduced to kitsch, such as in a website, glimpsed by the crew while in Poland, called crazyguide.com, offering ‘Communist Tours’); or the Hungarian cemetery of old Soviet statuary filmed shortly before we see a grandiose Slovakian memorial cemetery of Russian Liberation heroes. Most searing of all the ‘funerary’ sites in the film besides Auschwitz itself are what we might call two Soviet-era industrial graveyards: the steelworks at Nowa Huta in Poland, revisited by Ferrario / Belpoliti along with film director Andrzej Wajda, who had used the site for his 1970s film Man of Marble, and who looks over its ruins and its memories (and that of the entire Soviet era) as if the factory were a snow-covered ‘corpse’; and the extended sequence of film-time — again mixing archive footage, present-day landscapes and interviews, shot in panning and hand-held camerawork — spent in and around the Chernobyl nuclear plant and the nearby ghost city of Prypiat. At the heart of the Chernobyl contaminated zone and city lies a vast field where rusting heaps of machinery and technology (modernity) lie poisonously decaying in their radioactive state: the camera pans slowly across the field as if contemplating the aftermath of a war or a plague. Primo Levi’s words return in voice-over, ref lecting on the entropy of the natural world and of human history, strangely compelling and prescient even today, and as relevant to the Holocaust as to this other history, this other graveyard: This Earth of ours is governed by a perverse, although not invincible power, which puts disorder before order, compound before pure substances, tangled knots before parallel lines, rust before iron and stupidity before reason. The world seems to be heading towards some kind of ruin and the most we can hope for is that its progress will be slow.

14

Introduction

The textures of the world and of history as ruin run like a tactile thread through the film, coded through mutiply contrasting aesthetics and through knowing cultural resonances and reprises: from the aesthetics of the socialist realist statuary and sculptures to the films of Wajda; from the mock-aggrandizing architectural styles of railway station halls to the unassuming brickwork of old Gulag buildings; to the folk culture of local music, such as when visiting the centre of Lviv, where we hear the story of Ukrainian folksinger Igor Bilozir, beaten to death by Russian nationalists in 2000 for playing Ukrainian songs in his own city and country. This plural aesthetic dimension allows the film knowingly to spill over into a series of self-consciously post-modern, late-capitalist and wrily witty moments, where all those traces of the past and their kitsch residues rub up against each other and jostle for space in the new realities of the early 2000s. At Nowa Huta in 2005, for example, the camera frames a series of icons and street-signs at a crossroads: Deutsche Bank’s logo in the backgroud; in the foreground, angled against each other, the streetnames ‘Solidarnosc Avenue’, ‘Ronald Regan Square’ and ‘John Paul II Avenue’. These names mark together the end of Communism, the convulsive rise of capitalism and commercialism, and also incipient globalization: the steelworks of Nowa Huta, we are told, are now owned by an Anglo-Indian conglomerate, and later in the film, we will meet further multiple signs of the migrations of people and capital in and out of eastern Europe that have marked the new capitalisms of late twentieth-century globalization. This is signalled particularly, in a nod to the pivotal role of Italy in Primo Levi’s story and the genesis and endpoint of his journey and this film, by migrations between western and eastern Europe. The episode ‘Moldavia. Emigration’ follows a 2000km coach journey from Moldavia to Italy taken by a nurse hoping to send some euros home to her children; but it is followed by ‘Romania. New Horizons’, where we learn also of older emigrations, of ethnic Germans hounded out of Romania or indeed deported by Russians to Siberia after the war (back to Judt’s postwar), and the subsequent inf lux from northern Italy of Italian stonemasons, seen in archive footage dancing to Romanian music at a 1960 workers ball. The sequence is followed by a converse contemporary look at a new outsourced Italian-owned factory churning out cheap products for global export. For obvious reasons, then, but also for a more complex and subtle set of resonances, this motif of journeying and migration lies at the very foundations of the film’s exploration of the intersecting of European histories and geographies, and their cultural markers, from 1945 to 2005 and all points in-between. Indeed, the single most obsessive visual and stylistic motif of this documentary-road-movie is the contemplating of sites and lines of transit: roads, train-tracks, station buildings and long-shot landscapes, especially rural landscapes. All of these represent the interstitial spaces that give substance and direction to the journey, Primo Levi’s journey, the film’s journey and our journey, from Auschwitz, to and throughout the geographies and histories of the postwar world. These lines and paths are like figures, geometrical and material, that allow the intersections that this book is exploring to be enacted and visualized, in both form and substance. It is striking to note, therefore, that Primo Levi’s Journey opens with another framing history, the announcement of another truce to be layered on top of and to intersect others it

Introduction

15

evokes, from Levi’s personal truce of 1945, or Europe’s truce from the end of the World War to the start of the Cold War, to the strangely distended ‘truce’ of the entire Cold War era from 1948 up to the ‘thaw’ of 1989: that is, the ‘truce’ that stretched from 1989 — and the apparent ‘end of history’ — to 11 September 2001 and the start of a radically new form of global anxiety and geopolitical tension, a new form of so-called ‘war’. Ferrario / Belpoliti start their film zooming out from and across images of skyscrapers, as Levi’s story is introduced, and then it homes in on Ground Zero, with a voice-over declaring that ‘we too, children of the new century, have reached the end of our truce. What awaits us cannot be known, but sometimes the future can be glimpsed through going back to the questions that history has left unanswered. So, exactly sixty years on [...] with our eyes and his words, we set out on a journey to follow Levi’s road’ (emphasis added). The hybridities of Primo Levi’s Journey, its ‘journeying between’ so many differ­ence places and layers, are useful as an emblem of what this book is trying to examine: the eclectic intermingling of strands of visual culture, of national and trans­ national borders and cultures, of threads of history and representation, all somehow unavoidable in the late contemplation of the dark history of the Holocaust, and its transposition into the cultures, especially the visual cultures of the present. The three case studies above introduce the multifarious types of category disturb­ ance which this book argues are symptomatic of recent audiovisual engagements with the Holocaust and other genocides. They offer glimpses of the instability of the borders of contemporary images, which link disparate memories, histories and modes of mediation in complex and unsettling ways. They demonstrate that the Holocaust has become a crucial touchstone in explorations of an eclectic range of present-day social, economic and ethico-political concerns, from the ownership of memory and narratives of victimhood, via the mediated consumption of suffering and violence, to the transnational circulation of people, capital and images. Thefts, appropriations, hauntings, survivals, transits, palimpsests, montage, traces and intermediality: the interstitial tropes and motifs identified in these preliminary readings as characteristic of Holocaust-related visual culture today recur across the five sections into which this volume is divided, which focus particularly but by no means exclusively on the shifting boundaries between nations, images, genres, media and instances of genocide respectively. Emiliano Perra’s chapter, ‘Between National and Cosmopolitan: Twenty-FirstCentury Holocaust Television in Britain, France and Italy’, makes an important contribution to recent debate on forms of televisual transmission of knowledge and memory of the Holocaust, by setting against each other and comparing three key Western European cases studies. Perra draws out in his analysis a series of complex and often awkward negotiations in the televisual field: between national and transnational dimensions of television drama, documentaries and other forms of coverage of the Holocaust; between scholarly or professional historiography and forms of knowledge, and the public sphere of television; and finally, between themes of collaboration and rescue as narrative patterns in TV-films and miniseries of recent decades. Perra makes reference to a wide range of material, from the

16

Introduction

highly inf luential and controversial French broadcast of 2008, Shoah par balles: l’histoire oubliée (The Shoah by Bullets: Forgotten History), to the Italian miniseries about two Fascist film stars, Sanguepazzo (Wild Blood, 2010), directed by acclaimed filmmaker Marco Tullio Giordana, to recent transmissions of ceremonies at Auschwitz or reworkings of the Anne Frank story. The chapter shows how the field of television production is a prime arena for the enactment of collective processes of ‘coming to terms with the past’ that are still active and highly, often politically charged, at the turn of the millennium. Judith Keilbach’s chapter ‘Collecting, Indexing and Digitizing Survivor Accounts: Holocaust Testimonies in the Digital Age’ investigates how contemporary media technologies have impacted on the ways in which Holocaust testimonies are collected, disseminated and received. Her contribution undertakes a comparison between the use of such technologies by the two most prominent testimony archives, the Fortunoff Video Archive and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Archive. As Keilbach illustrates, the different origins of these archives allow us to retrace the gradual development of Holocaust memory from local to global: while the Fortunoff Video Archive began as a grassroots movement, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Archive grew out of the wordwide success of Schindler’s List. Keilbach presents a detailed discussion of the different rationales according to which these two archives make use of digital technologies to store and disseminate their collections. It thereby becomes clear that digital storage media and the global accessibility of the World Wide Web at once offer enormous potential for popularizing testimony and raise questions about the rights and interests of the survivors. Moreover, Keilbach scrutinizes how digital technologies allow for the reorganization of testimony, be it through indexing, making video testimonies searchable according to predefined categories, or through educational practices of re-editing testimony. She demonstrates how in both cases, new media have also transformed our encounter and engagement with audiovisual testimony. Laura Rascaroli builds her chapter around a particularly rich and recently f lourishing kind of filmmaking enquiry into the Holocaust, which she traces in origin to work by Marcel Ophüls, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and others, and which she labels the Holocaust ‘essay film’. The essay film, as she has shown in her work elsewhere, is not a genre as such, but rather a ‘diverse, shifting and protean form’ which thus lends itself especially well to the multiple forms and sites of transition — of passing or mortality, passing on, passing through and transmission — that late twentieth- /early twenty-first-century memory and testimony in audiovisual media bring with them. Rascaroli’s chapter is entitled ‘Transits: Essayistic Thinking at the Junctures of Images in Harun Farocki’s Respite and Arnaud des Pallières’s Drancy Avenir’. It uses these two essayistic film enquiries into, and re-evocations of, sites of Holocaust transit and transition — the camps of Westerbork, in the Netherlands, and Drancy, near Paris — to show the fragility of the essay form as it approaches the Holocaust, and its appeal to dialogue with the spectator, its ability to give shape to the movement of thought and enquiry into history itself. What is especially striking here is the analysis of the formal workings of film, of the dialectical properties of montage, intertitles, black screen and soundtrack and more, to suggest a series of

Introduction

17

absences which are compared to Didi-Huberman’s notion of ‘lacuna-images’, the gaps within and between images that structure our late knowledge of the Holocaust. In his chapter, ‘Haneke and the Camps’, Max Silverman considers two films by Michael Haneke, Funny Games (1997) and Das weiße Band. Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon) (2009). Rather than reading these films as in some way symptomatic of or merely allusive to the Holocaust, Silverman deploys the notion, developed in his work elsewhere with Griselda Pollock, of the ‘concentrationary’. He argues that Haneke’s work echoes and envisions Giorgio Agamben’s intuition that the site and space of ‘the camp’ represent the ‘hidden matrix’ of modern life, a generalized form of violence that is confined neither to any particular place nor singular moment in time. In this way, Silverman suggests, Haneke opens up the image to a generalized violence informed by a concentrationary logic, and thereby bypasses the trap of the banalization of the image, as posited by Serge Daney in his inf luential essay ‘The Tracking Shot in Kapo’, which attempts to stage the ‘real’ historical image of the Holocaust and in doing so instead effaces history. Silverman’s acutely careful readings of both Funny Games and The White Ribbon show how the image in Haneke becomes a site of intersection between different times and places and how even their most banal of scenes become haunted by a dark presence of unimaginable cruelty, invisibly located in the present and shaped in the form of the camp. In the next chapter, Ferzina Banaji, author of a new book on the evolution of images of the Nazi genocide in French cinema, broaches the freighted question of how sustainable the conventions and taboos of Holocaust representation that were progressively established in twentieth-century theory and culture appear in the new millennium. She does so by intervening in the debate provoked by Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-self-aware, hyper-violent and critically polarizing re-imagining of the Second World War in Inglourious Basterds (2009). Entitled ‘The Nazi Killin’ Business: A Postmodern Pastiche of the Holocaust’, the chapter argues that although Tarantino’s epic may on the surface appear little concerned with historical reality, it can productively be contextualized within the framework of filmic treatments of the Holocaust. For Banaji, criticisms of the film for exploiting the genocide as a vehicle for hermetic, self-referential postmodern play underestimate the acute knowingness it displays with regard to the codes, tropes and motifs of Holocaust cinema. One of a cluster of recent films focusing on Jewish violence against Nazis, Inglourious Basterds, she suggests, not only revises visual and narrative material from Holocaust revenge fantasies of the 1960s and 1970s and from Schindler’s List, but also reworks elements from the Second World War combat film, the western and other genres in Holocaust-specific ways. In Banaji’s reading, Tarantino’s intensely cinephilic negotiation of inter-generic boundaries facilitates a distinctively twentyfirst-century reappraisal and updating of the representational conventions of the Holocaust film. Banaji hints at a tension between the very concept of genre and the singularity often attributed to the Holocaust that is more explicitly teased out in Barry Langford’s chapter, as an issue complexly raised by recent North American and European mainstream cinema and television fictions. Langford, author of major studies of cinematic genre, post-classical Hollywood and Holocaust film, titles his

18

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chapter ‘Globalizing the Holocaust: Fantasies of Annihilation in Contemporary Media Culture’. What currency, Langford asks, does the critical orthodoxy according to which the Holocaust resists accommodation to representational codes suitable to other topics retain in the early twenty-first century? The chapter opens by tracing the process of institutionalization that has simultaneously affirmed the Holocaust as a locus of uniqueness and positioned the event as a source of readily recognizable images that can be drawn on in treatments of disparate subjects. Arguing that the controversial ‘genericization’ of the Holocaust (which he finds confirmed by Schindler’s List) may in fact be viewed as a ‘performative interrogation’ of the widespread notion of the event as ‘sui generis’, Langford goes on to trace a reciprocal interaction in which the Holocaust film today increasingly borrows from other genres, while mainstream productions — from depictions of World War II, via the horror film, to sci-fi and fantasy — ever more conspicuously incorporate Holocaust tropes. He concludes by exploring the implications of the new discourse of trauma that was initiated by the events of 11 September 2001 for the central position that the Holocaust has come to occupy in contemporary culture. In her chapter, ‘Re-Imagining the Neighbour: Polish-Jewish Relations in Contem­porary Polish Visual Culture’, Matilda Mroz presents a transmedial perspective on engagements with the Holocaust in recent Polish film and art. At the centre of her analysis stands the figure of the neighbour which illustrates the difficult relationship between ‘Poles’ and ‘Jews’ during and after the Nazi occupation. In particular, Mroz is interested in representations of Poles hiding Jews as paradigmatic of Holocaust memory in Poland. Discussing a wide range of audiovisual productions, she demonstrates how since the end of Socialism, this paradigm has been subject to repeated redefinitions. With regard to feature films such as Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2001), Mroz demonstrates how re-imagining the absent neighbour poses the ethical challenge of balancing empathic closeness with respectful distance. Beyond the cinema, she sees this ethical dimension as especially problematic with regard to Rafał Betlejewski’s performance event ‘Płonie Stodoła’ (‘Burning Barn’, 2010) about the Jedwabne pogrom of 1941. By contrast, Yael Bartana’s art installation ‘...And Europe Will be Stunned’, a self-consciously utopian call for a return of Jews to Poland, incites ref lection about the future of neighbourly relations between Poles and Jews. In Mroz’s account, these and other works show how both the figure of the neighbour and the hider-hidden-paradigm have been reconfigured between and across various media, as well as, in several cases, in a transnational context. The chapter ‘Performing Cultural Memory: The Holocaust in Dutch MultiPlatform Television Documentary’ by Berber Hagedoorn reconsiders the relationship between television, history and memory. Countering notions of television as a medium without a sense of the past, she looks at two recent Dutch television productions and how these prompt viewers to remember World War II and the Holocaust: 13 in de Oorlog (13 at War, 2009–10) for young and De Oorlog (The War, 2009) for adult audiences. Hagedoorn demonstrates how such multi-platform productions, making use of internet convergence, establish contact between private and public forms of remembrance. For instance, the use of ‘ego-documents’ such as

Introduction

19

diary fragments avoids totalizing national perspectives in favour of a consideration of local conditions and the complexity of individual fates. And in the case of the online game linked to 13 at War, young users are confronted with difficult choices conveying a multi-dimensional media experience of the past. In sum, in Hagedoorn’s analysis, multi-platform television emerges as a dynamic practice of memory stimulating historical consciousness on a broad scale. Its success in fostering an exchange between private and public views of history is mirrored not least by the numerous viewer responses which the two productions have received. Annette Hamilton’s chapter ‘Cambodian Genocide: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Cinema of Rithy Panh’ shifts the focus of discussion towards a different history of genocide outside Europe and examines its treatment in the documentaries of Cambodian-born but French-trained filmmaker Rithy Panh. Much like the director and his work, Hamilton’s argument is situated and seeks to negotiate between different histories and cultures. Departing from European debates about the ethics of photographic records of extreme violence, and the lack thereof in the Cambodian context, she explores the unique approach developed by Panh in order to rework and remember the crimes of the Khmer Rouge with his films. Central to this approach is Panh’s use of the paintings of Cambodian artist Vann Nath, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, as a way of highlighting as well as overcoming the absence of lens-based images of the genocide. Moreover, Hamilton explores Panh’s strategy of re-enacting the past with victims and perpetrators at sites of atrocity such as the former Tuol Sleng Interrogation Centre. It is a strategy which, according to Hamilton, has profound ethical implications: intertwining the perspectives of those persecuted by and acting in the name of the regime, Panh’s films blur the boundaries between what might be seen as irreconcilable points of view, and raise questions about the role of the director in reconstructing difficult and painful experiences. Connections between different instances of genocide and between images associated with them are examined further by Piotr Cieplak and Emma Wilson in the concluding chapter, ‘The Afterlife of Images: Rwanda’. Here, the authors pursue in new directions concerns that they have addressed in previous writings on images of the Rwandan genocide (Cieplak) and on film, materiality and mortality (Wilson). Their primary focus is Juan Reina’s Iseta: Behind the Roadblock (2008), a documentary investigation of possible uses of the sole piece of film of actual killing in the Rwandan genocide, which was captured by BBC cameraman Nick Hughes in Kigali in 1994. Cieplak and Wilson show how Iseta raises questions about the evidentiary and legal functions and the memorial and affective resonances of Hughes’s footage — and, by extension, of other lens-based genocide images. Moreover, in an act of virtual montage, they juxtapose this unique record with the singular photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau taken half a century earlier by a Sonderkommando member (which have been inf luentially dissected by DidiHuberman). Acutely careful to avoid suggesting a direct comparability of the two events, they demonstrate that ref lection on footage from Rwanda can offer new perspectives on discussions in the early twenty-first century about Holocaust images and their afterlives.

20

Introduction

Films and television programmes 13 in de Oorlog (13 at War), dir. Marcel Goedhart, Hein Hoffmann, and Vincent Schuurman (NPS, 2009–10) Aufschub (Respite), dir. Harun Farocki (2007) A Film Unfinished, dir. Yael Hersonski (2010) Drancy Avenir, dir. Arnaud des Pallières (1997) Funny Games, dir. Michael Haneke (1997) Ghetto/Asien in Mitteleuropa (Asia in Central Europe), dir. unknown (1942) Histoire(s) du cinéma, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1988–98) Holocaust, dir. Marvin Chomsky (NBC, 1978) Inglourious Basterds, dir. Quentin Tarantino (2009) Iseta: Behind the Roadblock, dir. Juan Reina (2008) Man of Marble, dir. Andrzej Wajda (1976) The Memory Thief, dir. Gil Kofman (2008) Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), dir. Alain Resnais (1955) De Oorlog (The War), dir. Matthijs Cats, Gerda Jansen Hendriks, Dirk Jan Roeleven, and Godfried van Run (NPS, 2009) The Pianist, dir. Roman Polanski (2001) ‘Ritorno ad Auschwitz’ (Return to Auschwitz), dir. Daniel Toaff and Emanuele Ascarelli (1982; broadcast by Sorgente di vita (Life Source), RAI, April 1983) Sanguepazzo (Wild Blood), dir. Marco Tullio Giordana (RAI UNO, 2010, 30–31 May. 21.10) Schindler’s List, dir. Steven Spielberg (1993) Shoah par balles: l’histoire oubliée (The Shoah by Bullets: Forgotten History), dir. Romain Icard (France 3, 2008, 12 March. 20.50) La strada di Levi (Primo Levi’s Journey), dir. Davide Ferrario and Marco Belpoliti (2006) Warsaw Ghetto, dir. Alexander Bernfes (BBC, 1966) Das weiße Band. Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon), dir. Michael Haneke (2009)

Notes to the Introduction 1. See Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, trans. by Assenka Oksiloff (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). 2. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 3, 9. 3. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2003). 4. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See also her edited volume Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 5. See, for example, Sylvie Lindeperg, ‘Nuit et brouillard’: un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), and Emma Wilson, ‘Material Remains: Night and Fog’, October, 112 (2005), 89-110. 6. Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, ‘Introduction: Concentrationary Cinema’, in Concen­ trationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’ (1955), ed. by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2011), pp. 1–54 (pp. 2, 44). 7. Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, p. 97. 8. See, for instance, Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2004). 9. See, for example, Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, and Jeremy Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).

Introduction

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10. See, for instance, Claude Lanzmann, ‘Le Lieu et la parole’, in Bernard Cuau and others, Au sujet de ‘Shoah’, le film de Claude Lanzmann (Paris: Belin, 1990), pp. 293–305 (pp. 296–97). 11. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. by Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 [2003]), p. 167. 12. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, p. 35. 13. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, p. 120. 14. Details of the incomplete film are provided in the Fritz Bauer Institute’s ‘Cinematographie des Holocaust’, rev. edn (2012) [accessed 1 August 2012]. The catalogue entry notes that although there is no officially documented title, the film is referred to as Asien in Mitteleuropa (Asia in Central Europe) in the testimony of ghetto survivor Jonas Turkow. 15. See Dirk Rupnow, ‘Die Spuren nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik’, Zeitgeschichte-Online (October 2010) [accessed 12 March 2012]. 16. Lucy Dawidowicz, ‘Visualizing the Warsaw Ghetto: Nazi Images of Jews Refiltered by the BBC’, Shoah: A Review of Holocaust Studies and Commemorations, 1.1 (1978), 5–6. Anja Horstmann argues that the film is likely to have been conceived in quasi-ethnographic terms as an archive of Jewish ways of life for the future, but notes that only specific, often stereotyping, scenes were deemed worthy of ‘preservation’ (‘“Judenaufnahmen fürs Archiv”: Das dokumentarische Filmmaterial “Asien in Mitteleuropa”, 1942’, Medaon, 4 (2009) [accessed 12 March 2012]. 17. See, for example, Richard Brody, ‘A Film Unfinished’, New Yorker [n.d.] [accessed 12 March 2012]. 18. Sue Vice, ‘For Most of It, I Have No Words’, Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, 2 (2010), 513–16 (p. 515). 19. Rupnow, ‘Die Spuren nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik’. 20. Dalia Karpel, ‘Silence, Interrupted’, Haaretz, 28 January 2011 [accessed 12 March 2012]. 21. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, p. 166. 22. The survivor witnesses are not named in the film, only in the closing credits. 23. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, p. 142. 24. Primo Levi, La tregua (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), translated as The Truce (London: Bodley Head, 1965). It has often been published together with Levi’s first work of Holocaust testimony, Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 1958 [1947]): e.g. Primo Levi, If This is a Man/The Truce (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). 25. Levi, If This is a Man/The Truce, p. 208. 26. ‘The Author’s Route Home’ in Levi, If This is a Man/The Truce, pp. 85–86. 27. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), especially pp. 13–128. 28. American translations of the book are titled The Reawakening. 29. See for example W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (London: Harvill, 1998), like much of his work haunted also by the Holocaust. The walking-haunting trope bears comparison with Eraldo Affinati, Campo del sangue (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), an account of the author’s journey on foot from Venice to Auschwitz. 30. In fact, extracts from other works by Levi are also used, on occasion. 31. See, for example, Belpoliti’s travel articles and drawings for the newspaper Il manifesto, collected in La prova (Turin: Einaudi, 2007); the DVD and book bundle Marco Belpoliti and Andrea Cortellessa, Da una tregua all’altra: Auschwitz-Torino sessant’anno dopo (Milan: Chiarelettere, 2010). 32. The programme was made by Daniel Toaff and Emanuele Ascarelli in June 1982 and broadcast by RAI (Italian state television) in an episode of the programme on Jewish life, Sorgente di vita (Life Source), April 1983.

PA RT I

v

Between Nations

C h ap t e r 1

v

Between National and Cosmopolitan Twenty-First-Century Holocaust Television in Britain, France, and Italy Emiliano Perra Television’s approach to the Holocaust is the subject of a relatively small, but steadily growing body of work. This attention is certainly welcome. After all, we cannot afford to neglect the encounter between this key event of the twentieth century, and a medium that, due to its global impact, stands as something of a symbol of the second half of the century and beyond. If we want to understand the place of this event in popular memory culture, we need to look at television. In 2001, Janice Hadlow estimated that on any evening in the UK there was at least one programme aired related to World War II.1 I would add that a significant portion of these programmes was to some degree related to the Holocaust, that this was not a specifically British occurrence, and that this trend has only marginally ebbed in the last decade. Much of the existing literature in this field centres on the analysis of single countries such as the United States, Germany, Italy, Israel, or Britain,2 but only a few studies have developed a comparative approach.3 This chapter discusses some key trends in British, French and Italian Holocaust television since 2000. If Hadlow’s claim is not a wild exaggeration, it is clear that a complete overview of television’s treatment of the Holocaust would require much more space than I have here. In the following pages, I narrow my focus to the exploration of three broad themes. The first one is represented by the relationship between national and transnational (or cosmopolitan) memory as it emerges from the representation of this historical event. The second theme is represented by the complex relationship between scholarly works of synthesis and comparable TV products. Through the discussion of predominantly high-profile documentaries, I will argue that British, French and Italian Holocaust television present differing degrees of commitment towards bridging the gap between recent historiographical developments and popular divulgation. While television in Britain and France has offered some accounts to its viewers that are both informed by scholarship and engaging, in Italy such work of synthesis is largely missing. The third section engages with works of fiction such as TV-films and miniseries. In particular, I investigate how the related themes of

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collaboration and rescue are presented by these products, a focus that allows the exploration of recent developments in each country’s ‘coming to terms with the past’. In the final pages of this contribution, I will draw together the national and transnational dimensions of my argument by looking at recent TV renditions of the ultimate ‘universalized’ Holocaust story: that of Anne Frank. National and Transnational Holocaust Memory The transnationalization of Holocaust memory is a development that has attracted growing attention in the last decade. Scholars from a variety of fields have described this crucial historical event as the source of official forms of shared European or even cosmopolitan memory, morality and identity.4 There is certainly a good degree of truth in this claim, as well as in the related one that the process of European integration is finding a common unifying memory in World War II and the Holocaust.5 However, the development of an unbounded continental memory is still at an embryonic stage.6 When talking about European memory, we are still mainly referring to different national articulations of memories pertaining to events that, while shared, affected European countries in varying degrees and in different ways.7 Thus, EU commemoration of the Holocaust is an example of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, whereby transnational memories are situated, inf lected and expressed at the local level.8 This first section of the chapter engages with the interplay between these two dimensions of memory as ref lected by TV representation of the Holocaust. Television’s contribution to the development of transnational forms of Holocaust memory can be explored from a variety of perspectives. One is represented by what Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz call ‘media events’, by which they refer to the quasi-oxymoronic category of live broadcasting of history.9 One Holocaust-related example of a media event was the ceremony held in Auschwitz on 27 January 2005 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camp. Dozens of heads of state and countless survivors gathered to remember the event. It was an event specifically constructed to cross national borders and deliver messages of universal resonance. It was broadcast live in many countries, including Italy, France and Britain. While these factors certainly concur in conveying an idea of commemoration that goes well beyond the boundaries of a state, it must also be considered that media events are mediated and negotiated in a number of ways, for example through the interplay between the live feed coming from the site of commemoration and its in-studio coverage. This last factor conditioned the presentation of the event in each country, defusing its transnational value. To develop the point, I will give an account of empirical viewers’ experience of the broadcast: my own, viewing the event on the f lagship (and traditionally strongly Catholic) Italian State channel RAI UNO, compared to that of literary scholar Annekie Joubert, who watched it on the BBC.10 Joubert was struck by the simplicity of the ceremony broadcast by the BBC and by the recollections worded by the Jewish, Romani and Soviet survivors in their brief testimonies listened to by world leaders, whose attendance served to reinforce

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the importance of the event. Her understanding was that survivors were the central players of the event, and she was moved by the ecumenical prayers said during the ceremony. However, she also noted that the Jewish group of victims remained central within the ‘global gathering of mourning and remembrance’.11 My own experience of the same media event was quite different. I was struck first of all by the peripheral role of the survivors gathered at the ceremony in RAI UNO’s broadcast: far from being the central players, they were marginal. Their testimonies were lost, superseded by the voices of in-studio guests in Italy. These included Italian survivors such as Guido Terracina and Schlomo Venezia, journalist Paolo Mieli and Catholic hard-liner Rino Fisichella, then rector of the Pontifical Lateran University and chaplain of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (currently archbishop and President of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization). No historians were involved. The discussion was dominated by religious themes. While Joubert and other BBC viewers listened to survivors’ testimonies, Italian viewers were informed about Christian protest against the so-called ‘Euthanasia Programme’ in Nazi Germany and the importance of Jewish forgiveness after John Paul II’s apologies for past Christian prejudice against the Jews. They were also shown a short extract from the popular miniseries Perlasca: un eroe italiano (Perlasca: An Italian Hero, 2002) in which a little Jewish girl warns her Catholic rescuers of the danger they face in helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Budapest. Moreover, the programme’s own twist on the theme of a common European memory and identity was that Auschwitz was the locus of the shared Judeo-Christian roots of Europe — a view with which the host Roberto Olla, Fisichella and Rome’s Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni concurred. The studio went silent only when the host announced ‘the central moment of the whole ceremony’: the Pope’s message, read by the Apostolic Nuncio to Poland, Józef Kowalczyk. John Paul II’s statement was the only one broadcast in its entirety without interruption. One final important specificity of the Italian broadcast of the event was that, being dominated by in-studio coverage in Italy, it was distinctively Italo-centric. Not only were the Jewish survivors who retold their stories Italians, but most importantly the notion of Holocaust victims was expanded to comprise a variety of groups including POWs, in a manner consistent with the cumbersome definition established in the national law on Holocaust remembrance passed by the Italian parliament in 2000.12 The conclusion of the special programme, its ‘message’ if you will, was delivered by the host Olla: religion is a fundamental need, and Europe must work towards rebuilding its religious ‘spirit’. There is more than anecdotal evidence to this. Media events have three partners: the organizers, the broadcasters and the audiences.13 The way the broadcaster re­com­bines the elements of the event is bound to inf luence the way audiences receive it. The Auschwitz ceremony can be seen as a mediatized ritual, one of ‘those exceptional and performative media phenomena that serve to sustain and/ or mobilize collective sentiments and solidarities’.14 The meaning of such a supra­ national event is re-territorialized and articulated in ways that are country- and culture-specific.15 RAI inscribed it within a Catholic interpretation of the Holocaust, casting Catholics as protagonists and lead interpreters of the event,

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and Jews as the supporting act whose presence was fundamental in order to fully legitimize the narrative offered, but who were never allowed to drive it. Another factor potentially favouring the formation of a European historical conscience refers to the increasing diffusion in the European TV market of transnational digital channels providing factual entertainment, including history. Such is the case of the media conglomerate Arts & Entertainment Television Network, or AETN. The network’s f lagship History (formerly known as The History Channel) covers most of the European continent, providing a mixture of local programming and rescheduled extension from History UK. Another example, possibly even more significant, is represented by Arte, the Franco-German channel famous for its distinctively eclectic and highbrow programming. Arte was launched in 1992 and its existence is as much a political move as it is about culture. The channel was seen by German and especially French policy-makers as the cultural equivalent of the Franco-German alliance within the EU, a view that has not lost centrality over time, since the channel’s Head of Programming Christoph Hauser stated in 2006 that Arte’s objective was no less than to give Europe a soul.16 However, despite this claim, the channel’s diffusion is by and large limited to France and Germany; it is not quite yet the purported engine of a shared televisual European conscience. Besides these entirely transnational channels, there is also the case of international productions put in place by national networks on an ad hoc basis such as the 2005 BBC-PBS coproduction Auschwitz, which I discuss below. More detailed research on how these documentaries were adapted for consumption in other national contexts (Were they dubbed or subtitled? Were they aired integrally? Or were they edited and/or integrated with other material?) and on their reception would help us to understand this aspect of contemporary Holocaust memory. Although the transnationalization of Holocaust memory and TV representation is growing, the national dimension is still predominant, as I argue in the next two sections. Professional History and Documentaries The opening of archives following the Soviet Union’s collapse coincided with — and had a lasting impact on — the development of history-writing on World War II and the Holocaust, in particular perpetrator research. Historians have currently developed an integrated approach that incorporates functional decisions taken on an ad hoc basis within the ideology-driven system of beliefs of Nazi Germany’s racial state. The wealth of new documents has led historians to produce detailed reconstructions of the destruction process, with its complex dynamic of inputs from Berlin, initiatives taken on the ground and different degrees of collaboration from local populations and institutions. Equally important is the much clearer picture we now have of the early stages of the extermination conducted predominantly in the Soviet Union and resulting in the massacre of over one million Jews by the SS, the police, the Wehrmacht, and a far from insignificant presence of local collaborators.17 This early phase is now sometimes called the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ or la Shoah par balles as it is known in France, where the term has gained wide currency following the success of a book by Patrick Desbois and of the ensuing documentary.18

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France 3’s broadcast of Shoah par balles: l’histoire oubliée (The Shoah by Bullets: Forgotten History) on 12 March 2008 in prime-time was the culmination of a series of cross-media events. The process began when French Catholic priest Patrick Desbois embarked on a journey in search of traces and witnesses of the exter­m ination of the Jews in the former Soviet Union, starting from the remains of the Rawa-Ruska camp in Ukraine, where his grandfather had been deported.19 In 2004, Desbois became President of Yahad-In Unum, a Jewish-Catholic joint organization with the task of conducting research on the Holocaust in Ukraine and Belarus. A first result of the research was the exhibition Les Fusillades massives des juifs en Ukraine 1941–1944: la Shoah par balles (Mass Shootings of Jews in Ukraine, 1941–1944: The Shoah by Bullets) organized by the Mémorial de la Shoah foundation and held in Paris between June 2007 and January 2008.20 The success of the exhibition was symptomatic of growing public interest in this aspect of the extermination, also exemplified by the positive reception of Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), large portions of which dealt with the actions of the killing units on the Eastern front.21 In 2007, Desbois’s book Porteur de mémoires hit the shelves. The gripping testimonies, not encumbered by detailed footnotes and supported by a f lashy blurb claiming that ‘a Catholic priest reveals the Shoah by Bullets’, proved a successful recipe.22 The following year the book was translated into English as The Holocaust by Bullets, with a foreword by Paul Shapiro from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), and in 2009 it was reissued in France by the major publisher Flammarion. Since 2007, a series of prizes and awards, honorary doctorates and distinctions on both sides of the Atlantic have been conferred on Desbois. The story of a Catholic priest devoted to recovering the memory of murdered Jews in predominantly Christian Orthodox countries had potential for mass appeal and France 3, the second channel of the public network France Télévisions, decided to create an event around it. Shoah par balles aired as an episode of the investigative magazine Pièces à conviction (Incriminating Evidence) — moved to prime-time for the occasion — and was followed by an in-studio debate with Desbois himself and politician and Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil. This conjunction was not haphazard; from the title of the documentary itself to its press launch, the programme was not simply presented as an investigation of a lesser known aspect of the Holocaust, but sensationally as a ‘forgotten’ history that Desbois had brought back to life after years of painstaking research.23 The pro­ gramme host Élise Lucet introduced the documentary as the sensational discovery made by a French Catholic priest of a Holocaust before the gas chambers. Much of the press went along with this mythical narrative, which was immediately countered by Holocaust historians Christian Ingrao and Jean Solchany. The two historians expressed their astonishment at a programme that overtly claimed that the mass killings in the Soviet Union had been kept hidden until now, failing to mention the fact that evidence of such massacres had been discussed in public since the immediate postwar period, and took Desbois to task for having made precious little effort to dispel this impression during the broadcast.24 The charges made by Ingrao and Solchany were countered by Holocaust historian

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Edouard Husson, who had collaborated with Desbois on the dissemination of his research.25 Things took an unpleasant turn when Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, who had also participated in the research, was allegedly excluded by Husson from the organization of a conference after her refusal to retract criticisms of Desbois’s interviewing methodology made during a radio show.26 The debate now turned into a full-blown controversy, with Georges Bensoussan rejecting as a ‘silly’ marketing ploy the very notion of ‘Shoah by Bullets’, while Claude Lanzmann and Omer Bartov voiced serious doubts about the value of research such as Desbois’s that almost programmatically plays down the extent of native anti-Semitism and local collaboration in the massacres.27 This debate highlights one important general question involving TV approaches to the Holocaust: does divulgation require the sort of sensationalism that presents every survey as a ‘discovery’, even if the facts are already well known among specialists?28 What is sure is that sensationalism helps in constructing heroic figures of sorts. Shoah par balles is perhaps less about the events themselves than it is about Desbois’s own personal journey of discovery. The documentary chronicles different stages of Desbois’s research, from his interviews with local witnesses of the events, to his meetings with research staff of the USHMM in Washington DC. His persona opens and ends the film and is constantly present on screen and/or referred to in the voiceover commentary. In order to be effective for a large public, this personal discovery cannot ‘simply’ be the story of a research project that adds valuable information to an already established framework of knowledge, as befits academic standards of evaluation; it must be the discovery by the hero of a story that had been ‘forgotten’ (as the documentary suggests in its title) and would have been completely erased, had it not been for this porteur de mémoire. This construction of the figure of the hero who singlehandedly saves the day works quite well for fictional accounts, but might be a little more cumbersome in documentaries that make truth claims about Holocaust research, and it is worth noting that even some academics contributed to this image of Desbois as the discoverer of a forgotten aspect of the past.29 A remarkably different approach to the same phase of Holocaust history was taken by Michaël Prazan’s outstanding three-hour documentary Einsatzgruppen, which aired on France 2 in April 2009.30 There are at least four main differences between this work and Romain Icard’s Shoah par balles. First of all, here historians hold centre stage. Christopher Browning, Martin Dean, Christian Ingrao, Radu Ioanid and Jürgen Matthäus are not simply chosen to validate with their professional authority the claims made in the documentary, but actually appear to drive its narrative. While witness testimonies are not entirely absent in Einsatzgruppen, the documentary is not primarily about them. Thus, the majority of screen time is employed showing stock images of the Holocaust. Some of them comprise of wellknown archival material, seen as generic footage in countless past documentaries. However, here this material is presented with accurate textual description of the city and the year in which it was taken, thus restoring it to its context and in this way allowing viewers to see it anew. Einsatzgruppen also exhibits lesser known footage, some of which is truly extraordinary, such as the powerful display of brutalization

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Fig. 1.1. Einsatzgruppen, dir. Michaël Prazan (2009). DVD capture.

offered by an amateur film made by a young cameraman on leave from the Eastern front depicting the burning of three hanged felt puppies.31 Einsatzgruppen thus appears to display a trust in the redemptive power of the archival image to show the horror — either literally by re-presenting acts of murder caught on camera, or metaphorically as in the ‘puppies’ film — reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s approach presented in his Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), while Shoah par balles, although not as wary about the heuristic value of archival images as Claude Lanzmann,32 still relies much more heavily on the power of the word. A third difference is that in Einsatzgruppen the author is removed from the screen and from the narrative. Unlike Shoah par balles, Einsatzgruppen is not about Prazan; viewers are not invited to identify with him in their ‘discovery’ of this aspect of Holocaust history but to develop a more rational knowledge as opposed to an emotive and empathic one. A final difference between the two approaches to Holocaust history is represented by the emphasis Einsatzgruppen puts on the importance of local collaboration, consistent with recent historiographical trends and the work of historians interviewed in the programme. In other words, unlike Shoah par balles, Einsatzgruppen does not claim to uncover previously little known aspects of the Holocaust, but presents up-to-date information about research on those aspects. Recent Holocaust documentary has seen some important stylistic innovation which affects its relationship to historical research. In Britain, the BBC’s highprofile documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (2005) made extensive use of staged re-enactments (as well as of CGI), following in the footsteps of other equally lavish prime-time historical productions about events situated within living memory, such as BBC 2’s 2004 The Miner’s Strike, The Four Minute Mile and Dunkirk.33

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Auschwitz presented Ian Kershaw as historical and script consultant for the series and listed a roster of first-class advisers such as Christopher Browning, David Cesarani, Robert Jan Van Pelt, Dieter Pohl and Piotr Setkiewicz. Thanks to this historical expertise, the Final Solution is explained according to the by-now generally accepted scholarly view that it was the product of a complex mixture of orders from the top and initiatives from below — although Auschwitz curiously situates the decision to unleash the Holocaust not in Summer or Autumn 1941 but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a view shared only by a minority of historians, most notably Christian Gerlach, to which neither Kershaw nor Browning subscribe.34 Careful historical reconstruction emerges not only in overarching interpretations, but also in the attention with which visual sources are referenced, and in the choice to explore relatively new angles on the event. Examples of the latter are the whole episode (in a series of six) dedicated to the theme of corruption among the SS, a choice that among other things helps dismantle resilient popular myths about this corps; and the decision to discuss at length the deportation to Auschwitz of three Jews from the Channel Islands, thus introducing the theme of (potential) British collaboration with the Nazis, object of recent scholarly interest and already presented in rather more rose-tinted colours in fictional accounts such as ITV’s Enemy at the Door and Island at War.35 British collaboration with the Nazi invader was also at the centre of a curious allohistorical (i.e. counter-factual) documentary aired on The History Channel in 2005. Alternate histories of World War II are recurrent in British postwar culture including television, where they have featured in TV plays, documentaries and tiein books, as well as miniseries.36 Hitler’s Britain combined Nazi occupation plans for Britain and the history of German occupation in Western Europe including the British Channel Islands, to imagine what could have happened had Germany decided to proceed with Operation Sea Lion.37 In its first half, the programme painted a less than f lattering image of occupied Britain. All the historians interviewed (Michael Burleigh, Terry Charman, and Gerwin Strobl) agreed that the Nazis would have found a figure from the existing structure of government to work with. In this sense, the first part of the documentary presented itself as a TV version of military historian Adrian Gilbert’s book Britain Invaded, which saw collaboration as the most likely outcome, thus implicitly countering the alternate history version of the ‘finest hour’ myth (i.e. Britain’s resistance and eventual victory over Nazi Germany) offered by conservative historians Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson.38 The visual presentation of this grim allohistory combined archival footage and fictional material, in particular from the 1965 cult movie It Happened Here, set in Nazi-occupied Britain.39 Gavriel Rosenfeld has argued that alternate stories about British defeat and occupation recur more frequently when the country’s selfconfidence is put to the test. Such was the case during the 1960s and 1970s and again from the 1990s onwards.40 Whether coming from the left or from the most conservative and isolationist sectors of the right, the main target of these counternarratives was the myth of the ‘finest hour’. Rosenfeld argues that on the left this myth was criticized as a chauvinistic leftover from the Thatcher era, while for

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sectors of the conservative right, British participation in the war was to be criticized as the main cause of its decline. While Rosenfeld’s claim applies to the extremes of the political spectrum, a look at recent mainstream historical productions on British television (even more so with the proliferation of history offerings on digital television), shows that established narratives about World War II are a constant source of appeal, and this despite frequent challenges to these narratives posed by historians in the last few decades.41 Lavish high profile productions aside, most hours of historical programming are made with a tight budget and on a commercial basis. Nazism, the Holocaust and the British war effort are palatable topics for a devoted audience of predominantly white, male history fans aged over forty. This seems to be the case with Hitler’s Britain. In the first part, the programme banks on the sensational nature of the source material in order to offer a spectacular and unconventional account of World War II. In its second part, it rehearses the established heroic narrative by telling the story of the ‘Auxiliary Units’, the guerrilla formations of the Home Guard to be deployed in case of invasion. The same budgetary constraints dominate Italy’s historical programming. In the ten-year period under discussion, Italian television did not offer high-profile (and costly) documentary productions of the likes of Auschwitz. Instead, it aired scores of documentaries on a cluster of topics ranging from the biographies of Hitler and other dignitaries of the Nazi regime, to the promulgation of the racial laws by Fascism in 1938, to episodes of the Holocaust in Italy, to biographies of predominantly Italian rescuers. These documentaries aired as episodes of two ongoing series, both on RAI TRE: La grande storia (The Great History, 1997- ), occasionally broadcast during prime time, and La storia siamo noi (History Is Us, 1997- ), programmed in a much less favourable early morning slot as well as on the network’s digital terrestrial television channel RAI Storia. The budget limits imply that Italian TV documentaries have to rely on recombining a limited set of very familiar images, or alternatively focus on domestic themes that can be illustrated with images borrowed from Italian archives. For this reason, many World War II documentaries centre on Fascism, and more specifically on Mussolini and his inner circle. Between 1998 and 2010, the series La grande storia aired episodes such as L’ultimo Mussolini (The Last Mussolini), Gli uomini di Mussolini (Mussolini’s Men) I, II, and III, Mussolini l’ultima verità (Mussolini, The Last Truth), Il segreto di Mussolini (Mussolini’s Secret), In missione per Mussolini (In Mission for Mussolini), Mussolini tra pace e guerra (Mussolini Between War and Peace), Alla corte di Mussolini (At Mussolini’s Court). These documentaries are much less concerned with providing historical information and historiographical interpretation than with personal relations among fascist leaders and speculating on their psychology. Even less care is paid to the historiographical treatment of Nazism from the late 1990s onwards. Documentaries about the Third Reich rely on the shock value of footage often used to support narratives that ignore current historiography in favour of addressing questions such as sensationalist investigations into Nazism and the occult, for instance by asking whether ‘Hitler was involved in an obscure alliance with the Evil One’, as I misteri del nazismo II (Mysteries of Nazism II) did.42

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This last example highlights another important aspect of mainstream historical programming in Italy: the productive structure is designed in such a way that more often than not professional historians are presented in an ancillary position, and a more key position is accorded to journalists or other more widely-known but less knowledgeable ‘experts’.43 When historiographical interpretations are offered, for example of Italian involvement in the Holocaust, these are often simplistic and dated, presenting the 1938 laws as a token paid to the alliance with Germany, or emphasizing the rejection of the persecution by the Italian people and the army, described in one such documentary as ‘guiltless, unlike the Germans, of violence against the Jews’.44 In this context, positive examples such as Dalle leggi razziali alla Shoah (From the Racial Laws to the Shoah, 2008), which pointed out the fact that a third of the around 8,000 Jews deported from Italy had been arrested by Italians and that left the final word to survivor Liliana Segre’s remark that the ‘Shoah is also an Italian problem’, are the exception.45 Holocaust TV Fictions Between Collaboration and Rescue The second great pole of Holocaust television is represented by TV films and miniseries. It is in the realm of fiction that some of television’s main characteristics such as intimacy and immediacy emerge with more force. The former identifies television’s inherent inclination for personalizing historical matters within the confines of drama played out between a manageable number of players and consumed within the privacy and intimacy of the domestic environment. Immediacy defines television’s penchant for concentrating on people and events that are likely to resonate with contemporary audiences. In other words, historical TV fictions are less committed to factual accuracy than concerned with animating ‘useable pasts’. For this reason, understanding why certain popular Holocaust fictions have been produced in the last ten years is just as important as ascertaining their accuracy.46 Since their inception in the early 1970s, TV films and miniseries have dealt with serious issues, including history.47 Moreover, the success of Holocaust. The Story of the Family Weiss further contributed to establishing Holocaust fictions as a recurring presence in American network programming; in the 1980s, no less than five major Holocaust-related miniseries were produced in the US alone (Playing for Time in 1980, The Wall in 1982, The Winds of War in 1983, Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story in 1985, and War and Remembrance in 1988–89). Europe was a little slower in creating its own Holocaust TV fictions, but Italy, France and Britain have by now produced a significant body of such products. In this section, I will highlight certain comparative trends in the TV fiction of these three countries. The most remarkable divergence to emerge from a bird’s-eye view is that, while many British and French fictions produced in the last ten years marked a return to history, often overlapping with the hybrid genre of docufiction, Italian fictions signalled a distinctive shift away from historical accuracy. A further difference, particularly remarkable in a comparison between France and Italy, is that while French fictions of the period often engage with the theme of collaboration with Nazis, Italian ones are overwhelmingly centred on victimhood or rescue.

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In the new century, RAI aired a number of TV films and miniseries on Holo­ caust-related themes, as well as more generally on Italy during the war. Many of these fictions are very liberal ‘free adaptations’ of historical events or pure fictions. A number of them invite viewers to side with the point of view of fascists or German officers. This approach was one product of a historical and political debate holding sway since the 1980s, in which sizeable sections of the political right tried to do away with the centrality of the Resistance in Italy’s public memory by presenting Fascism and antifascism (in particular Communism) as morally and historically equivalent. This conf lict over memory entered a new dimension in the new century, with the government dominated by the centre-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. Given the direct inf luence exerted by governments over RAI’s programming, these miniseries can be seen as the product of right-wing hegemony over mainstream TV representations of the past.48 A well-known example of this turn is represented by the miniseries Il cuore nel pozzo (The Heart in the Well, 2005), dealing with the controversial killing of ethnic Italians (seen as fascist victimizers) by Titoist partisans in Istria at the end of the war, and in a way that has been judged ‘unashamedly sympathetic to the Italian ethnic cause’.49 Such was also the case of La guerra è finita (The War Is Over, 2002), a sort of Jules et Jim set in Nazi-occupied Italy. The two friends and love rivals Claudio and Ettore separate when the former joins the X MAS battalion in the Italian Social Republic, while the latter joins the partisans (and along with the beloved Giulia kills Claudio’s father). The miniseries is a revisionist melodrama that sides with Claudio, portrayed as the only one to be consistent with his ideals, while the others were depicted as consumed by hatred and opportunistic in joining the stronger side (i.e. the Allies).50 Even more noteworthy was Al di là delle frontiere (Beyond Borders, 2004), a miniseries based on the memoirs of Angela Ghignino/ Nini Wiedemann, former partisan and lover (and future wife) of Wehrmacht official Ans Wiedemann.51 Here the focalization is that of Ans: Italians are all untrustworthy as potential partisans, while Angela is attacked by a group of peasant women represented as dehumanized harpies (or zombies). The identification with the German perspective is such that the soundtrack is nothing other than a violin version of the German national anthem! One further example of this liberal use of history is offered by the 2004 Holocaust fiction La fuga degli innocenti (The Flight of the Innocent), which represented the alliance between the Italian Social Republic and Nazi Germany with the image of a group of Italian carabinieri pointing rif les at Wehrmacht soldiers.52 This cavalier approach to history, combined with the strong penchant for hagiographic representation of historical figures (be they religious, political, or even sporting figures) that defines many TV fictions in Italy produces an important effect. Besides depictions of rescuers who actually did save Jews, such as Giorgio Perlasca and the somewhat more ambiguous figure of chief of Italian police in Fiume (Rijeka) Giovanni Palatucci, who smuggled Jews to Southern Italy and ended his life in Dachau,53 Holocaust miniseries in Italy overstate or create from scratch acts of opposition and rescue with no historical foundation; this is because, if colla­boration in the persecution of the Jews is damning and unredeemable,

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Fig. 1.2. La fuga degli innocenti, dir. Leone Pompucci (2004). DVD capture.

representations that situate themselves within the dominant twenty-first-century discourse that levels differences between fascists and antifascists must emphasize or invent opposition to the persecution. Figures who are exonerated from complicity in the persecution of the Jews in these popular representations include the royal family in Maria Josè: l’ultima regina (Maria Josè: The Last Queen, 2002), which takes pains to show that the King Victor Emmanuel III opposed (but duly signed) the 1938 anti-Semitic laws54 and fascist leaders such as Mussolini’s son-in-law and former Minister of Foreign Affairs Galeazzo Ciano, who is presented in Edda (2005) as an unlikely hero and a moral example who rejects the racial laws, whereas in fact, when the laws were passed, he had given ‘the Duce his full support’.55 Even an important future Prime Minister and Christian Democrat leader such as Alcide De Gasperi, whose historical stature would survive unscathed a non-simplistic approach, is presented in the biopic miniseries De Gasperi: l’uomo della speranza (De Gasperi: Man of Hope, 2005) as being incensed by the racial laws, but not as the man who, writing with the nom de plume Spectator in L’Illustrazione Vaticana, had expressed the wish that ‘Italian racism will put in place concrete measures to defend and increase the value of the nation’.56 A recent and particularly indicative example of this exculpating trend is offered by the miniseries Sanguepazzo (Wild Blood, 2010), directed by acclaimed filmmaker Marco Tullio Giordana. It is the romanticized story of Osvaldo Valenti and Luisa Ferida, two stars of fascist cinema and partners in life who wholeheartedly supported the Italian Social Republic and joined the X MAS commando, mainly employed as an anti-partisan force. In this capacity, they most likely took part in the torture of antifascists. For this reason, they were executed shortly after the Liberation. This miniseries too is lenient with its characters, inserting an episode of sympathy

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expressed by Valenti for the Jewish porter of the hotel where he lives that has no confirmation in any of the evidence available.57 Seen as a whole, these distortions not only collude in perpetuating the myth of the ‘good Italian’, but also often propose a reversal of history that runs the risk of setting Italy’s Holocaust discourse in popular mass media apart from those of its Western partners.58 These current trends in Italian Holocaust television stand in remarkable contrast with the ones emerging in France and Britain, where documentary and fiction often overlap and blur the boundaries between these two genres. Programmes like La Résistance (The Resistance, 2008) in France or The Relief of Belsen (2007) in Britain are more akin to docufictions in their approach to the historical subject matter and to their source base than historical fictions.59 These programmes’ innovative format is put at the service of relatively fresh approaches to conventional narratives. Channel 4’s The Relief of Belsen is a dry dramatization of the event seen from the point of view of the British troops engaged in the daunting task of trying to save the lives of thousands of starved and disease-ridden camp prisoners. Introduced by the disclaimer that the liberation of Belsen did not bring an end to the death toll but marked instead the beginning of a humanitarian catastrophe, the TV film draws on and dramatizes first-hand testimonies (in particular that of senior medical officer Major-General James Johnston)60 to tackle a thorny issue in British Holocaust memory. Around 14,000 prisoners of the camp died in the twomonth period following its liberation, a circumstance that to this day still represents a sore point in Anglo-Jewish relations. As noted by Ben Shephard, this is due to a combination of factors, including the fact that the relief of Belsen intertwined with the rapidly degrading relations between British Jewry and the country’s authorities linked to the issue of Palestine and the persistence of barely disguised anti-Semitic prejudice among British officers in the aftermath of the war, not to mention the fact that any life lost after the enormity of the Holocaust is in itself particularly painful.61 In this sense, the drama is selective, inasmuch as it only shows the operation from the perspective of British officers. It is clearly a deliberate production choice; viewers never see the survivors and thus have no access to their perception of the events. While it does not shy away from displaying the many f laws in the rescue effort, The Relief of Belsen is thus still partial. Notwithstanding this limitation, the drama, interspersed with harrowing archival footage, delivers a ‘powerful punch’62 that provides a sort of behind the scenes for the images of mass graves filled with emaciated corpses pushed en masse by caterpillars, which have to a large extent come to stand as an icon of the Holocaust — notwithstanding the fact that they are not technically about the Holocaust.63 This hybrid format seems to be particularly relevant in contemporary French Holocaust television. Alongside La Résistance, another recent docufiction dealing with Holocaust-related topics worth mentioning here is Serge Moati’s Mitterrand à Vichy (Mitterrand in Vichy), if anything because of the wide response it garnered.64 These docufictions cover two key aspects of France’s relationship with the Holo­ caust, namely collaboration with, and resistance to, the persecution and deportation of Jews under French authority. Both aired in 2008.

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La Résistance was an ambitious 388-minute long docufiction presenting a compre­ hen­sive history of the Resistance that included the maquis as well as unarmed resistance, political opposition as well as humanitarian rescue. In other words, the docufiction aimed at joining political revolt against the occupation and opposition to the Holocaust into one single narrative. The result is a fairly binary account that glorifies the French people and substantially clears low- and mid-level Vichy functionaries while damning their leaders. This narrative is deployed in its entirety in the first two episodes, Vivre libre ou mourir (Live Free or Die) and Quand il fallait sauver les juifs (When the Jews Had to Be Rescued), which served as a showcase for the whole series, since they were ninety minutes long each and aired on the mainstream France 2 instead of the fifty-two minutes each on the niche channel France 5 accorded to the remaining four. Preceded by the disclaimer that ‘all scenes in this film are authentic’, the docufiction argues that Pétain targeted Jews as part of what he perceived as antiFrance — and for this reason Vichy passed anti-Semitic laws without waiting for a German request and set up camps such as Pithiviers (which La Résistance rushes to define as only officially under French administration but de facto ruled by the SS). However, the French people were not anti-Semites; they failed to revolt against the racist laws only because the government did not publicize them. Proof of their lack of prejudice was, according to La Résistance, the failure of the exhibition Le Juif et la France (The Jew and France) organized by the Germans in Paris in September 1941 to elicit local anti-Semitism. Moreover, the Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup was boycotted by many officers, allowing two thirds of the Jews targeted for arrest to escape and find refuge among the population. La Résistance claims that by 1943 ‘civil society had become a solidarity society’ establishing an efficient rescue network, while the resistance reached the mountains and became les maquis. While the collaboration between the curiously defined ‘two anti-Semitic regimes in Europe’ grew increasingly solid, the joint effort of the armed Resistance and an organized rescue network, bolstered by a peaceful army of ordinary citizens, prevented the number of victims from exceeding 76,000 while 250,000 Jews survived — figures summarized in a caption at the end of the second episode.65 This is clearly a rather selective narrative. It largely relied on the type of clear-cut binary distinctions between the Resistance as the true France on the one hand and Vichy on the other that had inf luenced French public memory well into the 1980s. In particular, it went against the grain of a significant trend of 2008. As historian Barnett Singer noted regarding Vichy, in 2008 ‘nuancing was [...] the order of the day’.66 That year saw a number of publications that indeed went to great lengths to add complexity to the retelling of wartime France’s history, culminating with Simon Epstein’s book on the presence of antiracists in Vichy and anti-Semites within the Resistance.67 In the same year, a distinctive contribution to this process of ‘nuancing’ was made by the docufiction Mitterrand à Vichy, which aired during prime-time on France 2 and was followed by a documentary by Hugues Nancy that assembled interviews with a number of historians and associates of Mitterrand in order to understand his conduct in Vichy, as well as his unapologetic response to the issue when it first

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became public.68 The story is well known: in 1994 Pierre Péan published a book that disseminated to a wide readership information about Mitterrand’s activities as an official under Vichy and, perhaps even more damagingly, about the President’s long friendship with René Bousquet, who since 1978 had been indicted as the architect of the Vel d’Hiv roundup.69 The book generated discomfort amongst the public and especially on the left. Mitterrand’s subsequent TV interview reaffirming his version of his own past (and by extension the country’s) did little to dispel the outrage. The controversy marked the less-than-glorious end of the once hegemonic narrative that expunged Vichy from French history and in so doing relieved the Republic of the duty of dealing with such an inconvenient past. One year later, the new President Jacques Chirac distanced himself from his predecessor by acknowledging the persecutions and deportations as historical crimes of France as a whole, thus opening a new phase in the country’s politics of memory.70 The docufiction and documentary comprising Mitterrand à Vichy present themselves as a poised retrospective look. Both products stressed very carefully that distinctions were not necessarily categorical, that Vichysto-résistants were legion, and that Mitterrand had indeed played an important role in the Resistance.71 This equitable look at the past garnered overwhelming praise, albeit with the exception of Mitterrand’s widow.72 However, 2008 also signalled a shift opposite to the ‘nuance’ trend. This shift is best exemplified by the reports on public commemorations drafted by two commissions, one presided over by eminent historian André Kaspi (commissioned by the Minister of Defence who was also in charge of Veterans’ Affairs) and the other by the President of the National Assembly, Bernard Accoyer. While this is not the place for a detailed discussion of these reports, it is important to note that they both converge in their guidelines about the need for the State to disinvest in commemorations of victimhood — not least because of the danger of competition among different victim groups (for example, between Jewish and Arab French citizens with regard to the Shoah and the war of Algeria) — and on the opportunity to ‘decentralize’ commemorations that do not fit in the master paradigm of national unity. Besides highlighting the importance of the role played by the media, this decentralization of commemoration is specifically intended both as local and as supranational, in particular as regards the memory of the Shoah, officially commemorated every 27 January both in Europe and globally by the UN.73 This dimension takes us back to the interplay between national and transnational (or cosmopolitan) dimensions in Holocaust television discussed in the opening pages above. A final aspect of this phenomenon, which touches on all of the threads discussed in this chapter, is represented by Holocaust stories that have achieved universal status. Such is the case of Anne Frank, whose story has been studied by many scholars and represented countless times in a variety of media including TV.74 As a conclusion to the chapter, I investigate two representations of Anne Frank’s story: the first one is The Diary of Anne Frank, a BBC-France 2 coproduction that followed quite closely the text of the diary; the second one is Mi ricordo Anna Frank (I Remember Anne Frank, 2010), an RAI TV film that puts on screen Anne’s life

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in the camps.75 Here too, national approaches vary. The BBC-France 2 production was packaged in remarkably different ways by the two broadcasters. BBC 1 aired it in 30-minute episodes on five consecutive nights in January 2009, while France 2 broadcast a shorter 95-minute-long version on a single night in October 2008 as part of a special Anne Frank night. The fiction was followed by Anne Frank, l’aprèsjournal (Anne Frank: The After-Diary), a documentary on the deportation and death of Anne and the afterlife of the diary.76 The film (or miniseries) delivers the story in the driest manner possible, setting itself as a radical alternative to George Stevens’s Hollywood benchmark, without however resisting the temptation to convey the impression that the famous phrase ‘in spite of everything, I still believe that people are truly good at heart’ was the last one penned by Anne in her diary.77 The RAI production, in turn, presented the features of a melodrama overcharged with emotions and displaying some important culturally-specific features. Consistent with other Holocaust-related fictions on Italian TV such as the aforementioned Perlasca, Anne’s portrait verges on hagiography, as when she steps out of her group of prisoners upon arrival at Auschwitz to provide comfort to a group of children waiting to be gassed, and makes them sing a nursery song. This representation of Anne as self less, highly spirited, and willing to make sacrifices in the most extreme circumstances makes her look more akin to a Christian martyr than to a Jewish victim of the Holocaust. Holocaust TV is tightly linked to broader cultural and political developments. The further the events recede from us, the less the subject is likely to prove contentious. Transnational Holocaust remembrance is its most notable consequence. The process of construction of a shared European (at least, Western European) official Holocaust narrative takes nourishment from memory rituals such as the Auschwitz ceremony discussed in this chapter. Moreover, as recent developments in France’s politics of memory seem to imply, this trend is likely to increase; only time will tell if this ‘decentralization’ of memory culture will become hegemonic and what role the mass media will play in this transition. However, a number of examples cited in this article, including the different ways in which the Auschwitz ceremony was framed, reveal the persistence of important aspects of cultural specificity that national televisions help to preserve. As long as the Holocaust is perceived as relevant and TV networks are to some degree inf luenced by national politics — an inf luence that is relatively slight in Britain, more significant in France, almost paralyzing in Italy — it is not easy to foresee an end to this double regime of Holocaust memory, part domestic and part cosmopolitan. This chapter has argued that television is a medium inherently sensitive to the interplay between these two regimes, and that precisely for this reason it will be important to further explore this medium’s relationship with the different layers of Holocaust memory, a work that would require a degree of detail that far exceeds the scope of this preliminary survey.

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Television programmes Al di là delle frontiere (Beyond Borders), dir. Maurizio Zaccaro (RAI UNO, 2004, 2–3 May. 20.50) Anne Frank, l’après-journal (Anne Frank: The After-Diary), dir. Christophe Weber and Laurent Portes (France 2, 2008, 7 October. 22.50) Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, dir. Laurence Rees (BBC One, 2005, 11 January–15 February) Bousquet ou le grand arrangement (Bousquet or the Great Arrangement), dir. Laurent Heynemann (Arte, 2007, 16 November. 20.40) Il cuore nel pozzo (The Heart in the Well), dir. Alberto Negrin (RAI UNO, 2005, 6–7 February. 20.50) Dalle leggi razziali alla Shoah (From the Racial Laws to the Shoah), dir. Daniela Padoan (RAI TRE, 2008, 12 October. 13.21) De Gasperi: l’uomo della speranza (De Gasperi: Man of Hope), dir. Liliana Cavani (RAI UNO, 2005, 24–25 April. 20.50) The Diary of Anne Frank, dir. George Stevens (Twentieth Century Fox, 1959) The Diary of Anne Frank, dir. Jon Jones (BBC 1, 2009, 5–9 January. 19.00) Edda, dir. Giorgio Capitani (RAI UNO, 2005, 23–24 May. 20.50) Einsatzgruppen, dir. Michaël Prazan (France 2, 2009, 16 April. 22.55 & 23 April. 23.00) Enemy at the Door, dir. Bill Bain and others (ITV, 1978–1980) An Englishman’s Castle, dir. Paul Ciappessoni (BBC 2, 1978, 5, 12, 19 June) La fuga degli innocenti (The Flight of the Innocents), dir. Leone Pompucci (RAI UNO, 2004, 16–17 May. 20.50) La guerra è finita (The War Is Over), dir. Lodovico Gasparini (RAI UNO, 2002, 5–6 May. 20.50) If Britain Had Fallen, dir. Norman Longmate (BBC 1, 1972, 12 September) Island at War, dir. Peter Lydon and Thaddeus O’Sullivan (ITV, 2004) It Happened Here, dir. Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo (Image Entertainment, 1965) Le Journal d’Anne Frank (The Diary of Anne Frank), dir. Jon Jones (France 2, 2008, 7 October. 20.50) Maria José: l’ultima regina (Maria Josè: The Last Queen), dir. Carlo Lizzani (RAI UNO, 2002, 7–8 January. 20.50) Mi ricordo Anna Frank (I Remember Anne Frank), dir. Alberto Negrin (2010, 27 January. 21.00) I misteri del nazismo II (The Mysteries of Nazism II), dir. Rosario Maria Montesanti (RAI TRE, 2002, 18 March. 20.50) Mitterrand à Vichy (Mitterrand in Vichy), dir. Serge Moati (France 2, 2008, 22 April. 20.50) Mitterrand a Vichy, le choc d’une révélation (Mitterrand in Vichy: The Shock of a Revelation), dir. Hugues Nancy (France 2, 2008, 22 April. 22.20) Mussolini combatte (Mussolini Fights), dir. Nicola Caracciolo (RAI TRE, 1998, 26 October. 20.50) La grande storia The Other Man, dir. Gordon Flemyng (ITV, 1964, 7 September) ITV Play of the Week Perlasca: Un eroe italiano (Perlasca: An Italian Hero), dir. Alberto Negrin (RAI UNO, 2002, 28–29 January. 20.50) The Relief of Belsen, dir. Justin Hardy (Channel 4, 2007, 15 October. 21.00) La Résistance (The Resistance), dir. Félix Olivier (France 2 and France 5, 2008, 18,19, 22, 29 February and 7, 14 March. 20.50) Sanguepazzo (Wild Blood), dir. Marco Tullio Giordana (RAI UNO, 2010, 30–31 May. 21.10) Senza confini (Without Borders), dir. Fabrizio Costa (RAI UNO, 2001, 23–24 September. 20.50) Shoah par balles: l’histoire oubliée (The Shoah by Bullets: The Forgotten History), dir. Romain Icard (France 3, 2008, 12 March. 20.50)

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Notes to Chapter 1 1. Referenced in Anna Reading, The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 78. 2. See at least Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) on the United States; Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006) on Germany; Stefano Luconi, ‘Beyond La vita è bella: The Persecution of Jews in Early 21st-Century Italian Historical Fiction for Television’, in Cultural Perspectives on Film, Literature, and Language, ed. by Will Lehman and Margit Grieb (Boca Raton: BrownWalker, 2010), pp. 175–85 on Italy; Oren Meyers, Eyal Zandberg, and Motti Neiger, ‘Prime Time Commemoration: An Analysis of Television Broadcasts on Israel’s Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism’, Journal of Communication, 59 (2009), 456–80 on Israel; Judith Petersen, ‘How British Television Inserted the Holocaust into Britain’s War Memory in 1995’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 21 (2001), 255–72 on Britain. 3. Frank Bösch, ‘Moving History: Television and Holocaust in Central Europe since the 1950s’, unpublished lecture given at the German Historical Institute London, 3 March 2011; Julie Maeck, Montrer la Shoah à la télévision, de 1960 à nos jours (Paris: Nouveau monde, 2009); Andrei S. Markovits and Rebecca S. Hayden, ‘ “Holocaust” before and after the Event: Reactions in West Germany and Austria’, New German Critique, 19 (1980), 53–80. 4. Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The “Holocaust” from War Crime to Trauma Drama’, European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (2002), 5–85; Daniel Levy, and Natan Sznaider, ‘The Cosmopolitanization of Holocaust Memory: From Jewish to Human Experience’, in Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas, ed. by Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Wolf (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 313–30; Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, trans. by Assenka Oksiloff (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). 5. Dan Diner, ‘Restitution and Memory: The Holocaust in European Political Cultures’, New German Critique, 90 (2003), 36–44 (p. 36); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), pp. 801–31; Eva-Clarita Onken, ‘The Baltic States and Moscow’s 9 May Commemoration: Analysing Memory Politics in Europe’, Europe-Asia Studies, 59 (2007), 23–46 (p. 30). 6. Paolo Jedlowski, Il racconto come dimora: ‘Heimat’ e le memorie d’Europa (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2009), p. 63; Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth, ‘A European Memory?’, in A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, ed. by Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth (New York: Berghahn, 2010), pp. 1–20 (p. 12). 7. Teresa Grande, ‘Quale memoria per l’Europa?’, in Rammemorare la Shoah: 27 gennaio e identità europea, ed. by RI.LE.S (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2009), pp. 51–67 (p. 51); Eşref Aksu, ‘Global Collective Memory: Conceptual Difficulties of an Appealing Idea’, Global Society, 23 (2009), 317–32 (p. 328); Claudio Fogu and Wulf Kansteiner, ‘The Politics of Memory and the Poetics of History’, in The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, ed. by Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 284–310 (p. 294) 8. Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe, trans. by Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). 9. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 10. Annekie Joubert, ‘History by Word of Mouth: Linking Past and Present through Oral Memory’, in Historical Memory in Africa: Dealing with the Past, Reaching for the Future in an Intercultural Context, ed. by Mamadou Diawara, Bernard Lategan, and Jörn Rüsen (New York: Berghahn, 2010), pp. 27–52. 11. Joubert, pp. 45–46. 12. Robert S. C. Gordon, ‘The Holocaust in Italian Collective Memory: Il giorno della memoria, 27 January 2001’, Modern Italy, 11 (2006), 167–88.

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13. Dayan and Katz, p. 54. 14. Simon Cottle, ‘Mediatized Rituals: Beyond Manufacturing Consent’, Media, Culture and Society, 28 (2006), 411–32 (p. 415). 15. Andreas Hepp and Nick Couldry, ‘Introduction: Media Events in Globalized Media Cultures’, in Media Events in a Global Age, ed. by Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp, and Friedrich Krotz (Oxon: Routledge, 2010), pp. 1–20 (p. 10). 16. Jean K. Chalaby, Transnational Television in Europe: Reconfiguring Global Communications Networks (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 103 and 136. 17. On these recent historiographical trends, see Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 18. Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, trans. by Catherine Spencer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Shoah par balles: l’histoire oubliée, dir. Romain Icard (France 3, 2008, 12 March. 20.50) 19. Desbois, Holocaust, pp. 6–8. 20. Boris Czerny, Edouard Husson, and Sophie Nagiscarde, Les Fusillades massives des juifs en Ukraine 1941–1944: la Shoah par balles. Catalogue de l’exposition Mémorial de la Shoah (Paris: Mémorial de la Shoah, 2007). 21. Jonathan Littell, Les Bienveillantes (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). 22. Patrick Desbois, Porteur de mémoires: sur les traces de la Shoah par balles (Paris: Michel Lafon, 2007). 23. ‘Pièces à Conviction: Shoah par balles: l’histoire oubliée’ (2008) [accessed 11 April 2011]. 24. Christian Ingrao and Jean Solchany, ‘La Shoah par balles: les historiens oubliés’, nonfiction. fr, 2008 [accessed 11 April 2011]. Their argument was developed in the 27 May 2009 episode of the radio programme Fabrique de l’histoire, aired on France Culture, and in Christian Ingrao and Jean Solchany, ‘La “Shoah par balles”: impressions historiennes sur l’enquête du père Desbois et sa médiatisation’, Vingtième Siècle (2009), 3–18. 25. Edouard Husson, ‘L’Allemagne reconnaît l’importance des recherches sur la “Shoah par balles” ’, Marianne, 2009 [accessed 11 April 2011]. 26. Laignel-Lavastine was speaking on the 27 May 2009 episode of the radio programme Fabrique de l’histoire (Radio France). 27. The debate was summarized in the e-magazine lesinfluences.fr; see Emmanuel Lemieux, ‘Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine vs Père Desbois’, Les Influences, 2009 [accessed 11 April 2011]; ‘Peut on encore débattre des sujets qui fâchent sur France-Culture?’, Les Influences, 2009 [accessed 11 April 2011]; ‘Le Père Desbois, victime d’un double antisémite’, Les Influences, 2009 [accessed 11 April 2011]; Omer Bartov, ‘Finding — or Erasing — Ukraine’s Jews?’, Haaretz, 2007 [accessed 11 April 2011]; see also Guillaume de Syon, ‘The Einsatzgruppen and the Issue of “Ordinary Men” ’, in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. by Jonathan C. Friedman (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 148–55 (p. 153), and Michaël Prazan, Einsatzgruppen (Paris: Seuil, 2010), pp. 415–16. 28. Audrey Kichelewski, ‘Shoah par balles: l’histoire oubliée’, Histoire@Politique, 2009 [accessed 11 April 2011]. 29. Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 516. 30. Einsatzgruppen, dir. Michaël Prazan (France 2, 2009, 16 April. 22.55 and 23 April. 23.00). 31. Prazan, pp. 450–52. 32. Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London: Wallf lower, 2008), p. 5. 33. Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, dir. Laurence Rees (BBC One, 2005, 11 January — 15 February); Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 45–46.

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34. Christopher R. Browning, ‘The Origins of the Final Solution’, in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, pp. 156–67 (pp. 164–65); Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution ( Jerusalem: International Institute for Holocaust Research — Yad Vashem, 2008), pp. 99–100. 35. Enemy at the Door, dir. Bill Bain and others (ITV, 1978–1980); Hazel R. Knowles Smith, The Changing Face of the Channel Islands Occupation: Record, Memory and Myth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Island at War, dir. Peter Lydon and Thaddeus O’Sullivan (ITV, 2004). 36. An Englishman’s Castle, dir. Paul Ciappessoni (BBC 2, 1978, 5, 12, 19 June); The Other Man, dir. Gordon Flemyng (ITV, 1964, 7 September), ITV Play of the Week; Norman Longmate, If Britain Had Fallen (London: BBC/Hutchinson, 1972); If Britain Had Fallen, dir. Norman Longmate (BBC 1, 1972, 12 September). 37. Walter Schellenberg, Invasion 1940: The Nazi Invasion Plan for Britain (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2000). 38. Adrian Gilbert, Britain Invaded: Hitler’s Plans for Britain: A Documentary Reconstruction (London: Century, 1990); Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson, ‘Hitler’s England’, in Virtual History: Alternatives and Counter-Factuals, ed. by Niall Ferguson (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 281–320. 39. It Happened Here, dir. Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo (Image Entertainment, 1965). 40. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 70. 41. John Ramsden, ‘Myths and Realities on the “People’s War” in Britain’, in Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Europe, ed. by Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens (New York: Berghahn, 2010), pp. 40–52 (p. 48). According to Tristam Hunt, ‘Reality, Identity and Empathy: The Changing Face of Social History Television’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006), 843–58 (p. 844), this is due to the fact that these patriotic narratives bolster a national identity rendered fragile by immigration, devolution and European integration. 42. I misteri del nazismo II, dir. Rosario Maria Montesanti (RAI TRE, 2002, 18 March. 20.50); on this see Francesca Anania, Immagini di storia: La televisione nacconta il Novecento (Rome: Rai-Eri, 2003), pp. 83–101 and 153. I thank Robert Gordon for pointing out to me that such programmes also air on UK digital TV, thus presenting an interesting thematic similarity between Italian mainstream Holocaust TV and British digital minority channels. 43. This happens much more frequently in Italy than in France. My view of French historical television programming is thus more generous than Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, ‘Staging Historical Leaders on French Television: The Example of Napoleon Bonaparte’, in Televising History: Mediating the Past in Postwar Europe, ed. by Erin Bell and Ann Gray (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 95–106 (p. 98). 44. Mussolini combatte, dir. Nicola Caracciolo (RAI TRE, 1998, 26 October. 20.50). 45. Dalle leggi razziali alla Shoah, dir. Daniela Padoan (RAI TRE, 2008, 12 October. 13.21). 46. Gary R. Edgerton, ‘ “Where the Past Comes Alive”: Television, History, and Collective Memory’, in A Companion to Television, ed. by Janet Wasko (Chichester: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 361–78 (pp. 366–69). 47. Mark Moss, Toward the Visualization of History: The Past as Image (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), p. 152. 48. For details about the Berlusconi Government’s political control over RAI in the period, see Matthew Hibberd, The Media in Italy: Press, Cinema and Broadcasting from Unification to Digital (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008), pp. 114–16. 49. Martin Purvis and David Atkinson, ‘Performing Wartime Memories: Ceremony as Contest at the Risiera di San Sabba Death Camp, Trieste’, Social and Cultural Geography, 10 (2009), 337–56 (p. 344); Il cuore nel pozzo, dir. Alberto Negrin (RAI UNO, 2005, 6–7 February. 20.50). 50. La guerra è finita, dir. Lodovico Gasparini (RAI UNO, 2002, 5–6 May. 20.50). 51. Nini Wiedemann, Al di là delle frontiere (Firenze: Loggia de’ Lanzi, 1998); Al di là delle frontiere, dir. Maurizio Zaccaro (RAI UNO, 2004, 2–3 May. 20.50). 52. La fuga degli innocenti, dir. Leone Pompucci (RAI UNO, 2004, 16–17 May. 20.50). 53. Perlasca: Un eroe italiano, dir. Alberto Negrin (RAI UNO, 2002, 28–29 January. 20.50); Senza confini, dir. Fabrizio Costa (RAI UNO, 2001, 23–24 September. 20.50). I have already discussed the importance of Perlasca in current Holocaust memory culture in Italy in ‘Legitimizing

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Fascism through the Holocaust? The Reception of the Miniseries Perlasca: un eroe italiano in Italy’, Memory Studies, 3 (2010), 95–109 and Conflicts of Memory: The Reception of Holocaust Films and Television Programmes in the Italian Press, 1945 to the Present (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 223–30. On Palatucci, see Susan Zuccotti, ‘Pope Pius XII and the Rescue of Jews in Italy: Evidence of a Papal Directive?’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 18 (2004), 255–73 (pp. 261–62). On Senza confini, see Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 137–39. 54. Maria José: l’ultima regina, dir. Carlo Lizzani (RAI UNO, 2002, 7–8 January. 20.50). 55. Edda, dir. Giorgio Capitani (RAI UNO, 2005, 23–24 May. 20.50). See Ray Moseley, ‘Ciano, Galeazzo’, in Dizionario del fascismo, ed. by Victoria De Grazia and Sergio Luzzatto (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), pp. 279–82 (p. 280). 56. De Gasperi: l’uomo della speranza, dir. Liliana Cavani (RAI UNO, 2005, 24–25 April. 20.50). See Paolo Piccoli and Armando Vadagnini, De Gasperi: Un trentino nella storia d’Europa (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004), p. 36; Franco Cuomo, I dieci: chi erano gli scienziati che firmarono il Manifesto della razza (Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2005), pp. 24–25; Luconi, p. 180. 57. Sanguepazzo, dir. Marco Tullio Giordana (RAI UNO, 2010, 30–31 May. 21.10). On Valenti and Ferida, see Romano Bracalini, Celebri e dannati: Osvaldo Valenti e Luisa Ferida. Storia e tragedia di due divi del regime (Milan: Longanesi, 1985). 58. Luconi, pp. 181–82. 59. The Relief of Belsen, dir. Justin Hardy (Channel 4, 2007, 15 October. 21.00); La Résistance, dir. Félix Olivier (France 2 and France 5, 2008, 18,19, 22, 29 February and 7, 14 March: 20.50). 60. James Alexander Deans Johnston, ‘The Relief of Belsen Concentration Camp: Recollections and Ref lections of a British Army Doctor’, in Rosensaft Papers (Washington, DC: USHMM, 1970 ca.). 61. Ben Shephard, ‘The Medical Relief Effort at Belsen’, in Belsen 1945: New Historical Perspectives, ed. by Suzanne Bargett and David Cesarani (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), pp. 31–50 (p. 46). 62. Gareth McLean, ‘Watch This’, The Guardian, 15 October 2007 [accessed 27 November 2011]. 63. Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 189 and Toby Haggith, ‘Filming the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen’, in Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television since 1933, ed. by Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (London: Wallf lower, 2005), pp. 30–49 (p. 33). 64. Mitterrand à Vichy, dir. Serge Moati (France 2, 2008, 22 April. 20.50). 65. This narrative is clearly inf luenced by the work of Jacques Sémelin, Unarmed against Hitler: Civilian Resistance in Europe, 1939–1943, trans. by Suzan Husserl-Kapit (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993). Sémelin was one of the series’ historical advisers. 66. Barnett Singer, ‘The Changing Image of Vichy in France’, Contemporary Review, 2009 [accessed 2 December 2010]. 67. Simon Epstein, Un paradoxe français: Antiracistes dans la Collaboration, antisémites dans la Résistance (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008). Other books published in 2008 include Thomas Rabino, Le Réseau Carte: Histoire d’un réseau de la Résistance antiallemand, antigaulliste, anticommuniste et anticollaborationniste (Paris: Perrin, 2008) and Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon, Les Vichysto-résistants: de 1940 à nos jours (Paris: Perrin, 2008). 68. Mitterrand a Vichy, le choc d’une révélation, dir. Hugues Nancy (France 2, 2008, 22 April. 22.20). 69. Pierre Péan, Une jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, 1934–1947 (Paris: Fayard, 1994). Bousquet’s story from 1978 to his assassination in 1993 was the subject of another ‘nuanced’ fiction broadcast on Arte in 2007, Bousquet ou le grand arrangement, dir. Laurent Heynemann (Arte, 2007, 16 November. 20.40). 70. For an overview of this crucial turn in France’s relationship with its past, see Richard J. Golsan, Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 103–23, and Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 159–78. 71. Moati emphasized this aspect in an interview he gave to the Nouvel observateur on the eve

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of the broadcast; see ‘Mitterrand et Vichy’, nouvelobs.com (2008) [accessed 3 December 2010]. The publication of the tie-in book by Serge Moati and Hugues Nancy, Mitterrand à Vichy: Le choc d’un révélation (La Tour d’Aigues: Éd. de l’Aube, 2008) accompanied France 2’s special. 72. For the praise, see Christophe Barbier, ‘Les Années Grises de Mitterrand’, L’Express, 2008

[accessed 3 December 2010]; Mathieu Castagnet, ‘Mitterrand à Vichy, retour sur un passé qui n’est pas passé’, la Croix, 2008 [accessed 3 December 2010]; Eric Conan, ‘Mitterand, retour sur “les années Vichy” ’, Marianne, 2008 [accessed 8 December 2010]; Alain Duhamel, ‘Mitterrand, Vichy et la Résis­ tance’, Libération, 2008 [accessed 2 December 2010]; Clara Dupont-Monod, ‘Une fiction et un docu­mentaire pour comprendre’, Marianne, 2008 [accessed 8 December 2010]. Danielle Mitterrand criticized the docufiction’s dating of Mitterrand’s switch to the Resistance in 1943 instead of late 1942. Her critique was publicized in Emmanuel Berretta, ‘François Mitterrand: Nouvelle controverse sur son passé vichyste’, Le Point, 2008 [accessed 3 December 2010]; Hubert Védrine, ‘Retour nécessaire sur deux controverses’, La Lettre de l’Institut François Mitterrand n° 23, 2008 [accessed 3 December 2010]. The only negative review was Thierry Leclère, ‘Mitterrand à Vichy Documentaire-fiction de Serge Moati (France, 2008)’, Tèlérama, 2008 [accessed 8 December 2010]. Leclère claimed that viewers were left ‘frustrated by the documentary and deceived by the fiction’. 73. Rapport de la Commission de réflexion sur la modernisation des commémorations publiques, ed. by André Kaspi (Secrétariat d’Etat à la Défense et aux Anciens Combattants, 2008); Rapport d’information fait en application de l’article 145 du Règlement au nom de la mission d’information sur les questions mémorielles, ed. by M. Bernard Accoyer (Assemblée Nationale, 2008). For extensive discussion of the two reports and their implications, see Johann Michel, Gouverner les mémoires: Les Politiques Mémorielles en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010); Johann Michel, ‘La Fragmentation des régimes mémoriels dans la France contemporaine’, in PluralismusKonflikte — Le Pluralisme en conflits: Österreichisch-Französische Begegnungen, ed. by Marie-Luisa Frick, Pascal Mbongo, and Florian Schallhart (Wien: Lit Verlag, 2010), pp. 21–41; Johann Michel, ‘Regards croisés sur les rapports Kaspi et Accoyer: Le retour du régime mémoriel d’unité nationale’, in La Mémoire et le crime, ed. by Michel Danti-Juan (Paris: Éditions CUJAS, 2011), pp. 199–216. 74. The most recent study of Anne Frank is Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp. 141–62. 75. The Diary of Anne Frank, dir. Jon Jones (BBC 1, 2009, 5–9 January. 19.00). The French version was fifty-five minutes shorter and aired on a single night; see Le Journal d’Anne Frank, dir. Jon Jones (France 2, 2008, 7 October. 20.50). A one-hundred-minute-long version also aired on PBS on 11 April 2010. The RAI film was Mi ricordo Anna Frank, dir. Alberto Negrin (2010, 27 January. 21.00); the film was based on Miep Gies and Alison Leslie Gold, Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of Miep Gies Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family (London: Bantam, 1987). 76. Anne Frank, l’après-journal, dir. Christophe Weber and Laurent Portes (France 2, 2008, 7 October. 22.50). 77. The Diary of Anne Frank, dir. George Stevens (Twentieth Century Fox, 1959).

C h ap t e r 2

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Collecting, Indexing and Digitizing Survivor Accounts Holocaust Testimonies in the Digital Age Judith Keilbach Survivors have always played an important role in shaping historical knowledge about and remembrance of the Holocaust. First, they contributed significantly to knowledge about what actually happened at the concentration camps: in the weeks after their liberation, survivors led Allied soldiers, journalists, politicians, as well as the German civilians who were ordered to visit the sites, around the camps, showing them the conditions in which victims had had to live, demonstrating torture methods and explaining how the gas chambers and furnaces worked; survivors also appeared as witnesses in the Nazi trials and did not just identify perpetrators but also provided a great deal of historical detail; and their experiences were recorded and collected by organizations such as the Polish Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralną Żydowska Komisja Historyczna) and the Hungarian National Committee for Attending Deportees (Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság), by individuals such as David Boder, and later by the Wiener Library, Yad Vashem and other institutions, in the form of questionnaires or witness statements.1 Secondly, the survivors kept the memory of these horrible events alive through descriptions of their own fates, thereby also remembering those who were killed in the concentration and extermination camps; they held memorial services, campaigned for the establishment of memorials and monuments and were living reminders to prevent future genocides. Nevertheless, as Annette Wievorka has suggested, the survivors and ‘their per­ sonal, individual memories’ mostly remained ‘confined within closed family-like groups’2 and only over time drew significant public attention.3 Survivors’ testimonies became socially significant in the Eichmann trial (1961), which is why Wievorka defines this moment as the ‘advent of the witness’.4 The survivors’ testimony about their personal experiences as witnesses for the prosecution, even though — as Hannah Arendt charged5 — it contributed little to establishing truth in the legal sense, was broadcast on the radio, reported in cinema newsreels and televised in thirty-eight countries.6 Yet despite the Eichmann trial’s worldwide distribution of Holocaust testimony, there was no ‘cosmopolitization of memories’, such as Daniel

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Levy and Natan Sznaider find in the 1990s.7 Just as historiography and memorial culture still took place within national frameworks during the early 1960s, the survivors were also — if at all — organized in national victims’ organizations (such as, for instance, the national committees of the different concentration camps and the national associations of those persecuted by or resisting the Nazis) or they met in private or in regional or local groups ( Jewish communities or local associations of Holocaust survivors). The persistence of national memory collectives makes clear that, despite the Eichmann trial’s worldwide broadcasting, it did not set in motion any cosmo­ politization of Holocaust remembrance in the sense of a ‘de-nationalization’. The trial is nevertheless a telling reference point for engagement with transnational remembrance, as it illustrates that worldwide attention towards Holocaust survivors requires the use of media, and that the act of testimony is connected to certain media constellations. At the time of the trial, radio, cinema and television were responsible for the distribution of Holocaust testimony, whereas nowadays global access to survivor testimony is enabled by databases, MPEG files and the internet. This chapter deals with audiovisual Holocaust testimony in the digital age. Of particular interest here are the media conditions that now determine the rationale of the collection and the dissemination of testimony. Survivors’ testimony can take the form of many different media: from written documents (questionnaires, interview transcripts, autobiographical reports), to audio recordings and video testimonies. While these testimonies were long only accessible in the libraries and institutional archives responsible for their collection, digitalization and the internet have significantly changed the conditions of access to these documents, as media technology now offers access that is no longer tied to any one particular location. The example of video testimony shows this development particularly clearly — especially considering the longstanding technological challenges in providing access to collections of moving images. It will become clear that access to video testimony is characterized by a particular tension between the global and the local that on the one hand results from technological conditions and on the other from ethical concerns. Given that survivors’ testimony takes material form — for instance, paper, audiotape, videocassette, or hard drive — it could be concluded that storing on these media compensates for the generational shift: even after the last eye witnesses have died, their admonishing voices will still be audible. Their testimony is captured in thousands of video interviews that will still be accessible after their death. This mediatization does not detract from the power of their statements. The immediacy of the video image, one of this medium’s main characteristics, enables us — as James Young notes about video testimonies — to ‘respond to pictures of people as if they actually were people’.8 However, video testimony also presents the new millennium with a challenge. Tony Kushner calls it a ‘crucial point in the use of Holocaust testimony’ and wonders about the ‘use that is to be made of this material’.9 This chapter will take up that question and analyze the range of services offered by two witness projects. Its main concern is to show to what extent media-technological developments

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effect changes in the access to and uses of witness testimony. This excludes the use of testimonies in historiography, their fragmentation and montage in documentary films or museum exhibits, as well as the selection criteria for the use of clips in TV programs, which are mainly oriented towards generating coherence and affect; existing publications already cover these subjects.10 The following will instead deal with the media conditions that make these different uses possible in the first place. It is therefore important to study the media-technological conditions of the collecting, archiving and accessing of Holocaust testimony. Collecting Video Testimony In what follows, two projects of recording interviews will serve as examples of the possibilities and challenges that Holocaust testimony presents in the digital era. These are the two most prominent video testimony archives, the Fortunoff Video Archive and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Archive. With contemporary changes in the media landscape (digitization, the internet), both archives have seen considerable changes in the conditions under which they record testimony. This has required the archives both to adapt and to reformulate their tasks and objectives, especially in relation to handling testimony. In order to discuss the questions and problems that have arisen or arise in this process, it is first necessary to describe both archives’ inception as well as their practices so far. This excludes their interview methods, already studied elsewhere.11 The Fortunoff Video Archive started as a grassroots movement in New Haven at the end of the 1970s. This was a time when Holocaust awareness was slowly starting to grow in the US. Multiple states included the Holocaust in their mandatory curricula, NBC was showing the Holocaust mini-series (1978), and President Carter appointed a commission to gather suggestions for an appropriate form of Holocaust remembrance (the commission’s report led to the construction of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the introduction of national Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust).12 Aside from these nationwide efforts and events, there were also many local initiatives, for instance in New Haven, where private citizens instigated the construction of the first Holocaust monument on state land, which was inaugurated in 1977. In sync with these developments, Laurel Vlock, a producer for the local TV channel WTNH planned a documentary program about the Holocaust. During her research she contacted Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst who specialized in the psychological effects of the Holocaust and was a child survivor himself. Ultimately their collaboration led to the recording of several video interviews with Holocaust survivors in the spring of 1979, during which ‘Vlock and Laub both realized that what they had recorded was extraordinary and that the impact of these stories should be shared’, as Joanne Weiner Rudof states in her review of the archive’s history.13 Over the next two years, the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, as the initiative was then called, recorded nearly 200 further video interviews in New Haven and a few other American cities.14 On the one hand these conversations were ‘a corrective response’ to popular media representations of the Holocaust,15 on the

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other they may have provided the survivors with a chance to free themselves from their nightmares.16 Finally, they created ‘video recordings of public broadcasting quality’ for ‘future educators and filmmakers’.17 Since 1981 the collection has belonged to Yale University, which has continued the project since. The collection of what has since been renamed the Fortunoff Video Archive now comprises around 4400 interviews. Amongst the conditions of possibility of such a witness archive are not only the growing awareness of the Holocaust in the US, but also the availability of video technology. The introduction of video cameras on the consumer market enabled many grassroots movements to record video of marginalized people telling their own story in their own words. The technology also proved well suited to the Holocaust Survivors Film Project: it is inexpensive and easy to use, and the duration of videotapes allows for relatively long interviews without annoying interruptions (which are necessary when recording interviews on film and having to change reels). Through its visual dimension, video testimony can furthermore provide more information than a transcript of a survivor’s words: aside from the Holocaust survivors’ statements, the camera also registers their searches for words, their hesitations and silences, and of course their facial expressions and visible emotions. It is not least this visual dimension and the (apparent) immediacy of the video image that contributes to the compassion that the interviews are often understood to produce in viewers. Video technology was also important to the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which was founded in 1994. When Steven Spielberg was shooting Schindler’s List (1993) in Krakow — so the founding myth of the organization goes — several Holocaust survivors working as extras expressed their desire to report on their own experiences in the camps. Touched by their suggestion, Spielberg started a foundation to record the stories and the voices of the survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust. Faced with the knowledge that time was pressing 50 years after the end of the war, the foundation made it its goal to collect at least 50,000 interviews within five years. To achieve this, they hired 1000 videographers and trained 2300 interviewers who interviewed witnesses in fifty-six countries and thirty-two languages. Since 2006 the Shoah Foundation has been affiliated with the University of Southern California, where the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education collects the interviews, makes them accessible and, as will be shown below, suggests various ways of using the collection. The witness project of the Shoah Foundation, as well as Schindler’s List, can be seen as examples of the ‘de-territorialization and individualization of memory’.18 Although Levy and Sznaider have already extensively discussed the globalization of Holocaust remembrance that goes along with Spielberg’s project, I would like to point out one further feature of the project. Contrary to the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, which was started in opposition to popular media representations and was grounded in the counter-public sphere, the witness project of the Shoah Foundation is mainly characterized by what Derrida calls an archontic rationality: it aims to collect and protect as much testimony as possible before all the witnesses die, and then systematically categorize these to make them accessible.19

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Global Collection and Local Networks The size of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Archive collection is not just due to the resources made available for the continuation of the project,20 but it can also be seen as an expression of the globally spreading awareness of the Holocaust. Whereas most of the testimony collections were limited to the local or the national, the Shoah Foundation has aimed to collect testimonies globally since its very inception. Although the Fortunoff Video Archive began as a local project limited to the New Haven community, it too orientated itself more internationally over time (and with its growing financial means) and began also to interview survivors living abroad. The fact that its reach was limited to the US and Israel in the 1980s and later was extended to Canada and Western Europe is not just related to the geographical location of Holocaust survivors, but also to the bipolar world order before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Only with the opening up of the Eastern Bloc did the visibility of Eastern European survivors increase and did they become available for witness projects. No wonder, then, that the Shoah Foundation, with its decidedly global mission (as well as its origin on a Krakow film set), started holding interviews in the former Eastern Bloc in the middle of the 1990s.21 The global mission of the Shoah Foundation was a special challenge not only because of the scope of the project. As the foundation implemented its strategies from the top down and had its main seat in the US, it also had to contend with the difficulty of contacting survivors abroad. Although f lyers were distributed and ads placed in newspapers in search of willing witnesses, these people reacted rather cautiously. It became clear that the willingness to talk about Holocaust-related experiences is dependent on the trust placed in the people or the organization conducting the project. To that end, the Shoah Foundation contacted local groups such as Jewish communities or survivor organizations and hired people to function as regional coordinators of the interview project. This cooperation made sure that the survivors got to know the person who invited them to contribute to a global collection of Holocaust testimony. After the first interviews in a region new contributors were then often found on the basis of past contributors’ recom­ mendations; other survivors got in touch as they had heard about the project from others. The fact that all contributors were sent a videocassette of their interview provided further stimulus to contribute to the project. ‘Providing interviewees with copies of their testimonies for their private use proved to be the best form of outreach’, acknowledges the Shoah Foundation.22 If the collection of interviews is driven by the need to ensure that as many memories as possible are recorded, the Shoah Foundation’s sending contributors videocassettes of their interviews also reveals their concerns over the passing down of family memories, positioning them at the heart of memory discourse. The procedure with which the Shoah Foundation won survivors’ contributions to a global witness archive thus presupposes the existence of local organizations and networks, as the interview partners were located through these local groups. In this light one could discuss which groups were contacted and which people were not reached in this process. Here, though, I would like to stress one of the

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key conditions for this worldwide collection of Holocaust testimonies: it was only through cooperation with local groups and their networks that the Shoah Foundation’s global mission could ever be successful. For a more ‘organically’ grown project like the Fortunoff Video Archive, getting in touch with survivors was a much less complicated issue: as a grassroots movement, the Holocaust Survivors Film Project was itself part of a network. The first interviewees were friends, family members and acquaintances from New Haven and later on also from other American cities. This network was also connected to survivors in other countries, who in turn were organized in similar networks and gradually then were also interviewed themselves. To conduct these interviews more people were trained in the particular practice of the Fortunoff Video Archive and then sent out to record the interviews wherever the survivors were living. Whereas the Shoah Foundation thus always had a global mission that could only succeed through cooperation with local organizations, the Fortunoff Video Archive’s originally local network expanded over time so that its collection today also includes interviews conducted on various continents. Both developments thus point to the cosmopolitization of Holocaust memory. Databases As the Holocaust Survivors Film Project was from the start occupied with recording the interviews, handing over the tapes to Yale University made it possible for the recordings to be accessible. Scholars dealing with the narrative structures of autobiographical accounts, with memory and trauma, or with the Holocaust as a historical event could all view the videos at Yale’s university library. In the early days of the video project, during the analogue era, viewing the material meant watching it on VCRs from start to finish, as videocassettes are only linearly accessible and the interview content was then not yet searchable. The building of a computerized database for the university library, which from the mid-1980s would include the witness interviews, was the first sign of the witness testimony’s transition to the digital era. This made the interviews easier to search on site; global access of the kind now possible through Orbis, the Yale university library catalogue, was then still unthinkable. For the Shoah Foundation and its goal of collecting at least 50,000 witness testi­ monies, on the other hand, it was clear from the outset that indexing the inter­v iews’ content would be of central importance. To this end a cataloguing and indexing system was developed. This so-called Testimony Catalogue lists personal information (name, place of birth, family, religion), relevant places (ghettos, camps) and general experiences (hiding, resistance, f light, forced marches), all information taken from questionnaires filled out by the interviewees in preparation for the interview. The witness interviews are additionally indexed with the help of a thesaurus comprised of 50,000 terms, the majority of which are geographical. During the indexing process the video recordings are divided in one-minute segments, which are then accorded one or more relevant terms by a historical content analyst or indexer. Using a keyword search and through the search terms’ links to time codes, thematic

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Fig. 2.1. Interface of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive online, showing the testimony of Basia Toporski. Website capture.

passages from an interview can be called up to the precise minute. This database function on the one hand implies users who search for specific locations and on the other users who do not view entire interviews but only fragments of them. The difference in registering the interviews that becomes apparent when com­ paring the Fortunoff Video Archive and the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive especially clarifies the media-technological developments that took place over the fifteen years that separate the beginnings of the two projects: the analogue recording process of video technology, which requires a linear playback of the tape, stands in sharp contrast to the database logic of the digital age that is based on fragmentation. That the Fortunoff Video Archive now also makes use of digital possibilities will be shown later. The fragmentation of the statements and the ability to call these up by means of keywords imply a change of attitude in watching the interviews. There is a difference between inserting a videocassette in a VCR about which one only knows that it will contain the testimony of a Holocaust survivor and clicking a keyword that triggers a brief interview excerpt. In the latter case one surely is less likely to listen empathetically in the way that viewers are often thought to do when faced with Holocaust survivor testimony. The argument that video testimony shows ‘whole human beings’23 can also be called into question in light of the statements’ fragmentation. And, finally, another aspect of the database causes unease in connection to the Holocaust, as systematic data collection was just what the Nazis used to identify Jews, Roma and Sinti.24

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The multitude of languages resulting from the Shoah Foundation’s global reach in collecting testimony presents an additional challenge for the indexing of the collection by the minute. In order for the database to function, the keywords need to be standardized. This does not only mean that the spelling of names and places needs to be standardized, but also that the indexing thesaurus can only exist in one language — which, in the case of the Visual History Archive’s interviews in thiry-two different languages, means translating any non-English testimony. As the thesaurus is composed of English terms, all interviews in other languages had to be transferred into English keywords. It is only through this translation that any particular witness testimony can be found in the database at all. Prerequisite for access to the multilingual archive of the Shoah Foundation is thus the use and knowledge of its standard language, English. Digitization The ease of use of video technology makes it ideally suited to recording interviews, though using video as a storage medium also has its difficulties. As it is a known fact that the life span of videocassettes is limited, the Fortunoff Video Archive started to copy its tapes in the mid-1990s.25 The development of other video standards also presents issues, as the eventual discontinuation of the players necessary to view the recorded material inevitably means that after the last suitable machine breaks down, the material will no longer be accessible. Copying the older material onto new tapes thus often also means a reformatting to a more up-to-date video format. The Shoah Foundation decided to record its interviews on Beta SP, a professional (analogue) format also used for television. Yet this format too has since been superseded, which is why the Foundation is now working to convert all its 52,000 videos into digital Motion JPEG 2000 files — a project undertaken with the help of robotic technology and documented on the Foundation’s homepage and YouTube Channel.26 As already mentioned, videocassettes require viewing on site. Although it is possible to make copies, this process always involves a loss of data and thus a degradation in quality. The fact that the Shoah Foundation makes copies of the interviews available to interested institutional parties (museums, libraries, educational institutes and so on) might have been a reason for their choice of a high-resolution (analogue) video format, as it guarantees the copies’ image quality. The digitization of video formats, however, opens up brand new possibilities: not only does copying no longer entail any loss of data or quality, the interviews can also be copied in many different ways (to discs, hard drives and so on) and they can be distributed much more easily. The convenient DVD medium, for instance, means a considerable saving on storage space for the many institutes that possess copies of part of the Foundation’s collection.27 In their digital incarnation the interviews ultimately separate themselves from their material carriers even more and it becomes technically possible to view them anywhere (no longer just at the site of the archive). Yet, there are numerous obstacles still blocking global access to Holocaust witness testimony, as will be shown later on. The Shoah Foundation started the digitization of its circa 100,000 hours of material in 2008, and by May 2012 96% of the interviews had been converted into

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digital form. Aside from preservation copies in the Motion JPEG 2000 format there were also copies made in other formats (MPEG1 and 2, QuickTime, Flash, Windows Media Player) in order to enable ‘access to the testimonies by students, academics, and researchers around the world’.28 Parts of the Fortunoff Video Archive collection are now also available in digital form (through the support of the Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas [Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe], among other organizations). This digitization not only aims to preserve the interviews, but also to improve their availability and ‘provide our testimonies to other universities and museums for research purposes’.29 Given this self-description as a research archive, one can conclude that new media have clearly contributed to a shift in the rationale behind the collection, which originally started as a counter-public project. Local Archives and Global Access The Shoah Foundation firstly makes its interviews accessible through single videocassettes or DVDs available to interested institutions (museums, memorials, libraries, history workshops, survivors’ groups, Jewish communities and so on). Secondly, it has also drawn up licensing agreements with selected institutions that allow these access to the entire Visual History Archive. Though at first this was only possible from American institutions, soon licenses were granted around the world — completely in agreement with the global mission of the archive’s interview collection — with Berlin’s Free University (Freie Universität Berlin; FU) the first non-US institution to gain access to the entire archive. Prerequisites of any cooperation with the Visual History Archive are being connected to a highperformance network (Internet 2 or GÉANT, for example) that guarantees data speeds of at least 100 mbps, a video server with at least 1 TB of storage space, as well as the capacity to provide archive users with assistance. These requirements explain why the licensed partners of the Visual History Archive are almost exclusively universities, as these are bound to be connected to research networks with hightransmission capacities anyway. These transmission rates and storage capacities are necessary because the Shoah Foundation uses the Internet to send the video testimonies as MPEG1 files from Los Angeles to cooperating institutions, where they are then stored on local servers. As local capacity is limited, these institutions never host a complete copy of the entire collection, only a part of it. At the FU in Berlin, for instance, only copies of the German-language interviews and those related to the city of Berlin are kept. Should someone be interested in testimony that is not (yet) locally available, those specific files will be requested from Los Angeles and usually uploaded to the local server within hours. In order to view the video testimony you thus have to visit an archive or library that either has a collection of videocassettes or DVDs or is connected to the Visual History Archive through a research network that provides access to all 52,000 interviews. These licensed institutions — thirty-eight in total, twenty-three of which are in the US — can be found in ten countries: the others are Canada, Australia, Israel, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the United Kingdom and Greece.

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Fig. 2.2. Global map of institutions with public access to the USC Shoah Foundation’s video archive. Website capture. Visual History Archive online.

What is striking about both the contents of the local servers of these major partners and the video collections of the (at this time 175) ‘small’ institutions that feature material from the Visual History Archive is that their selection is based on their respective national perspective. Just as it seems self-evident that the Germanlanguage interviews were the first ones uploaded onto the FU servers in Berlin, so have Holocaust memorials, Jewish museums and cultural centres in Europe, Australia and New Zealand almost exclusively collected videos that were recorded in their country or language. The Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam, for instance, holds 1049 video interviews that were recorded in the Netherlands, the War Memorial Museum in Auckland fifty-three interviews conducted in New Zealand, the Center for Jewish Studies in Bucharest five interviews in Romanian, and the Jewish community in Zagreb six interviews in Croatian. Despite the global orientation of the Shoah Foundation’s interview project the composition of the local collections is just as limited to the national perspective as before. These collections thus do not differ significantly from many other witness archives whose local or national historical focus has always been explicit. The video interviews of the Fortunoff Video Archive are also accessible from various places. The interviews that came into being through the assistance of local organizations are included in the collections of those institutions and are thus accessible there as well. About a quarter of the complete archive has been digitized and made accessible to the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the organization that also funded the digitization process. These video testimonies are viewable in the Information Centre of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial as well as the offices of the foundation, alongside interviews conducted by the foundation itself or by one of its other partners. The selection of interviews from the Fortunoff Video Archive that is accessible in Berlin is greatly inf luenced by the place where they can be seen. The Memorial

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to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a tourist attraction which has significantly contributed to Berlin’s city branding due to its impressive design and central location, between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz. As a tourist destination the Memorial has many international visitors, whom it provides with information in many languages, and the video interviews that can be viewed at the Information Centre also cover a wide range of languages. The database of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which covers all the video testimonies, is also a testament to the efforts to make the archive accessible to as many different users as possible: all the interviews are transcribed in their original language and translated into German in their entirety. It is possible to read these texts while you watch the testimonies.30 The archive’s location in Berlin clearly shows the tension between the local and the global that characterizes the witness archive in the new millennium. On the one hand, it is evident from looking at the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive that, despite its worldwide collection of witness testimony, this global archive is dominated by local or national historical access. The design of the database definitely contributes to this, as it enables filtering for a single language and as its thesaurus of 50,000 keywords, ‘most of which are of geographic nature’,31 already suggests that most searches are for places. The Fortunoff Video Archive interviews available at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, on the other hand, make it clear that any transnational archive use is also dependent on the archive’s location. Holocaust Testimony on the Internet Although the Shoah Foundation’s project to interview as many survivors as possible was pressed for time since its inception, fifty years after the Holocaust, it can be argued from a media-technological standpoint that to keep pace with contemporary technological developments it started too soon. While the Shoah Foundation is still digitizing its collection and uploading this to its institutional partners’ servers, the technological possibilities have long since developed much further. The fact that the Shoah Foundation has made copies of its digitized videos in various formats already shows that it has long anticipated new ways of transmission and access. Web/ database gateways and video compression and streaming technology indeed do not just enable online database access, but also the viewing of video testimony on the Internet. In the light of their affinity for technology and their global mission it is no wonder that the Shoah Foundation has long aimed to provide a web-based solution to accessing its archive. Parts of the Visual History Archive are already accessible online today. Once registered as a user, anyone can search the database online for names, experience groups (e.g. ‘Jewish survivor’, ‘homosexual survivor’, ‘liberator’), keywords, as well as the language in which interviews were conducted. Via the homepage of the Visual History Archive Online, it is furthermore possible to stream over 1000 English-language video testimonies. In large part these interviews have been placed on YouTube, where the Shoah Foundation has its own channel. Whereas the Visual History Archive Online, with its search functionality and its

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partitioning in segments that are visible and searchable during the video streaming, is clearly aimed at and based on (scholarly) research, the rationale behind the placement of Holocaust testimony on YouTube is mainly to make the videos easily accessible to anyone (without the need for registration). This was made possible through the release agreement the interview partners signed, which transferred all rights to this type of utilization to the Shoah Foundation.32 The video testimony of the Fortunoff Video Archive, on the other hand, cannot be found online (with the exception of a few interview compilations and edited testi­ monies that were created in the 1980s and placed on YouTube by Yale University in 2009). The Fortunoff Video Archive has secured control over its collection through the contracts it drew up with its cooperation partners. The contract stipulates, for instance, that the interviews in the collection of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe are not allowed to be edited, and that they are exclusively accessible at the Information Centre and at the Foundation’s offices. Any use of excerpts, for example in presentations or lectures, requires an official request to be filed with the Fortunoff Video Archive. This usage limitation is not least based on legal grounds, as the Holocaust survivors were promised the protection of their interests and the right to deny permission for any further use of their testimony. While it has passed on its collection to various other institutions, the Fortunoff Video Archive thus secures its power over the collection. Although many interviewees might not have any objection to the publication of their testimony on the Internet, the Fortunoff Video Archive does not make their testimony available online. This decision is, on the one hand, based on wanting to protect the interests of Holocaust survivors; after all, these conversations feature some deeply personal stories. On the other hand, the foundation is trying to prevent the testimony from being abused. It is well known that interviews with witnesses can contain factual errors: names or dates can be falsely recalled, media depictions mix with people’s own experiences, and descriptions of traumatic experiences often do not exactly match the verifiable, intersubjective external reality.33 Holocaust deniers use these ‘faulty’ statements by survivors to strengthen their arguments. Eric Hunt, for instance, uses for his internet-distributed film The Last Days of the Big Lie (2009) interview excerpts from the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive to expose ‘Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust Hoax’, to cite the subtitle of this 124-minute concoction. Statements by interviewed survivors are called into question through confrontation with other documents and otherwise used to trivialize the Holocaust. ‘Out of 50,000 video interviews there must be some Jews telling some semblances of truth about life in the concentration camps’, starts the voice-over of a sequence in which various witnesses recall camp orchestras, plays, the soccer league, painting, libraries and movie theaters, as well as report on the beer and cigarettes that were for sale in the camp canteens. These statements were taken from Shoah Foundation interviews that are accessible online and have been downloaded and edited to be part of Hunt’s relativist, revisionist and anti-Semitic project. The archives under discussion here react very differently to the mash-up culture of the digital age that generates new meanings from recombined audiovisual material: while the Fortunoff Video Archive controls the distribution of its interviews, the

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Shoah Foundation makes its videos accessible to anyone. Furthermore, as will be shown, it even encourages its users to make these kinds of remixes. This does not just change the rationale behind Holocaust testimony collection, but it also gives the testimony itself a new role. New Roles for Testimony Archives Video testimony of the Holocaust has many roles: for survivors the act of testifying can be a kind of indictment or it can have a therapeutic effect; for the viewer it can be a source of information or an admonition. It functions as a historical source, provides insight into the construction of meaning and into memory processes, inspires literary works and enriches historical exhibitions with its personal stories. The vast number of already available recordings presents every researcher with the challenge of choosing which testimonies to view. Faced with the lack of an overview of the complete collection it is no wonder that, in the case of the Visual History Archive, users with no particular search in mind are likely to start their research based on geographical locations. The Shoah Foundation reacts to this issue by acting as a curator and suggesting to different user groups specific selections.34 The website sets out ‘Testimony Clips’, ‘Online Exhibits’ and ‘Segments for the Classroom’ on specific themes, with the possibility of also watching the entire interviews if the user chooses. These recom­ mendations guarantee the users meaningful interview excerpts without having to sift through the extensive database and view the interviews in their entirety. Along with this pre-selection of interviews, the Shoah Foundation now more strongly takes on an educational role, which it has also explicitly included in its strategies. Aside from interview excerpts, the website also features educational and teaching material for schools (in various languages), and it also organizes various (international) workshops for teachers. With its suggestion of including video testimony in the classroom, the Shoah Foundation is responding to students’ growing media consumption,35 and the teaching objectives to be achieved with the use of Holocaust testimony are extremely diverse: they can ‘provide a human face to history’, help ‘appreciate the invalidity of stereotypes, misconceptions, and/ or generalizations’, ‘provide students with an affective understanding of history’, ‘help students identify different types of information available in primary sources’ and ‘sensitize students to the distinction between fact and opinion, and essential and non-essential information’.36 Since 2011, teachers who are invited to join the IWitness Community have been able to do so by using IWitness, an educational tool developed by the Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and other institutions that makes more than 1000 interviews accessible for educational purposes (and is still in its testing phase in 2012). The interviews in the Fortunoff Video Archive are also increasingly integrated in teaching. The Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, for instance, offers a wide range of options for schools, including project days in the video archive.37 Its Information Centre furthermore accentuates another way the witness testimony is used: in its ‘Room of Sites’ audio stations are installed where visitors can sit down and listen to the memories of survivors who talk about their

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experience at one of the places that are presented in the exhibition. The specific way the testimonies are presented and the intensity of the interviews invites visitors to pause and listen, thereby stimulating empathy and commemorating the victims to whom the monument is dedicated. Here, the interviews are first acknowledged as testimony and appreciated in terms of the memorial and commemorative moment they represent.38 Both testimony archives show evidence of shifts in their original goals and roles. Whereas the Holocaust Survivors Film Project aimed to give survivors the opportunity to tell the story of their lives, the testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archive are nowadays used as historical sources, as texts in literary or trauma studies, or to commemorate the Holocaust itself. In the case of the Shoah Foundation interviews, the shift becomes even more apparent: their goal initially was to collect as many interviews as possible, then it became to make them searchable and to digitize the video tapes. Whereas the interviews were collected as Holocaust testimony, they are now being used to stimulate tolerance (through its Testimony to Tolerance Initiative) and to serve as comparisons to memories of other genocides, which the Shoah Foundation has been collecting in the form of interviews with genocide survivors in Armenia, Cambodia and Rwanda since 2011. The Shoah Foundation in particular focuses more on education. Its Holocaust testimony does not serve solely to teach tolerance and humanity. The Shoah Foundation also wants to use its IWitness educational tool to contribute to prac­ ticing new media applications. Besides the conveying of historical knowledge, ‘digital citizenship’ and ‘multi-literacies for the 21st century’ are also central teaching goals of the online educational tool. Just as the name suggests that students working with IWitness will become secondary witnesses of the Holocaust,39 so the website emphasizes that ‘students have the opportunity to use technology to become more active learners while encountering survivors and other eyewitnesses talking about their experiences before, during and after the Holocaust. This application empowers them to participate in their own learning by providing them with the tools to think critically, investigate, develop projects, analyze, and collaborate with others’.40 And thus the testimony is reframed as practice material to learn digital citizenship skills. In line with this teaching aim, IWitness also makes it possible to cut together a video of one’s own using material from the interviews. This functionality not only attracts those interested in following in Spielberg’s footsteps, but it mainly responds to the mash-up und remix culture of the digital age. With the aim of developing media literacy, students are invited to use the witness testimony to develop ‘a thoughtful visual dialogue by editing your own video projects and sharing them with the community’.41 The monitoring by the teachers who can follow the progress and the projects of their students seems to guarantee that the mash-ups will not be used to relativize the Holocaust. The ‘Editing Ethics’ tutorial furthermore explains the ‘Editing Basics and Ethics for IWitness Users’,42 which again are based on the standards for digital citizenship. That the tasks and goals of witness archives transform over time is self-evident — just as is the fact that the witnesses’ memories and the politics of memory change.

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Fig. 2.3. ‘Editing Ethics’ Tutorial on IWitness. Website capture.

After a phase in which the survivors’ need to tell their stories was key, much now revolves around the archives’ use to younger generations. The media the archives have on offer grant us insight into the way they see themselves as well as the way they see their users. One current answer to Kushner’s question about the use of testimony today is that it forms part of attempts to enhance digital literacy. The Shoah Foundation’s interviews, with their specific forms of media processing (database, segmentation, digitization and so on), present an excellent training ground for this development. Translation by Florian Duijsens Websites ‘About Us’, IWitness Website, USC Shoah Foundation [accessed 16 May 2012] ‘Cataloguing Guidelines’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012] ‘Considerations and Guidelines for the Use of Visual History Testimony in Education’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012] ‘Editing Ethics’, IWitness Website, USC Shoah Foundation [accessed 19 May 2012] Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies Homepage, [accessed 16 May 2012] ‘Interviewee Release Agreement’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012] ‘Preservation Effort Underway’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012]

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‘Preserving History’, USC Shoah Foundation YouTube Channel [accessed 8 November 2012] ‘Preserving The Archive’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012] ‘Projekttag im Videoarchiv’, Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas Website [accessed 16 May 2012] ‘The Interview’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012] ‘Who Can Join?’, IWitness Website, USC Shoah Foundation [accessed 16 May 2012]

Notes to Chapter 2 I would like to thank Verena-Lucia Nägel and Daniel Baranowski, who have generously granted me insight into the working methods of the Visual History Archive at the Freie Universität Berlin and the video archive of the Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas. 1. For early interviews, see Alan Rosen, The Wonder of their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 10–12. The standardization of these early interviews, as well as their illustrative and quantitative use, are criticized by Tony Kushner in ‘Holocaust Testimonies, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation’, Poetics Today, 27 (2006), 275–95. 2. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 55. 3. The dating of the first real public awareness and recognition of Holocaust survivors varies from country to country, and is closely related to their political function within society. See, in the case of the US, Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1999); and in that of Israel, Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Owl Books, 2000). 4. Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, p. 57. 5. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, revised and enlarged edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 225. 6. See ‘The Eichmann Trial’, Television Age, 7 August 1961, p. 27. 7. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, trans. by Assenka Oksiloff (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), p. 16. 8. James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 164. 9. Kushner, ‘Holocaust Testimonies, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation’, p. 275. 10. On the use of testimony in historical studies, see Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), and Kushner, ‘Holocaust Testimonies, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation’. On its use in television, see Judith Keilbach, Geschichtsbilder und Zeitzeugen: Zur Darstellung des Nationalsozialismus im bundesdeutschen Fernsehen (Münster: Lit, 2008). 11. For more on this, see Henry Greenspan and Sidney Bolkosky, ‘When Is an Interview an Interview? Notes from Listening to Holocaust Survivors’, Poetics Today, 27 (2006), 431–49. 12. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, pp. 207–26. 13. See Joanne Weiner Rudof, ‘A Yale University and New Haven Community Project: From Local to Global’ (2007) [accessed 16 May 2012]. 14. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 133. 15. Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 176–77. 16. See, for example, Shoshana Felman, ‘Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching’, in

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Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–56 (p. 46). 17. Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p. 144. 18. Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, p. 152. 19. On the archontic function of archives see Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics, 25.2 (Summer 1995), 9–63 (p. 10). 20. The foundation was funded by the proceeds of Schindler’s List. 21. The highest numbers of interviews were recorded in the US (19,841 interviews) and Israel (8504), followed by Ukraine (3433). In Poland there were 1438 interviews, in Hungary 802, in Russia 675, in Slovakia 656, in Bulgaria 611, in the Czech Republic 566, in Belarus 248, in BosniaHerzegovina 55, in Croatia 326, in Estonia 9, in Georgia 6, in Latvia 79, in Lithuania 137, in Kazakhstan 6, in Macedonia 9, in Moldavia 278, in Romania 146, in Serbia and Montenegro 345, in Slovenia 11, and in Uzbekistan 25. 22. ‘The Interview’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012]. 23. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 163. 24. Cf. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001). The adoption of identity categories such as ‘homosexual survivor’, ‘Jewish survivor’, ‘Jehovah’s Witness’, or ‘Sinti and Roma’, which the Shoah Foundation uses to describe different ‘experience groups’, appears especially problematic. 25. Rudof, ‘A Yale University and New Haven Community Project’, p. 11. 26. ‘Preserving the Archive’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012]; ‘Preservation Effort Underway’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012]; ‘Preserving History’, USC Shoah Foundation YouTube Channel [accessed 8 November 2012]. 27. Cf. Derek Kompare, ‘Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television’, Television & New Media, 7 (2006), 335–60 (p. 346). 28. ‘Preserving the Archive’, [accessed 16 May 2012]; author’s emphasis. 29. Rudof, ‘A Yale University and New Haven Community Project’, p. 17. 30. These transcripts cannot however be searched in full and the keywords are not created according to a given thesaurus but result from each individual’s interview. For more on this, see Daniel Baranowski, ‘Die Singularität des Zeugnisses: Zu den Auswertungen des Videoarchivs am Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas’, in ‘Ich bin die Stimme der sechs Millionen’: Das Videoarchiv im Ort der Information, ed. by Daniel Baranowski (Berlin: Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, 2009), pp. 72–86 (p. 82). 31. ‘Cataloguing Guidelines’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012], p. 3. 32. ‘Interviewee Release Agreement’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012]. 33. On ‘false’ memories, see Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Felman and Laub, Testimony, pp. 57–74 (pp. 59–63). 34. On the role of the curator, see Robert Gehl, ‘YouTube as Archive: Who Will Curate this Digital Wunderkammer?’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12 (2009), 43–60. 35. ‘Considerations and Guidelines for the Use of Visual History Testimony in Education’, USC Shoah Foundation Website [accessed 16 May 2012], p. 3. 36. Ibid., pp. 3–4. 37. ‘Projekttag im Videoarchiv’, Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas Website [accessed 16 May 2012]. 38. Baranowski, ‘Die Singularität des Zeugnisses’, p. 74.

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39. On the concept of secondary or intellectual witnesses, see Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘Shoah and Intellectual Witness’, Partisan Review, 65.1 (1998), 37–48. 40. ‘About Us’, IWitness Website, USC Shoah Foundation [accessed 19 May 2012]. 41. ‘Who Can Join?’, IWitness Website, USC Shoah Foundation [accessed 19 May 2012]. 42. ‘Editing Ethics’, IWitness Website, USC Shoah Foundation [accessed 19 May 2012].

PA RT I I

v

Between Images

C h ap t e r 3

v

Transits Essayistic Thinking at the Junctures of Images in Harun Farocki’s Respite and Arnaud des Pallières’s Drancy Avenir Laura Rascaroli ‘The true picture of the past f lits by’ Walter Benjamin 1

The debate on how best to remember the Holocaust, and thus not to betray it, and on whether narration is an adequate means to preserve and communicate its memory, has become particularly crucial in the face of the progressive disappearance of direct witnesses and survivors. As Stephen Feinstein has observed: ‘There is more and more of a burden and an increasing urgency to tell the story. The generation of witnesses is passing’.2 Passing is here, of course, a euphemism for dying; but the first meaning of the verb in its intransitive form has to do with moving in a specific direction, and with going through. The Latin verb for ‘to traverse’ and ‘to go past’, transeo, is also used figuratively for ‘to die’. Thus, transit is both a passing and a passing away — the double semantic value of the verb gestures towards our understanding of human life as a journey, and as a transitory state. The effects of transitoriness (of time, life and matter) are very much at the core of the question of Holocaust remembrance; they are, indeed, at the root of the issue of the difficulty of testifying to a horror that is not only commonly perceived as unspeakable, but that is also obliterated by both the enforced and natural disappearance of many of its material traces — the camps, the bodies, the documents. In the harrowing opening sequence of Claude Lanzmann’s seminal documentary, Shoah (1985), Simon Srebnik, one of the only two survivors of Chełmno, returns to the site of the extermination camp, now an empty field, where he was shot in the head and left for dead forty years before, and comments in disbelief: ‘It’s hard to recognize, but it was here. They burned people here [...]. Yes, this is the place [...]. I can’t believe I’m here. No, I just can’t believe it. It was always this peaceful here’. While Richard Kearney in his compelling reading of the sequence focuses on the paradox of the impossible testimony,3 what strikes me most in Srebnik’s verbal response to the site is the image of a place that is simultaneously unrecognizable and familiar

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— a place that still is, and that at the same time, is no more; as well as his disbelief at, and concomitant recognition of, its peacefulness.4 Such peacefulness, settled in place over long postwar decades of neglect, now seems almost to enclose within a parenthesis the horror years of Chełmno, during which at least 152,000 people were annihilated — as if those years were but a transitory interlude. It is indeed on transits that I wish to ref lect in this chapter, in ways that interrogate memory, testimony, narrative, representation and specific elements of audiovisual communication, filmic language and the essay form. I will consider two films. Harun Farocki’s Aufschub (Respite, Germany/South Korea, 2007, 40 minutes), a contribution to the 2007 Jeonju International Film Festival Digital Project, is a silent film based on a montage of the 16mm footage of the Westerbork camp, Netherlands, shot in 1944 by inmate Rudolf Breslauer under orders from the SS Camp Commander, Albert Gemmeker. Devoid of archival footage or interviews, Arnaud des Pallières’s Drancy Avenir (France, 1997, 84 minutes) gives voice to several narrators: a survivor expresses his horror at returning to an indifferent France; a history teacher muses over the inheritance of the Holocaust; a young historian studies survivors’ accounts of the Parisian Drancy camp, and the relationship between the old camp site and the housing project it now hosts; a captain taking his boat upriver worries about hostile strangers hiding in the forest. Adopting diverse and almost opposite strategies (one contains only archival footage, the other only present-day, original images; one is silent, the other places much emphasis on the spoken word; one is documentary, the other fiction — or better, quasi-fiction, as Jacques Rancière rightly defines it),5 they share an uncompromising essayistic approach and a focus on transit camps: both Westerbork and Drancy served in fact as interim way stations on the journey towards extermination. Situated in the north-eastern Netherlands, Westerbork was established by the Dutch authorities in October 1939 to intern Jewish refugees who had entered the Netherlands illegally from Germany. In July 1942, the German authorities took control of Westerbork, which served until 3 September 1944 as a transit camp for Dutch Jews who were to be deported to German-occupied Poland. In this period, 97,776 Jews were deported from Westerbork, most of whom were killed upon arrival at Sobibor and Auschwitz. Westerbork was, for the vast majority of its inmates, ‘the penultimate stage of their earthly existence. [...] However, the Westerbork sojourn itself was still bearable to its transients’.6 This stage on the inmates’ journey that would end further east was, in fact, an endurable way station, an impression certainly fabricated for the purpose of camouf laging the horrors awaiting them, and thus of obtaining collaboration along the way. ‘ “Natural” death did not occur at Westerbork: apparently no one was beaten, nobody starved, and medical care was surprisingly good’.7 Still, life at the camp was dominated by ‘the inexorable rhythm of the trains’:8 about 1000 Jews left the camp every Tuesday, and panic among the inmates increased every weekend, when lists of those to be deported were drawn up by the Jewish camp administration. In France, La Cité de la Muette (the housing development of La Muette) was also a way station, situated in the district of Drancy, twelve kilometers northeast of Paris. 67,000 of the 75,000 Jews deported from France to the death camps in Poland were

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interned at Drancy. Built in the 1930s, La Cité de la Muette was originally a citéjardin development, a modernist experiment in public housing; it was turned into a hub for the deportation of Jews after the notorious roundup of August 1941, the rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv’, when over 12,800 people were held at the Parisian Vélodrome d’Hiver for days without food, and then transferred to Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande or Pithiviers. Drancy remained under the control of the French police until SS Captain Aloïs Brunner took charge of it in June 1943. As Poznanski explains, ‘from the German perspective, Drancy was supposed to be just one stop along the route that was to lead all of these Jews to Auschwitz’.9 However, life in Drancy was by far less bearable than in Westerbork: ‘French (and later German) prison guards at Drancy were among the most brutal of any camp outside Auschwitz and Dachau. [...] Most conservative rates place the number of deaths in Drancy itself at around 3000.’10 Both Harun Farocki and Arnaud des Pallières chose to engage with the transit camps of Westerbork and Drancy through the essay film form. According to Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman, two main traditions may be recognized in the manner in which the cinema, both fictional and documentary, has dealt with the topic of the Holocaust: a realist and a non-realist one. While the first is an intuitive category of (apparently) easy definition (the authors point to what they call the ‘classical narrative cinema of Hollywood’ in fiction, and in non-fiction to didactic and chronological documentaries), their somewhat convoluted description of the non-realist tradition is revealing of classificatory strain: a ‘non-linear or non-chronological, poetic and occasionally ref lexive approach, in which there is particular concern, and often experimentation with, the cinematic form’.11 This ‘non-mainstream approach’ can be traced as far back as Alfréd Radok’s Daleká cesta (The Long Journey, 1949) in fiction film, and Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog in documentary. Haggith and Newman resort to a psychological argument from existing critical literature to account for this tradition: Joshua Hirsch explains the non-realist approach as a kind of cultural manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder: artists have responded to the trauma of the Holocaust and exposure to the atrocity footage that documented it [...] by developing a form of filmmaking that conceded the impossibility of representing this event through realism.12

While the explanation is suggestive, I would rather point to the fact that filmmakers have deliberately chosen the essay form due to its capacity to construct a personal ref lection and to engage the embodied spectator in a close dialogue, involving him or her in the construction of meaning. This wish may be seen as a logical and meaningful response to the demands that the Holocaust makes of us and to the highly complex philosophical questions it raises, on responsibility, on agency, on memory and on testimony. It is bound to elicit responses that articulate both deep personal emotions and ref lections, and intense interrogations that we are all but compelled to share with others. The urge to think and to share one’s ref lections with others is well served by the essay form. Essays are the expression of subjective critical thinking, which is not offered as anonymous or collective, but as originating from a single authorial

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position.13 The film essay’s enunciator, who often overtly says ‘I’ and concedes that he or she is the director, is usually present in the text as a narrator who shares a voice and, often, a body with the empirical author. The relationship between author, enunciator and narrator, however, is never unproblematic. The essay film, in fact, tends to self-ref lexively probe not only its subject matter, but also subjectivity and authorship. Because the essay’s enunciator is not a generalized authority, but a specific subject who speaks for herself, takes responsibility for her discourse, and overtly embraces her contingent viewpoint, it follows that she does not speak to the audience as an anonymous and collective entity. The argument of the essay film addresses a real, embodied spectator, who is invited to enter into a dialogue with the enunciator, to follow his/her reasoning, and to respond by actively participating in the construction of meaning. Hence, the essay film is a fragile form of discourse, for it must accept and welcome the ultimate instability of meaning and embrace openness as its unreserved ethos. The essay film, however, is a diverse, shifting and protean form and, indeed, not at all a genre; films as diverse as Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread, 1933), Chris Marker’s Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia, 1957), Orson Welles’s Vérités et mensonges (F For Fake, 1974), Groupe Dziga Vertov’s Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976), Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) and Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) can all be considered essay films. Each essay is unique and articulates in a distinct manner the textual structure of address of the I/essayist to the you/spectator; and it is precisely on account of this communicative structure that the experience of the essay film materializes, and our impression of being summoned to participate in the construction of essayistic meaning is achieved. Most frequently, the essay film employs voiceover to create spectatorial address; however, Respite and Drancy Avenir demonstrate that it is possible to make an essay film without voiceover, as in Farocki’s case; and that it is possible for the enunciator to renounce his unique voice and let multiple subjects speak instead, as des Pallières chose to do in his film.14 That the essay film may be particularly germane to the interrogation of the Holocaust seems to find confirmation in its frequent use by filmmakers. In a list of movies on the Shoah, for instance, Jean-Michel Frodon includes under the ‘essay film’ heading thirty-two titles produced in various countries between 1947 and 2007, encompassing both little known and prominent films — among the latter, Marcel Hanoun’s L’Authentique procès de Carl Emmanuel Jung (The Authentic Trial of Carl Emmanuel Jung 1966), Marcel Ophüls’s The Memory of Justice (1973–76) and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler, A Film From Germany, 1977);15 many would add to the list Resnais’s Night and Fog. These and other films tend to ask questions and raise problems rather than offering clear-cut answers; they also, as all essays do, incorporate a trace of the process of thinking itself.16 The felt presence of a process, of a making and of an unfolding, points to the performativity of the essayistic text, and to the mobility of its meanings, something which brings us back to the sense of motion that is at the core of the ideas of transit and passing. What I mean to gesture towards here is the ability of

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certain texts to capture the movement of thought and to give a shape and form to thought about movement, an ability that will be at the centre of the analysis of the two films below. The making of essay films on concentration camps suggests a position of dissent from the argument of the radical ‘unthinkability’ of the Holocaust, proposed as a limit of thought by Jean-François Lyotard, among others.17 As such, these films are political films.18 In the case of Farocki’s film in particular, the filmmaker’s thinking is generated by the encounter with archival images (those of the Breslauer footage), in a manner that evokes Arlette Farge’s observation, in her Le Goût de l’archive, that ‘in its singularity, an archival object can rupture the fabric of received thought and pose a challenge that the historian can meet only through a highly self-ref lexive and unfinalizable conceptual labor’.19 In des Pallières’s case, instead, the filmmaker’s thought emerges in the interstice created by the juxtaposition of the thinking of a range of real-life subjects (survivors, intellectuals, novelists) and an image-track rigorously in the ‘now’ of the narration. While des Pallières’s eschewal of archival images seems to support the argument of the unimaginability (and thus unrepresentability) of the Holocaust — in line not only with Lyotard’s discourse, but also, in filmic terms, with Lanzmann’s — the intense negotiation between words and images that the film develops urges the spectator to use his or her imagination rather than renounce it, thus evoking art historian Georges DidiHuberman’s argument that Auschwitz not only must be imagined but that it is also ‘only imaginable’.20 Essay films like these, far from relinquishing the possibility of thought in the face of Auschwitz, offer a ref lective and ref lexive approach whose results have an import that arguably exceeds the confines of the field of cinematic achievements. In his lucid rereading of Didi-Huberman’s analysis of the four Sonderkommando photographs illegally taken in Auschwitz in August 1944, and then smuggled inside a tube of toothpaste to the Polish Resistance, Sven-Erik Rose directs our attention to Didi-Huberman’s concept of the ‘image-lacune’ (lacuna-image), which refers to the incomplete, fragmentary nature of the visual archive of the Holocaust. DidiHuberman, however, equally draws from Water Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image and from Siegfried Kracauer’s concept of cinematic montage to theorize ways in which the ‘lacuna-image’ may be made readable: Against those who declare the visual archive of the Shoah either irrelevant or taboo, Didi-Huberman insists on the possibilities for critical engagement with it through dialectical montage. In Didi-Huberman’s conception, montage aims not to assimilate disparate elements into a totality, but rather much like in Benjamin’s famous concept of the image that f lashes up where dialectics reaches a ‘standstill’, insists on historical singularities and therefore multiplicity.21

It is opportune to note that thesis, antithesis and resolution are not what Benjamin intended to evoke with the term dialectical montage. As Kaja Silverman has suggested, for instance, the concept is closer to Baudelairean correspondance, which highlights resemblances by linking together temporally divergent moments, which are thus allowed to enter into a communication. These correspondences or similarities, then, ‘render null and void concepts like progress, development, and cause

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and effect’.22 The cinematic metaphor of dialectical montage places much trust in film’s ability to think, and to move thought beyond its standstill positions, and is thus apt to introduce the following discussion, in which I examine not only the role of the practice of montage in the films’ thinking, but also that of other textual and communicative structures. Respite The concepts of ‘lacuna-image’ and of dialectical montage are particularly ger­ mane to Farocki’s Respite. The film shows Breslauer’s rushes with a degree of manipulation and intervention that, at first sight, may appear to be minimal, especially on account of the complete lack of sound — but that, in truth, is profound and meaningful. Instead of speaking over the images, as he did, for instance, with the archival footage in Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory, 1995), Farocki interpolates white intertitles over black screens, which give information, attract attention to specific details, or offer interpretations. The intervention, especially when examined vis-à-vis Resnais’s bold editing of some of the same footage in Night and Fog, seems highly respectful and almost philological.23 However, the essayistic meanings emerge precisely from the montage of images and written comments. As both Sylvie Lindeperg and Thomas Elsaesser have shown, Respite foregrounds (like much of the rest of Farocki’s oeuvre) the theme of work, and makes reference to the cinematic form of the corporate film.24 The footage, a rare example of Nazicrafted filmic documentation of life in concentration camps, can be compared to Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Terezin: A Documentary Film of the Jewish Resettlement), the infamous propaganda film shot in

Fig. 3.1. The Westerbork camp’s ‘company logo’. Aufschub, dir. Harun Farocki (2007). DVD capture.

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1944 in Theresienstadt in advance of a visit of the Danish Red Cross. However, the Westerbork film was initiated for the purpose not of deceiving a delegation, but of demonstrating the high productivity and efficiency of the camp. It is in this sense that the footage may be seen as the basis of a corporate or industrial film-in-themaking and, indeed, Farocki in Respite dwells not only on images showing inmates hard at work, but also on an astonishing ‘company logo’ of the camp, dominated by a factory’s smoking chimney. Chillingly, the chimney, a symbol of industrial production, ‘is found at the centre of a chart signaling with arrows and numbers, “entrances” and “exits” (notably to the East) of the prisoners of the Dutch camp’.25 Productivity is thus linked not only to industrial and agricultural work, but also to the numbers of inmates processed and sent to extermination. With this film Gemmeker meant to prove how efficiently he ran Westerbork, for he wished to avoid being posted to an extermination camp — something that SS officers regarded as a punishment; the film, thus, worked for him as a form of deferral. In his analysis of Farocki’s text, Elsaesser elucidates the many ways in which the film in the making constituted a ‘respite’, or a postponement of the journey east, for all involved — not only for Gemmeker, but also for the inmates: for the few months of the shooting, Breslauer and his ‘actors’ kept deferring the order to board the next train. Thus, not only Westerbork as transit camp was a pause, an interval on the inevitable journey; the film was, too. In Elsaesser’s words, ‘the film itself not only uses slow-motion, but in its somewhat disorganized, casual and non-linear manner also practices its own kind of deferral’.26 Slow motion, fragmentation and non-linearity are not aesthetic textual practices here, but become strategic in ways that imbricate the film in the making with an ongoing act of resistance. Fragmentation and non-linearity are of course also Benjaminian strategies in the approach to history. Arguably, Farocki’s dialectical montage makes order in this programmatic dis­ organization, while not betraying it. It is at this juncture of my discussion that it is possible to elucidate how transits and pauses become doubly relevant — on the one hand, to questions of memory, testimony and representation and, on the other, to textual and communicative strategies mobilized by the essayist filmmaker. In relation to the first set of concerns, Elsaesser has shown how Farocki’s film proposes an ‘epistemology of forgetting’ as a way to protect the memory of the Holocaust not from ignorance but rather from too much knowledge. Elsaesser’s argument stems from the fact that, in his film, Farocki chooses to ignore what is known about Breslauer’s footage; in particular what is known about the face of a girl paralyzed by fear peeking from the open door of a boxcar and looking at the camera (an image which became an icon of the Jewish Holocaust, until she was identified as Settela Steinbach, a Sinti and not a Jew); and about the date of birth on the suitcase of a sick woman transported on a hand-cart, which allowed historians to date the footage at 19 May 1944.27 By suspending or ‘pausing’ our knowledge and, thus, by looking at the footage with new eyes, Farocki — Elsaesser argues — has made a film not about the Holocaust but about our knowledge of the Holocaust. Farocki asks us to look at this famous footage through the lens of the industrial film, thus prompting

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us ‘to a revision and a rethink of what has so far prevented the majority of the footage from being shown: namely that these scenes of everyday life, of sports and recreation either did not fit the conventionalized Holocaust narrative, or seemed too unbearably ironic in their innocence and ignorance’.28 Thus, by ‘re-winding’ the footage, Farocki creates respites or gaps into which the spectators may insert their own repertoire of images of the Holocaust. Furthermore, these respites ‘are meant to forestall the relentless logic of automatically attributed meaning’.29 Timothy Corrigan, who talks of departure as both a historical and a conceptual figure in Farocki’s film, points at ways in which the actual transitions, which are documented by the images of the train leaving the station, also emerge as conceptual transitions in the film itself. Corrigan directs our attention to the manner in which, through the pausing of the image, Farocki attempts to rescue the historical subject that is erased ‘through the anonymity of its transitory image’. In this sense, the film and the train’s boxcar are both ‘passing’, even if the film gives an illusion of presence and permanence.30 It is my intention here further to unravel these textual strategies of transition and passing, of pausing and replaying, highlighted by both Elsaesser and Corrigan, for the purpose of interrogating the deep connection between them and Farocki’s particular articulation of the essayistic gesture in Respite. Respite is an unusual essay, as Farocki’s thinking in the film is not supremely eloquent, f luent and f luid, as we generally expect from essays, but essential, economical and somewhat discontinuous. The intertitles are short and intermittent; they offer information (‘The film was never completed’), ask questions (‘Are these prettifying images?’), point at details in the shot (‘In the background, a watchtower’), or infer from the visible evidence (‘Meaning: we are your workhorses’). It is clear that this laconic written text does not compose an essay; the essayistic meanings emerge from the juxtaposition and interplay of intertitles and footage (both original and modified by Farocki’s interventions), and from the transitions that both separate and connect them. Respite can be said to be composed of ‘lacuna-images’, both because Breslauer’s is an unfinished and unedited film and because its images lack fullness — something is evidently, scandalously missing from them (the fully-f ledged horror, pain, death, the knowledge of the future). In Farocki’s film of the footage, the effect of a series of lacunae and voids is further enhanced by the fragmentation of the visuals by the black screens, which is in turn accentuated and intensified by the intertitles. The black screens function, at one level, as pauses in the visuals, and could thus be said to gesture towards the nature of interval and respite that the transit camp offered, and that Breslauer’s film itself embodied. As holes punctured in the footage, then, they suggest voids in the discourse of the film, arguably in a way that both alludes to a falling silent before the incommensurability of the horror (a silencing further underscored by the ‘audible’ silence of the film) and to an ultimate lack of meaning. The film creates pause and void also via other strategies: Farocki sometimes uses a freeze frame, or traces a circle around an important detail, or replays the images to further consider and ponder them. This slowing down of the progression of the film becomes particularly evident when, after little over half of the film, the following intertitle appears: ‘These images can also be read differently’. The film, then,

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Fig. 3.2. SS Camp Commander Albert Gemmeker filmed at the Westerbork camp in 1944. Aufschub, dir. Harun Farocki (2007). DVD capture.

‘rewinds and replays’ itself,31 now with intertitles suggesting new interpretations of the visuals. If the black screens on the one hand hinder the film’s progression, on the other hand they are productive lacunae, inasmuch as they move thought forward and provide spaces for the ref lection of both enunciator and receiver. Not only may spectators insert into these gaps their own ‘Holocaust memories’, as suggested by Elsaesser; the pauses function at once as voids to be filled and as transitions. They piece together fragments of footage, thus creating a montage; furthermore, by both suggesting and problematizing interpretations, by probing the visible, and by inviting the spectator to mentally contemplate other and more dramatic images of the Holocaust that form part of our collective memory, they create an internal dialectic and engage the audience at once in an act of reading, in a dialogue with the enunciator, and in a process of creation of meaning. In other words, they both mimic and facilitate transitions of thought and of intellectual exchange. In his discussion of the film, Corrigan usefully reminds us of Farocki’s own description of the movement of thought in terms of a looking for an image that is ‘like a juncture, the way one speaks of a railway junction’.32 Such junctures and transitions connect moments in and of thinking; however, these connections arguably do not result in progress, in development and in assignations of cause and effect — to refer once again to Silverman on the Baudelairean concept of correspondence.33 Development and cause/effect connections are not relevant, because Farocki avoids constructing a f lawless and f luent argument, and thus producing an overarching narrative of the Westerbork camp, of the Breslauer film, or of the Holocaust. Conversely, what he does is focus, with tactful but insistent inquisitiveness, on some of the possible

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meanings provided by footage that consists in a moment of hindered transition towards the centre of the Holocaust. Even more evidently, what he does is offer the spectator the chance to direct a fresh and persistent gaze towards footage that is both highly familiar and completely opaque. It is in the pauses and junctures of the intertitles and of postproduction intervention that Farocki’s disembodied but distinctive enunciator puts himself forward in the first person, reaches out for the spectator and engages him/her in an act of thinking and in a dialogue among equals. Most evidently outspoken in the intertitles, he uses them to direct questions at us (‘Are these prettifying images?’) and to put us on the same plane as him, by associating us with his ref lections and including us in his responses to the footage by using the first person plural (‘We expect different images from a Nazi-German camp’). He involves us in his thinking and probing of the material, and shares his hypotheses (‘Perhaps the presence of the camera had a certain effect’; ‘I think that is why the cameraman Rudolf Breslauer avoided any further close-ups’). The intertitles, of course, do not work as interpellations in isolation, but always jointly with the images as well as the postproduction labour that slows down and pauses those images. Furthermore, the enunciating subject problematizes his authorship and deconstructs his authority over the footage by attracting attention, via captions and post-production intervention, to the agency of the two (distinct and dissimilar) subjects from whom the footage originated: Breslauer and Gemmeker — as well as through his continuous thinking of the past in relation to the present. In so doing, and by choosing to work on archival footage only, Farocki positions himself — as I argue he often does in his oeuvre — not as a producer of images but as a (critical) spectator of the ‘images of the world’.34 He thus places himself in a particularly privileged position to create a dialogue and intellectual exchange with an audience that is equal to him, to the extent that it shares with him the same perspective and (nearly) the same cognitive position. Farocki’s film is thus an essay that does not capitalize on f luidity and eloquence, but that makes a virtue of intervals and voids. Pause is both an act of resistance, which mimics and amplifies the suspending function of Breslauer’s footage, and a textual strategy that aims at engaging the spectator in a dialogue with an enunciator who does not possess the images any less or any more than the audience does. The enunciator’s fragmented thinking produces an essayistic dialogue through lacunaimages and image-junctures, while all the time relativizing the results of his reading of meanings in the footage. These, indeed, are recognized as many times coded — because of the multiple subjectivities inscribed in the original footage; because of the footage’s different, even antithetical functions and purposes; and because of the multiple stratifications of intervening historical and philosophical discourses. Montage is here given the task of overcoming the gridlock of dialectics produced by both the incommensurability and the excessive circulation of Breslauer’s footage — the historical transit of certain images from the footage through multiple films and contexts. Respite offers a form of thinking that does not aspire to totality and seamlessness, but whose strength is entirely in the (dis)junctures of verbal and visual montage.

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Drancy Avenir An early episode of Drancy Avenir is set in a classroom, where a history teacher is lecturing on the Holocaust while simultaneously ref lecting in voiceover on his own teaching, on memory and history, as well as on his identity as a Frenchman and a Jew. Behind him, handwritten in white chalk on the blackboard, is the famous thesis IX from Walter Benjamin’s inf luential 1940 text, ‘On the Concept of History’, describing the ‘angel of history’ who, as in Klee’s painting of Angelus Novus, fixedly stares behind him with his mouth open, contemplating what we see as a chain of events and he as a single catastrophe, while being pulled away by the storm of progress.35 Some of the words the historian speaks come from the same text. The sequence of the lecture is programmatic, inasmuch as Drancy Avenir is profoundly informed by Benjamin’s ideas on history and on the dialectical image. The Benjaminian constellations of images that the film evokes and conjures up do not only come from the history/memory of the Holocaust, but also from novels, fiction films, paintings and music. A palimpsestic as well as a polyphonic film, almost all of Drancy Avenir’s spoken and written words come from published sources (as the spectator discovers, most likely with some surprise, reading the film’s closing credits), including survivors’ memoirs, philosophical essays, and novels by such writers as Walter Benjamin, Joseph Conrad, Robert Antelme, Annette Muller, Nissim Calef, Charlotte Delbo, Franz Kaf ka, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lanzmann and Georges Perec. The quotations are often slightly rewritten by des Pallières (words are added, omitted or altered), so old writing mingles with new, indeed as in a palimpsest. The many citations also include a sequence from the unfinished The Merchant of Venice filmed in 1969 by Orson Welles. Other films and directors are also evoked, though more indirectly, so much so that the entire film can be considered as a montage of citations from literature, philosophy, and the cinema. One of the presiding authorities behind Drancy Avenir is Jean-Luc Godard, evoked by des Pallières’s strategy of layering strata of language, sound and image, as well as by his conception of history and philosophical approach to issues of memory, trauma, and modernity. Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) in particular presents points of contact with Drancy Avenir, and not only because Godard includes in his film a shot of the ‘Drancy Avenir’ tram stop that gives its name to des Pallières’s film. Histoire(s) du cinéma is a bold, radically experimental video essay on the history of both the cinema and its century. The features of this film which Kaja Silverman discusses in the following passage have an obvious relevance not only for Drancy Avenir, but also for Respite, so much so that it is worth citing Silverman in full: A sequence from part 1B of Histoire(s) du cinéma renders unusually explicit the Benjaminian imperative driving such formal experimentation. This sequence begins with a montage of train images, drawn from a range of films. With it, Godard invokes both the birth of cinema, begun, by many accounts, with the Lumière Brothers’ The Train Leaving the Station, and the nineteenth century, which created public transportation. He then relates the nineteenth century and the whole of cinematic history to Auschwitz through a chilling shot of a deportee looking out of a partially open door in a German train en route to one of the camps.36

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Fig. 3.3. A literal ‘image-juncture’ in Drancy Avenir, dir. Arnaud des Pallières (1997). DVD capture.

The image Silverman refers to is, evidently, that of Settela Steinbach, the Sinti girl who left Westerbork on 19 May 1944 on a train in transit towards her demise. Images of trains and shots from trains and other vehicles are central to Drancy Avenir. One of its most striking moments consists in a frontal shot of a railway junction at Drancy. Two sets of tracks cross over and separate again before our eyes; some railroad cars slowly move towards us, only to swerve either left or right at the last moment. This literal image-juncture works, as in Godard’s film, and like all other images in Drancy Avenir, as a catalyst that subtly evokes other images in our mind, in this specific case, images that speak of technology and modernity, communication and dispersion, progress and destruction. Unlike Histoire(s) du cinéma, however, in which Godard juxtaposes and merges diverse, even contradictory images, creating constellations that are simultaneously amalgamated and fragmented by a complex dialectical montage, des Pallières achieves comparable but distinct effects by adopting a method closer to Farocki’s in Respite. As I will show more in detail below, his painfully beautiful shots, like Respite, evoke rather than show other images, thanks to a sophisticated montage of visuals and soundtrack. However, while in Respite archival footage is made to conjure up in the spectator’s mind much more tragic and violent images that are temporally co-present to it, in Drancy Avenir images of the present, of the most banal everyday, ineffably ‘contain’ and evoke mental images from past horrors. Whereas Respite questions the past, Drancy Avenir interrogates the present — and the future. It is here that des Pallières’s film is profoundly Benjaminian, and indeed actualizes Benjamin’s pronouncement that ‘every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’.37

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Drancy Avenir makes of that threat its main concern. As the history lecturer argues, ‘Work on the extermination has to be an investigation of the present.’38 In the section devoted to the young historian who plans to research Drancy, the theory of time of British idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) is mentioned. In opposition to the commonly held view of time as a river that f lows from its origin towards us, Bradley’s unconventional take on temporal transition suggests that it is the future that f lows towards us; the point at which the future becomes the past is what we call the present. Immediately after this sequence, which is meaningfully filmed on a bridge crossing the railroad, we see a river, and begin to hear a new narration. The text, on which more below, includes an explicit ref lection on the river as time: ‘Going up that river was like travelling back to the beginnings of the world, so that you ultimately felt bewitched, detached from everything that had gone before’. It is here that the film is most explicit about its method, and that it comes closest to Farocki’s strategy of ‘rewinding’ time.39 Drancy Avenir’s essayistic argument on time is poised, to use the words of Jacques Mandelbaum, ‘between the absence of genocide in the visible world (deliberate eclipse of the event, weakening of the memory, disappearance of its witnesses) and the insistent presence of the voices and literary texts that haunts the devastating beauty and infinite calm of this film’.40 Images of ordinariness and even peaceful joy, like those of children playing in the snow, become almost unbearable as the voiceover narrates horrors from written memoirs. The connections established by the montage between visuals and spoken text are, however, more complex than this. The thinking of the film is much subtler than a simple juxtaposition of words by Holocaust survivors and either contemporary urban landscapes or interiors that allude to and thus materialize the presence/absence of the past. Several of the texts recited by the film’s narrators are, in fact, far from evidently connected to the Shoah, if at all. Perhaps the most surprising example is the reading by an invisible narrator, called ‘the explorer’ in the end titles, of passages from Heart of Darkness over images of a journey upriver.41 Thus defamiliarized, Conrad’s words, with their description of the dangers lurking in the forest, appear to mysteriously foreshadow the horrors that would devastate Europe. As Jacques Rancière has argued, ‘This voyage-meditation on the strange proximity of inhumanity mimes, in a certain sense, the movement of the film in the direction of this “inexplicable” which, in any case, has come about.’42 It is also in this sense, I argue, that we can talk, as Richard Kearney does, of a ‘narrative margin’ created by the film.43 Because of the scope of its ref lection, which takes place in the margins or interstices of the text — the spaces that are created in between voice and image, actual image and virtual image, present and past, and texts of different provenance — Drancy Avenir succeeds in being simultaneously specific to Drancy and France, and in speaking to broad questions of modernity, progress, history, violence, and western subjectivity. Just as I remarked on Respite’s distinctiveness as an ‘ineloquent essay’, Drancy Avenir’s singularity as an essay containing almost no original words (bar the small adjustments made by des Pallières) must similarly be signalled. Yet, the film is undeniably an essay, which powerfully engages its spectator in a broad ref lection on a set of themes including temporality, purpose, violence, testimony, memory,

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identity, displacement, power, civilization, progress. But how can Drancy Avenir be an essay if the words that are spoken in it are not its author’s, if the film is not only apparently devoid of original thinking and ref lection, but also conjoins passages from such diverse texts by so many subjects? Precisely like Respite, Drancy Avenir demonstrates that filmic essays are not just about the verbal; film thinks cinematically, via dialectical montage, but also by mobilizing utterly distinctive textual and communicative strategies. Powerful filmic means are indeed employed in Drancy Avenir to generate spectatorial ref lection and to make the image of the past f lash in the present, thus actualizing it in unsettling ways, and redeeming it for the future. The film’s soundscape — composed of classical music, of textured sounds and noises, and of the intense, searching voices of several narrators, young and old, male and female — is used to great effect for this purpose. The soundtrack has a depth and richness that is rarely experienced, especially in non-fiction cinema, and unfolds in parallel to the visual track, thus creating layers, fractures, interstices between them. Voiceover is used to both present and explore thought, in conjunction with the harrowing beauty and allusiveness of the image and with the transitions between sounds and images. Furthermore, interpellation, a key strategy of the essay film, is relentless. The spectator is summoned to take his/her place in the text by the absence of visible interlocutors. The narrators, in fact, mostly muse in voiceover while alone, or else converse with unseen characters; in this way, the spectator is directly summoned, and is asked to occupy the place of the partner in a conversation. On occasion, people stare directly into the camera lens, looking at us with searching eyes for long instants. During the history lecture, we are positioned among the students, sitting at the same level as them. Through these strategies, we are relentlessly and directly addressed by the text, in a way that ensures we are constantly called into question, and asked to engage with the enunciator. It could be argued that these gazes have the same function as Farocki’s black screens: they break the unceasing f low of cinematic time, drawing attention to the filmic apparatus and asking us to position ourselves as ref lexive spectators. One technique in particular is exploited by des Pallières to great effect: slow travelling shots are a true signature figure of the film, evoking the practice of modernist directors and, in particular, Alain Resnais.44 In Resnais’s work, travelling shots can be said to function as a materialization of the meandering progression of thought and of memory.45 One film by Resnais especially is evoked by Drancy Avenir: Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), a seminal text of the nouvelle vague and a lesson in modern cinematic thinking applied to notions of unspeakable traumatic memory and of non-linear temporality. Both films use tracking shots to explore urban spaces with catastrophic histories. Hiroshima, mon amour also privileges a Benjaminian approach to history, and is one of the key modernist films in which the image of the past f lashes in the present, to use Benjamin’s expression, or in which sheets of past and present meet, to allude to Gilles Deleuze’s conception.46 The majestic travelling shots, the elegant framing and cinematography, the textured soundtrack and the many references to classical literature, art and music in Drancy Avenir are also at times reminiscent of Andrej Tarkovsky’s work.

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What is special about des Pallières’s use of tracking shots is, however, that it is so extensive while their motion is often so slow that it is almost unnoticeable. This is probably why Mandelbaum has written that Drancy Avenir ‘records a perpetual present at last revealed — through the tectonic movement of quotations and connections, words and locations — and the hallucination upon which it is based: the continued presence of the extermination’.47 The movement, however, is not just that of transits and transitions between quotations, images, words and places. The film is characterized by a constant, calm but inexorable mobilization — of people (who often walk or travel), nature (a f lowing river, clouds in the sky) and vehicles (metro, cars, trains, boats), but also of the images themselves. The shots, indeed, move because of the travelling camera; and when they are fixed, as is for instance the opening shot, the light changes so noticeably and dramatically while we watch that the image is profoundly mobilized in spite of the fixity of the camera. This shot of unusually long duration draws attention to changes we might normally overlook. The most extraordinary example of this imperceptible tectonic mobility can be found during the history lecture in the first part of the film. At one point, the teacher stands up and erases the passage on the angel of history from the blackboard. The camera is fixed on the board, which it embraces frontally and in its entirety, as the teacher erases the chalk, then walks out of the frame, only to come back into it a few moments later. The wet sponge leaves on the blackboard swirly traces of chalk, which slowly dry out, turning progressively whiter; thus, the image gradually and almost imperceptibly mutates before our eyes. In voiceover, we hear Benjamin’s words: ‘the authentic image of the past appears in a f lash then fades forever. It’s a unique, irreplaceable image that fades if the

Fig. 3.4. The historian’s blackboard in Drancy Avenir, dir. Arnaud des Pallières (1997). DVD capture.

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present does not see its relevance for it’. The movement of the changing patterns of chalk on the surface of the blackboard (and of the screen) is a visually arresting materialization of the core strategy of this film and, equally, of Farocki’s Respite: the transit of (true) images from the past to the present. The authenticity of these images is, of course, Benjaminian, rather than referring to a discourse that authoritatively asserts its veracity and truthfulness over other discourses. These images, in other words, are intense but transient moments in which we recognize the presence of a past which comes alive again, thus revealing its relevance for the present time. Epilogue Westerbork was totally demolished in the 1970s; nothing remains of the camp, bar the memorial monuments and, two miles from the former site, a museum. La Cité de La Muette was also almost entirely demolished in 1976, save for a large block, which, superficially repainted and refurbished, is today once again a low-rent housing complex, as when it was originally built. The two transit camps’ distinct destinies epitomize the different but ultimately equivalent ways in which the material traces of the Holocaust have passed, having being destroyed and erased by bulldozers, or else reconditioned and beautified by a refashioning of architectural spaces. These places, now unrecognizable and yet uncannily familiar, continue to give rise to true images of the past. While these images, as Benjamin has claimed, only f lit by, film is particularly capable of recognizing and revealing them, on account of its predisposition to movement and transitoriness, and of its aptitude for dialectical montage. Essay films are especially keen to exploit these attributes of the filmic language in order to develop personal ref lections and share them with their spectator. Arguably, the most useful cinema on the Holocaust is, indeed, a cinema that thinks at the junctures of, and in the gaps between, moving images. Films Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory), dir. Harun Farocki (1995) Aufschub (Respite), dir. Harun Farocki (2007) L’Authentique procès de Carl Emmanuel Jung (The Authentic Trial of Carl Emmanuel Jung), dir. Marcel Hanoun (1966) Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), dir. Marcel Ophüls (1969) Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Man with a Movie Camera), dir. Dziga Vertov (1929) Daleká cesta (The Long Journey), dir. Alfréd Radok (1949) Drancy Avenir, dir. Arnaud des Pallières (1997) Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), dir. Agnès Varda (2000) Hiroshima, mon amour, dir. Alain Resnais (1959) Histoire(s) du cinéma, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1988–98) Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler, A Film From Germany), dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (1977) Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread), dir. Luis Buñuel (1933) Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), dir. Groupe Dziga Vertov (1976) Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia), dir. Chris Marker (1957) Los Angeles Plays Itself, dir. Thom Andersen (2003) Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), dir. Alain Resnais (1955) Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (1985)

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The Memory of Justice, dir. Marcel Ophüls (1973–76) The Merchant of Venice, dir. Orson Welles (1969) The Thin Blue Line, dir. Errol Morris (1988) Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Terezin: A Documentary Film of the Jewish Resettlement) (1944) Vérités et mensonges (F For Fake), dir. Orson Welles (1974)

Notes to Chapter 3 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 253–64 (p. 255). 2. Stephen Feinstein, Witness and Legacy: Contemporary Art about the Holocaust (Minneapolis: Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota/Lerner, 2000), p. 19. 3. Quoted in Richard Kearney, On Stories (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 59. 4. Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) starts with a similar ref lection, and its method throughout focuses on showing how the apparent normality filmed by the camera in the now of the narration conceals a horrifying past. 5. Jacques Rancière, ‘La Constance de l’art : A propos de Drancy Avenir’, Trafic, 21 (1997), 40–43. 6. Henry L. Mason, ‘Testing Human Bonds within Nations: Jews in the Occupied Netherlands’, Political Science Quarterly, 99 (1984), 315–43 (p. 335). 7. Mason, p. 335. 8. Mason, p. 336. 9. Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, trans. by Nathan Bracher (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), p. 310. 10. Ruth Hanna Sachs, Leaflets of Our Resistance. Volume 1 (Camarillo, CA: Exclamation!, 2009), p. 12. 11. Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman, ‘Introduction’, in Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television since 1933, ed. by Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (London: Wallf lower, 2005), pp. 1–15 (p. 9). 12. Haggith and Newman, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. 13. For a more thorough development of these and the following ideas, see Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London: Wallf lower, 2009). 14. Multiple narrators are also typical, for instance, of Chris Marker’s cinema. 15. Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century, ed. by Jean-Michel Frodon, trans. by Anna Harrison and Tom Mes (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 337–46. 16. See, for instance, Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 20. 17. For instance in ‘Discussions, or Phrasing “After Auschwitz” ’, in Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and the ‘Jewish Question’ in France, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 149–79, and in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 18. The essay film merges a political and an avant-garde tradition; to say ‘I’ is, after all, firstly a political act of self-awareness and self-affirmation. It is also relevant that key essay films on the Holocaust, such as Night and Fog and Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity, dir. Marcel Ophüls, 1969), have been politically controversial to the point of being censored or banned from TV broadcasting. See Haggith and Newman, ‘Introduction’, p. 11. 19. Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Seuil, 1989), paraphrased in Sven-Erik Rose, ‘Auschwitz as Hermeneutic Rupture, Differend, and Image’, in Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetic, Memory, ed. by David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael D. Richardson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), pp. 114–37 (p. 126). 20. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. by Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 [2003]), p. 45. 21. Rose, p. 130; emphasis in the original.

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22. Kaja Silverman, ‘The Dream of the Nineteenth Century’, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 17 (2002), 1–29 (p. 4); emphasis in the original. 23. For an analysis of the use of the Westerbork footage in Night and Fog, where it is mixed with footage both shot by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto and by the Western Allies when they liberated the concentration camps in Germany, see Sylvie Lindeperg, ‘Nuit et Brouillard’: Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007). 24. Sylvie Lindeperg, ‘Suspended Lives, Revenant Images: On Harun Farocki’s Film Respite’, trans. by Benjamin Carter, in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, ed. by Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (London: Koenig Books, 2009), pp. 28–34; Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Holocaust Memory and the Epistemology of Forgetting? Re-wind and Postponement in Respite’, in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, pp. 57–68. 25. Lindeperg, ‘Suspended Lives’, p. 32. 26. Elsaesser, p. 61. 27. The rest of the footage, especially the parts devoted to everyday life and recreational activities, is infrequently screened. 28. Elsaesser, pp. 66–67. 29. Elsaesser, pp. 67–68. 30. Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film, from Montaigne, after Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 160–61. 31. Elsaesser, pp. 67–68. 32. Corrigan, p. 161. 33. Silverman, p. 4. 34. Rascaroli, The Personal Camera, pp. 44–63. 35. Benjamin, p. 257. 36. Silverman, p. 6. 37. Benjamin, p. 255. 38. This and all subsequent quotations from Drancy Avenir are drawn from the English subtitles of the 2008 Arte Video DVD edition of the film. 39. In his discussion of the film Rancière similarly uses the French expression ‘remontée’, with meanings such as ‘returning upstream’, ‘rewinding’, ‘going back’ (Rancière, p. 42). 40. Jacques Mandelbaum, ‘Recovery’, in Cinema and the Shoah, pp. 25–42 (p. 39). 41. For a post-colonial and post-Holocaust reading of Heart of Darkness see Robert Eaglestone, ‘Reading Heart of Darkness after the Holocaust’, in After Representation? The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture, ed. by R. Clifton Spargo and Robert M. Ehrenreich (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 190–219. 42. Rancière, p. 42 (my translation, LR). 43. Kearney, p. 170 n14. 44. Lanzmann’s Shoah also makes insistent use of the travelling shot, however in this case as a means to ‘evoke the sense of the journey of millions to their death’ (Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 103). 45. Laura Rascaroli, ‘The Space of a Return: A Topographic Study of Alain Resnais’s Providence’, Studies in French Cinema, 2 (2002), 50–58; ‘L’Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad’, in The Cinema of France, ed. by Phil Powrie (London: Wallf lower, 2006), pp. 101–10. 46. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005 [1985]), pp. 112–21. 47. Mandelbaum, ‘Recovery’, pp. 39–40.

C h ap t e r 4

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Haneke and the Camps Max Silverman The Image and the Camp In his famous 1992 article on Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1959 film Kapo about the con­ centration camps, the French art and film critic Serge Daney criticizes Pontecorvo’s aestheticization of death in a particular tracking shot in the film. Despite admitting to never having himself seen Kapo, Daney is inspired to write about it because of an earlier condemnation of the film by the director Jacques Rivette in a brief article published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1961 entitled ‘De l’abjection’ (‘On Abjection’).1 Daney takes up Rivette’s critique by suggesting that the tracking shot, which ends up with a close-up image of the actress Emmanuelle Riva electrified on the barbed wire of the camp, was a step too far for ‘inconsiderately abolishing a distance [Pontecorvo] should have “kept”. The tracking shot was immoral for the simple reason that it was putting us — him filmmaker and me spectator — in a place where we did not belong’.2 As a counter to this ‘step too far’, Daney, like Rivette, posits Alain Resnais’s film about the camps Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), which appeared four years before Pontecorvo’s film, in 1955. According to Daney, the major difference between Resnais’s treatment of the image and that of Pontecorvo is that Resnais puts a ‘stop’ on the image and, in that crucial moment, avoids the aestheticization of horror, thus respecting Adorno’s injunction about art after Auschwitz. In Rivette’s words, Kapo allows us to become ‘accustomed to the horror, which little by little is accepted by morality, and will quickly become part of the mental landscape of modern man’, yet ‘you cannot accustom yourself to Night and Fog’.3 Daney’s essay is both a celebration of the ability of cinema to warn us of the persistence of horror in these post-war years and, in the second part of the essay, a lament on the demise of cinema in the decades following, overtaken by television and the endless manipulation of images for entertainment and profit. As Daney says: (t)he stop on the image has ceased to operate; the banality of evil can launch new, electronic images. [...] The images are no longer on the side of the dialectical truth of ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’; they have entirely shifted to the side of promotion and advertising, the side of power.4

Daney bemoans the aestheticization and banalization of structures of inhumanity through the endless repetition of gestures of inhumanity which have inured us to

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the menace of real horror. In other words, what Daney movingly describes as the necessary stop on the image to allow for seeing beyond the surface and the reading of history has been overtaken by the impulse behind Pontecorvo’s tracking shot to fix the image within a banalized and commodified aesthetic. Is Daney right that this marks the demise of cinema’s ability to relate to history? He is certainly not alone in viewing contemporary culture in such bleak terms, as the work of Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Bernard Stiegler and many others clearly demonstrates. Though not specifically about the role of the image today, Giorgio Agamben’s post-Foucauldian thesis on the camp as the new nomos of the modern similarly engages with our inability to perceive the presence of inhumanity within the banalized structures of normal life. If Daney seeks to open up the image to the presence of real horror, Agamben seeks to open up the everyday to the persistence of camp life. Agamben suggests that attention to the juridico-political structures of the camp rather than to the historical events which took place in concentration camps ‘will lead us to regard the camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past (even if still verifiable) but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living’.5 What would it take today, then, in the age of the commodification of the image and (if Agamben is to be believed) the normalization of ‘the camp’, to produce a new shock of recognition that could counter the tyranny of the image and ‘the norm’ by exposing the work of history? In this chapter I would like to use the concerns raised by Daney on the nature of the image and Agamben on the camp as ‘the hidden matrix’ of modern life to consider two films by the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke: Funny Games (1997 and then remade in Hollywood in 2007) and Das weiße Band. Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon) (2009). If Daney suggests that the banalized aesthetic of the image effaces a real history of violence, Agamben warns us of the generalized nature of that violence which is not confined to a particular place or time. Haneke’s cinema seeks to open up the image to this generalized history of violence. Exposing Violence: Funny Games and The White Ribbon The story-line of Funny Games is fairly simple: a bourgeois couple, Anna and Georg Schober, their son (also Georg) and their dog arrive at their lakeside holiday home and are then subjected to a series of sadistic games by two young men, Peter and Paul (who also refer to each other in the film as cartoon characters Beavis and Butthead and Tom and Jerry). The games format is introduced in the opening scene, however, before we meet Peter and Paul: driving to their holiday home, Anna and Georg are guessing titles and composers of pieces of classical music. Their game includes the familiar catch-phrases ‘my turn now’, ‘no peeping’, ‘I give up. What is it?’, ‘3–2 to me’, and so on. Paul’s later questions to camera as he proposes that the couple bet on the timing of their own death — ‘What do you think? Can they win? You’re on their side aren’t you? Who will you bet on?’, ‘As they say on TV, “Place your bets” ’ — are, similarly, clichés from popular reality and game shows, except now the banal expressions have been detached from the family entertainment of

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the original game and inserted into a gruesome scene of sadism and cruelty. This slippage means that the games format acquires an uncanny character, part familiar and domesticated routine, part accompaniment to torture. The games are ‘funny’ in the ambiguous sense of being light-hearted and ‘just for fun’, on the one hand, and strange and sinister on the other. Like the disturbing juxtaposition in the opening scene of the sublime voices in pieces by Tebaldi and Handel and John Zorn’s screeching saxophone on the chaotic track ‘Bonehead’ (played by his avantgarde fusion band ‘Naked City’), the demarcation lines between order and disorder, and horror and the everyday are breached and discrete spaces are made to overlap uncomfortably.6 This unsettling combination of games routine and the torture chamber or concentration camp is central to the film’s structure. Paul plays ‘hot and cold’ to lead Anna to the family’s dog which Paul has bludgeoned to death; the game ‘kitten in the bag’ consists of placing a cushion cover over the son’s head whilst his mother is forced to strip; ‘hide and seek’ is the structure underpinning young Georg’s attempt to escape from captivity and Paul’s search for him in the neighbour’s house; ‘eeny, meeny, miny, mo’ will decide who, of Anna and Georg, will die first; and the proceedings in general are regulated by the bet proposed by Paul that the family will be dead in twelve hours. There are powerful echoes here of the inf luential post-war analysis of the ‘concentrationary universe’ by the French camp survivor David Rousset, in which the horrific acts of the SS are carried out in the form of games and sport: La structure des camps comme Neue-Bremm, près de Sarrebrück [...] est commandée par deux orientations fondamentales: pas de travail, du ‘sport’, une dérision de nourriture. [...] Un des jeux consiste à faire habiller et dévêtir les détenus plusieurs fois par jour très vite et à la matraque; aussi à les faire sortir et entrer dans le Block en courant, tandis que, à la porte, deux S.S. assomment les Häftlinge à coups de Gummi. Dans la petite cour rectangulaire et bétonnée, le sport consiste en tout. [The regime of camps like Neue-Bremm, near Sarrebrück, [...] is typified by two basic directions: no work, but rather, ‘sports’; and a minimum of food. [...] One of the games consists of making the prisoners dress and undress several times a day at top speed and to the tune of the blackjack. Another is to make them run in and out of the barracks while two SS men stand at the door with rubber bludgeons to beat them over the head. In the little rectangular cement courtyard, there are all sorts of sports.] 7

Funny Games adopts a similar Kaf kaesque slippage between camp brutality and the games format. The difference is that Rousset describes horror in the form of the everyday while Haneke transforms the everyday into horror. The conversion of the games format into a system of violence is paralleled by an overlaying of a camp iconography on the familiar setting of the holiday home. The gates to the house begin to resemble the gates to a concentration camp (especially when the young Georg tries to climb the gate in the dark in his unsuccessful attempt to escape); the play of light and dark on the façade of the house at night, and the oblique camera angle from which it is shot, transform the familiar features of the home into a place of menace; and the domestic, bourgeois interior, consisting

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Fig. 4.1. ‘Camp gates.’ Funny Games, dir. Michael Haneke (1997). DVD capture.

Fig. 4.2. ‘Sitting room as torture chamber.’ Funny Games, dir. Michael Haneke (1997). DVD capture.

of TV and remote control, golf clubs, kitchen knives and so on, are converted into objects of extreme violence so that the humdrum sitting room becomes a torture chamber. The norm and the extreme are drawn together uncannily so that ‘funny games’ slide uncomfortably between entertainment and horror.8 Critics of the film have, in general, referred to the way in which Haneke disturbs our culture of violence for entertainment by making it leap out of the virtual world of the TV set and mainstream Hollywood cinema screen and inhabit the ‘real’ world of the bourgeois sitting room. (The shooting of the couple’s son Georg, indexed by the blood dripping down the screen of the television set, is a

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graphic example of this exposure of the real violence contained in the banal TV image.) Haneke himself has said that his main aim in the film was to critique the violence on our screens that we consume on a daily basis for entertainment, and that his reason for remaking the film, shot for shot, in Hollywood, ten years after its release in Germany, was because the original version did not reach its main target audience (that is, the American public) for whom it was originally intended.9 This understanding of the film could also be applied to other Haneke films, like Caché (Hidden, 2005) for example, in which the gated world and smooth screens of bourgeois space are shown to hide violence, trauma and death.10 However, I believe we need to be more precise about the links Haneke creates between bourgeois space, the popular games format and violence in Funny Games. Agamben’s thesis on the camp here becomes a useful conceptual model for understanding. It is not simply that bourgeois space hides a world of violence (despite Agamben’s description of the camp as ‘the hidden matrix’ of modern life); that space is actually part of the new locus for camp life. Agamben’s argument rests on the idea, first, that what starts out as a state of exception, in which the rule of law is temporarily suspended, actually becomes the norm and, second, that what is defined as the exception is not, strictly speaking, outside the norm anyway but profoundly articulated with it, as the one can only define itself in relation to the other. Agamben’s approach thus deconstructs the binary opposition of outside/inside the law to create a far more f luid version of the juridico-political structures of the camp. The camp is no longer that which defines a specific, identifiable and compartmentalized space in which, in Rousset’s words subsequently adopted by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism ‘everything is possible’,11 (just as, for Foucault, disciplinary power in modern society is not simply confined to penal institutions) but any space in which human beings are subject to the unregulated bio-political power of the state. In his book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben suggests that the real scandal of the famous football match played between SS guards and members of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz is not simply the ‘grey zone’ of complicity which it establishes between victims and perpetrators (that Primo Levi talks about in The Drowned and the Saved), but the way in which the illusion of normality hiding real horror persists in different forms today. Agamben says the following: I [...] view this match, this moment of normalcy, as the true horror of the camp. For we can perhaps think that the massacres are over — even if here and there they are repeated, not so far away from us. But that match is never over; it continues as if uninterrupted. It is the perfect and eternal cipher of the ‘gray zone’, which knows no time and is in every place. Hence the anguish and shame of the survivors [...]. But also hence our shame, the shame of those who did not know the camps, and yet, without knowing how, are spectators of that match, which repeats itself in every match in our stadiums, in every television broadcast, in the normalcy of everyday life. If we do not succeed in understanding that match, in stopping it, there will never be hope.12

If a simple football match can be the site of horror, this should act as a warning to us all of the presence of horror in the most unlikely of places. There is a similar logic at work in Funny Games. Haneke also blurs the opposition

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between outside and inside the law by transforming the domestic space, and the banal format of the game or reality show, into the sadistic space of the torture chamber or concentration camp in which ‘normal’ social rules and ethics have been waived. He demonstrates that the structures of inhumanity — a world without law and ethics — do not inhabit a separate world but are deeply embedded in the structures of contemporary popular culture, and within the legal and ethical framework of modern democratic societies. The family’s inability to understand the ‘logic’ at play here (at one stage Georg shouts ‘You want our money? Help yourselves and get out’, as if Peter and Paul’s games could be neatly fitted into the legal categories of ‘breaking and entering’ and ‘theft’) is due to their blind attachment (and our own) to ‘normal’ conventions which fail imaginatively to perceive the presence of a camp ‘logic’ within the logic of bourgeois law and popular culture. The everyday reality show for popular entertainment, in which the fate of individuals (punishment, eviction and so on) is in the hands of the viewers (that is, our hands), is shown to share the structures of the camp. Paul’s questions and winks to camera encouraging us to place our bets and show our allegiances are simple variations of the banal Big Brother catch-phrase ‘you decide’ by which we are interactively implicated in the fate of others. And although we empathize with the victims (as Paul recognizes), we nevertheless willingly cast our vote as perpetrators for their eviction and demise on a daily basis. What, then, has happened to the domesticated space that we thought we were inhabiting when we sit down to watch a game or reality show (or, indeed, go to the cinema for entertainment) and the ethical norms of empathizing with the victim that we thought we shared? We are not only witnessing the real violence that is hidden by contemporary popular culture; we are made to confront the possibility that that culture (our culture) is late capitalism’s version of camp life. Agamben’s depiction of the variety of spaces that the camp may inhabit in modern society allows us to understand more fully the logic of Haneke’s transformation of bourgeois space: [...] if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography.13

By ‘bringing home’ (so to speak) the complicity between domestic and camp space, and the norm and the state of exception, Haneke makes visible the repressed underside to the banalized image of the entertainment industry. Although The White Ribbon takes us back to a small village in pre-First World War Germany, in which a series of sadistic acts seems to be perpetrated by the village children, it nevertheless presents, like Funny Games, an uncanny blurring of horror and the everyday and a complicity between a camp culture and ‘normal’ society. Haneke once again demonstrates how violence, cruelty and torture are not only compatible with strict moral and religious codes but are part of the same fabric. What is particularly striking in both films is the way in which exposure to the inner logic of cruelty inherent in ‘normal’ life shocks its representatives when

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they are its victims. In Funny Games, for example, although the world of senseless punishment and gratuitous violence is part of the very culture consumed by the bourgeois family, it is simply not recognized as such (in fact, not recognized as anything to do with their normal world) when they are confronted with it in their own home. Similarly, in The White Ribbon, all the upholders of order and purity in the village — the pastor, the doctor, the baron, the baron’s steward and even the school-teacher (as I shall discuss shortly) — are shocked and disturbed when their own everyday cruelty is reciprocated by the children of the village.14 Yet, if the recognition of their complicity with violence is denied the guardians of order, that recognition is nevertheless made visible to the viewers of both films, and, indeed, our own complicity with the violence of our culture. Complicity is achieved in The White Ribbon through the drawing together of opposites. The sadistic acts of torture carried out on Sigi and Karli, the sons of the baron and the midwife respectively, can only be reconciled with the pure and innocent faces of the other children of the village if we cease to see purity and cruelty in discrete terms: the country idyll, in which the two sons of the baron’s steward and Sigi are lying on the river bank shaping and playing whistles (the panpipes to accompany the pastoral scene), suddenly becomes a scene of attempted murder when one of the brothers throws Sigi into the river; the measured tone of the doctor belies his sadism as he pronounces the cruellest of words to the midwife (his mistress); the brutal torture of Karli, in which he is almost blinded, is followed by the concern of the children enquiring about his condition. When the pastor gives his two eldest children, Klara and Martin, ten lashes of the cane for having stayed out and lying about their whereabouts, and then forces them to wear the white ribbon for their sins, the camera remains outside the room where the beating takes place while we hear the cries from within, thus transforming the bland and puritanical interior of the pastor’s house into a torture chamber.15

Fig. 4.3. ‘Innocence and hell.’ The White Ribbon, dir. Michael Haneke (2009). DVD capture.

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Haneke achieves this blurring of opposites by showing how the surface image is an illusion hiding a complex layering of practice. Hence, the image in which the pastor’s children are seen looking out of the window at the fire blazing outside, with the ref lection of the fire in the window, as if engulfing their innocent faces in a hellish furnace, or that of the ‘innocent’ gaze of the doctor’s young son looking into the room in which his father is sexually abusing Anni, his daughter, become the composite images of choice for Haneke, as they achieve, within a single frame, the superimposition of ‘differences’ (like a collage) so much a part of his politicoaesthetic practice. Once this way of reading the image is established, we cannot see the innocent faces of the children (or the bland interior of the pastor’s house) without also seeing the invisible but present ‘other’ face of evil. Even the purest of gestures — for example, the gift of the caged bird that the pastor’s youngest son offers his father — cannot simply be taken at face-value, as we are led to doubt the truth of the visible. It is through the lens of the unreliability of the visible image that we should read (or understand) the account of the events in the village by the school-teacher; if the image can lie, then so can the word. The device of the unreliable narrator (and hence the unreliability of memory, as the teacher-narrator ref lects on events from his past) complements the ambivalence of the image. Is the teacher himself not complicit in the children’s violent acts that he describes? After all, he is, arguably, more directly involved than the other figures of authority in the village in impressing on the young the values of civilization as he is their teacher. When he denounces the children to the pastor, should we not question his own role (as well as that of all the other adults) in the cruel acts that he exposes? Is his courtship of the young governess Eva quite as pure as he describes it?16 The illusion of surfaces would suggest that ‘purity’ is not a ‘pure’ term and that the white ribbon always contains traces of darkness, even though they are not immediately visible. Haneke uses the classic modernist device of exposing

Fig. 4.4. ‘Even a peaceful countryside ...’ The White Ribbon, dir. Michael Haneke (2009). DVD capture.

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‘the illusion of the image as offering a “window on the world” ’ as a means of reintroducing into the frame civilization’s discontents (habitually denied by the self and projected onto the other).17 Images of the peaceful countryside around the village — vast open skies and cornfields blowing gently in the wind — bring to mind the opening words of Jean Cayrol’s haunting commentary in Night and Fog: ‘Même un paysage tranquille [...] peut mener à un camp de concentration’ [‘Even a peaceful countryside [...] can lead to a concentration camp’]. Like Resnais, Haneke draws horror into the most becalmed of sites. Filming Intersections Towards the end of The White Ribbon, the voice-over of the narrator (himself an ambivalent presence, as I have suggested) announcing the outbreak of the First World War (the grand conf lagration that was to give the lie to the march towards the light and progress of the Enlightenment project) accompanies an image in which the baronial hall in light can be seen through a dark archway, not only literally and metaphorically playing with light and dark but also resembling an eye or an aperture. The final image in the film of the congregation in church assembling to the angelic sound of the choir in the gallery above, directed by the teacher/narrator, is like the final bow by the cast at a theatre, or a coming-together for a photograph. Both these sequences are indicative of Haneke’s method for filming intersections: they are a complex montage in which multiple meanings are condensed into a single image, a mise-en-abyme, or miniature, of the film as a whole. In Funny Games and The White Ribbon Haneke thus disturbs the surface image by transforming it into a site of overlapping and interconnecting pieces which never coalesce to form a completed puzzle. As I suggest above, this is both an aesthetic and political strategy. The superimposition of different frames of reference (the games format and the camp in Funny Games, the authoritarian order of traditional society and the disorder of random cruelty in The White Ribbon) is a poetic condensation of elements to open up the moment to a complex history. Haneke’s images are a spatialization of history, converting the linearity of chronological time and the discrete nature of different spaces into a new paradigmatic and palimpsestic spatio-temporal configuration. These images resemble the Benjaminian image or constellation in which history can be perceived in the moment and depth invades the surface.18 It is this structure which provides an answer to Daney’s questions about the ability of the image today to respond to history and to Agamben’s challenge to the singularity of moments of extreme violence. If Haneke’s approach to the image is to transform it into a site of overlapping con­texts, especially drawing together horror and the everyday, then it clearly pre­sents a challenge to our understanding of good and evil as binary opposites. Haneke’s cinema points up the illusion of divorcing civilization from barbarity and invites us, instead, to see them as inextricably related. He places us in the realm of those critiques of modernity by Adorno, Arendt, Fanon, Christopher Browning, Zygmunt Bauman and others which understand instances of extreme violence

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in modern history — including the Holocaust and colonialism — as profoundly articulated with the Enlightenment project and the western invention of Man rather than as aberrations from it. Arendt famously used the expression ‘the banality of evil’ to describe Adolf Eichmann’s role in the Final Solution: the same expression could be used to describe Haneke’s cinema.19 Haneke’s politico-aesthetic model therefore puts the particular into contact with the wider structures of the modern world which ideologically masquerade as the norm. This is why Haneke often suggests that his films should not only be seen as relating to specific times and places but in more general terms. The White Ribbon opens with the teacher/narrator explaining that the strange events that he is about to recount ‘could perhaps clarify certain things that happened in this country’. The clear implication of this statement is that the behaviour of the village children on the eve of the First World War can tell us something about the violence of the adults that they would become in the following decades. Yet this interpretation is itself too limited, for, as Haneke has himself said: [The White Ribbon] isn’t a film about Germany specifically. I am just using Germany as a model to be able to talk about radicalism in general. [...] I don’t think it is right to push the film away from you and say that it is only about Germany. It is the nature of a particular situation which could exist in any country or culture.20

Elsewhere Haneke has said ‘(t)he film uses the example of German fascism to talk about the mental preconditions for every type of terrorism, whether it comes from the right or the left, and whether it’s politically or religiously motivated’.21 This bears comparison with Rousset’s comment at the end of his essay on the camps: [...] il serait facile de montrer que les traits les plus caractéristiques et de la mentalité S.S. et de soubassements sociaux se retrouvent dans bien d’autres secteurs de la société mondiale. [...] Ce serait une duperie, et criminelle, que de prétendre qu’il est impossible aux autres peuples de faire une expérience analogue pour des raisons d’opposition de nature. L’Allemagne a interprété avec l’originalité propre à son histoire la crise qui l’a conduite à l’univers concentrationnaire. Mais l’existence et le mécanisme de cette crise tiennent aux fondements économiques et sociaux du capitalisme et de l’impérialisme. Sous une figuration nouvelle, des effets analogues peuvent demain encore apparaître. Il s’agit, en conséquence, d’une bataille très précise à mener. [... it would be easy to show that the most characteristic traits of both the SS mentality and the social conditions which gave rise to the Third Reich are to be found in many sectors of world society. [...] It would be blindness — and criminal blindness, at that — to believe that, by reason of any difference of national temperament, it would be impossible for any other country to try a similar experiment. Germany interpreted with an originality in keeping with her history, the crisis that led her to the concentrationary universe. But the existence and the mechanism of that crisis were inherent in the economic and social foundations of capitalism and imperialism. Under a new guise, similar effects may reappear tomorrow. There remains therefore a very specific war to be waged.]22

This is not simply a question of using the particular to talk about the universal,

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for either Rousset or Haneke. Haneke’s aesthetic practice, as I have defined it here, reshapes the relationship between the particular and the universal so that they, too, have to be reformulated in a non-dichotomous way. By blurring the contours of horror and the everyday, one time and other times, one space and other spaces, he shows us the intersections and similarities between ‘opposites’ without collapsing these into a homogeneous whole. Agamben’s notion of the presence of camp structures in different spaces is, similarly, an understanding of the tension between similarity and difference. His thesis emerges, in part, from the critiques of the concentrationary universe proposed by Rousset and Arendt (and which underpin the making of Resnais’s Night and Fog) which warn us of the continued presence of the radical potential of ‘total domination’ in the aftermath of the war. It does not imply that all life is camp life; but it does jolt us into an awareness of the hidden presence of camp structures in ‘normal’ life whose phenomenal form can appear under different guises. The mistake would, therefore, be to confuse an understanding of the concentrationary universe (of which, as Arendt said, ‘(the) camps are the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power’)23 with the Holocaust, which is (in the way we have come to understand the term since the 1970s) the specifically targeted genocide of a particular racialized group (the Jews). The concentrationary and the exterminatory programmes clearly overlap but also need to be distinguished if we are to understand the continued presence of a systematic attack on the notion of what is a human being (that is, all human beings), a programme which was introduced in its most egregious form in the concentration camps but which cannot be contained in that singular instance. This is not to universalize the Holocaust and efface the singularity of the attempted genocide of the Jews (a critique that has been made of Night and Fog and, indeed, any attempt to relate the Holocaust to other moments of extreme violence); it is, rather, to suggest that Agamben’s return to the theories elaborated by Rousset and Arendt on the concentrationary universe and ‘total domination’ reminds us of a juridico-political assault on the human, and a need to see through its ruses, that persists in different sites today and affects us all.24 Haneke’s relational politico-aesthetic approach to film, exemplified in Funny Games and The White Ribbon, can perhaps be more clearly understood, then, within a concentrationary or camp logic rather than through the lens of the Holocaust, which specifies the singularity of the event. These films show how the image is a site of intersections between different times and places and how the most banal of scenes is haunted by a dark presence of unimaginable cruelty. They reinvest the image with imagination; it is only by going beyond the visible that we can perceive the connections between one thing and another. These ref lexions return us to Daney’s concern that the cinema no longer has the ability to break through the accumulated layers of entertainment images to put a stop on the image (with all that that entails) in the manner of Night and Fog. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Rousset, Arendt, Cayrol and Resnais were acutely aware of the difficulty of exposing the persistence of horror in everyday life. It could be said that that task is greater still today, as the capacity of the image to efface a sense of history has been extended in an age of new technologies and globalized commodity capitalism. Daney recognizes

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that, in this climate, ‘the banality of evil can launch new, electronic images’.25 Yet Haneke’s politico-aesthetic strategy could be seen as a challenge to the way evil is hidden in those new images today. His way of defamiliarizing the everyday to show how camp structures have become normalized is one possible indication that cinema can still stage the tension between the visible and the invisible, and the moment and history, in ways that disturb the Matrix-like cocoon of late capitalist culture, and can still warn us in the new millennium, as Night and Fog did in the aftermath of the war, of the continued presence of structures that we thought were buried in the past. Films Caché (Hidden), dir. Michael Haneke (2005) Le Corbeau (The Raven), dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot (1943) Funny Games, dir. Michael Haneke (1997) Funny Games (remake), dir. Michael Haneke (2007) Kapo, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo (1959) Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), dir. Alain Resnais (1955) Das weiße Band. Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon), dir. Michael Haneke (2009)

Notes to Chapter 4 1. Serge Daney, ‘The Tracking Shot in Kapo’, trans. by Laurent Kretzschmar, Senses of Cinema, 30 ( January-March 2004) [accessed 23 August 2011] (first published in Trafic, 4 (1992), 5–19); Jacques Rivette, ‘On Abjection’, trans. by David Phelps with the assistance of Jeremi Szaniawski [accessed 24 October 2011] (first published as ‘De l’abjection’, Cahiers du cinéma, 120 ( June 1961), 54–55). 2. Daney, ‘The Tracking Shot in Kapo’. 3. Rivette, ‘On Abjection’. 4. Daney, ‘The Tracking Shot in Kapo’. 5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 [1995]), p. 166. 6. As Catherine Wheatley observes, ‘what initially appears as unthreatening and knowable soon transforms into something strange and unsettling’ (Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), p. 79). Should we be shocked, though, by this sudden descent from the sublime to Hell, given what we know about the orchestras formed by inmates in a number of the concentration camps? 7. David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1965 [1946]), pp. 54–55 (The Other Kingdom, trans. by Ramon Guthrie (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), pp. 58–59.) For other examples of connections between sport and the concentrationary universe in French literature, see Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoel, 1975) and Philippe Grimbert, Le Secret (Paris: Grasset, 2004). 8. For a discussion of Freud’s concept of the uncanny (‘Das Unheimliche’) in relation to Haneke’s treatment of domestic space, see David Sorfa, ‘Uneasy Domesticity in the Films of Michael Haneke’, Studies in European Cinema, 3 (2006), 93–104. 9. See for example ‘Michael Haneke: Interview’, Time Out, 15 October 2007 [accessed 24 October 2011]. 10. For further discussion of the relationship between bourgeois culture and hidden violence in Haneke’s Caché, see my articles, Max Silverman, ‘The Empire Looks Back’, Screen, 48 (2007), 245–49 and ‘The Violence of the Cut: Michael Haneke’s Caché and Cultural Memory’, French Cultural Studies, 21 (2010), 57–65.

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11. Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, p. 181. 12. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. by Daniel HellerRoazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999 [1998]), p. 26. I am grateful to Griselda Pollock for these insights. 13. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 174. 14. A similar process is at work in Caché as the return of the violence of their own culture (if not by a child, at least through naive and child-like drawings) is simply not understood by Georges and Anne (the later incarnations of Georg and Anna of Funny Games). 15. The word ‘torture’ is explicitly mentioned when the baron addresses the congregation in church following the brutal treatment inf licted on his son: ‘At first I thought my child had been tortured by those who cut off my cabbages to get even’. By connecting this act with the earlier ‘accident’ involving the doctor, the baron implies that torture is endemic and that responsibility and guilt are collective rather than simply individual acts. (The mutual suspicion and denunciations in the film and the filming in black and white are reminiscent of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 wartime allegory Le Corbeau (The Raven).) 16. The narrator does, of course, give us a clue at the very beginning of his story as to his uncertainty about the accuracy of all the details: ‘I don’t know if the story I want to tell you is entirely true. Some of it I only know from hearsay. After so many years, a lot of it is still obscure, and many questions remain unanswered.’ This opening statement is made against a black screen; the first image only emerges gradually out of darkness. The play of light and dark (literally and metaphorically) is thus established early on to warn us of claims to truth and objectivity. In an interview which accompanies the 2010 Artifical Eye DVD of the film, Haneke explained his intentions in the following way: ‘I am trying to point out to the viewer that the film is an interpretation, it is an artefact of someone’s memory and someone saying that this is “how it might have been”. What I want to do is to counter this lie and false realism which claims that we know how things were. No one can know this.’ 17. Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema, p. 92. For discussions of Haneke’s aesthetic of staging offscreen space, see Libby Saxton, ‘Secrets and Revelations: Off-screen Space in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005)’, Studies in French Cinema, 7 (2007), 5–17; and Michael Cowan, ‘Between the Street and the Apartment: Disturbing the Space of Fortress Europe in Michael Haneke’, Studies in European Cinema, 5 (2008), 117–29. 18. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 416. 19. At the time of writing this chapter (2011), the fortieth anniversary of the famous Stanford Prison experiment by Philip Zimbardo is a timely reminder of the proximity of ‘normality’ and ‘evil’. 20. Interview with Haneke for DVD of The White Ribbon. 21. ‘Every Film Rapes the Viewer’ (interview Michael Haneke), Spiegel Online International, 21 October 2009 [accessed 17 August 2011]. 22. Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire, pp. 186–87; The Other Kingdom, p. 173). 23. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004 [1951]), p. 566. 24. For further discussion of the distinction between the concentrationary and exterminatory programmes, see Sylvie Lindeperg and Annette Wieviorka, Univers concentrationnaire et génocide: Voir, savoir, comprendre (Paris: Mille et une nuits/Arthème Fayard, 2008), and Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, ‘Introduction: Concentrationary Cinema’, in Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’ (1955), ed. by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2011), pp. 1–54. 25. Daney, ‘The Tracking Shot in Kapo’.

PA RT I I I

v

Between Genres

C h ap t e r 5

v

The Nazi Killin’ Business A Postmodern Pastiche of the Holocaust Ferzina Banaji Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France You probably heard we ain’t in the prisoner-takin’ business; we in the killin’ Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin’ (Lt. Aldo Raine, Inglourious Basterds).1

About half way through Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 epic Inglourious Basterds there is a critical turning point: in a leafy valley strewn with corpses, Aldo Raine (played by Brad Pitt), the tobacco-chewing, Tennessee-accented lieutenant in charge of the eponymous Basterds, a group of avenging American Jewish soldiers, confronts a German sergeant. The sergeant, Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel), refuses to betray the locations of other German units in the vicinity, whereupon Raine orders the ‘Bear Jew’, Golem-like Sergeant Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), to beat him to death. Rachtman’s bloody end by baseball bat is met with cheerful catcalls from the assembled Basterds, fulfilling the expectations of the Tarantino-literate spectator, and definitively seeding the fantastical within the text of the film. Set between 1941 and 1944, Inglourious Basterds depicts two separate Jewish plots to assassinate high-ranking Nazi officials — one to be carried out by a young woman who runs a Paris cinema and the other by the marauding vigilante Basterds — while slaughtering as many others along the way as possible. The film is divided into five, increasingly convergent chapters — Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France, Inglourious Basterds, German Night in Paris, Operation Kino and Revenge of the Giant Face (these names have been adopted to title the five sections of this chapter). While various genres can convincingly be adduced in an analysis of the film, given its deliberate employment of tropes from the world war combat film, the spaghetti western, the so-called macaroni combat film and Nazisploitation, among others, this chapter will examine the case for Tarantino’s film to be included also within a trajectory of Holocaust representation. Inglourious Basterds’ deliberate and prodigious pastiche of references to other Holocaust films and its inclusion of Holocaust motifs even while appearing to mimic other cinematic genres, provides ample oppor­ tunity to map its visual experimentation onto contemporary visualizations of the Holocaust. Indeed the argument will be made here that Tarantino’s film pertinently

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updates the Holocaust film for the twenty-first century. Putting the debate about ethics to one side, Tarantino is asking what cinema can do that is new in the context of the Holocaust and the answer effectively brings to the fore what the limits of Holocaust representation might be for the present. To preface my argument, it is worth brief ly sketching out here the ethical issues that emerged in debates about Holocaust representation, most of which find their genesis in Theodor Adorno’s much-quoted (indeed, much-misquoted) 1949 dictum that writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. A great deal of scholarship has focused on articulating limits of representation. Take, for instance, scholar Terrence Des Pres’s rules of representation, which emphasized the sanctity of the Holocaust and proscribed anything that depicted it as less than unique or inaccurately; or the view of filmmaker Claude Lanzmann (director of the austere documentary, Shoah (1985)): ‘Je pense profondément qu’il y a un interdit de la représentation’ [I believe deeply that there is a prohibition on representation].2 Such uncompromising pronouncements have proved to be at odds with the proliferation and, often, the nature of representations of the Holocaust. Indeed, the Holocaust has become firmly embedded within mainstream Western cultural — visual, literary, artistic — discourse. By the time Tarantino turned to World War II and the Nazi genocide, it had already been addressed in hundreds of films (from little known documentaries to multiple-Oscar-winning, Spielberg-directed narrative epics), on television (from NBC’s Holocaust in the 1970s to being name checked in HBO’s Sex and the City in the 2000s) and in books from highbrow literature (such as Jonathan Littell’s Goncourt-winning Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones, 2006)) to graphic novels (Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986 and 1991)); it also exists in forms ranging from the virtual (a Google search reveals over twelve million hits in 0.28 seconds) to the physical (museums and memorial sites being constructed across the globe), in addition to having a presence in the legal, philosophical and educational spheres. In broad terms, films on the Holocaust evolved thematically from depictions of the universal — Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) famously avoided making explicit reference to the Jewish identity of deportees and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) depicted Anne’s story as a young girl’s struggle against the evils of a relatively generic Fascism — to portrayals of the particular — in films like La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997) and Un secret (A Secret, 2007), which drew attention to the Jewish specificity of the Nazi annihilation project by explicitly commenting upon or visualizing the Jewishness of their main protagonists. Even amongst films that explicitly address Jewish identity (and with specific relevance for this chapter), further contrast may be drawn between portrayals of passive inaction, such as those found in Schindler’s List (1993) and The Pianist (2001), which limit the abilities of their Jewish protagonists or narrativize inability to act, and depictions of Jews taking violent action against Nazis such as those found in Edward Zwick’s Defiance (2008) and Robert Guédiguian’s L’Armée du crime (Army of Crime, 2009). Resonating through Inglourious Basterds, the explicit visualization of Jewish action is an element of a number of recent films that helps bolster the case for Tarantino’s film to be considered within a broader continuum of Holocaust representation. Additionally, inasmuch as it revisits the idea of a Holocaust revenge fantasy, Tarantino’s film is far from unique: precursors

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include the 1974 film The Odessa File and earlier still, the Czech film Já, spravedlnost (I, Justice, 1968), both of which fictionalized history within narratives of Jewish vengeance. Tarantino takes these disparate elements of fantasy and action — both of which have roots in Holocaust representation — and combines them with a pastiche of other symbols and cinematic allusions, raising fundamental questions about the nature of Holocaust film in the twenty-first century.3 Many Holocaust films have prefigured Tarantino’s themes of Jewish action and resistance, his exploration of revenge fantasies and even his use of pastiche. What makes Inglourious Basterds particularly worthy of closer attention is that although it appears to be rewriting Holocaust history, it is really rewriting Holocaust filmography. By introducing and using manifold cinematic references, Tarantino unhooks the Holocaust-on-film from the Holocaust-in-history: a cinematic legerdemain that evidently worked at the box office and which I argue here has relevance for future representations. As these introductory comments have described, Inglourious Basterds is a multigenre text and any analysis of it must therefore take into account its use of other genres as well. The next section of this chapter analyzes the film by matching its visualization to other cinematic references. This will be followed by a consideration of the critical reaction to Tarantino’s visual fantasy which will offer, in part, an examination of what is expected of film’s interaction with the Holocaust since it is precisely this expectation that creates tension within the text: what happens when an auteur with a penchant for graphic violence makes a film about a historical subject which has often been thought to pose singular challenges to representation? The revisions to Holocaust filmography are analyzed primarily through two lines of enquiry: the film’s depiction of graphic violence and its inversion of the paradigm of history informing film to turn cinema into the device through which history is transformed. The overall analysis will touch upon some of the key issues that have defined Holocaust representation and which, in the twenty-first century, appear open to significant revision. Inglourious Basterds Inglourious Basterds is a film that gives scholars of the Holocaust and of visual culture pause for thought. It affirms Tarantino’s status as the ultimate postmodern pastiche rip-off artist through a provocative triptych of cinematic affect that destabilizes audience expectation, that troubles with its visceral and hyper-visualized violence and that provokes with its fantasy of rewritten history. It is also a film with a deliberately self-ref lexive cinematic commentary running throughout, drawing attention to the structures and forms of visual culture that inf luence it and effectively locating the postmodern within Holocaust representation. The film’s five chapters all have roughly the same format: a dialogue-heavy, multilingual build-up that culminates in an orgy of violence. The tension in each chapter is intentionally intensified — Tarantino explains this as the visual equivalent of stretching a rubber band — and then released in a rapid denouement.4 Each of the chapters also draws on a unique set of film references which will be examined in this section as they occur through

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the narrative, since the starting point for this analysis of Tarantino’s visual mimicry is the assertion that Inglourious Basterds is first of all not as much a film about the Holocaust as a film about films, some of which are about the Holocaust. Chapter One: Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France opens the film on a dairy farm in rural France. Farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet) faces the diminutive but intimidating figure of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) who proceeds to interrogate LaPadite with a combination of scrupulous politeness and undeniable menace. He is after the Dreyfus family, dairy farmers like LaPadite, who remain unaccounted for in his meticulous records. Rather than defusing the rising tension, Landa’s request for a glass of milk and permission to smoke and production of a comically large pipe, dramatically contribute to the dread anticipation as it is revealed that Landa’s nickname is ‘the Jew Hunter’, a fact that the nervously perspiring LaPadite already appears to know. The detailed focus on the minutiae of Landa’s list — the rustle of paper, the careful filling of ink into his pen, the close-up on names and details as they are written down, even the light that falls on the papers throughout the scene — is a revision of imagery drawn from another iconic list, that of Spielberg’s opus Schindler’s List. Tarantino’s opening musical score, a speeded-up version of Beethoven’s Für Elise, is an (auditory) echo of the manic piano played during Spielberg’s depiction of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto.5 Similarly, the (visual) framing of LaPadite and Landa positioned with the list between them, a trio of light against dark, is a restaging of the classically lit scenes between Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth, with the paradigmatic structure of good and evil altered since salvation is to be found neither in the list, as was the case in Spielberg’s film, nor through LaPadite, who proceeds to betray the Dreyfus family. The long take with its chiaroscuro lighting falling on the faces of Landa and Lapadite, and on the incomplete list between them, is only broken when the camera moves slowly downward to reveal the Dreyfus family hiding underneath the wooden f loorboards of LaPadite’s kitchen. The scene ends in a hail of bullets and the slaughter of most of the Dreyfus family; only the teenage daughter, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), escapes and while f leeing down the mountainside hears Landa call after her that they will meet again. It is worth noting that the massacre of the Dreyfus family is not explicitly depicted (as is the case with other bloody endings later in the film) and is rather implied through the rapid-fire editing. This nod to a representational taboo suggests, perhaps, that the first of Tarantino’s chapters is aware of certain conventions of Holocaust representation. Chapter Two: Inglourious Basterds shifts to the visual imagery of an entirely different genre, namely, that of the World War II combat film. This chapter introduces the Basterds, their leader, Raine, and their mission: ‘we’re gonna be doin’ one thing and one thing only [...] killin’ Nazis’. Tarantino commented that Inglourious Basterds was his ‘Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare or Guns of Navarone kind of thing’ and from the opening scenes of this chapter Tarantino’s visual debt to the combat genre is quickly apparent.6 Scholarly analysis of the genre indeed stresses precisely this set up of ‘a group of men, led by a hero, [who] undertake a mission that will accomplish an important military objective’.7 Additionally, this group of soldiers often come from all over the United States, which they do in Tarantino’s film (although some

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films in the genre also depict British soldiers), and they often represent an ethnic and religious diversity, which they do not in this case since the Basterds are all Jews. Another slight divergence from the conventions of the genre takes the shape of the scarce attention that is paid to military paraphernalia or symbols other than the swastika that Raine carves onto the foreheads of lone survivors of the Basterds’ attacks. Indeed, these divergences from the combat genre act as Holocaust-specific insertions within the chapter, as the soldiers are ‘updated’ into avenging Jews and, in a bloody twist on the tattooing of the bodies of camp prisoners, the victim now scars the perpetrator. Other combat genre rules are also refashioned as Tarantino does away with the marching or walking shots typically used to indicate a journey forward, and although the Basterds’ mission is posited as noble, there is little sense of the nobility of the group as the hyper-realized violence testifies that it is through their cruelty that their notoriety spreads. The Nazis of the film are not faceless and generic but are, in fact, clearly identified, either humanized by means such as the poignant close-up on Rachtman’s face just before his death, or merely named, for example by comic balloon-like name insertions. It is worth noting that giving them a face does not, in Tarantino’s pastiche universe, mean representing them with any great depth of understanding. Raine clarifies: ‘[A] Nazi ain’t got no humanity. They’re the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin’, mass murderin’ maniac and they need to be destroyed. That’s why any and every son of a bitch we find wearin’ a Nazi uniform, they’re gonna die’. While other recent films depicting Nazis have sought to make a distinction between the SS and Wehrmacht soldiers (consider Der Untergang (Downfall) in 2004 or Zwartboek (Black Book) in 2006), here they are all simply Nazis (a word often used interchangeably with German). A unique tension is, in fact, to be found in the generic evil that the Nazi/German figure is expected to embody and the visually explicit violence perpetrated upon them by the Basterds. This inverted tension is highlighted by a scene that is intercut with our introduction to the Basterds, as a furious Hitler demands to know who these savage Jews are who dare murder Germans. A nervous Private is shown into the Führer’s office; the only one to survive a Basterd massacre, he removes his cap to reveal Raine’s handiwork of the swastika carved into his forehead, much to Hitler’s pity and horror. Another cut takes us back to the Basterds, introducing some of the group’s more overtly psychopathic members with the familiar Tarantino f lourishes of pop art titles, back stories and contrapuntal music, drawing explicit attention to the artificiality of the film. The chapter concludes with Rachtman’s graphic death in the valley, described at the start of this chapter, surrounded by laughing Basterds: a visual insertion of the Jewish revenge fantasy into the combat genre. Moving the plot to Paris and to 1944, Chapter Three: German Night in Paris reintroduces Shosanna as the proprietor of a cinema hall and going by the name Emmanuelle Mimieux. Enter celebrated German sniper, baby-faced star of Goebbel’s fictional upcoming film Stolz der Nation (Nation’s Pride), and Shosanna’s unshakably ardent pursuer, Friedrich Zoller (Daniel Brühl). Zoller introduces himself to Shosanna against the backdrop of film posters going up and is emboldened in his pursuit by her stern riposte: ‘Je suis française. Nous respectons les réalisateurs dans notre pays’ [I am French. We respect directors in our country]. Tarantino’s love of

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French cinema, his much-vaunted respect for the canonical auteurs of the Nouvelle vague, and his proclamation at Cannes at the premiere of Inglourious Basterds — ‘I am not an American film maker, I make movies for the planet Earth and Cannes is the place that represents that’ — hint at the distinct, non-Hollywood visual references that emerge in this chapter.8 From the films being advertised at Shosanna’s cinema hall, such as G. W. Pabst’s 1929 Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (The White Hell of Piz Palü) starring Leni Riefenstahl, and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s grim 1943 indictment of French collaboration, Le Corbeau (The Raven) (which had, in fact, been banned by the Nazis and could not have been screened in occupied Paris), to allusions to Max Linder, Charlie Chaplin and 30s star Lilian Harvey, the richness of Tarantino’s visual web intensifies, matching the plot twist that irrevocably places cinema itself at the crux of the film. In a brightly lit scene in a Parisian café, Zoller convinces his patron, Goebbels, to host the premiere of Stolz der Nation in Shosanna’s cinema. Goebbels agrees and asks Landa who has just entered to oversee preparations. Shosanna, already terrified from having been rudely escorted to the café and excluded from much of the German dialogue, is now face to face with the man who murdered her parents. Far from panicking, however, Shosanna is already planning her vengeance. A brief aside follows about the extremely f lammable properties of nitrate film narrated by Samuel L. Jackson and accompanied by a visual insertion from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 film Sabotage. The cine-literate spectator will know that the boy in the clip is unaware that he is carrying a bomb that will shortly explode, prefiguring both the use of celluloid as key catalyst in the conclusion of the film, and the fact that its end will be a fiery one. Film as destroyer gives new meaning to Shosanna’s comment that she will make a film ‘uniquement pour les nazis’ [only for Nazis]. Jewish revenge, now visualized via European cinema, inserts Tarantino’s visual update into yet another cinematic tradition. Chapter Four: Operation Kino starts to tie up these narrative strands by introducing yet another: Lt Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), a film critic in his pre-war career, is recruited to infiltrate the premiere with the help of the Basterds and a German spy, the glamorous Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). The cinematic references are now decidedly amusing with a knowing wink to film scholars as Hicox proudly reveals that he is author of Art of the Eye, the Heart and the Minds: A Study of German Cinema in the 1920s and Twenty Four Frame Da Vinci (an anachronistic swipe at Godard who famously declared that film was truth twenty-four times a second) that Hicox goes on to explain is a sub-textual film criticism of the oeuvre of Pabst. He also writes articles for a journal called Films and Filmmakers. Hicox must rendezvous with von Hammersmark in a village tavern on the outskirts of Paris in order to put into motion Operation Kino but their meeting will prove extremely dangerous as the tavern, it turns out, is overrun with Nazi soldiers. Pabst is referenced a third time when Hicox is asked to explain his unusual accent to the roomful of Nazis and he explains that he comes from Piz Palü, a town made famous by Pabst’s most commercially successful film (and, in fact, Riefenstahl’s as an actress) in which the young Hicox and his family were extras. But just in case there were any illusions about the esteem in which Tarantino holds smooth-talking, whisky-guzzling film critics or scholars, Hicox’s rendezvous

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goes disastrously wrong. A quick succession of close-ups deftly reveals that the tiny basement tavern holds many more guns than first shown and in the dramatic shootout that ensues Hicox is killed along with a Basterd, a German Major, the table full of Nazis, the tavern keeper and his waitress. Von Hammersmark, pulled bleeding from the wreckage, leaves behind a shoe which will be found by Landa in a twisted Cinderella moment. A new Operation Kino is formulated: Raine with two Basterds, Donny and Omar (Omar Doom), will be von Hammersmark’s Italian escorts for the premiere. Their Italian disguise is, one may assume, a tribute to Enzo Castellari whose 1978 Quel maledetto treno blindato (The Inglorious Bastards) was the eponymous inspiration for Tarantino (although his deliberate misspelling has remained rather cryptically unexplained). The final two chapters of the film are much more explicit in their depiction of violence, visually echoing recent films such as Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn (2007) and Defiance and Army of Crime (both mentioned above), which hint that extremely graphic violence could be part of what characterizes certain future strands of Holocaust representation, overturning visual taboos of the past. Tarantino’s climactic conclusion, Chapter Five: Revenge of the Giant Face, is set in Shosanna’s cinema hall. It is a veritable bloodbath: von Hammersmark is murdered by Landa; Shosanna and Zoller die in a mutual shootout just as the cinema’s stock of celluloid is set ablaze; Landa spirits Raine away and makes a deal with the Allies to be granted asylum at the end of the war, thus facilitating the bloody end of the Nazi high command. Donny — the Golem himself — enters the balcony in which Hitler and Goebbels are seated and pumps them full of bullets, then turns his machine gun onto the burning, screaming mass of people trapped in the hall before the entire building explodes. From the slow motion machine gun reminiscent of Scarface (1983) and the slaughter at the end of Carrie (1976), both from Brian de Palma’s bloody oeuvre, to the huge laughing spectre that seems to turn Shosanna into the Wizard of Oz, Tarantino’s fifth chapter revels in an orgy of referential violence. The film ends with Landa at the receiving end of Raine’s unique branding of Nazis, the swastika carved into his forehead. Zoller commented earlier that ‘Josef [Goebbels] thinks [Stolz der Nation] will be his masterpiece’, which Raine echoes here in the film’s closing remark: ‘You know something [...] I think this just might be my masterpiece’, a fitting conclusion from Tarantino the auteur. German Night in Paris In July 2008, a full year before its release, either as a result of a wily marketing team or the hype that generally accompanies the latest offering of a Hollywood enfant terrible, the script for Inglourious Basterds was leaked online. The viral buzz that surrounded the film and its controversial depiction of history grew into a roar well before its release at Cannes the following year where it received a standing ovation. Although it did not pick up the Palme d’Or, Waltz was awarded Best Actor at Cannes, BAFTA, the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor: quite literally a German night in — and beyond — Paris. This section looks at the public and critical reaction to Inglourious Basterds as a means to contextualize a film which instantly divided critics and audiences.

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Daniel Mendelsohn articulated the key concern that the film triggered: Controversies about the uses of Jewish suffering in World War II in popular entertainment — no matter how innocently such entertainment may be intended — go back at least as far as Mel Brooks’s The Producers in 1968, and exploded once again in 1997 when Roberto Benigni’s concentration-camp comedy, Life is Beautiful, came out. It’s possible that at least some of the discussion of Inglourious Basterds will focus on the appropriateness (or inappropriateness) of using the Holocaust, even tangentially, as a vehicle for a playful, postmodern movie that so feverishly celebrates little more than film itself.9

The gruesome violence perpetrated by the Basterds, the film’s combination of cartoonish and real, and the utterly unreal revision of history appalled some critics. Jonathan Rosenbaum called it ‘deeply offensive as well as profoundly stupid [...] akin to Holocaust denial’: ‘Inglourious Basterds makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp as a historical reality. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention — by which I mean a reality derived only from other movies — it loses its historical reality.’10 Rosenbaum’s criticism is revealing in itself since it acknowledges, although apparently without consistency, the sense that this is not a film about an event but a film about other films. Moreover, the implication that a film about the Holocaust should make the Holocaust more historically comprehensible is profoundly f lawed, even more so when the film from its opening scenes establishes itself as one whose history is not to be taken seriously. This chapter argues for the necessity of viewing Tarantino’s film as a textual device for transmitting images gleaned from other films precisely in order to suggest that that what is at stake here is not historical reality à la Rosenbaum but a revision of film reality. By apparently putting ethical considerations, which have so significantly shaped thinking on Holocaust representation, to one side, Tarantino creates the opportunity to depict something utterly new and he is, quite simply, showing us what film has the capacity to do. Aside from ethical objections such as those expressed by Mendelsohn, Inglourious Basterds’ formal and stylistic elements also found detractors: Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian branded it a catastrophic ‘colossal armour-plated turkey from hell. [...] It isn’t funny; it isn’t exciting; it isn’t a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn.’11 The New York Times critic found it repellent and vulgar.12 Reviews in The New Yorker and London Review of Books were ambivalent: was Tarantino being ironic or insulting?13 Was the film insightfully parodic or just plain ridiculous? Or both? Was it acceptable, given the conventions associated with Holocaust films, to kill Hitler in a Parisian cinema hall at the hands of Jewish soldiers? Or did the fact that ‘these bad guys were real, this history was real, and the feelings we have about them and what they did are real’ revoke Tarantino’s license to play with historical fact?14 The film’s long running time (153 minutes) and multiple linguistic registers (well over half the film is in either German or French) also found detractors who argued that Anglophone audiences, obliged to read subtitles, were unlikely to watch it. But contrast this with the film’s global box office takings in excess of $320 million, which made Inglourious Basterds Tarantino’s most financially successful film to date. No matter what critics thought, audiences worldwide were ready for Kill Hitler.

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Operation Kino This section will analyze how Inglourious Basterds revisits certain characteristics of Holocaust films while also offering a representational update for the twenty-first century. The analysis will focus on two key gestures of defiance — the film’s depiction of extreme violence and its rewriting of historical fact.15 With rare exceptions, much of the critical analysis of Tarantino’s larger oeuvre centres on the graphic violence that mixes the realistic with self-conscious cinematic homage. Pulp Fiction (1994), for instance, sees Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) having to choose a weapon with which to avenge a brutal anal rape: a baseball bat courtesy of Walking Tall (1973), a chainsaw courtesy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or a samurai sword from The Yakuza (1974). He chooses the third. In Inglourious Basterds, the baseball bat is reprised and framed rather sensationally as the ultimate American weapon of choice through Donny’s commentary after bludgeoning Rachtman, which echoes a sports announcer cheering a home run. It is the pleasure of watching violence that is explicitly affirmed here, with combat in the film made equivalent to entertainment, from Donny’s cheering to Raine’s comment: ‘Quite frankly, watching Donny beat Nazis to death is the closest we ever get to going to the movies’. The implication of this violence-entertainment nexus for the spectator, at the movies and about to watch Donny beat a Nazi to death, is an uncomfortable complicity in the exercise: this is our pleasure that is being referred to. The hyperviolent world of the Basterds is rather like an ‘ethical holiday’ (as Ben Walters calls it), a guilty pleasure that one is tempted to see all the way through.16 The notion of all-American violence is made more elaborate by the gruesome twist in the Basterds’ mission, a requirement to deliver one hundred Nazi scalps to Raine. The first time the Basterds are seen in action, or rather post-action since the scene is framed as an aftermath to an ambush, they are scalping dead Nazis. Asked about this unusual hybrid between Holocaust film and the Western, Tarantino responded that scalping was symbolic of Native American guerilla resistance against tremendous odds. The hybrid violence that the Basterds enact, a pastiche of Americana, therefore, imbues them with a special power: [T]hey’re not just any Jews, they’re the American Jews. They’re Jews with entitlement. They have the strongest nation in the world behind them. So we’re going to inf lict pain where our European aunts and uncles had to endure it. And so the fact that you could actually get Nazis scared of a band of Jews, that’s — again, that’s a gigantic psychological thing.17

This power is not restricted to the American Jewish soldiers, for Shosanna too partakes of it. In preparing herself for the final conf lagration, her makeup is a literal rendition of applying war paint as she violently smears rouge across her cheeks and scarlet lipstick onto her pout. Presaging the incendiary finale is the soundtrack, David Bowie’s ‘Cat People’, crooning ‘See these eyes so green / I can stare for a thousand years / Colder than the moon / It’s been so long / And I’ve been putting out fire / With gasoline’.18 Shosanna is framed against a giant trompe l’oeil, the eye of the projection room, as she looks out onto the cinema, which prefigures her role

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as located above the film about to be screened, both as director of the inserted film and as destroyer of film reel. The film, Stolz der Nation, nestled within Inglourious Basterds, acts as a provocative device that troubles spectatorship by significantly problematizing the pleasure derived from on-screen violence. Although the culmination of Inglourious Basterds, Donny pumping Hitler full of bullets, is cathartic in terms of the build-up of tension in the plot thus far, the spectator’s reaction mimics that of Hitler who only moments earlier was chuckling at American soldiers being mowed down by Zoller in Stolz der Nation.19 Hitler’s amusement, his visible thrill at watching onscreen death, mirrors, magnifies and mocks the spectator’s own. The pleasure is finally rendered even more problematic in the final scenes of the film where the point of view shifts to Landa’s as Raine and Utevitch hold him down to receive his torturous branding. Landa, who has thus far been equal parts evil villain and master of ceremonies, presiding over the film with gleeful self-deprecation, frequently pausing to indulge an apparent fondness for dairy (milk chez LaPadite’s and cream for his strudel in a Paris café), master of several languages but beholden to no leader, suddenly finds himself at the receiving end of the film’s violence. Since Landa’s character has so thoroughly distorted conventional certainties about good and bad, the implication of this final perspectival shift might well be that few are not bound up in the extreme violence of the film. An exception, however, is made for violence meted out to the Jewish figures in the film — the massacre of the Dreyfus family isn’t explicitly portrayed, as mentioned above, and Shosanna’s death comes about as a result of a lovers’ spat, her Jewish identity hidden from her ardent beau — which implies that Tarantino ably teases out a tension between representational moratoria and graphic violence. Here is, in fact, a director who delights in exploiting the spectator’s expectations, especially the assumption that in a movie set during World War II the violence will be enacted upon, and not by, Jews. Believing that the audience knows how a film will play out within the first five minutes, Tarantino constantly strives to circumvent this sense of expectation through the form employed: by inserting meta-textual references to a multiplicity of cultural artefacts such as other films, TV shows and songs, and drawing attention to the structural conventions of the genres under Tarantino’s expert gaze. The sly appropriation of things that are often recognizable if not directly attributable won him the enthusiastic approval of fans and critics alike who branded him an undeniably postmodern auteur or, as Hicox would presumably have it, an auteur capable of sub-textual readings. There is certainly ample evidence of Tarantino’s cine-literacy in Inglourious Basterds with its abundant use of varied imagery. Walters, in his analysis of the film, points out: [Inglourious Basterds] opens, for instance, with a Universal Studios logo whose vintage hints at neither the film’s setting nor its production date, but the period midway between, the tone of whose genre pictures it apes. The score is filched from other films, characters are named for obscure actors and filmmakers, and there are innumerable references to UFA, G. W. Pabst, and Leni Riefenstahl; there’s even a riff on King Kong as representative of ‘the story of the negro in America’.20

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What makes Inglourious Basterds different from the rest of Tarantino’s oeuvre, however, is that cinema here is not pure reference; it is actually the plot as well. Mendelsohn’s observation that in Inglourious Basterds ‘movies aren’t just a subtle (or not so subtle) element in an allusive aesthetic game; they are, at last, front and center’, is particularly apt.21 Almost all the characters (with the exception of the Nazi and Allied top brass) work in the film industry: from von Hammersmark, the star, to Hicox, the critic; from Shosanna, the theatre owner, to Zoller, the soldier turned celebrity actor. Even the Basterds have a cameo as Italian filmmakers. Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, is here introduced as the head of the German film industry on par with Mayer and Selznick. The critical event that moves the plot is a movie premiere, that of the film within the film discussed above. The key catalyst in annihilating the Nazis (according to Shosanna’s plan) is intensely f lammable film stock. And the location of the climax is not a battlefield or a war room, it is a cinema hall. Cinema even affords immortality: Shosanna and Zoller both by now dead are still alive on screen, alluding to the ability of the medium to long outlive its creators. The fifth chapter suggests that this is not just about the film, but what happens when (and where and how) one watches the film. ‘I like that it’s the power of the cinema that fights the Nazis [...] not just as a metaphor, as a literal reality’, Tarantino commented, making his film (à la Walters) a literal weapon of mass destruction.22 Revenge of the Giant Face So does cinema — Shosanna’s giant face laughing aloud — have the power to apparently bring down the Third Reich? Is this remarkably baroque counterfactual a manifesto about the power of cinema to change the world? Or is it, like Stolz der Nation, just another film about soldiers shooting and killing? The answer lies somewhere in between: if cinema is powerful because here it kills Hitler, it is also rather powerless in the face of real evil. All the cinematic figures — critic, star, director, producer — are pretty poor performers. Their covers are easily blown, their accents are atrocious, their editing shoddy. Moreover, it is not (the idea of ) cinema that kills the Nazis, but the very tangible and highly f lammable nitrate film stock. Although the words film and cinema tend to be used synonymously it is pertinent to note here that their etymological roots are distinct: film referring to the strips of celluloid and cinema to the original machine used to create and project moving images. This is certainly a distinction worth making since it opens up the debate, forcing it beyond an intangible sense of the power of cinema to the very real notions of an industry, its economics and its potential for propaganda. These multiple dimensions available in reading film are alluded to throughout Inglourious Basterds. What Tarantino’s film does, without a doubt, is dismiss any pretensions of historically accurate content in cinema by unequivocally asserting that film really relates only to itself, that cinema sets its own rules and that history, even that of the Holocaust, cannot dictate its terms of representation.

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Films and Television Programmes L’Armée du crime (Army of Crime), dir. Robert Guédiguian (2009) Carrie, dir. Brian De Palma (1976) Cat People, dir. Jacques Tourneur (1942) Cat People, dir. Paul Schrader (1982) Le Corbeau (The Raven), dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot (1943) Defiance, dir. Edward Zwick (2008) The Diary of Anne Frank, dir. George Stevens (1959) The Dirty Dozen, dir. Robert Aldrich (1967) Escape from Sobibor, dir. Jack Gold (1987) Guns of Navarone, dir. J. Lee Thompson (1961) Holocaust, dir. Marvin J. Chomsky (NBC, 1978) Inglourious Basterds, dir. Quentin Tarantino (2009) Já, spravedlnost (I, Justice), dir. Zbynek Brynych (1968) Katyn, dir. Andrzej Wajda (2007) King Kong, dir. Merian Cooper (1933) Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), dir. Alain Resnais (1955) The Odessa File, dir. Ronald Neame (1974) The Pianist, dir. Roman Polanski (2001) The Producers, dir. Mel Brooks (1968) Pulp Fiction, dir. Quentin Tarantino (1994) Quel maledetto treno blindato (The Inglorious Bastards), dir. Enzo Castellari (1978) Reservoir Dogs, dir. Quentin Tarantino (1992) Sabotage, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1936) Scarface, dir. Brian De Palma (1983) Schindler’s List, dir. Steven Spielberg (1993) Un secret (A Secret), dir. Claude Miller (2007) Sex and the City, created by Darren Star (HBO, 1998–2004) Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (1985) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, dir. Tobe Hooper (1974) Der Untergang (Downfall), dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel (2004) La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful), dir. Roberto Benigni (1997) Walking Tall, dir. Phil Karlson (1973) Die Weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (The White Hell of Piz Palü), dir. Georg Wilhelm Pabst (1929) Where Eagles Dare, dir. Brian Hutton (1968) The Wizard of Oz, dir. Victor Fleming and others (1939) The Yakuza, dir. Sidney Pollack (1974) Zwartboek (Black Book), dir. Paul Verhoeven (2006)

Notes to Chapter 5 1. All citations from the film are the author’s own transcriptions. 2. Terrence Des Pres, ‘The Duty of Memory and the Reading of Testimonies’, in Building History: The Shoah in Art, Memory and Myth, ed. by Peter M. Daly and others (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 109–23 (p. 110); Claude Lanzmann, ‘Holocauste, la représentation impossible’, Le Monde, 3 March 1994, section Arts-Spectacles, pp. i, vii (p. vii). Survivors such as Jorge Semprun have meanwhile made cogent arguments for the need for artifice in order to make their stories more comprehensible. 3. I make this argument about the evolution of cinematic narratives of Jewish action and resistance using a larger corpus of film texts in my monograph, France, Film, and the Holocaust (New York:

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Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and it is relevant to note that, although largely observable, these thematic shifts are not intended to be chronologically set in stone. Jewish action is, for instance, also visualized in Escape from Sobibor as early as 1987. 4. Tarantino comments in an interview: ‘I remember a critic actually saying, sometime after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, that I was too much a lover of minutiae to ever become a master of suspense. So the technique I was trying to employ in this movie was this: the suspense is like a rubber band that’s being stretched throughout the scene, getting tighter and tighter and tighter. And if I’m pulling that off, if I am successful in that, then the idea isn’t to make the scene shorter. The idea is to see how long I can stretch the rubber band out. The scene should be as long as it can be, as long as the rubber band will hold. It should take it to its finest, finest point. And then — snap! And when it snaps, it’s over in a second.’ ‘Quentin Tarantino Interview’, AskMen [n.d.] [accessed 2 December 2011]. 5. It is not the same piece, however: Schindler’s List employs Bach’s English Suite No. 2 in A Minor, a fact made explicit when two guards pause mid-round-up to comment on the music and argue about whether it is Bach or Mozart. 6. Tarantino cited in Marc Lee, ‘Battle of the Blockbusters’, Telegraph, 26 March 2009 [accessed 26 November 2011]. 7. Jeanine Basinger, ‘The World War II Combat Film: Definition’, in The War Film, ed. by Robert Eberwein (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 46–47. This is indebted largely to Basinger’s masterful extended analysis of the genre, which provides a wealth of detail about its evolution and development: The World War II Combat Film: The Anatomy of a Genre (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003). 8. Tarantino cited in ‘Tarantino Film the Talk of Cannes’, 20 May 2009 [accessed 6 April 2012]. 9. Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘Inglourious Basterds: When Jews Attack’, Newsweek Magazine, 13 August 2009 [accessed 27 November 2011]. 10. Both citations from Rosenbaum’s blog (emphasis in the original); see ‘Recommended Reading: Daniel Mendelsohn on the New Tarantino’, and ‘Some Afterthoughts about Tarantino’, JonathanRosenbaum.com, 17 and 27 August 2009 [accessed 27 November 2011]. 11. Peter Bradshaw, ‘Cannes Review: Tarantino’s Basterds is an Armour-Plated Turkey’, Guardian, 20 May 2009 [accessed 27 November 2011]. 12. See Manohla Dargis, ‘Inglourious Basterds (2009): Tarantino Avengers in Nazi Movieland’, New York Times, 20 August 2009 [accessed 28 November 2011]. 13. See David Denby, ‘Americans in Paris: “Inglourious Basterds” and “Julie & Julia” ’, New Yorker, 24 August 2009 [accessed 1 March 2012]; Michael Wood, ‘At the Movies: Inglourious Basterds directed by Quentin Tarantino’, London Review of Books, 31.17 (September 2009), 18 [accessed 8 May 2012]. 14. Mendelsohn, ‘Inglourious Basterds: When Jews Attack’. 15. Other such gestures are also worth close examination, in particular Tarantino’s favourite plotline of female vengeance, since the latter updates the Holocaust film, which is often marked by traditionally passive female narratives. See, for example, Sara Horowitz’s article on the occlusion of the female in Schindler’s List, ‘But Is It Good for the Jews? Spielberg’s Schindler and the Aesthetics of Atrocity’, in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. by Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 119–39, or Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s ‘Gendered Translations: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, ed. by Stuart Liebman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 175–90, both of which offer pertinent contextual readings of the gender imbalance in Holocaust film.

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16. Ben Walters, ‘Debating Inglourious Basterds’, Film Quarterly, 63.2 (2009–10), 19–22 (p. 19). 17. Tarantino in an interview on National Public Radio, initially broadcast on 27 August 2009, here reproduced from ‘Quentin Tarantino: “Inglourious” Child of Cinema’ [accessed 30 November 2011]. 18. For lyrics, see: [accessed 22 December 2011]. The song was originally intended for another film, Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982), itself a remake of Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 horror film of the same name. 19. See Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 77. 20. Walters, ‘Debating Inglourious Basterds’, p. 19. 21. Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘Inglourious Basterds: When Jews Attack’. 22. Tarantino cited in Walters, ‘Debating Inglourious Basterds’, p. 20.

C h ap t e r 6

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Globalizing the Holocaust Fantasies of Annihilation in Contemporary Media Culture Barry Lang ford ‘You can’t engage with that subject except on the very highest level of artistic integrity.’ Discussing his decision to stage Mieczysław Weinberg’s Auschwitz opera The Passenger in Austria in spring 2011, director David Pountney neatly encapsulated what might be considered a prevailing orthodoxy concerning Holocaust art in mainstream European and American intellectual culture.1 This unique and terrible subject, Pountney suggested, mandates an approach that visibly manifests an appro­ priate degree of gravity and even reverence; Pountney explicitly differentiated The Passenger from other (unnamed) ‘f lippant and irresponsible’ works about, or referencing, the Holocaust that merely ‘exploit its emotional weight’.2 Pountney presumably would not wish to concede knowingly lower levels of acceptable ‘artistic integrity’ and ambition in his other productions; nonetheless, he sets the bar for artistic treatments of the Holocaust appreciably — if inexactly — higher. How to benchmark this seriousness? Extrapolating somewhat, we might surmise that the artwork’s expressive powers — narrative, imagery, theme — will be clearly concentrated on the subject at hand, without distraction by trivial epiphenomena; that the text ought to display an appropriate modesty in the face of its own inevitable inability to render the full horror and enormity of the event; and that cumulatively, these and other tropes acknowledge that the Holocaust as a subject ought not to be, and in fact cannot be, fully or readily accommodated to the prevailing formal conventions of style and genre appropriate to other subjects. Such claims have become a central and readily recognizable part of the theoretical discourse around the Holocaust that has developed in the last half-century, to the point where they constitute a dominant and distinctive branch of philosophical aesthetics devoted to Holocaust representation. The aim of this chapter is, by discussing a number of mostly mainstream, commercial fiction film and television productions released in the United States and Europe in the last decade, to consider whether these premises are, or can be, maintained into the second decade of the twenty-first century, given the growing historical distance of the Holocaust itself. First I will outline the ‘institutionalization’

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of the Holocaust, through a survey of its increasingly inescapable presence in screen portrayals of World War II. I will then discuss the ways in which narratives of genocide and either direct allusions to the historical Shoah or the appropriation of readily recognizable Holocaust tropes reconstitute the Holocaust as a reservoir of fungible imagery for exploitation across a wide range of narrative and thematic contexts.3 I argue that, by making the Holocaust generally ‘available’ as a cultural touchstone and/or trope, this institutionalization has (perhaps paradoxically) created the conditions for the supersession of the very canons of Holocaust art on which it relies. Finally, I will consider the consequences of the sudden advent of a new vehicle of the ‘traumatic sublime’ — the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 — for the Holocaust’s privileged place in contemporary cultural debates about the meanings, values and limits of civilization itself.4 The Holocaust in the New Millennium Of course, this discourse is itself both culturally and historically specific, and is bound up with the ways in which — since the end of World War II, and over the last three decades in particular — the Holocaust has become a central ‘location’ in European culture, an almost ubiquitous focus of education, public commemoration and debate, academic research, and media representation, importantly if often highly controversially including film and television. This centrality is itself anything but a given — it is rather a complex cultural production whose intellectual and epistemological genealogy can be traced over several decades.5 As numerous studies have established, scholarly and public understandings of the Holocaust in their historiographical, political/ideological, and cultural contexts have evolved from general marginalization in the early post-war period, to a perception of the Holocaust as a (or even the) defining event of modern European history. This ‘highvisibility’ Holocaust, now institutionalized in educational curricula and annual governmental ceremonials, has progressed via a well-known series of landmark events in public media culture — the bestselling publication and subsequent stage and screen adaptations of The Diary of Anne Frank in the 1950s, the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the broadcast of the American mini-series Holocaust in West Germany in 1979, the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of the war’s end, the release of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in 1985, climaxing in the release of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and the inauguration of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 1993 — alongside scholarly historiographical work that expanded very rapidly from the late 1970s and by the end of the century had reached massive proportions (while giving rise to charges of the creation of a ‘Holocaust industry’, especially in the United States).6 By the start of the twenty-first century, therefore, the Holocaust existed — not always comfortably — as both (a) historical event(s) and as an important cultural ‘production’. As the latter, the Holocaust has become a significant vector of ideo­ logical legitimation, something conceived as simultaneously aberrant — the ultimate violation of the post-Enlightenment social and human contract — and integral — insofar as by antithesis the Holocaust helps define and consolidate the normative

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humane values against which it fundamentally offends. An essential principle of this project is an understanding of the Holocaust as an event without ready historical and moral precedent,7 a limit-case not merely of the human capacity for violence, cruelty and exploitation but of humanity itself. This incontestable, atrociously totemic, and absolute status has meant a growing emphasis on the qualities assigned to the Holocaust in inf luential postwar criticism and philosophy — famously including George Steiner and Theodor Adorno, and more recently Jean-François Lyotard — as a kind of historical singularity: a black hole around whose literally unimaginable and immeasurable immensity the governing conventions, assumptions, and practices of a whole range of conventional political, philosophical, aesthetic, and discursive orders are bent violently out of shape and ultimately rewritten. These philosophical debates have trickled down to the cultural mainstream (the programme notes for the ENO’s production of The Passenger cited Jurg Amman’s remark that ‘in the face of the reality, all invention is obscene’), and find a diluted echo in the inexact yet widespread agreement in middlebrow commentary that Holocaust art is uniquely burdened by the obligation to ‘live up to the enormity of the subject’.8 In Holocaust literature and art, the preferred formal correlative to this (itself much-debated) notion of the Holocaust-as-singularity has been, broadly speaking, the kind of modernist strategies whose textual practices — indirect, halting, fragmentary — ref lexively confess the inadequacy and limitations of representational art when confronted with the atrocious sublimity of the Shoah. Ilan Avisar speaks for an aesthetic consensus when he remarks approvingly on the ‘restraints, hesitations and stammers’ that characterize ‘authentic artistic responses to the Holocaust’.9 Such ‘authenticity’ is at a particular premium when mimetic representations of the Holocaust in literature, drama, and art come under discussion; and perhaps especially so — in part because of their ostensibly indexical nature — mainstream narrative film and television.10 Thus while Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), Shoah, and other comparably austere and aporetic works have been granted canonical status, more mainstream works — particularly, though not exclusively, historical dramatizations like Holocaust and Schindler’s List — are received with considerable condescension if not suspicion, as much on principle (for their apparent accommodation of the incommensurable to the narrative, characterological and generic norms of commercial film and television) as on their individual merits. I have argued elsewhere that the validation of a particular ‘Holocaust aesthetic’ grounded in a modernist sense of ruination may be not only ill-conceived historically and philosophically, but also wilfully blind to the complexities of generic affiliation in Holocaust art — specifically film — and furthermore unsustainable as a template for aesthetic practice.11 In this chapter, however, I wish not to defend the principle of the Holocaust’s (in my view inevitable) imbrication with mainstream conventions, but to examine some of the specific forms this involvement has taken in the last decade. In particular, I argue that the institutionalization of the Holocaust, as brief ly summarized above, has over time proven to be in tension with the very epistemological and ontological claims that have secured it this status. I aim to demonstrate that it is precisely the ‘availability’ of the Holocaust as a cultural

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touchstone — commemorated, invoked and ceaselessly represented — that makes it increasingly hard to sustain the traditional Holocaust rhetoric of untouchability and unrepresentability. After all, the Holocaust is today far from unnameable: on the contrary, it is endlessly named, cited, invoked, recalled; the ‘unrepresentable hypothesis’ (after Foucault) falters in the face of this ongoing and insistent barrage of representation. Creative practice fully ref lects this reality; this chapter will explore some of the implications for the scholarship of Holocaust representation. The Holocaust and the World War II Combat Film The ‘event horizon’ of the Holocaust is nowhere more clearly traceable than in the transformed shape of recent historical accounts of World War II, in which ethical questions, civilian suffering generally and above all the extermination of the Jews now typically take centre stage. Michael Burleigh’s 2010 Moral Combat exemplifies this shift, devoting almost a fifth of the entire length of its ‘moral history of the Second World War’ (encompassing all theatres, not just Europe) to the Holocaust.12 A glance at changing media treatments of the war through the late 1990s in the US and UK alone confirms this conceptual and attitudinal shift. In television documentary, for example, ITV’s landmark 1973 series The World At War devoted a single episode (of 26), ‘Genocide’, to the Holocaust — albeit an extremely powerful one, prefaced by a unique to-camera address by series narrator Laurence Olivier, funereally garbed; two decades later, two of the six episodes of the 1997 BBC documentary series The Nazis: A Warning from History were devoted to the Holocaust, while Nazi racial policy and ideology were central throughout; the same producer, Laurence Rees’s subsequent 2005 documentary series, the somewhat misleadingly-titled Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, was the first multi-episode history of the Holocaust on UK television. The most spectacular and inf luential recent dramatic treatment of the war, Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) mostly sidelines the Holocaust in its depiction of the D-Day landings and the subsequent advance of American forces into occupied France (though we do see the Jewish member of the platoon waving his — pretty anachronistic — Star of David amulet at a passing column of German POWs and taunting them with the triumphant ‘Jude! Jude!’). However, Ryan’s expansive pendant, the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), not only includes an episode in which Easy Company liberate an unnamed concentration camp within Germany, but gives that episode the emphatic title ‘Why We Fight’ (recalling, of course, the celebrated Frank Capra-produced series of wartime propaganda short films). An interesting dimension of ‘Why We Fight’ is the unusual emphasis placed on the complicity of German civilians in Nazi atrocities. In fact, German combatants (Wehrmacht or SS) are absent from the episode, which frames the discovery of the camp by the advancing Americans with sequences portraying their relations with the civilian population in newly occupied German territory. In the opening sequences, the Americans’ attitude is casually predatory, enjoying and exploiting the spoils of victory in a variety of ways (looting, black marketeering, purchasing sexual liaisons with GI rations, and so on). After discovering the camp, its skeletal

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surviving inmates (identified as Jews), and evidence of mass murder, the GIs’ attitude shifts drastically: the inhabitants of the nearby town are compelled to carry corpses and dig mass graves. The camp sequence as a whole is presented as a f lashback, bookended by a brief prologue and epilogue in a German town reduced to rubble by the Allied onslaught: as the GIs impassively watch the German townsfolk scrabbling amidst the wreckage of their homes, the implicit message is hard to miss — they have brought this devastation on themselves. This clear statement of collective guilt, which runs counter to the general trend in Holocaust cinema to focus blame squarely on perpetrators rather than bystanders, is interesting inasmuch as it may indicate the receptiveness of media texts to cultural contexts. In this case, the 1996 publication of Daniel Goldhagen’s bestselling Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which notoriously explained the Holocaust by citing the purportedly unique inf luence in pre-war Germany of ‘eliminationist anti-semitism’, seems to provide an obvious correlative to Band of Brothers’ portrayal of civilian complicity.13 The significance of this lies less in its accuracy or otherwise as history (Goldhagen’s book of course got an excoriating reception from other historians), than in its demonstration that mainstream renderings of the Holocaust are malleable in that they importantly ‘channel’ ongoing debates and interpretations about the Holocaust. It also suggests that these frameworks for understanding are themselves ‘pre-selected’ and mediated by the degree of their wider visibility and purchase on cultural consciousness. It mattered less, in other words, that Goldhagen’s work was subsequently exposed within the scholarly community as a bad history, than that his eye-catching and simple interpretation had successfully disseminated itself through the broader culture. (By contrast, Christopher Browning’s equally powerful, hugely inf luential, and much better-evidenced — but less well-known outside scholarly circles — Ordinary Men (1992), to which Goldhagen’s book was partly intended as a rejoinder, has found much less obvious purchase on filmic accounts of the Shoah.)14 The extent to which understandings of World War II (at least the European theatre) have come to be profoundly informed by ‘Holocaust consciousness’ is clearly visible in another production bearing Spielberg’s imprimatur, albeit more remotely: the animated children’s film Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park, 2000), the first collaboration between Park’s British Aardman Productions (creators of the Wallace and Gromit films) and DreamWorks SKG, the studio Spielberg co-founded in 1994. Chicken Run — which relates the ultimately successful escape attempt of a f lock of battery hens from their grim captivity at the hands of the sadistic Mr and Mrs Tweedy — is in large part a genial parody of various fondlyremembered POW films of the 1950s and 1960s, most notably Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953) and John Sturges’s The Great Escape (1963), to which it makes particular and sustained allusion. Yet the plot development that makes the chickens’ escape vital and urgent — Mrs Tweedy’s decision to abandon egg production for more profitable ‘homemade’ (in fact, industrially produced) chicken pies — introduces unmistakable Holocaust tropes into the generic mix. Whereas the POW genre is generally characterized — the bleak conclusion of The Great Escape notwithstanding — by a tenor of sturdy manliness and the optimistic, ‘have-a-go’ spirit of its in­domi­table and inventive (usually officer-class) escapologists, Holocaust films —

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and above all films depicting the death camps, even those portraying attempts at resistance or escape (for example, Jack Gold’s TV movie Escape From Sobibor (1987) and Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2001)) — are inevitably marked by strong elements of abjection and despair. Yet the Tweedys’ conversion of their battery farm into an industrialized slaughterhouse — which entails the construction of a huge and infernal pie-making apparatus, complete with smoking chimney-stack, in a converted barn — completes a set of iconographic markers that similarly ‘convert’ Chicken Run into a kind of Holocaust narrative. On the muddy ‘Appellplatz’ in front of their hutch, beneath perpetually overcast skies, the terrorized (and of course almost entirely female) chickens are subjected to daily inspections, with ‘selections’ (for the Tweedys’ dining table) of the weakest, and with the impending (and eventually, to the chickens’ mortal terror, recognized) certainty of wholesale extermination, that have no real analogue in the POW film but are readily recognizable from similar tableaux in Sophie’s Choice (1982), Schindler’s List and other filmic portrayals of Auschwitz. Similarly, on the syntactic axis Chicken Run’s dramatic focus on the concept of industrialized mass death (albeit out of commercial, hence rational, rather than purely ideological motives) places a key Holocaust motif at the centre of the film.15 The chickens’ escape is not (as in conventional POW films) a statement of irrepressible individualism (Steve McQueen as ‘the Cooler King’) and/or military duty, but an existential necessity. That it is driven by excess rather than privation (the chickens are overfed to fatten them for the chopping block, rather than worked and starved to death) might be seen as a knowing, macabre reversal of the conventions of Holocaust narratives. My interest in pointing out these clear Holocaust references is not to incorporate Chicken Run into a canon of Holocaust cinema, so much as to reiterate the extent to which not only direct depictions of, but even, as here, comic analogies of World War II in contemporary popular cinema ref lect the ways in which understandings of that conf lict have been profoundly reshaped by the Holocaust’s central place in contemporary culture. This has arguably reached a point where depictions of the war that fail to acknowledge the extermination of European Jewry exhibit severe textual stress as the price of this omission. Captain America: The First Avenger ( Joe Johnston, 2011), for example, is notable for the enormous, even bizarre lengths it goes to, apparently to avoid invoking the Holocaust. Although this may partly be explained by a need to avoid replicating core narrative material from a much more important Marvel franchise, X-Men (on which see below), the same comparison makes it equally clear that it is not any generalized compunction at the idea of including the Holocaust in fantasy-action popcorn blockbusters that accounts for its absence from Captain America. Oddly given the comic-book original’s clearlyavowed project of embodying and valorizing American democratic values against external totalitarianisms (first Nazism, subsequently Soviet Communism),16 Johnston’s film not only invests considerable narrative effort in establishing Cap’s antagonist the Red Skull as merely a Nazi fellow-traveller rather than a true believer (he espouses instead a generic and ideology-free super-villain Nietzscheanism), but also masks the ethnicity of Cap’s mentor, the émigré German-Jewish scientist Dr. Abraham Erskine. Given the opportunity to explain his background on the eve of

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the experiment that will transform the puny Steve Rogers into the muscle-bound Captain America, Erskine speaks to his protégé of his repugnance at Hitler’s brutality and the latter’s betrayal of German culture — but makes no reference whatsoever to the racial persecution that presumably drove him from his homeland. Once Cap takes the fight to the Red Skull, the film effectively abandons its notional World War II setting, with a series of commando-style assaults on Hydra military research facilities inexplicably located throughout German-occupied Europe to the apparent indifference of the German authorities. Cap’s anachronistically multi-ethnic support team, the Howling Commandos, similarly includes an African-American and a Japanese-American — but not the combat film’s traditional Brooklyn Jew. By contrast, the equally fantastic reworking (in fact, Brechtian ‘refunctioning’) of history in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) makes it quite obvious that as far as Tarantino is concerned the Holocaust is the only wartime ‘truth’ that really matters: the film’s delirious rewriting of the historical record is presented as a moral and ethical necessity.17 The unbearable truth of the Holocaust mandates its reimagining as a revenge fantasy, whose literally filmic accomplishment (the Holocaust victim Shosanna’s f lammable nitrate stock erupting into f lames that engulf Hitler, Goebbels and the rest of the Nazi elite) satisfyingly reverses historical fact (it is Nazis, not Jews, who perish in agony battering at the locked doors of their death chamber) while simultaneously acknowledging the fantasy status of the restitution thus accomplished.18 The release of Schindler’s List confirmed the presence of Holocaust film as a ‘genre’ in mainstream commercial cinema, incorporating discernible generic tropes (such as repeated stagings of the encounter with the ‘limits of representation’ in sequences of mass death in the gas chamber) and syntax (perhaps most controversially, redemptive — hence arguably illegitimate — narrative trajectories). This ‘genericization’ of the Holocaust, while highly controversial — as accommodating to representational convention a history widely understood as irreducibly singular, literally sui generis, hence in some measure challenging or exploding representation itself19 — could equally be understood as an important performative interrogation of these same concepts of uniqueness. Inglourious Basterds however might be seen as pushing to the opposite end of the ‘limits of representation’: a high-modernist work of considerable seriousness masquerading as postmodern pulp Guignol. Its ultra-knowing collapse of categories and transgression of canons of taste, historical accuracy and generic discrimination testify to the ongoing conviction of the Holocaust as singularity, and set it apart from other films of the same period in which the Holocaust is generically ‘encountered’ in far less self-aware fashion. Genre and Holocaust Film: Horror and Fantasy The hoary urban myth that the original release print of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) incorporated subliminal f lash-frame images of concentration-camp victims encapsulates the uneasy symbiosis of the horror film and the Holocaust. On the one hand, horror’s gleefully exploitative treatment of violence and suffering is anathema to the high moral and ethical seriousness demanded of Holocaust art. On

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the other, as Caroline Picart and David A. Frank have argued, American filmmakers have frequently drawn on the traditions of the Gothic horror film in portraying the Holocaust.20 Casting Nazi genocide in the narrative conventions and visual rhetoric of the preternaturally monstrous, they suggest, discharges both text and spectator of an intractable and unmanageable historical burden by the abstraction of material history. Conversely, the employment of horror-film motifs can be conceived positively as a means whereby the spectator is enabled to engage with the otherwise alienating Otherness of the Holocaust — a kind of ethical and cognitive bridge-building.21 In any event, legitimate or venal, the assumption is that horror’s generic tropes are tactically recruited in the service of the larger agenda of dealing imaginatively with the Holocaust. Recently, however, there is some evidence that the priorities in this relationship have shifted, with the Holocaust finding itself incorporated into horror’s paradigmatic generic codes. At least two horror films in the 2000s, Paul Schrader’s The Exorcist prequel Dominion (2004) and David S. Goyer’s The Unborn (2009), invoke a largely dehistoricized and decontextualized version of the Holocaust as a touchstone of (literally) diabolical evil while in no significant sense being ‘about’ the Holocaust.22 As Lawrence Baron notes, ‘the Shoah symbolizes the essence of evil to the average viewer’.23 Thus referencing Nazi war crimes, a universal shorthand for atrocious extremes of sadistic violence, intensifies the sense of fear and menace horror aims to instil in its audience while adding a veneer of wider and deeper significance to its generic trappings. A similar move to ‘kick off ’ a genre plot by exploiting the Holocaust had been previously noted, and deplored, in the critical reception of Bryan Singer’s 1998 adaptation of Stephen King’s novella Apt Pupil.24 However, whereas Apt Pupil is sub-generically a lurid psychological horror film, both the more recent pictures specify a supernatural dimension to the Holocaust. Of the two, Dominion has the more ambitious artistic aspirations and arguably uses the Holocaust with rather more discretion — befitting the ambitions of the Exorcist series’ progenitor, the devoutly Catholic writer William Peter Blatty, who in adapting his own novel for the screen intended a serious exploration of the eternal conf lict between diabolic evil and faith (a dimension somewhat lost amidst the notoriety and blockbuster success of Friedkin’s original film, and its inauguration of a new regime of ‘body horror’ driven by spectacularly visceral effects). Written and directed by Paul Schrader — another filmmaker whose religious sensibility, in Schrader’s case his Calvinist upbringing, has consistently informed his work — Dominion opens with Father Merrin (destined to become the eponymous exorcist in 1970s Georgetown in the original film) encountering a murderous SS officer in occupied Holland. In retaliation for resistance activities, the Nazi forces Merrin to select individual members of his own congregation for execution or see the community massacred wholesale. The diabolical choice confronting Merrin echoes the famous climax of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice while more generally evoking (and partly inverting) the selections on the Auschwitz arrival ramp. (The arbitrariness of selection and salvation might also be seen, given Schrader’s background, as suggestive of the Calvinist doctrine of election.) In Kenya after the war, Merrin meets Sarah, a doctor whose tattooed forearm identifies her

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as a Holocaust survivor: she later explains that she is a survivor of the Chełmno extermination camp. The historical inaccuracy aside,25 Sarah’s backstory — which is not subsequently referred to in the film — acquires symbolic significance when at the film’s denouement she (rather than the African child who has to this point been the apparent focus of supernatural activity) is revealed to be possessed by the ancient demon Pazuzu. In the climactic exorcism the demon speaks to Merrin in the words of the SS officer from the prologue. Nazi crimes, it is suggested, are simultaneously a manifestation of eternal, atavistic evil and the ‘entry-point’ for this endlessly circulating malevolence to interfere in human affairs. Thus an ‘explanation’ of sorts is proposed for the Holocaust, an event whose enormity renders it explicable only in metaphysical terms. Meanwhile Merrin, who having lost his faith as a result of his wartime experiences had turned to the secular and historical path of archaeology, now returns to his ministry and commits himself again to the eternal struggle against Satan and his works. Indirectly, the Holocaust offers a route out of historical engagement into the timeless realm of faith. The Unborn, a more straightforward shocker than Schrader’s film, shares with the latter the notion of the Holocaust as an ethical ‘rift’ that empowers malevolent supernatural forces even if it is not directly motivated by them (again this is left vague). And again, the Jewish — specifically, the Jewish female — body carries forward the burden of evil vented into human history by the Holocaust. A classic ‘body-horror’ narrative marked by phobic imagery of parturition and the grotesque female body, The Unborn is also a site of striking ideological confusion, apparently suggesting Jewish complicity (albeit helpless or unconscious) in both the Holocaust itself and/or its contemporary resonances. Upon falling pregnant, the film’s young American protagonist Casey learns of a suppressed family inheritance dating back to Josef Mengele’s lethal experiments in Auschwitz. Casey’s investigations lead her to her own grandmother, who reveals that as children she and her twin brother Bruno — Casey’s grand-uncle — fell victim to the crypto-medical experiments of Mengele, Bruno dying in the process. Bruno’s body was then opportunistically reanimated by a dybbuk which has subsequently haunted the female lineage of Casey’s family (driving her own mother to madness and suicide). As in Dominion, it is Jewish trauma (rather than, as in Apt Pupil, resurgent Nazism) that contaminates the present — doubly so in The Unborn, since the hostile wandering spirit that takes advantage of Jewish death in Auschwitz is itself Jewish (and can only be expelled by a Jewish ritual exorcism). As Aaron Kerner observes, this premise troublingly renders Jews ‘both victim and instigator’.26 While this is surely very far from the intention of either filmmaker, arguably it is a direct if not inevitable outcome of the decision to render Nazism and the Holocaust as not only profoundly irrational and ultimately inexplicable (with which at least some commentators would agree), but supernatural and hence essentially ahistorical. Both of these films illustrate the ways in which, even as the contemporary Holo­ caust text becomes increasingly porous to other generic inf luences, in a reci­procal movement mainstream works increasingly draw on the Holocaust as a powerful reservoir of imagery and dramatic impact without — as the orthodoxy would imply — feeling compelled thereby to become ‘about’ the Holocaust as such.

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The Holocaust starts instead to become just one, albeit a still highly-charged and sensitive, option in a repertoire of grisly evocative references lent added rhetorical — as distinct from moral or ethical — weight by their status as authenticated historical fact. The idea of the Holocaust as a labile and dehistoricized presence in contemporary thought is both exploited and commented on by another recent horror film, Eli Roth’s example of ‘torture-porn’ Hostel (2005). The iconography of the torture complex in Hostel (notionally located in Slovakia, whose presumably intentional conf lation with war-scarred Slovenia in the screenplay suggests a deliberately imprecise imaginative geography, a generalized and impenetrable, but indisputably murderous ‘East’ conterminous with Timothy Snyder’s mid-century ‘Bloodlands’27) clearly invokes the Holocaust, specifically Auschwitz as ‘death factory’: an abandoned industrial facility complete with heaped naked bodies, shambling Sonderkommando-like aides clad in gauntlets and rubber aprons, crematorium and towering smokestack. The transparency of such motifs testifies to the degree of generic codification by now achieved by Holocaust film: the film’s mise-en-scène strongly echoes Blake Nelson’s dramatization of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando uprising The Grey Zone (a film which, just to complicate matters, itself adapts science-fiction motifs of biomechanical dehumanization in service of a familiar thesis of the Holocaust as the lethal outcome of the reified and instrumentalized attitudes inculcated by and inherent in technological modernity). The extent and coherence of Hostel’s critical-satiric dimension (promoted by Roth in interviews), not simply ref lecting but ref lecting on phobic American attitudes to the world ‘outside’, is subject to challenge and debate.28 What is clear is that in this film the Holocaust circulates as a benchmark of violent Otherness without an evident cultural, historical or even national location (after all, the sadists’ garb could as well be the uniforms of Stalinist executioners — see the discussion of Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn (2007) below): in fact, it functions — again echoing the broader cultural ‘uses’ of the Holocaust — as a negation whose delimiting capacity in fact depends on its dislocation from material history. In its own limited way, this evacuation of the real historical and political context and content of the Holocaust in favour of a scary yet ultimately (precisely because disconnected from historical reality) reassuring version testifies to the powerful hold ‘Holocaust exceptionalism’ has come to exert on popular consciousness. A black hole is, after all, only a prosaic metaphor through which a literally invisible and — outside of theorems of general relativity — inconceivable physical reality is cognitively ‘managed’. Similarly, if we find the Holocaust-as-horror trope imaginatively or morally bankrupt, this perhaps ref lects the difficulty of finding adequate real-world analogues for thinking and depicting events ‘where neither memory nor imagination can follow’, in Elie Wiesel’s haunting words;29 that have so persistently been characterized as beyond imagination, speech or sight (‘you cannot look at this’, as Claude Lanzmann famously — or notoriously — insists30). Dominick LaCapra’s comments on the dangers of ‘sacralizing’ the Holocaust are pertinent here, inasmuch as the profane supernatural visions on which demonic horror relies are inversions of, and dependent on, a notion of the sacred, however

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reductive.31 (Norman Finkelstein’s tirade against the Holocaust as a contemporary ‘mystery religion’ makes the point more vehemently.) Through horror, as Picart and Frank observe, ‘the time and space of the Holocaust are clearly separated from us and our territory’32 — not, however, in the culturally-authenticated forms of modernist abstraction but in the delegitimated vernacular of mass culture.33 Holocaust representation thus proves not to steer a path, as Zygmunt Bauman proposes, between ‘the Scylla of sacralization and the Charybdis of banalization’ but rather through the former directly into the latter.34 Perhaps nowhere are these trends better illustrated and distilled than in Marvel/ Fox’s X-Men franchise (four series instalments altogether, 2000–11, plus the spin-off X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)). Here there is no question of the Holocaust being simply accommodated to generic norms: from the prologue of the first film, set in Auschwitz (recapitulated and extended for the 2011 prequel X-Men: First Class), the actual history and the prospect of genocide are central to the whole series. While the concept of genetic mutation offers a handy catch-all from which a wide variety of prejudices can be addressed and critiqued (notably homophobia), and the post9/11 entries certainly add Homeland Security paranoia to the narrative mix, the series antagonist Magneto’s biography as a Holocaust survivor defines his attitudes towards non-mutants and his conviction of the limited possibilities for peaceful co-existence between different species (analogously, different ethnic groups and other majority/minority cultures). A key plot driver of the first film is a Mutant Registration Act that (for Magneto) ominously recalls the Nuremberg Laws; X2 (2003) centres on an outright genocidal plot to locate and kill every mutant on earth;35 while X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) involves a serum that will ‘normalize’ mutants’ genetic makeup (thus depriving them of their superhuman powers), echoing Nazi eugenic policy and sterilization programmes. Erik Lehnsherr’s (aka. Magneto) background as a Holocaust victim has been part of the comic series’ mythology since 1981, and has played an increasingly foregrounded role in the print series, culminating in the 2008 graphic novel Magneto: Testament, which deals exclusively with the young Magneto’s experiences as a German Jew,36 culminating in his deportation to Auschwitz where (perhaps inevitably) he becomes a member of the Birkenau Sonderkommando and takes part in the 1944 uprising.37 Onscreen, X-Men: First Class elaborates Magneto’s Holocaust backstory, revealing that following the first revelation of his powers during a traumatic selection on the unloading ramp at Auschwitz (the sequence that opens both the prequel and Singer’s original X-Men (2000)), the young Erik Lehnsherr is subjected to experiments by Nazi fellow-traveller and secret mutant Schmidt; following the war, Erik embarks on a personal quest of vengeance against his Nazi torturers (and murderers of his family). During the Kennedy administration, he is brief ly recruited to the pro-social, New Frontier-ish brigade of mutants headed by Charles Xavier — but when at the film’s climax the Soviet and US Cold War adversaries temporarily combine forces against the new common enemy, the hated and feared mutants, Erik leads the mutants’ successful resistance with the familiar Holocaust admonition ‘Never again!’ Across the series as a whole, Magneto is depicted as a charismatic and tragic figure, who is frequently outf lanked narratively by much more overt (non-

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mutant) villains, usually associated with the military, political and/or corporate establishments. Yet it is made equally clear that he has wilfully chosen to learn the wrong lessons from his traumatic history. For all that Magneto is an ambivalent, at times sympathetic antagonist, his extremism, ruthlessness and violent tactics are repeatedly contrasted to the tolerant humanism of the X-Men (he also surrounds himself with unequivocally brutal mutant henchmen). His dictatorial leadership of the fascistically-named Brotherhood of Mutants also compares poorly to Charles Xavier’s benign democratic regime. In fact, it is repeatedly suggested throughout the series that Erik Lehnsherr’s refusal to lay to rest his ravaged past has made him a version of the very tyrannies he opposes: at the end of X-Men: First Class, having finally revenged himself upon his nemesis Schmidt, Lehnsherr dons the helmet of his dead adversary (who has allied himself with both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms). Thus once again — as in Exorcist: Dominion and The Unborn — Holocaust survivors become ‘their own worst enemy’, carrying a toxic burden of unassuageable trauma into the postwar world. Furthermore, particularly in the mid-2000s when French-led opposition to Bush’s invasion of Iraq prompted a hostile redrawing of the continental European map by hegemonic Republicans into ‘old’ (dictator-appeasing, duplicitous, ‘cheese-loving surrender monkeys’) and ‘new’ (friends of freedom) Europes, the German-Jewish Magneto’s patrimony identifies his value-system as fundamentally un-American, victim or not.38 Fantasy and Beyond: 9/11, the Holocaust and the Atrocious Sublime The terrorist attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001 instantly introduced a new, topical, ideologically supercharged and immensely powerful discourse that for perhaps the first time offered ‘competition’ to the Holocaust as a/the contemporary register of trauma and the sublime. Rhetorics of the unspeakable, unimaginable, unrepresentable, etc., traditionally associated with the Holocaust almost instantly attached themselves wholesale to the destruction of the World Trade Center, and equally familiar debates ensued concerning the protocols and ethics of representation of the catastrophe, whether actuality (above all ‘falling man’ footage from the Twin Towers) or dramatic recreation (in films such as Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006) and Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006)).39 At the same time, the urgent need for a lexicon of atrocity inevitably summoned up Holocaust tropes as generally-recognized bearers of catastrophic trauma, generating historical composites — fantasies of annihilation — that might be characterized less as ‘prosthetic’ than as ‘cyborg’ memories.40 Appropriately, therefore, it is particularly in science fiction and fantasy analogues of 9/11 that the 2001 attacks and the Holocaust increasingly become iconographically and ideologically fused. This is plain to see in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), one of the most blatant translations of 9/11 into science-fiction. Spielberg very clearly deploys various 9/11 tropes including alien ‘sleeper cells’ erupting in the middle of suburban New Jersey, traumatized ash-caked survivors of the first Martian attack, a downed airliner, and rows of photos of the dead and missing.41 But the horror of these sequences is simultaneously intensified by inescapable overtones of the

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Holocaust. The grey powder that veils survivors of the initial assault is in fact not building dust but the ash of the incinerated dead — an image previously rendered onscreen by Spielberg himself in Schindler’s List. In a f leeting but eerie scene, as the protagonists wander through a wood — evoking perhaps the birch groves that surrounded the Birkenau crematoria — discarded and shredded clothing tumbles down around them from the sky above, poignant metonymic remnants of the dead recalling that key Holocaust trope, the mounds of clothes, personal possessions and hair in the ‘Canada’ warehouses at Auschwitz. Later, we see terrified fugitives rounded up and corralled by the Martians in overcrowded cages prior to their mass extermination. Similarly, the cyborgs in Terminator: Salvation (2010) — which has been described as a ‘sci-fi Shoah’ — round up the surviving remnants of humanity in airborne boxcars and decant them at a ramp in the concentration-camp-like Skynet headquarters.42 The destruction of the Tree of Souls by airborne assault in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) offers one of the most direct SF transpositions of the attacks on the World Trade Center: the gigantic Tree’s destruction and collapse, the terrified, incredulous and traumatized reaction of the Na’avi, and the splintered remains of the Tree’s enormous stump as the dust and fire die down, all explicitly mimic the scenes at Ground Zero. But when the film’s principal bad guy, the former Marine colonel Quaritch, lays out his plan he does so in overtly genocidal terms that again weave the Holocaust into the mix, declaring that ‘we will blast a crater in their racial memory so deep that they won’t come within a thousand clicks of this place ever again’. Both Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) and the 2003–09 television series Battlestar: Galactica adapt and exploit a variety of images and ideas from the Iraq war, the ‘war on terror’, and 9/11; but both also deploy extensive and powerful Holocaust motifs. Galactica’s third season clearly portrays the human resistance underground opposing New Caprica’s brutal military occupation by the synthetic Cylons as versions of the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, complete with suicide bombers (thereby challenging audience assumptions and identifications). But the helpless complicity of the Judenrat-style puppet human government and police force are just as evidently modelled after the experience in the Jewish ghettoes of occupied Poland. Similarly, the teeming, brutalized migrant ghetto in Children of Men combines images of caged, tortured prisoners that immediately call to mind Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib (while engaging with contemporary debates about economic migrants and ‘Fortress Europe’) with scenes of deportations and selections that at the very least strongly hint at mass extermination. The examples brief ly surveyed here indicate that in the early twenty-first century the Holocaust is one amongst several powerful, ideologically and culturally freighted discourses of trauma and historical rupture (discourses themselves powerfully inf luenced by the Holocaust itself as precedent), still perhaps privileged in some degree by virtue of its historical priority and unquestioned enormity, but no longer perhaps as sui generis as was previously believed. As well as 9/11 (and without making judgment here of the relative historical and moral gravity of these very different cases), other examples would have to include the Balkan wars of the 1990s, an ongoing leitmotif in contemporary screen depictions of internecine

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warfare;43 the ‘other Holocausts’ (the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian Holodomor, Rwanda and Cambodia) now the subjects of official (if also sometimes controversial) commemoration worldwide; and even media discourses around brutalization and torture during the post 9/11 ‘war on terror’, such as the notorious images from Abu Ghraib. From this f lows a visibly greater porosity to and for generic and other appropriations in popular media, far from any ‘sacral’ notion of the Holocaust. This however is not to say that the Holocaust can be abstracted from history — either its own or that of its cultural construction and consumption in various forms. Ilan Avisar argues that ‘any discourse of the Holocaust is liable to reduce its subject by accommodating the unprecedented enormities to existing states of cognition, representation, and ideological competition’:44 but as true as this clearly is, Avisar’s claim itself is informed by ‘Holocaust exceptionalist’ assumptions that, as I have tried to show, have since the turn of the new millennium become more publicly questionable than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. Such assumptions, indeed, must be subject to the same cultural, aesthetic and ideological contextualization Avisar acknowledges in Holocaust representation. That this complexly overdetermined situation applies in the historic locations of the Holocaust itself as well as the more distant contexts of the UK and US is very visible in Andrzej Wajda’s 2007 Katyn, a solemn dramatization of the infamous 1940 massacre of 2000 Polish officers by Stalin’s NKVD. Setting aside the film’s merits and f laws as history, and without falling into the obvious trap of competitive victimhood, one nonetheless notes Wajda’s revisionist deployment of unmistakeable, powerful Holocaust tropes, from the overcrowded wooden bunks of the Soviet POW/concentration camp, to the shots of goods trains bearing the Polish officers to their deaths in the Katyn forest, to the images of bodies and mass graves — all in the context of a strikingly Jew-free wartime Poland.45 Undertaken as a conscious act of civic memorialization,46 Katyn illustrates both the Holocaust’s continuing currency in the economy of atrocity, its profound affective charge, and at the same time its inevitable instantiation in the changing climate of its reception as, and in, history. Films and Television Programmes Amen, dir. Costa-Gavras (2002) Apt Pupil, dir. Bryan Singer (1998) Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, prod. Laurence Rees (BBC, 2005) Avatar, dir. James Cameron (2009) Band of Brothers, prod. Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Erik Jendresen and others (HBO, 2001) Battlestar: Galactica, created by Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and Glen A. Larson (Sci-Fi Channel, 2003–09) The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, dir. Mark Herman (2009) Captain America: The First Avenger, dir. Joe Johnston (2011) Chicken Run, dir. Peter Lord and Nick Park (2000) Children of Men, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2006) Coriolanus, dir. Ralph Fiennes (2011) Defiance, dir. Edward Zwick (2008) The Diary of Anne Frank, dir. George Stevens (1959)

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Escape From Sobibor, dir. Jack Gold (1987) The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkin (1973) Exorcist: The Beginning, dir. Renny Harlin (2004) Exorcist: Dominion, dir. Paul Schrader (2004) The Great Escape, dir. John Sturges (1963) The Grey Zone, dir. Tim Blake Nelson (2001) Holocaust, dir. Marvin J. Chomsky (NBC, 1978) Hostel, dir. Eli Roth (2005) Inglourious Basterds, dir. Quentin Tarantino (2009) Katyn, dir. Andrzej Wajda (2007) Mondani a mondhatatlant: Elie Wiesel üzenete (To Speak the Unspeakable: The Message of Elie Wiesel), dir. Judit Elek (1996) The Nazis: A Warning from History, dir. Laurence Rees (BBC, 1997) Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), dir. Alain Resnais (1955) Pasażerka (The Passenger), dir. Andrzej Munk and Witold Lesiewicz (1963) The Pianist, dir. Roman Polanski (2001) Saving Private Ryan, dir. Steven Spielberg (1998) Schindler’s List, dir. Steven Spielberg (1993) Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (1985) Sophie’s Choice, dir. Alan J. Pakula (1982) Stalag 17, dir. Billy Wilder (1953) Terminator: Salvation, dir. McG (2010) The Unborn, dir. David S. Goyer (2009) United 93, dir. Paul Greengrass (2006) War of the Worlds, dir. Steven Spielberg (2005) Why We Fight (series), prod. Frank Capra (1942–45) The World At War, prod. Jeremy Isaacs (ITV, 1973) World Trade Center, dir. Oliver Stone (2006) X2, dir. Bryan Singer (2003) X-Men, dir. Bryan Singer (2000) X-Men: First Class, dir. Matthew Vaughn (2011) X-Men: The Last Stand, dir. Brett Ratner (2006) X-Men Origins: Wolverine, dir. Gavin Hood (2009)

Notes to Chapter 6 1. David Pountney, interviewed on Today, Radio 4, 19 September 2011. The Passenger is based on the Polish radio play Pasażerka z kabiny 45 (Passenger from Cabin 45, 1959) by Catholic Polish Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz (the play was also the basis for Andrzej Munk’s posthumously completed (by Witold Lesiewicz) 1963 film of the same name). 2. David Pountney, ‘The Passenger’s Journey from Auschwitz to the Opera’, Guardian, 9 September 2011, section Film & Music, p. 6. 3. Because my concern here is with the broad dissemination of ‘Holocaust consciousness’, I will primarily be focusing on films in which the Holocaust is an important secondary element rather than the more obvious ‘Holocaust films’ of this period, for example, The Grey Zone (Tim Blake Nelson, 2001), The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2001), Amen (Costa-Gavras, 2002), Defiance (Edward Zwick, 2008), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman, 2009), and so on. 4. On the Holocaust and the ‘traumatic sublime’, see Dominick LaCapra, ‘Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben’, and Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Geljzer, ‘Teaching (after) Auschwitz: Pedagogy between Redemption and Sublimity’, both in Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust, ed. by Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Geljzer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), pp. 245–304. In relation to 9/11, see note 39 below.

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5. Thus whereas, for example, William L. Shirer’s 1960 best-seller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich devotes only some forty scattered pages (in a total length of 1200) to the persecution and murder of the Jews, a comparable recent work, Michael Burleigh’s 2000 The Third Reich: A New History devotes almost a third of its 900 pages to Nazi racial policy and cites the Holocaust unequivocally on the first page of the introduction as the central fact of the historical record and ‘a uniquely terrible event in modern history’. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960); Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. xi. 6. The ‘rise’ of the Holocaust in (mostly American) public culture is charted by Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, rev. edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). For a UK perspective, see Andy Pearce, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 1979–2001’, Holocaust Studies, 14.2 (2005), 71–94. Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry (London: Verso, 2000) is an excoriating polemic. 7. While obviously setting precedents, not least the legal concept of genocide itself. 8. Vernon Ellis, ‘An Opera for Auschwitz’, Guardian, 18 October 2011, p. 32. 9. Ilan Avisar, ‘Holocaust Movies and the Politics of Collective Memory’, in Thinking about the Holocaust: After Half a Century, ed. by Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 38–60 (p. 50). 10. I am using the term ‘indexical’ here more expansively than usual, referring not to the Piercian semiotic taxonomy (wherein the photographic image is indexical because of the film emulsion’s direct transcription of the presence of the photographed object — a claim in any case now rendered extremely problematic or even moot by digital cinema), but to the mimetic nature of (most) moving image narratives (whether digitally enhanced or not), which pose problems for the so-called Bilderverbot (the prohibition on the fabrication of graven images, i.e., on representation). On the latter, see Miriam Hansen, ‘Schindler’s List is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism and Public Memory’, Critical Inquiry, 22 (1996), 292–312. 11. See Barry Langford, ‘ “You Cannot Look At This”: Thresholds of Unrepresentability in Holocaust Film’, Journal of Holocaust Education, 8.3 (1999), 23–40. 12. Michael Burleigh, Moral Combat: A History of World War II (London: Harper Press, 2010), p. vii. 13. Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown, 1996). 14. On the Goldhagen controversy, see Daniel J. Goldhagen, Christopher R. Browning, and Leon Wieseltier, The ‘Willing Executioners/Ordinary Men’ Debate: Selections from the Symposium, April 8, 1996 (Washington: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001). See also The Goldhagen Effect: History, Memory, Nazism — Facing the German Past, ed. by Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 15. For an account of the ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘syntactic’ axes in genre, see Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999). 16. On the ideology of Captain America, see Matthew J. Costello, Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America (London: Continuum, 2009). 17. See also Ferzina Banaji’s chapter on Inglourious Basterds in this volume. 18. On reversal as a trope of Holocaust narratives, see Barry Langford, ‘Narrative Complexity as Ethical Performance in Holocaust Film’ (forthcoming). 19. See most notably Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, ed. by Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London: Wallf lower, 2008). 20. Caroline J. S. Picart and David A. Frank, Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006). 21. Barry Langford, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 265–66. 22. The prequel to The Exorcist exists in two versions, Schrader’s original Exorcist: Dominion and Exorcist: The Beginning, reshot by Renny Harlin when Schrader’s film proved unacceptable to the film’s producers, Morgan Creek. Although there are important differences between the two

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— Harlin’s film including more conventional horror elements than Schrader’s — the narrative, including the Holocaust thread, remains largely unchanged. 23. Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), p. 261. 24. Stuart Klawans, ‘Scream 4: The Holocaust’, The Nation, 2 November 1998, p. 34. 25. Chełmno (Kulmhof ) in central Poland, where the Jews of the Łódź Ghetto and the ‘Warthegau’ (Posen) were murdered in gas vans, was the first dedicated extermination facility the Nazis established, and operated in two phases between December 1941 and January 1945. Of an estimated 150,000 victims, there were only two known survivors, Mordechai Podchlebnik and Simon Srebnik, both of whom contribute memorable testimony to Lanzmann’s Shoah. 26. Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 163. 27. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Bodley Head, 2010). 28. Jason Middleton, for example, argues that while Hostel expresses a critical perspective on American imperialism, it ultimately recuperates the American subject position in the film as better, or at least less bad, than the pathologies encountered overseas. See ‘The Subject of Torture: Regarding the Pain of Americans in Hostel’, Cinema Journal, 49.4 (2010), 1–24. 29. Wiesel is referring specifically to his separation from his mother on the Auschwitz arrival ‘ramp’, in the French-Hungarian documentary Mondani a mondhatatlant: Elie Wiesel üzenete (To Speak the Unspeakable: The Message of Elie Wiesel) ( Judit Elek, 1996). 30. Claude Lanzmann, ‘Seminar with Claude Lanzmann’, Yale French Studies, 79 (1991), 82–99 (p. 99). 31. See Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and more recently, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 32. Picart and Frank, Frames of Evil, p. 69. 33. It might also be argued that history’s ‘uncanny’ return as horror ref lects the ubiquitous repression of historical consciousness in postmodernity, on Fredric Jameson’s famous analysis. 34. Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Categorial Murder, or: How to Remember the Holocaust’, in Re-presenting the Shoah for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Ronit Lentin (New York: Berghahn, 2004), pp. 25–40 (p. 30). 35. Lawrence Baron suggests that the genocidal Col. William Stryker is based on the former SS officer, later Hydra agent and foe of Nick Fury and other Marvel heroes (including the X-Men) Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, but this is incorrect: Stryker is based on the demented televangelist of the same name created by X-Men writer Chris Claremont in 1982. See Lawrence Baron, ‘X-Men as J-Men: The Jewish Subtext of a Comic Book Movie’, Shofar, 22 (2003), 44–52. 36. In Magneto: Testament the future Magneto bears the name Max Eisenhardt. On the treatment of the Holocaust in the print X-Men, see Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, ‘Witness, Trauma and Remembrance: Holocaust Representation and X-Men Comics’, in The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches, ed. by Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), pp. 144–60. 37. Part Three of Magneto: Testament features an interesting instance of the ‘Bilderverbot’ when Max’s duties in the gas chamber are represented by a two-page spread of black panels with only text boxes detailing his experiences. The morbid fascination with the Auschwitz Sonderkommando in popular visual media certainly merits further examination. This preoccupation surely reached its nadir in late 2010 when the video game developer Katuko announced a series of upgrades to its World War II-set first-person shooter game Wolfenstein: Wolfenstein Sonderkommando Revolt, Warsaw Uprising and Treblinka Rebellion. The releases were ultimately cancelled following pressure from the Anti-Defamation League and a negative response from retailers and some gamers. 38. For an interesting comparison, consider the notably unsympathetic portrait of a Holocaustsurvivor rabbi in postwar Brooklyn in Chaim Potok’s 1969 novel The Promise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971): ‘He had been in the country about two years and he still didn’t understand what it was really all about. He was unable to put aside his blood-filled parcel of memories’ (p. 289). 39. See Karen Randell, ‘ “It Was Like a Movie”: The Impossibility of Representation in Oliver

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Stone’s World Trade Center’, in Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the ‘War on Terror’, ed. by Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula and Karen Randell (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 141–52. 40. The allusion here is of course to Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 41. War of the Worlds is discussed — and deplored — as a 9/11 analogue by Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 120–22. 42. See Adam Wills, ‘Terminator Traps Yelchin in Sci-Fi Shoah’, JewishJournal.com, 22 May 2009 [accessed 24 September 2011]. 43. Most recently Ralph Fiennes’ version of Coriolanus (2011). 44. Avisar, ‘Holocaust Movies’, p. 56. 45. Jonathan Foreman’s review of the film in the London Jewish Chronicle points out that the chief rabbi of the Polish Army was amongst some 450 Jewish officers murdered at Katyn, but was never acknowledged in Wajda’s film: ‘A Flawed Story of Polish Martyrs’, 18 June 2009 [accessed 29 September 2011]. 46. The film was also broadcast on Russian state television in 2010 — reputedly at the edict of Vladimir Putin — ahead of the ill-fated joint Polish-Russian commemoration of the massacre that April, travelling to which Polish President Lech Kacynski and eighty-seven other Polish officials were killed in a plane crash.

PA RT I V

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Between Media

C h ap t e r 7

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Re-Imagining the Neighbour Polish-Jewish Relations in Contemporary Polish Visual Culture Matilda Mroz Before Poland lost independence in the late eighteenth century and was divided up by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, it was a multinational state where Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and other nationalities, as well as Polish Jews, lived in neighbourly proximity. Despite its mix of cultures, however, the division between ‘self ’ and ‘other’ was particularly significant to the formation of Polish self-identification and memory.1 Jews in particular were frequently perceived as an alien element within Polish society, both before and after Poland regained independence in 1918. As Zvi Gitelman points out: In Poland, Jews were the perfect out-group [... ]. They differed from Poles in every external marker conceivable: they looked different, dressed differently, spoke a different language, ate different foods [...], believed and prayed differently. Even when more and more Jews began to lose their external markers [...] they were often resented.2

The Polish-Jewish relationship highlights what Joanna Żylińska has called the ‘structural ambivalence’ around the term ‘neighbour’: ‘Even though it involved physical side-by-side coexistence, neighbourliness in fact seems to have preserved the distance between the Poles and the Jews, while also preventing affinity and emotional closeness.’3 While suggesting proximity, neighbourliness is predicated on the preservation of boundaries, ‘always already threatened by antagonism and violence’.4 The potentially explosive violence at the heart of neighbourly proximity is epitomized by events that took place in the Polish town of Jedwabne in 1941, when, as Jan Gross details in his book Neighbours (first published in Poland in 2000), several Polish villagers murdered almost the entire Polish-Jewish population of the town, many of whom were burnt alive in a barn.5 Gross claims that approximately 1,600 Polish Jews were killed that day. (Though some research in this area refers to ‘Poles’ and ‘Jews’ as if to two separate groups, I will refer where possible here to ‘Polish Jews’ or similar, to indicate that the Jews in Poland were also Polish citizens.) The murder of approximately three million Polish Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II, many of whom had literally lived side by side with non-Jewish Poles,

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was a catastrophic loss to Poland with which the country has arguably never fully come to terms. Jewish suffering and the Holocaust were inconvenient subjects for the Communist regime, which wanted to promote the memory of Polish suffering: the constant fear under the German occupation, the roundups, deportations, deprivations, and executions. This culminated in a particularly distorted national narrative relating to World War II characterized by a ‘ “pathological amnesia” about Jewish life and death’.6 Needless to say, the dark chapters of Polish history such as that represented by Jedwabne were repressed for decades. The legacy of Communist memory politics is vital to understanding the public’s responses to revelations about historical Polish crimes after 1989 and into the twenty-first century. Under Communism, Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust were framed in particular, ideologically-driven forms, focusing upon the brave Poles who hid Polish Jews despite the German decree that any Pole found doing so would be executed, along with their families. As Shmuel Krakowski writes, ‘more has been written on this subject [in Polish historiography] than on any other connected to the Holocaust of Polish Jewry’.7 Any deviations from this narrative, for example the acts of blackmailers (known as szmalcownicy) who sought to expose Polish Jews in hiding, were presented as the work of a minority, limited to the criminal fringes of Polish society. It was also this particular configuration of Polish-Jewish relations (hider-hidden) that emerged most strongly in Polish cinema, as I will outline below. The crumbling of the Communist regime in the 1980s was an important catalyst for the re-appraisal of Polish-Jewish relations in Polish discourse, a revision epitomized by Jan Błoński’s article ‘The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’, published in 1987, which was critical of Polish attitudes towards their former Jewish neighbours.8 ‘We must say first of all — Yes we are guilty’, he wrote, ‘we did take Jews into our home, but we made them live in the cellar’, and accepted them only when they ‘cease[d] to be Jews’.9 Nothing has disturbed the paradigmatic narrative of Poles extending help to Polish Jews quite like Gross’s Neighbours, however. As Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic write, the debate provoked by this publication ‘has been the most prolonged and far-reaching of any discussion of the Jewish issue in Poland since the Second World War’.10 Polish film has both mirrored and shaped this reappraisal of the hider-hidden paradigm, on a national as well as transnational scale. The first half of this chapter will describe how three films that are set during the Holocaust and were produced within the last decade frame their narratives of Polish-Jewish relations: Feliks Falk’s Joanna (2010), Roman Polanski’s co-production based on the memoirs of Władysław Szpilman, The Pianist (2002), and the first Polish-Israeli co-production, based on the short stories of Ida Fink and directed by Israeli Uri Barbash, Spring 1941 (2008). Its second half will consider two audio-visual projects that respond directly to Gross’s Neighbours, Zofia Lipecka’s installation at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw ‘Po Jedwabnym’ (‘After Jedwabne’, created 2001–03, displayed in 2008), and Rafał Betlejewski’s public event ‘Płonie Stodoła’ (‘Burning Barn,’ 2010) as well as his wider project entitled ‘Tęsknie Za Tobą, Żydzie’ (‘I Miss You, Jew’), housed on the website www.tesknie.com. Particularly amongst younger generations, in the last few years there has been a surge of interest in Poland’s past Jewish communities

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and in Jewish cultural life, as well as a desire amongst many intellectuals and government officials to dispel the widespread image of Poland as an anti-Semitic country. For the 2011 Venice Biennale, the Polish Ministry of Culture made the remarkable decision to approve, for the first time in the event’s history, a nonPolish artist to represent Poland, Israeli-born Yael Bartana. The final section of this chapter will consider how her installation ‘...And Europe Will be Stunned’ negotiates the complex issues surrounding Polish-Jewish relations in the past and posits their viability in the future. Hidden Neighbours in Polish Cinema While the narrative of Poles hiding Jews has been the most inf luential in Polish Holocaust cinema, there have been a variety of ways in which non-Jewish Poles are presented vis-à-vis their Jewish neighbours. Aleksander Ford’s Ulica Graniczna (Border Street, 1948) initially shows us Poles and Polish Jews living side by side (although not without tension), before the Jewish family is sent to the ghetto. One girl is hidden in a garage by a Polish boy. The film is scathing of those Poles who blackmail a PolishJewish family out of their apartment.11 In Andrzej Wajda’s Samson (1961), a Polish Jew, Jakub, who had been in prison before the war finds himself trapped outside the ghetto walls and seeks shelter with a succession of Polish hiders, including a group of People’s Army insurgents. In Świadectwo Urodzenia (Birth Certificate, 1961) by Stanisław Różewicz, a young Polish-Jewish girl, Mirka, survives a Nazi raid on her building by hiding amongst the rubbish. After encountering some hostile older boys who force her to say the Lord’s Prayer to prove she is not Jewish, Mirka is taken in by a succession of Poles until she is transferred to an orphanage. In Janusz Nasfeter’s Długa Noc (Long Night, 1967), a young man hides a Polish-Jewish man in a cellar until his neighbours discover him. Their fear forces both hider and hidden to f lee. Episode eight of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog (The Decalogue, 1988–89) recounts the story of a Polish-Jewish woman who returns to Poland from America and wants to know why one particular couple during the war agreed and then refused to hide her. The fall of Communism did not produce any radical changes to the paradigmatic narrative of Poles hiding Jews, although it could be argued that several films showed Poles in a rather poorer light than before. In Andrzej Wajda’s Wielki Tydzien (Holy Week, 1996), for example, a man attempts to force a Polish-Jewish woman into a sexual relationship against her will through the threat of revealing her true identity.12 Jan Łomnicki’s Jeszcze Tylko Ten Las ( Just Beyond This Forest, 1991) presents a particularly ambiguous portrait of a Polish hider, a mature woman who makes anti-Semitic remarks, takes bribes to save a Polish-Jewish child, but is then fiercely protective of her. In the film’s final scene Pole and Jew walk hand-in-hand to their common deaths.13 In Polish cinema on the whole, as Ewa Mazierska has argued, ‘the anti-Semitic attitudes of Poles are [...] more than balanced by the efforts of other Poles to save Jewish people’.14 While Polish Jews had more chance of survival under German occupation if they went into hiding, their ‘othered’ identities to Poles in cinema have frequently resonated with the ‘othered’ spaces in which they were hidden by Poles, in many

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cases defined by being spaces in which Poles were not: attics, cellars, crawl spaces behind cupboards. In film, these spaces are frequently depicted as cramped, dark, and cluttered. As Paul Coates writes regarding Samson, ‘the increasing lack of a place for Jakub is apparent not just in the characteristic spaces he inhabits — the prison, the Ghetto, the cellar — but in the recurrent emphasis upon the smallness of the windows through which he peers out.’15 Even when hidden in residential spaces such as apartments, there were always interdictions: keep quiet, keep away from the window.16 A range of such spaces can be seen in The Pianist, as Władysław Szpilman is hidden by a succession of Poles working for the underground. His existence is also threatened by Poles, one of whom spends all the money he has collected for Szpilman’s upkeep, leaving him sick, starving, and imprisoned in a f lat. While Szpilman faces death in whatever space he is in, the marked contrast between ‘Polish’ and ‘Jewish’ space is centred particularly on the outside and the inside of the ghetto. The Szpilmans are a thoroughly assimilated Polish-Jewish family initially living outside the area to be ghettoized (a departure from Szpilman’s memoirs17), whose obvious signs of being ‘other’ to non-Jewish Poles are minimized until they are forced by Germans to wear armbands and segregated physically from non-Jews by the ghetto boundaries. With them, we watch the ghetto wall being built. Polanski sears this image of the fatal barrier into viewers’ minds with a quick montage of four shots, each showing the wall from a different perspective. After his family have been deported and presumably killed, Szpilman’s view of what lies outside the ghetto walls (he explicitly draws attention to the fact that it is his first view of this in two years) re-affirms the distinction between inside and outside particularly clearly. Initially we see him being marched through the decaying, grey ghetto with other Polish-Jewish workers. From a frontal mid-shot of Szpilman, the film cuts suddenly to a subjectively-inf lected paradisal vision: a lateral tracking shot reveals a market set amongst green trees, overf lowing with brightly coloured f lowers and items of food, and visited by elegantly dressed Poles.18 Even once Szpilman leaves the physical ghetto wall behind, however, the barriers between him and his Polish hiders remain. When his Polish friend says to him that ‘it must feel better on this side of the wall’, he replies, ‘yes, but sometimes I’m still not sure which side of the wall I’m on’. As Coates puts it, the ‘wall’s physical collapse does not preclude the mental persistence of its after-image’.19 The film tends to keep closely to what, and how, Szpilman sees through pointof-view shots. We see Warsaw’s two Uprisings (1943 in the Ghetto and 1944 by the Home Army) as he does, from windows several stories up; when he looks through a broken window at a hospital, our own vision is impeded by jagged broken glass. Furthermore, on several occasions we are placed explicitly within his point-ofaudition: we hear the music that he presumably hears in his head as his fingers f lutter silently over the keyboard in his first apartment outside the ghetto, and we hear a persistent ringing when a bomb lands close to, and temporarily deafens him. At the same time, however, we watch his deteriorating condition at a certain remove, assisted by the frequently inscrutable nature of his facial expressions, and the long periods in which he acts silently and alone, and the viewer can only guess at his thoughts and emotions. As Alison Landsberg has pointed out, this is a distance

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Fig. 7.1. Szpilman’s point of view. The Pianist, dir. Roman Polanski (2002). DVD capture.

conducive to creating a relationship of empathy towards Szpilman, such that we can ‘imagine the other’s situation and what it might feel like, while simultaneously recognizing [our] difference from [him or] her’.20 The film thus highlights two different boundaries, that on the level of representation between Poles and Jews, and that between Szpilman and the viewer. The distance preserved between protagonist and viewer creates a relation akin to neighbourliness without the threat of violence that Żylińska sees as inherent in this concept and facilitates, in Jill Bennett’s terms, ‘an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible’.21 Spring 1941 opens in Poland in 1971 with the arrival of a cellist, Clara, who is to give a concert. As the film soon demonstrates, Clara was hidden by Poles during the Holocaust. The film cuts between sections in 1971 as she visits the people who hid her, and 1941, when she, her husband Artur, a doctor, and her remaining child (one is shot near the beginning of the film) f lee the arrival of the Germans in their town, turning up at a farm run by their acquaintance, Emilia. Throughout the film, Emilia is a somewhat unwilling hider. As her own husband remains missing in the war, she takes Artur to help her on the farm, while forcing Clara to hide in the attic during the day with the child. This is ostensibly for their safety, but her off hand comments to Clara — ‘with a face like yours, people will know right away’ — and to Artur — ‘You are fine. You look like us’ — are a painful suggestion of the hostility that permeates neighbourly relations. Emilia and Artur begin an affair early on in the film, and Emilia eventually falls pregnant and demands that Artur no longer visit his wife in the attic. When she finds Artur upstairs with Clara, she throws the family out. Artur takes his family to the house of one of his former patients, a farmer who agrees to hide them in the cellar, but they are soon discovered by Germans and Artur and the little girl are killed. The transitions between 1971 and 1941 suggest that the past is still very much present for Clara. These transitions are edited in such a way that the past scene seems to be directly what the present Clara witnesses and hears: for example, in a scene in

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the farmhouse in 1971, Clara hears a sound and turns to the door; this is followed by a cut to a shot of her husband and younger self entering through the door in 1941. Towards the end of the film, the older Clara is shown watching the younger Artur from within the same frame. This mise-en-scène suggests a formulation of traumatic experience that is consonant with that posited by Dori Laub: Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect.22

Something similar is suggested by the film’s epigraph, a quote from Ida Fink: ‘As much as I scrabble through the ruins of my memories, I find that time, that other time, fresh and untouched by forgetfulness.’ The traumatic events exist outside of causality, sequence and linear time.23 The presentation of events within two temporal frameworks functions in two contradictory ways: as a distancing device from the events of 1941, and as a device generating suspense, as the viewer attempts to decipher what happened in 1941 from what is said in 1971. This dynamic, which pulls us away from and towards the past, seems to be resolved in a surprising fashion at the film’s conclusion, where Clara is shown performing at a concert attended not only by the Polish characters from her ‘present’, but also by her dead family, her former self, and the younger Emilia. The dissolving of temporal boundaries creates an almost utopian vision of the dead neighbouring the living, and of Poles neighbouring Jews, presided over by the affective power of Clara’s playing. In terms of its cast, crew, and financing, Falk’s Joanna had more input from Polish sources than The Pianist or Spring 1941; this may go some way towards explaining its sometimes martyrological portrayal of a Polish hider. In the film’s opening sequence, a man tries to bribe a young Polish-Jewish mother who has taken her daughter to a café for her birthday. His well-dressed appearance and polite manner

Fig. 7.2. The young Clara at the elder Clara’s concert. Spring 1941, dir. Uri Barbash (2008). DVD capture.

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belies the stereotype of the lower-class, uneducated szmalcownik. The mother sends the child, Róża, to wait in the nearby church, but both mother and briber are caught in a roundup. Joanna, a waitress from the café, finds Róża in the church by chance. While churches were often used as places of refuge during the occupation, there are also religious overtones to this offering up of the Polish-Jewish child to Joanna, a childless widow (although she does not know at this point in the film that her husband has died), something that the film’s advertising campaign explicitly referred to in its use of an image containing three fragmented visions of her face, with the words ‘Crazy? Collaborator? Holy?’. When Róża becomes ill, she is heard coughing by a high-ranking German officer who has taken a shine to Joanna. Joanna offers herself up to him to be used sexually so that he will not reveal her secret. She is later accused of collaboration by the underground and her head is shaved; close-ups of her face and shorn head resonate with the cinematic visions of her French near-namesake in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928), contributing a further aura of martyrdom to her actions.24 Things are ultimately not quite so straightforward, however: Joanna collapses into a catatonic depression and for a while cannot take care of Róża. Eventually, she leaves her in a nunnery and embarks on a possibly suicidal trek in the Polish mountains. Nevertheless, throughout the film, Joanna in a sense becomes Mother to the Other. Initially Joanna and Róża share the same bed, and a utility cupboard concealed behind some shelves is used only in emergencies. There are several shots that show them tucked up together, blonde and black hair blending. Joanna refers to Róża as ‘my little daughter’, using the same word (córeńka) that Róża’s mother used, while Róża refers to Joanna as ‘my second mother’. Intimacy between Poles and Jews is often depicted in erotic terms in Polish cinema, as, for example, in Jan Jakub Kolski’s Daleko Od Okna (Keep Away From the Window, 2000), or Wajda’s Krajobraz Po Bitwie (Landscape After Battle, 1970), but Joanna emphasizes an intimacy in Polish-Jewish relations that is familial and protective.

Fig. 7.3. Joanna and Róża. Joanna, dir. Feliks Falk (2010). DVD capture

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Although presenting different configurations of Polish-Jewish relations, all three films share a focus on assimilated Polish Jews who tend to be middle class intellectuals, professionals and musicians (except, of course, for the child Róża, but the brief scene at the film’s opening suggests her mother is of a similar class). Their identity as Jews does not seem to be significantly important to their self-definition; they are what Mazierska, partially following Isaac Deutscher, has called ‘non-Jewish Jews’,25 and Mark Anderson, ‘Jewish in name only’.26 Polish feature films about the Holocaust (including co-productions) have rarely paid much attention to the lives of other Others, for example, Orthodox Jews, those who lived in shtetls, who studied the Talmud, who kept to dietary restrictions. This might be a consequence of a continued focus upon the paradigm of hiding, as one had a greater chance as an assimilated Polish Jew of being hidden successfully by Poles.27 Nevertheless, this lack of a varied image of Jewishness in Polish feature films about the Holocaust carries the threat that the lives and deaths of other communities will not be as well remembered. Beyond the Hidden: Jedwabne The story of Jedwabne, with its murder of Jews by their Polish neighbours, repre­ sents a ‘counter-memory’, to use Polonsky’s and Michlic’s term, to the narrative of Poles hiding Jews.28 It has by no means been accepted by all Poles. Polonsky and Michlic have set out a typology of responses to Gross’s work, ranging from the ‘radical apologetic’, outright rejections of his findings, sometimes including vitriolic attacks on his credibility, to the ‘self-critical’, which are particularly concerned with the moral ramifications of his text.29 Several public opinion polls have also been conducted that demonstrate a confusion amongst the Polish population about whether they should feel a moral responsibility for the crime.30 Nevertheless, the extensive debates surrounding Neighbours constitute an ‘important development involving the inclusion of the Polish-Jewish past in the post-war Polish collective memory, which for the last fifty years has been largely concerned with the Polish ethnic collectivity’.31 As yet, no fiction feature film has taken up the story of Jedwabne, although there have been documentaries that include interviews with former and current Jedwabne residents, for example Agnieszka Arnold’s Sąsiedzi (Neighbours, 2001) and Slawomir Grunberg’s The Legacy of Jedwabne (2005). Gross’s research has directly impacted upon the work of several installation and performance artists, however, such as Zofia Lipecka and Rafał Betlejewski. Although born in Poland, Lipecka has lived in France for many years. According to Katarzyna Bojarska, the artist [...] never felt a particular tie to her country of origin, Poland. It was only Gross’s book, and more specifically the discourse surrounding it which placed before her the problem of her national identity, the problem of the necessity of identifying with this dark side of Polishness.32

Problems of identification were enacted in her installation at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw. ‘Po Jedwabnym’ (‘After Jedwabne’) consisted of a main room and a corridor; passing through the corridor, one could hear the voice of Polish actor Andrzej

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Seweryn reading the testimony of Szmul Wasersztajn, reprinted in Neighbours, recounting in detail the horrific violence that was perpetrated against the Jewish population on 10 July 1941. In the main room, four projections, two facing each other, showed the expressions of people of various nationalities and generations listening to the testimony. Carefully placed mirrors multiplied these faces almost to infinity, as well as ref lecting visitors’ own faces back at them, encircling them within the space of the installation. The mirrors thus ‘multipl[ied] the witnesses’, as Bojarska has written, as though attempting to make up for the decades in which the Polish nation failed to witness this event.33 Simultaneously, the mirrors forced a confrontation with visitors’ own identities, ref lecting them and forcing them to ref lect, enacting the kind of ideal position of listening to testimony that Laub has described: ‘While overlapping, to a degree, with the experience of the victim, [the listener] [...] preserves his own separate place [...]. The listener, therefore, has to be at the same time a witness to the trauma witness and a witness to himself.’34 A more problematic response was undertaken by Polish artist Rafał Betlejewski, for whom Neighbours had also constituted a shocking epiphany.35 On 11 July 2010, the day after the anniversary of the massacre at Jedwabne, Betlejewski set a barn on fire in the village of Zawada. He had initially planned this symbolic event as a kind of village fair, with music and food, as a way to reach a greater number of people, but had been refused permission from local councils. Before the event, Betlejewski had been collecting emails and letters from visitors to his website www.tesknie. com, which were supposed to detail their negative thoughts about Jews, and could then be burned in the barn, in a symbolic expunging of Polish anti-Semitism. In the short film depicting the event that is available on his website, we see Betlejewski, dressed like a peasant from the 1940s, giving a short speech to the assembled crowd, before walking towards the barn. There, he scatters the white pieces of paper, sets the barn alight, and exits through the back. Crossing to the other side of the barn in this manner is for Betlejewski a symbolic act: ‘I am transferring myself, a Catholic Pole, from the spot where I am placed by history, namely “outside” the barn, towards the place where the Jews were, “inside” of it.’36 This statement elides the complex issues at play in this kind of symbolic crossing of barriers. In relation to Polish underground courier Jan Karski’s trip to the ghetto as described in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), Shoshana Felman writes: ‘It is not a simple thing to move from one side to the other side of the wall of the ghetto. He has learned that there is a radical, unbreachable and horrifying difference between the two sides of the wall.’ The ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’, she continues, ‘are qualitatively so different that they are not just incompatible but incomparable and utterly irreconcilable’, something that The Pianist attempts to indicate through its disjunctive editing.37 Felman warns against attempting to account for the ‘inside’ (of the barn, of the ghetto) ‘by merely projecting [the Poles’] inside on the outside’.38 The collapsing of barriers suggested by Betlejewski’s statement also works against the distance necessary to maintain empathy, to acknowledge that ‘the experience of the other is not one’s own’, as Dominick La Capra has stated.39 Another disturbing aspect of Betlejewski’s performance was the potential ease with which it could be consumed as spectacle, without encouraging much critical

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awareness about the historical event and its consequences for the present. Indeed, in the video, we see two young men who refused to leave the barn’s loft, protesting against what they saw as Betlejewski’s ‘trivialis[ing]’ of the Holocaust. Several drunk local men started to become violent and threatening, with one shouting ‘Get the fuck down! I want to go home, I want to see the f lames and go home!’, which may well have suggested to the protestors that they had proved their point (although it was not safe for them to descend until a police escort arrived). The inclusion of this episode within the video, as well as a voiceover that reads the many critical commentaries about the performance, suggests that one of Betlejewski’s interests is precisely the bringing to the surface of a variety of responses, whether violent, insulted, or indifferent. Nevertheless, it forms a contrast with Lipecka’s installation, in which one could hardly pull away from self-ref lection, literally and figuratively. Betlejewski’s performance was part of a larger project connected to the website ‘I Miss You, Jew’, which he set up with Judyta Nekanda-Trepka, a cultural and educational coordinator for the Warsaw Jewish community, after reading Neighbours, and which is a fascinating example of the growing interest in Poland’s former Jewish communities.40 In a section entitled ‘Memories’, Betlejewski encourages readers to submit their own memories (or local collective memories) about Jewish communities, in pre-war, wartime, and post-war Poland. This project attempts to f lesh out what can sometimes be a vague image of ‘lost Jews’ in Polish discourse, as though Poland had misplaced them, with stories of real individuals who lived, and mostly died, in Poland. The website is fundamentally interactive, and contributors have submitted not only memories about specific people but also stories of how readers have attempted to find places in which Polish Jews formerly lived as well as requests for information about people with whom they lost contact during and after the war. In another section of the website entitled ‘Photos’, Betlejewski showcases photographs that have been taken by him as well as project members ‘in those places in Poland where Jews used to live’.41 Many of these are staged in a similar fashion: a wooden chair, sometimes with a white woollen rug and yarmulke, is placed on a street or outside a house that has ties to past Polish-Jewish communities; the Polish individuals or groups that presently live in that location or that town stand alongside it. The empty chair, of course, symbolizes the place where a Polish Jew could or would have sat alongside a non-Jewish Pole as their neighbour. Most of these photographs are also accompanied by short texts, memories of the absent Jews who are being symbolized by the chairs. Apart from photographs, Betlejewski also works with what he terms ‘murals’ that are painted on walls in former Jewish areas. These usually mimic graffiti art with the slogan ‘I miss you, Jew’. As Betlejewski explains, he deliberately chose to work with urban graffiti as this was commonly used for anti-Semitic slogans.42 Moving away from walls as barricades between Poles and Jews (the function, for example, of ghetto walls), Betlejewski co-opts urban spaces to bear witness to the past Polish-Jewish presence. According to Betlejewski, the website and the visual art projects displayed on it were conceived

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Re-Imagining the Neighbour [...] as a process for Poles who do not identify themselves within the Jewish tradition, such as myself, to have a chance to confront and contend with their Jewish phobias [...]. We Poles need to recover the Jewish heritage that has long been part and parcel of our very own Polish identity and culture.43

Part of this project involves re-thinking the way in which Poles use the word ‘Jew’. Polonsky and Michlic have noted how different groups within Polish society use different terminology when discussing Polish-Jewish relations: Those who espouse a civic and pluralistic vision of Poland generally talk of ‘the Polish Jews’, ‘our co-citizens’, and ‘co-stewards of this land’ [...]. In contrast, for those who favor an integral nationalist view of Poland, the Jew is still referred to as a Jew (Żyd, sometimes lowercased, żyd), a term that demarcates the Jews from Poles and that in present-day Poland has a pejorative tone.44

Betlejewski’s use of the term ‘Jew’ was deliberately chosen to bring into the open the prejudice that is associated with the word.45 There was much commentary on his choice of the word for the project, particularly after the University of Warsaw agreed to allow Betlejewski to stage a small event on its premises in 2010 only if the word ‘Jew’ was removed from the slogan ‘I Miss You, Jew’. Nekanda-Trepka has defended their use of the word, stating that ‘admitting that a “Żyd” means “other, wrong” is akin to agreeing to anti-Semitic discourse. Being ashamed, afraid to call ourselves Jews is something we should not indulge’. In her opinion, Betlejewski ‘turns those [sic] old, painful, dirty set of words into something gentle and affective’.46 This attempt at a linguistic transformation is a very difficult task given that the word ‘Jew’ in Poland has long-established associations and connotations, many of them negative. On the other hand, these connotations have little chance of changing over time if the word ‘Jew’ is used in public discourse only by Polish nationalists, as Polonsky and Michlic suggest. The Neighbours Return? Betlejewski’s project largely addresses contemporary Poles while encouraging memories of pre-war Polish-Jewish communities. Yael Bartana’s installation at the Venice Biennale reached beyond the Polish context to stage a call for the return of Polish Jews to Poland, as well as encouraging non-Polish Jews to visit, and possibly settle in, the country. For her video and installation projects, she created a fictional organization entitled the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland ( JRMiP). Her video installation in the Polish Pavilion featured three films in three separate rooms, Szary Koszmary (Nightmares, 2007), Mur i Wieża (Wall and Tower, 2009), and Zamach (Assassination, 2011). A fourth room contained piles of large posters which visitors could take away from the installation. These posters, featuring the symbol of the JRMiP (an eagle, the symbol of Poland, and the Star of David) in white against a red background (echoing the colors of the Polish f lag), contained the manifesto of the movement, which stated that ‘We want to return! [...] We wish to heal our mutual trauma once and for all’.47 The screening rooms were linked by highly ref lective glass surfaces so that one could see through to another film in another enclave, as well as ref lected glimpses of the others, depending on how

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one moved. The volume on each film was also set at such a level that each of the film’s soundtracks could be heard over the quieter parts of the other films. This became particularly noticeable when, for example, the Polish national anthem played in Mur i Wieża (Wall and Tower) resonated through the space to inf lect the experience of viewing the other films. Thus, all the rooms communicated with their neighbours. The utopian aspects of Bartana’s project of Polish-Jewish reconciliation are, however, held in a deliberate tension with the possibilities of the project’s failure in each of the three films. In Nightmares, left-wing politician Sławomir Sierakowski delivers an impassioned plea for the Polish Jews to return to Poland, to ‘your — our — country’. The film draws on the aesthetics of propaganda to create an aura of patriotic heroism around Sierakowski, shooting him from below, using the camera to circle around him, and envisioning him in slow motion. Sierakowski, however, delivers his address to an almost empty and derelict sports stadium, the Stadion Dziesięciolecia in Warsaw, which was at the time being used as a bazaar. His call to ‘Jews! [...] People!’ is heard as the camera pans over the empty stadium seating, registering the lack of an audience for his address. ‘We will build schools and hospitals’, he cries, as the camera pans more closely over the weed-infested and crumbling space, a visual register, perhaps, of the desolation of the Polish landscape without such joint projects, but also a suggestion of their potential failure. Wall and Tower imagines that Jews from Israel have responded to Sierakowski’s call; the film traces the process of their erection of a kibbutz in the Muranów district of Warsaw, site of the former ghetto. The film’s vision of their work is deliberately idealized, according to Bartana: ‘I quote the past, the time of Socialist utopia, youthfulness and optimism — when there was a project of constructing a modernist idea of a new world.’48 Bartana’s statement leads one to question whether the utopian presentation constructs this world on a fantasy plane that will not be possible in the reality of contemporary Poland. Indeed, towards the end of the film, a group of (mainly elderly) Poles look curiously at the building, but do not enter this space of the other; as Bartana has stated of this internal tension to the work, ‘the settlement’s simplicity declares a presence, while at the same time sends a message of alienation and hostility.’49 In Assassination, Sierakowski, the declared leader of the JRMiP, has been killed, and the film stages his funeral, which is shown as a chance to bring together people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. The proceedings are haunted, however, by a woman dressed in clothes from the 1940s and carrying an old suitcase, an embodiment of a wartime Polish-Jewish refugee. As the exhibition leaf let claimed, Bartana’s work is intended to test ‘reactions to the unexpected return of the “long un-seen neighbour” ’; here, the returning stranger remains un-integrated, hovering over the film as painful reminder of a shared traumatic past.50 Conclusion The drive for homogeneity propagated by the Communist regime for several decades covered over a fundamental instability at the heart of self-identification in Poland, a land of shifting and at times disappearing borders. Timothy Snyder

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has eloquently formulated the way in which the f luidity and hybridity of Eastern European identities belie this homogeneity in relation to Holocaust memory: Of the more than four million Polish citizens murdered by the Germans, about three million were Jews. All of these three million Jews are counted as Polish citizens, which they were. Many of them identified strongly with Poland: certain people who died as Jews did not even consider themselves as such. More than a million of these Jews are also counted as Soviet citizens, because they lived in the half of Poland annexed by the USSR at the beginning of the war. [...] Does the Jewish girl who scratched a note to her mother on the wall of the Kovel synagogue belong to Polish, or Soviet, or Israeli, or Ukrainian history?51

Since the fall of Communism in Poland, according to Elwira Grossman, it has been more and more difficult ‘for Poles to evade the fact that their national tradition [quoting Halina Filipowicz] “has always thrived on vital permeations, on ceaseless hybridization, on cross-breeding and grafting” ’.52 Four of the six works that I have discussed enact this hybrid identity as cultural products: The Pianist, as a multinational co-production employing English and American actors to play the Poles, directed by a man who survived the Kraków ghetto but spent most of his time living outside Poland, and based on the memoirs of a Polish Jew; Spring 1941, filmed in Poland by an Israeli director, featuring well-known Polish, American and British actors, and based on the short stories of a Polish Jew who emigrated to Israel in 1957; ‘After Jedwabne’, created by an artist living abroad who was inspired by the tragedy of Jedwabne to re-engage with questions of Polish identity; ‘...And Europe Will be Stunned’, created by an artist born in Israel to a Polish-Jewish mother, and representing Poland. Perhaps the success of this hybridity at the level of cultural production may suggest that the re-negotiation of Polish-Jewish identities in an age of increasingly ‘cosmopolitan memories’ has a chance to progress.53 Feature films, installations, and internet projects clearly lend themselves to different forms of audience engagement. Films can powerfully address communities, and create a circle of responses around themselves through public discussion. Through their more interactive nature, installation works and internet projects have perhaps more potential to move beyond addressing communities, to creating new ones. As part of her installation project, Bartana created the JRMiP, which, though technically fictional, has drawn together artists, writers, politicians, critics and philosophers from around the world. Their writings feature in the volume published to replace the traditional exhibition catalogue for Bartana’s Biennale exhibition. Entitled A Cookbook for Political Imagination, it suggests creative and ethical paths for the movement to follow in the future.54 Betlejewski continues to inspire Polish visitors to his website to engage with the histories of their absent Polish-Jewish neighbours, and significantly his projects are enacted in highly visible public spaces. These artists in particular hope to re-imagine the concept of neighbourliness, fraught with past and present hostilities, to see it, as Dorota Głowacka and Żylińska have written, ‘as an ethical project of living with others, while negotiating the antagonisms implicated in those complex relations of otherness’.55

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Films Dekalog 8 (Decalogue 8), dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski (TVP, Tor, 1989) Daleko Od Okna (Keep Away From the Window), dir. Jan Jakub Kolski (TVP, 2000) Jeszcze Tylko Ten Las ( Just Beyond This Forest), dir. Jan Łomnicki (Kadr, 1991) Joanna, dir. Feliks Falk (ITI, 2010) Krajobraz Po Bitwie (Landscape after Battle), dir. Andrzej Wajda (Wektor, 1970) The Legacy of Jedwabne, dir. Slawomir Grunberg (Log In Productions, 2005) Mur i Wieża (Wall and Tower), dir. Yael Bartana (2009) La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc), dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer (Gaumont, 1928) The Pianist, dir. Roman Polanski (Canal +/TVP, 2002) Płonie Stodoła (Burning Barn), dir. Rafał Betlejewski (2010) Sąsiedzi (Neighbours), dir. Agnieszka Arnold (Telewizja Polska, 2001) Samson, dir. Andrzej Wajda (Droga/Kadr, 1961) Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (Les Films Aleph, 1985) Spring 1941, dir. Uri Barbash (Praxis/Opus Films, 2008) Świadectwo Urodzenia (Birth Certificate), dir. Stanisław Różewicz (Rytm, 1961) Szary Koszmary (Nightmares), dir. Yael Bartana (2007) Ulica Graniczna (Border Street), dir. Aleksander Ford (P.P Film Polski, 1948) Wielki Tydzień (Holy Week), dir. Andrzej Wajda (Heritage Films, 1995) Zamach (Assassination), dir. Yael Bartana (2011)

Notes to Chapter 7 1. Joanna B. Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), p. 4. 2. Zvi Gitelman, ‘Collective Memory and Contemporary Polish-Jewish Relations’, in Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. by Joshua D. Zimmerman (New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 271–90 (pp. 273–74). 3. Joanna Żylińska, ‘Who Is my Neighbour? Ethics under Duress’, in Imaginary Neighbours: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust, ed. by Dorota Głowacka and Joanna Żylińska (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. 275–300 (p. 283). 4. Ibid., p. 277. 5. Jan T. Gross, Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941 (London: Arrow Books, 2003). 6. Dorota Głowacka and Joanna Żylińska, ‘Introduction. Imaginary Neighbours: Toward an Ethical Community’, in Imaginary Neighbours, ed. by Głowacka and Żylińska, pp. 1–18 (p. 5). 7. Shmuel Krakowski, ‘Relations between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust: New and Old Approaches in Polish Historiography’, in Holocaust Literature: A Handbook of Critical, Historical and Literary Writings, ed. by Saul S. Friedman (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1993), pp. 203–15 (p. 204). 8. Jan Błoński, ‘The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’, Tygodnik Powszechny, 11 January 1987, reprinted in My Brother’s Keeper? Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, ed. by Antony Polonsky (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 34–48. 9. Ibid., p. 44. 10. Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, ‘Preface’, in The Neighbours Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland, ed. by Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. xiii-xiv (p. xiii). 11. Ulica Graniczna (Border Street), dir. Aleksander Ford (P.P. Film Polski, Poland, 1948). 12. Wielki Tydzien (Holy Week), dir. Andrzej Wajda (Heritage Films, Poland, 1995). 13. Jeszcze Tylko Ten Las ( Just Beyond This Forest), dir. Jan Łomnicki (Kadr, Poland, 1991). 14. Ewa Mazierska, ‘Non-Jewish Jews, Good Poles, and Historical Truth in the Films of Andrzej

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Wajda’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 20 (2000), 213–26 (p. 219). For more discussion of Polish-Jewish relations in Polish cinema before 2001, see also Paul Coates, The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (London and New York: Wallf lower, 2005) and Elżbieta Ostrowska, ‘Between Fear and Attraction: Images of “Other” Women’, in Ewa Mazierska and Elżbieta Ostrowska, Women in Polish Cinema (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), pp. 131–46. 15. Coates, The Red and the White, p. 164. 16. Daleko Od Okna (Keep Away From the Window) is the title of Jan Jakub Kolski’s film about a Polish couple hiding a Jewish woman (TVP, Poland, 2000). 17. Władysław Szpilman, The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw 1939–45 (London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 59. 18. Polanski stops short of showing us a carousel, but there is a hint of Czesław Miłosz’s famous poem, Campo di Fiori, which describes revelers on a carousel while the ghetto burns. 19. Coates, The Red and the White, p. 157. 20. Alison Landsberg, ‘Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 22 (2009), 221–29 (p. 223). 21. Jill Bennet, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 10. 22. Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London: Routedge, 1992), pp. 57–74 (p. 69). 23. Ibid., p. 69. 24. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc), dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer (Gaumont, 1928). 25. Mazierska, ‘Non-Jewish Jews, Good Poles, and Historical Truth in the Films of Andrzej Wajda’, p. 219. 26. Mark M. Anderson, ‘The Child Victim as Witness to the Holocaust: An American Story?’, Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture and Society, 14 (2007), 1–22 (p. 7). 27. See Nechama Tec, ‘Hiding and Passing on the Aryan Side: A Gendered Comparison’, in Contested Memories, ed. by Zimmerman, pp. 193–211. 28. Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, ‘Introduction’, in The Neighbours Respond, pp. 1–43 (p. 30). 29. Ibid., p. 33. 30. Ibid., p. 39. 31. Ibid., p. 32. 32. Katarzyna Bojarska, ‘I Znów Polskę, a Nie Wiosnę Zobaczę (Niespodziewanie Cze¸ ść 2) (And Again I Will See Poland and Not Spring. (The Unexpected Part 2))’, Obieg, 15 February 2009 [accessed 14 July 2011]. 33. Ibid. 34. Laub, ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, p. 58. 35. As he states in the Płonie Stodoła (Burning Barn) video, [accessed 14 July 2011]. 36. Betlejewski, Płonie Stodoła (Burning Barn) [acc­ essed 14 July 2011]. 37. Shoshana Felman, ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, in Felman and Laub, Testimony, pp. 204–83 (p. 236). Emphasis in original. 38. Ibid., pp. 260–61. 39. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 40. 40. Betlejewski, ‘Te¸ sknię za Tobą Żydzie (I Miss You, Jew)’ [accessed 14 July 2011]. 41. Betlejewski [accessed 14 July 2011]. 42. Betlejewski [accessed 14 July 2011]. 43. Betlejewski [accessed 14 July 2011]. 44. Polonsky and Michlic, p. 41. 45. Betlejewski [accessed 14 July 2011].

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46. Judyta Nekanda-Trepka, ‘Correspondence with Yad Vashem (October 2009)’, [n.d.] [accessed 14 July 2011]. 47. ‘The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland: A Manifesto’ [accessed 10 October 2011]. 48. N. N., ‘...And Europe Will be Stunned: Yael Bartana’, The Polish Pavilion at the 54th Inter­ national Art Exhibition in Venice ILLUMInations, 2011 [accessed 19 February 2013]. 49. Nicola Trezzi, ‘RE: DIASPORA, Yael Bartana, Elad Lassry, Ohad Meromi and Daniel Silver in Correspondence: Focus Israel’, Flash Art, 268 (2009) [accessed 14 July 2011]. 50. N. N., ‘...And Europe Will be Stunned: Yael Bartana’, The Polish Pavilion at the 54th Inter­ national Art Exhibition in Venice ILLUMInations, 2011. 51. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Bodley Head, 2010), pp. 406–07. 52. Elwira Grossman, ‘Introduction’, in Studies in Language, Literature, and Cultural Mythology in Poland: Investigating ‘The Other’, ed. by Elwira Grossman, Slavic Studies, 7 (2002), 1–19 (p. 7). 53. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, ‘Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory’, European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (2002), 87–106. 54. Sebastian Cichocki and Galit Eilat, A Cookbook for Political Imagination (Warsaw: Zachęta National Gallery of Art; Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011). 55. Głowacka and Żylińska, ‘Introduction’, p. 6.

C h ap t e r 8

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Performing Cultural Memory The Holocaust in Dutch Multi-Platform Television Documentary Berber Hagedoorn In the twenty-first-century landscape, where internet convergence and multiplatform storytelling have become central features of TV programming, the medium of television plays a pivotal role in constructing and stimulating historical consciousness of the Holocaust. Mediatized histories, life narratives and archival footage are more and more becoming part of the public domain. At the same time, the visual record and historical representation of the Holocaust is ever more becoming a topic of academic study.1 Increasing opportunities to share private memories through a variety of public platforms, mean that popular media forms and practices — in television, film, literature and digital media — function ever more as dynamic agents of history and memory in the representation and remembrance of, and education about, the systematic state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews and millions of other victims by the Nazi regime and its allies during the Second World War. The impact of the Second World War on Dutch history is such that it is often referred to as simply ‘the war’ or ‘the occupation’. The collective remembrance of occupation, persecution and genocide has constantly been negotiated throughout time. How to convey inhumane and unfathomable events to audiences is an especially loaded task, and even more so in the case of youngsters who do not have any prior knowledge of the ‘holocaustal event’2 of the Nazis’ Final Solution. Many television users are now (re-)viewing and remembering these events through current televisual practices that repurpose archival footage in new historical contexts, on various platforms and screens. In this context, Andrew Hoskins has argued: If one accepts that today television is the popular and preferred medium of history, then one should examine more closely the nature of the medium in order to account for today’s construction of the past. History, it appears, is always playing ‘catch-up’ with the modes of its representation and dissemination.3

In this chapter, I will re-think the relationship between television, history and memory by investigating how ‘multi-platform’ TV documentary programming helps to perform cultural memory of the Holocaust. The focus of this analysis will

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be on how the Dutch TV documentaries 13 in de Oorlog (13 at War, 2009–10) and De Oorlog (The War, 2009) can function as a practice of memory in their representation of this difficult and complex subject matter. The historical programme 13 at War was a youth drama-documentary series produced by public broadcaster NPS in cooperation with Teleac/NOT (since merged into NTR).4 Its purpose was to introduce the major historical events of the Second World War in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies (the Dutch colony which became Indonesia after the Second World War) to young viewers. The NPS produced this series together with the historical documentary series The War. In contrast to the youth series, The War focused on new insights into the events before, during and after the occupation. Both series are part of a larger cross-media format, which expands the themes and narratives of the documentary programmes. This study uses these series to explore the new dynamic ways in which cultural memory is performed across the current media landscape. Multi-Platform TV as a Practice of Cultural Memory Cultural memory is ‘memory that is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning’ — memory that is ‘entangled’ with history rather than always opposed to history.5 More than ever, cultural memory today is reliant on the exchange, circulation and technological capacities of media practices. Not only are the ways in which inhabitants of the current media landscape individually remember and forget impacted by media texts and images, but this development also affects the work of historians as gatekeepers of ‘official’ history and collective memory. Aleida Assmann has argued that historians have lost their monopoly over defining as well as representing the past: ‘What is called the “memory boom” is the immediate effect of this loss of the historian’s singular and unrivalled authority.’6 Critics have conventionally conceptualized television as annihilating memory — and conse­ quently history as well — arguing that ‘memory seems to play no role in television’7 and that television is ‘subtly erasing our sense of a past’.8 As a result, television has been widely regarded as ‘a key apparatus of popular culture which contributes to the fundamental loss of historical consciousness’.9 However, such conceptions of television need to be reconsidered in the present media climate. A growing interest in the ‘re-screening’ of the past exists in contemporary society. The recent innovation of the Anne Frank House’s Secret Annex as a digital 3D experience is a prime example of this trend.10 The Secret Annex in Amsterdam is unfurnished, due to the fact that homes of deported Jews were cleared out during the war and Otto Frank requested the Annex to remain empty after the war. However, visitors can go back in time in an online environment and explore how the rooms in the Annex, Otto Frank’s office and the attic (the latter two are closed in the actual museum for safety reasons) were used during the war and what they looked like. The website makes use of a variety of screen practices, including photographs, archival footage and previously aired TV broadcasts in which helpers like Jo Kleiman and Miep Gies share their memories about the people in hiding.

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In a similar fashion, formerly unavailable data is now easily accessible for the general public on several media platforms and screen practices related to television, varying from ‘traditional’ broadcast TV to digital theme channels and online TV and other archives. Practices of ‘re-screening’ repurpose images of the past, such as previously broadcast images and archival footage, by positioning these materials in new historical and media contexts. The medium of television has been transformed from a relatively stable and fixed technology into a more complex constellation of dynamic screen practices, by means of which audiences are making conscious decisions to view, collect, distribute and assimilate images of the past. As a result, memory is (re-)produced, circulated and made sense of through the cultural form of television in newfangled and more dynamic ways. Since viewing habits are based more and more on personal selection, like many TV programmes today, documentary programming is evidencing a heightened awareness of the existence of audiences both online and off line. Work by amongst others Eilean Hooper-Greenhill11 has shown that in the post-modern period, cultural organizations (such as museums) have in general become much closer to and more conscious of their respective audiences. In constructing a ‘useable past’12 for the present, new forms of pedagogy are demanded. Specialist knowledge remains important, and is combined with strategies to try to involve the imaginations and emotions of audiences. The War and 13 at War exemplify such approaches to historiography in the multi-platform era. As Assmann argues, quality and extension of memory of the Holocaust are bound to differ significantly depending on its framing, and consequently the com­ memorating community will be smaller or larger, limited or open.13 In The War and 13 at War, various means of representation are utilized to produce specific memory discourses and to ‘perform’ the past. If we understand cultural memory as a dynamic practice which can actually be performed, the performance of memory is ‘both a mnemonic device and a way in which individual memories are relived, revived, and refashioned’.14 For television makers working within the field of historical documentary, how to unite the ‘representation of reality’15 with a creative treatment of this reality is crucial to their practice, and thus the performance of the past. The nine-part series The War strived to bring the historical events of the Second World War in the Netherlands and the former Dutch East Indies to new generations, in a less exhaustive manner than its precursor, Loe de Jong’s 21-part series De Bezetting (The Occupation), which was broadcast in the Netherlands from 1960 to 1965, rerun in a shortened format from 1966 to 1968, and remade between 1989 and 1990.16 The War was created by editor-in-chief Ad van Liempt for a wide audience. In the early stages of developing The War, the idea for a parallel youth series emerged. By the concurrent production of comprehensive websites,17 DVD box-sets, companion books,18 and derivative products for education and the publication of historical sources,19 a considerable cross-media effect was established. Figure 8.1 demonstrates the multiple means of storytelling and user participation across a variety of platforms and screens in both The War and 13 at War. The series’ websites have both been successful in engaging their respective audiences, each on their own terms. Since the start of 13 at War (both series aired

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Fig. 8.1. Multi-platform storytelling in The War and 13 at War.

on 25 October 2009), the accompanying website has been visited almost 1.4 million times. About a third of these visits (439,509) included the 13 at War online game. During the original broadcast of the series in 2009, the website had approximately 200,000 visitors, half of which (97,850) also accessed the game. The yearly amount of visits has seen a steady rise, from 448,371 in 2010, to 509,530 in 2011 and 225,827 until May 2012. The proportion of visits including the game has since declined — from almost 50% in 2009, to a third of visits in 2010 and 2011, and 20% of visits in 2012. This may be related to the fact that a new level of the online game became available after another episode had been aired, which triggered added interest in the game. The screening of 13 at War episodes in primary education may be a factor in the website’s steadily rising viewing figures. In 2009, the website featured with the series The War saw 183,465 visits, however, these numbers declined from 146,450 in 2010 to 125,166 in 2011. The first five months of 2012 nevertheless show an increased interest in the website, with 69,106 visits until May 2012.20 Towards a New TV Historiography In the Netherlands, the ‘right/wrong’ perspective adopted by De Jong has become the ‘traditional’ perspective favoured by Dutch historiography of the occupation, as well as visual representations in popular culture, such as Dutch World War II feature films.21 Whilst more ambiguous images of resistance and collaboration are featured in films like De Aanslag (The Assault, Fons Rademakers, 1986) and Zwartboek (Black Book, Paul Verhoeven, 2006), the traditional perspective is characterized by strong moralizing in terms of goed (‘right’, e.g. heroic resistance fighters) and fout (‘wrong’, e.g. Dutch Nationalist Socialist Movement (NSB) members and other brutal collaborators). The ‘right/wrong’ perspective has increasingly been utilized in an encompassing way, especially through commemoration of the persecution and murder of the Jews.22 However, it fails to cover the wide range of choices and

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motivations for people’s reactions to the German occupation and persecution of Dutch Jews. Hans Blom, historian and advisor for The War, advocated the necessity of new research questions in his 1983 inaugural lecture.23 Academic research is at present in an advanced stage, bringing new insights and nuances. However, the general public still often thinks in moralizing terms of right and wrong. Blom has argued that this exemplifies how the distance between professional historians and the Dutch general public has amplified since De Jong’s approach as ‘the people’s educator’.24 Television is a creative process in which decision-making is par for the course. From the editor-in-chief to the presenter, creators working at various stages of a programme need to deal with choices regarding the selection and narration of a particular history. According to Van Liempt, bringing novel perspectives to the attention of current audiences was the primary reason for the production of The War. The editor-in-chief recognizes that this is not an easy feat, ‘because we grew up on moralism, and besides the right/wrong distinction was a matter of life and death during the war, often literally’.25 Whilst The Occupation did not feature witness statements by ex-NSB members,26 The War focused on the complex social history and choices of victims, perpetrators, accomplices and bystanders. Examples are the persecution of the Jews by the Dutch police, the role of civil servants in assisting the German oppressors, the continuation of ‘normal life’ during war time, or the dilemmas family members faced with respect to each other’s political choices.27 In this manner, The War demonstrates how a wider variety of private forms of remembrance has become part of the public domain, and as a result provides users with a more nuanced perspective on the historical events of the Second World War. The question of why the highest number of Jewish victims of the genocide in Western Europe came from the Netherlands remains a main focus of inquiry. However, current research distinguishes large differences in survival probabilities on a municipal level, by taking into account various local inf luences and the intensity of resistance and radicalism (arguing that local resistance provoked more German activity and therefore more arrests).28 The series’ presenter and narrator, radio-, TV- and news anchor Rob Trip, guides the audience through new insights based on recent research, witness testimonies and previously unpublished archival footage. The series is principally based on the use of what the creators call ‘ego-documents’, such as diary fragments. Trip’s narration style is grounded in the visiting of various historical locations and selected eyewitnesses. Consequently, the documentary creates an opportunity for historical narratives known locally, but not nationally, to take centre stage. In this manner, the series has been able to engage the Dutch general public with new outlooks and contradictory perspectives. Audiovisual Memory and Testimony In part 5 of The War, ‘How the Jews Disappeared from the Netherlands’, the tragedy of the more than 100,000 deported and murdered Dutch Jews is analyzed. Trip questions why this number was so high in the Netherlands, and why there

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was no action to stop the genocide of the Jewish community. The series does not come up with a definitive answer — which of course cannot be given — but does ask whether people needed to know about Auschwitz to discern that things would end badly for the Jews. Principally, the diverse witness testimonies demonstrate the complexity and unstraightforwardness of how people acted in response to the deportations to the East. For example, there is the personal story of Jules Schelvis, a survivor of seven concentration and extermination camps and today an independent scholar in the field of the persecution of the Jews.29 In 1943, he was deported to Sobibor, where his wife and her family were murdered. Schelvis’s testimony evokes an (in hindsight naively) optimistic attitude: We were young, we were strong. We just didn’t believe all those stories. We knew it was going to be tough for us, but we thought we were somehow going to survive. [...] I took my guitar with me to Westerbork, and later on also on the train to Sobibor. I thought: somehow or other there would be an opportunity to sing some songs around the campfire?30

Schelvis’ witness statement conveys to viewers ‘what it was like’ at that time: many people were still unaware of what the Nazis’ Final Solution would ultimately mean.31 The art of making historical television documentaries lies in the ability to narrow down what happened in the past by visual or oral means of representation, to make this event understandable for a wide range of people — without telling falsities. Because of the dying out of eyewitnesses of the Second World War — and therefore the loss of this generation’s ‘storehouse of memories’32 — the dilemma whether or not to include talking heads in The War was considerable. In the end, the programme makers decided to include interviews with eyewitnesses sparingly, a maximum of two to three talking heads per episode.33 This choice was principally made to elevate the level of authenticity. Here it must be noted that authenticity is a ‘red herring’, as Aaron Kerner argues, because ‘there is no transparent window through which we might render the past’.34 History in itself is a redactive process: historical narratives are always a re-construction or re-presentation of past events. Memory problems, distortions, misrepresentations: all need to be taken into con­ sideration. The creators therefore selected storytellers who, like Schelvis, can be deemed to be reliable authorities regarding the subject discussed at that moment in the conversation. Such recorded acts of remembering (and simultaneously forgetting) mainly consist of very individual witness statements. To represent reality on a level beyond such individual experiences, and to include the level of military leaders since deceased, the programme makers looked to other practices. Convinced by the wealth of the Second World War diaries available in Dutch archives, and aided by historian Bart van der Boom,35 the creators of The War decided to include ‘ego-documents’ such as diary fragments and letters. Such documents further reveal that, although many people were unsure about specifics, they nevertheless suspected the horrific fate awaiting Holland’s Jews. Crucially, these documents also transmit a sense of how this felt at the time. Such emotions are clearly conveyed through diaries. Firstly, the diary of Mosche Flinker, a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy:

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Secondly, a thirty-two-year-old Jewish woman, Klaartje de Zwarte-Walvisch, described her own views based on the events in the Hollandsche Schouwburg (Dutch Theatre), the assembly point on the outskirts of the Amsterdam Jewish quarter, after she had been arrested to be set to work in Poland: I could imagine that young people were able to do the forced labour. But the people I saw coming in [...]. Old, lame and blind people; one even frailer than the other. Were these people going to do hard labour?37

The diary of De Zwarte-Walvisch, written in Vught camp between March and July 1943, was recovered during the research process for The War. The diary has subsequently been published by the creators of The War and is now in the public domain. By means of such ‘ego-documents’ that transfer audiences back into the past, the public event of the Holocaust is intensified in the context of private perspectives (and vice versa). The television makers considered the extent to which memory narratives have been affected by the passing of time and intermediate events, and also how to convey these narratives to audiences. The creators initially experimented with the narration of these diary fragments by people who had actually experienced these events. An example was the case of a woman who wrote a diary (published in the 1950s) about her personal experiences as a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl, when she was not allowed to visit the beach and was expelled from school. However, during the editing process, this type of narration turned out not to work. The programme makers eventually decided to have the diary fragments read aloud by people who could have been their authors at that time. In the case above, a girl who is actually thirteen years old is heard. The narration was not only provided by schooled voice actors, but also by more average people to portray native dialects. Van Liempt states how this practice, which is not actually authentic, brings about a heighted feeling of authenticity.38 Whilst the past cannot be represented ‘as it was’,39 past events can be mediated through the ‘performance’ of memory, as exemplified by the selection and presentation of ego-documents and talking heads. This activity is principally reinforced and expanded by means of the series’ website, where the memory texts of key individuals are featured and provided with additional content and background information. Accordingly, televisual testimonies can function as practices of cultural and personal memory, highlighting how the increasing intertwining of the public and private can provide new outlooks on past events.

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Visible Evidence The mediation of past events through memory texts is often grounded in or combined with the (re-)use of archival footage. The War provides access to history by offering viewers a visual representation of the past — to the extent that what the camera operator has filmed through the lens can serve to document a historical event. The series incorporates often never-before-seen footage, such as recently discovered colour images of forced labour in a German factory, as well as unique photographs, for instance a singular existing photograph of Reinhard Heydrich’s visit to the Netherlands a few months after the Wannsee Conference. One of the functions of the incorporation of archival footage is to convey the atmosphere of a certain period from the past, through which we learn how people felt about, or what they knew about, certain events at that time. Of course, the availability of material is of overriding importance. Since the remake of The Occupation between 1989 and 1990, a considerable amount of archival and amateur footage has been recovered. The incorporation of such images in itself re-writes history, by bringing new perceptions of past events alive on Dutch screens. Such images encourage multiple readings by audiences and stimulate historical consciousness. For instance, amateur footage of a Jewish family leaving their home for the Dutch Theatre assembly point, unsuspectingly waving to the camera, urges viewers to consider the events of the past through the eyes of people who were present. Television not only offers access to images as visible evidence, but these images also help to evoke emotions and sentiments from previous times as a historical experience. This can be especially relevant when no eyewitness accounts are available or when eyewitnesses give an uninvolved reaction. According to Gerda Jansen Hendriks, one of the directors of The War¸ this historical sensation can be provoked by even ‘the simplest cinema newsreel’.40 For instance, original commentary from another period has a very different tone and colour, and serves as an excellent way to draw people into a different time and age. In this respect, footage can evoke the feeling of the past ‘not being in the past’, for example via a photograph of Schelvis’ first wife Rachel whom he still remembers daily. The incorporated materials are also given a new dimension by their juxtaposition with audiovisual and written testimonies, voice-over narration, music and sound effects. According to Jansen Hendriks, such a ‘modern’ representation will appeal more to audiences than viewing an archival clip out of context in a film museum or on a website.41 The website of The War provides the option to ‘catch-up’ and review these materials within an existing framework, in conjunction with background information, (additional) audiovisual content and (external) links, and serves as an important platform of source criticism due to the opportunity it offers for source annotation.42 Using such a combination of textual strategies prompts viewers to identify with histories and memories on a collective as well as an affective level.

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Visualizing the Past for a Young Target Audience Whilst The War was created for a wide, general audience, 13 at War was very much a programme made for a specific target audience: children aged approximately eight to thirteen years. The series has received enthusiastic responses from many older viewers as well, as the following example demonstrates: Last Sunday I watched your first episode together with my mother, who herself was 13 years old during the Second World War. My mother is traumatized by her lost childhood [...]. She has never been able to watch films or documentaries about the war. I have convinced her to watch this series in order to come to terms with the experiences of her youth, because she never has been able to view them from an adult’s point of view. [...] And it worked. Your target audience is therefore not only 8- to 12-year-olds and older, but also very special 77- to 82-year-olds. Many, many thanks for creating this series!43

13 at War creator and editor-in-chief Hein Hoffmann describes the programme’s ‘side effect’ of having encouraged grandparents to share their war experiences with their grandchildren as ‘unexpected’, but ‘really fantastic’.44 13 at War deploys a layered narrative structure to retain the attention of its youthful target audience. The series’ objective was to acquaint a young audience with the major events that happened in the Second World War to many different people in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies, but it did narrow events down to aspects of that history, so as not to overburden children with information. In its thirteen episodes, the following historical events and subjects took precedence: the Rotterdam bombardment; the occupation of the Netherlands by the Germans in May 1940; the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB); ‘England sailors’, men or women who made the dangerous crossing to England; betrayal and armed resistance; the prosecution of Jewish people living in the Netherlands and genocide; the Battle of Arnhem; the Dutch famine of 1944; the war in the Dutch East Indies, focusing on the Japanese occupation and the circumstances of Dutch families who were forced to live in camps; the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945; and the aftermath of war in the Netherlands. The series is presented from historical locations by Lisa Wade, who is best known for presenting Het Klokhuis (NTR, 1988-), a Dutch knowledge-based and satirical children’s programme, and includes a voice-over commentary by director Marcel Goedhart. Their main goal is to transfer historical information in a comprehensible way that makes the message ‘stick’, such as using clear dialogue, placing enlarged photographs of key figures in the frame, and by means of Wade’s ‘visual’ presentation. For instance, Wade explains how little room there was in a train wagon for people who were being deported to concentration camps by taking off her jacket, placing it in front of the train wagon in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and proceeding to stand on it, visualizing the space for two people with no room to sit or lie down. The series also incorporates archival footage to offer a visual representation of the historical events described, and deliberately excludes talking heads. Finally, each episode presents a certain aspect of the war in a fictionalized narrative. The Holocaust and its aftermath are principally represented in storylines concerning twelve-year-old Kaat van Gennep, a Jewish

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girl living in Amsterdam whose parents and elder sister are arrested; thirteen-yearold Roos van Gennep, Kaat’s sister, who is awaiting deportation from Westerbork along with her parents; and thirteen-year-old David, a Jewish boy who returns to The Hague after the war from the concentration camp Auschwitz. In the 13 at War online game, storylines of particular characters are further developed. For instance, Kaat van Gennep’s circumstances after her family’s deportation remain unclear in the TV series. However, in the game she is reunited with her aunt and goes into hiding. The stories of these fictional characters are extended beyond the level of the broadcast drama sequences, creating a trans-media story world in which historical events experienced from the perspective of a child via TV drama and online game play characterize what it was like to grow up during the war. Similarly to The War, 13 at War utilizes war diaries — in this case children’s — as important sources of historical information. Instead of providing a clearcut ‘cause’ and subsequent ‘effect’, or a clear distinction between perpetrators and heroes, the series provides a more nuanced view of accepted versions of history or the ‘consensus’ about the past. Documentary scenes and dramatized narratives demonstrate how during the war ‘life goes on’ as well as the friction of war time. One could debate whether such a tone is suitable for the young target audience. Whilst the series contains no shocking imagery, the archival images of prisoners behind barbed wire, as well as images of the many suitcases, heaps of hair, and piles of photos left after the mass extermination are very evocative. The dangerous atmosphere of wartime, and the fear of being caught or killed, is also present in the drama scenes. The scene in which a young Jewish girl and her mother are standing shivering in the Auschwitz ‘shower cabins’ is disconcerting and forces the audience to imagine themselves in their position. Both Van Liempt and Hoffmann praise the ‘no nonsense’ direction practised by co-editor-in-chief Loes Wormmeester, who argues that there are worse things in life than a child being kept awake at night by events that happened in the past — what is more, that may actually be a good thing.45 This imperative is also represented in the overall matter-of-fact tone of the series: [W]e also wanted to be realistic in our terminologies, right, we wanted to talk about Jews who were murdered. Not Jews who vanished [...]. No. [...] That sort of thing.46

The series represents in various instances the terror and fear that children and adults experienced during the occupation and genocide, and young viewers are allowed to be frightened. When a narrative is brought to a young audience in such a visual manner, they will most likely retain an interest in the events showed on screen, and are better able to grasp and remember what they are told. Imagining the Past: Historical Drama The fictionalized sequences are vital here, because these scenes picture events that could have happened in private and domestic contexts, and that are usually not captured in archival footage. An example is the story of David, the thirteen-yearold Jewish boy, who returns from the concentration camp Auschwitz. His whole

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Fig. 8.2. Drama in 13 at War, dir. Marcel Goedhart, Hein Hoffmann, and Vincent Schuurman (2009–10): episode 13, ‘After the War’. Courtesy of NTR. DVD capture.

family has been murdered. However, it is apparent that no one is interested in him upon arrival in The Hague. His parents’ house has been sold to a woman named Christina. The Dutchman who promised to look after the family’s valuables returns only one silver platter to him, instead of the whole lot. This man mutters: ‘Of all people “my” Jews return’.47 The episode also deploys f lashbacks when David recalls his family’s capture by the Germans. A girl living across the street from where they were hiding tells him that they were betrayed. David later encounters a police officer on the street who was present during their capture, who tells him: ‘It was not my fault, I was just doing my job’.48 When David returns to his old house, Christina, the woman who now owns his parents’ house, and the Canadian soldier she is dating, walk by. The Canadian invites David for supper. David recollects that Christina was also present at his capture. He asks her why she betrayed them: did she want their house or did she not like his mother? Christina sends him away and instructs him never to return. David encounters the girl he met earlier on the street, and tells her: ‘They forgot about me’.49 She shares one of her apples with him and they eat in silence (Figure 8.2; note that the pillar on the left is covered in missing person pamphlets). The goal of these dramatized narratives is to let the audience experience and imagine how events felt at the time. Therefore, the stories are made easily accessible by focusing on very personal situations of children who are of the same age as the target audience, and by shooting the drama scenes in an attractive cinematic style, characterized by narrative linearity. By experiencing these historical events through the eyes of a young person, young viewers are better able to connect to, understand and be aware of the events that happened at this time — and why it is important to remember these events today. For this purpose, the protagonists do not necessarily need to be ‘real’ people who actually lived. The performances in the

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programme combine history with memory and offer us what Winter has defined as ‘truth statements rather than true statements’.50 As a result, the programme’s representation of canonized history can be put into action in schools. By seeing and further discussing this programme, young people can scrutinize their own values and are made better aware of the significance of remembering these events. Tinted History Archival footage is incorporated to offer a visual representation of the described historical events. How can such footage engage young audiences? In the case of 13 at War, audiovisual materials are tinted. Due to the costs of tinting, only a small amount of images are tinted per episode, but this practice is implemented because the young target audience is most likely to connect less with black-and-white imagery, or may not be able to ‘grasp’ it. Hoffmann ref lects upon his own children’s reaction to archival footage: [T]hey always ask: ‘Did this really happen? Is it really true? Did they not have colour [film] back then?’ [...] They cannot really place it.51 (my italics)

By means of this highlighting technique, objects or items that have an important historical significance contrast sharply with the rest of the footage. For example, black-and-white footage of a Jewish woman being forced to wear a Star of David is shown (Figure 8.3). The yellow-tinted star makes her stand out, which highlights the feeling of this woman being singled out (the stills discussed appear in this volume entirely in black-and-white). However, the tinting technique is also used to emphasize elements within the archival images that are visually interesting. An example is the red- and yellow-tinted mitre of Saint Nicholas (Figure 8.4) during

Fig. 8.3. Woman with yellow-tinted Star of David in 13 at War, dir. Marcel Goedhart, Hein Hoffmann, and Vincent Schuurman (2009–10): episode 6, ‘Jews’. Courtesy of Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. DVD capture.

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Fig. 8.4. The figure of Saint Nicholas, with red- and yellow-tinted mitre, in 13 at War, dir. Marcel Goedhart, Hein Hoffmann, and Vincent Schuurman (2009–10): episode 2, ‘Occupation’. Courtesy of Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. DVD capture.

a procession as part of the national feast day that is very popular with children. The mitre playfully stands out, but also illustrates that such celebrations continued and life went on despite the war. This image is an indication of both the historical interests of the programme and its youthful target audience. The eye-catching use of tinted highlights in the archival footage also ‘triggers’ the target audience to pay attention. In a shot from the ‘Westerbork-film’ by Rudolf Breslauer,52 Settela Steinbach’s scarf has been tinted white-yellow (Figure 8.5). Although Steinbach’s historical significance is not made explicit here — unlike in the accompanying book53 — the tinting prompts the young audience to take extra notice of her, hinting at her historical importance. Therefore, when young audiences encounter Settela at a later time in another film, book, or video project, they are more likely to remember her. The Settela-with-the-tinted-headscarf represents one of many, echoing her own position as the ‘face’ of Holocaust victims. The use of colour amongst a dark mise-en-scène can also be compared to the motif of ‘the little girl in the red coat’ in Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), evoking a strong emotional reaction. However, the use of tinting is not purely affective in 13 at War, but also historically significant and playful. This practice caused surprised reactions amongst the more mature viewers. For example, many people were astonished to learn that the German aeroplanes often featured in iconic archival images were as a matter of fact coloured green with yellow. As a historical documentary, 13 at War differentiates itself from fictional pro­ gramming in objective, purpose and the type of audience expectations it cultivates through its deployment of archival material as ‘discourse of sobriety’.54 The reports by Wade and Goedhart affirm the factual voice and nature of the programme. The presenter, voice-over narrator and archival material all commit themselves to the demands of historical accuracy. The dramatized narratives offer an interpretation

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Fig. 8.5. Settela Steinbach, with tinted headscarf, in 13 at War, dir. Marcel Goedhart, Hein Hoffmann, and Vincent Schuurman (2009–10): episode 8, ‘Destruction’. Courtesy of Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. DVD capture.

of the central historical events, from the perspective of a child. Although the drama in 13 at War is inspired by and based on actual events, there is no evidence provided for the actual existence of the various protagonists. The programme makers’ premise is that it could have happened. As a result, the archival material generally affirms normative collective history from a Dutch national perspective, whilst the dramatized scenes offer room for recognizing and understanding the historical events through the eyes of a young person. This narrative format serves as a powerful tool to convey historical content and to stimulate remembrance. Educational Gaming: ‘What Would You Do in a Time of War?’ To improve the young audience’s ability to imagine or immerse themselves in the depicted historical situations, the 13 at War online game and website (Figures 8.6, 8.7 and 8.8), designed by IJsfontein Interactive Media, were promoted at the end of each broadcast by Wade as follows: ‘What would you do in a time of war? Go on the warpath on our website and experience this yourself!’. The game is an interactive quest in keeping with the content, situations, locations and characters from the series. The ‘look’ of the game resembles a diorama, in which the various locations and characters are composed from photographs. This is the first educational online game about the Second World War for Dutch children. The game is played as a narrative, in which the main objective is to find your father who has been missing since the Rotterdam bombardment. In the course of achieving this aim, the player must make choices, face challenges (such as finding a hiding place for Jewish refugees), examine objects and recover information, whilst playfully learning factual knowledge about historical events in addition to the broadcast episodes. A new level of the online game became available after the accompanying episode had been aired, which makes the most of the serial nature of the TV series.

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Fig. 8.6. 13 at War website. Courtesy of IJsfontein Interactive Media and NTR. Website capture.

Fig. 8.7. 13 at War game. Courtesy of IJsfontein Interactive Media and NTR. Website capture.

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Fig. 8.8. 13 at War game. Courtesy of IJsfontein Interactive Media and NTR. Website capture.

The game evokes the excitement, but even more so the dilemmas of wartime. Players are required to imagine how they would respond to certain situations in a time of war, such as if they would take something from an abandoned house of murdered Jews, or how wearing a Star of David affects which areas of a city they can access. Information or help from other people requires a favour in return, but may affect the player later on in the game. The player faces various problems and choices, and struggles with what is right or wrong, or whom they can trust. For example, when joining the Dutch resistance the player is made to doubt the correctness of their actions in view of their consequences: the more you rebel against the Germans, the more innocent people are arrested in retaliation. The sight of an increasing number of innocent people held captive in the prison courtyard visualizes this dilemma. The plot and goal of the game is easy to understand, and historical information is incorporated in a logical manner — for example, when arriving in England, you must prove your Dutch nationality by means of knowledge of events like the 1940 Rotterdam bombardment and the 1941 February Strike. Ultimately, the game results in a trial where the player needs to account for his or her actions, as several witnesses give evidence in court. When acquitted and reunited with your father you receive the ultimate reward: being able to go home. The game emphasizes the fundamental principle of the series that children need to experience and imagine themselves what growing up was like in times of war and genocide, as well as providing a more nuanced perspective on historical events. By creating a trans-media story universe with common characters, young TV users are motivated to connect content from the TV series to the game and vice versa, resulting in a richer and most likely more satisfying learning experience. These additional historical frameworks provided through a multi-platform approach need

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to be regarded as an integral and necessary part of television in today’s multi-media landscape. Conclusion This study demonstrates how profoundly the issue of whether the Holocaust can be represented, and even more so through the medium of television and linked plat­ forms, is connected to questioning the approaches media producers may undertake. As I have discussed, in the case of bringing this complex history to Dutch audiences in The War and 13 at War, different choices and selections are made for different target groups. These programmes are not a primary source, but represent and perform history and memory to large audiences in a comprehensible manner, stimulating historical consciousness and multiple readings. Several of the images and histories that are (re-)shown and (re-)told in these historical programmes may already be familiar to us. The image of Settela Stein­ bach in 13 at War is a prime example. This image from Breslauer’s so-called ‘Wester­bork-film’, filmed on 19 May 1944, has become an iconic symbol of the Holocaust and victims of Nazi persecution. Hoskins has argued that in our con­ temporary environment, defining images of a moment or event are overexposed and (sometimes instantaneously) rendered iconic, as ‘[t]he repetition, replaying and republication of an image or series of images, and its accumulation of captions, contexts, and narratives, smothers it so that much of its original meaning is leached out’.55 However, rather than rendering images less meaningful — and therefore less capable of memory — by textual strategies of re-use, I argue that by placing previously transmitted and archival footage within new interpretative frameworks, past events as well as past television can gain new levels of meaning for television viewers. Television users always ‘assimilate’ images ‘as best they can to pre-existing images and narratives’,56 and therefore the reviewing and remembering of previously transmitted and archival images opens up new important opportunities for ref lection and recollection. This is especially the case in The War, which invites new perspectives and incorporates often never before seen audiovisual materials and ‘ego-documents’, and 13 at War, whose young target audience will most likely not be familiar with the images shown. By means of the performance of memory in both projects, the consensus of history is deconstructed, re-written and expanded by a variety of memory texts. As multi-platform documentary projects, The War and 13 at War provide interpretive frameworks for shaping memory and historical consciousness of ‘holocaustal events’ of occupation, persecution and mass murder. Past events are mediated through the performance of a range of memory texts, from audiovisual and written testimony to the televizing of new historical perspectives, which blur the boundaries between public and private history and memory. By means of documentary programming, online websites, books and educational gaming practices, audiences can access, experience, discuss and exchange memory materials on a variety of platforms and screens. Characterized by a constant process of cultural negotiation, multi-platform TV documentary therefore demonstrates

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the increasingly networked nature of cultural memory of the Holocaust. It can be argued that this broader trend is visible beyond the Dutch context in cross-domain portals like Europeana57 and EUscreen,58 which transcend national connotations. Such projects offer opportunities for the creative re-use of archival materials and are an extension of televisual forms of re-screening. The War and 13 at War have provided people with the opportunity to discuss their memories with their family, and have even been a stimulus for people in opening up about traumatic events experienced during the occupation. Active remembering in this sense includes multi-platform storytelling: the selection and re-framing of memory texts by programme makers, as well as the interaction of television users — for instance, by means of user generated content in online gaming or website discussions. Such practices not only perform and help to preserve the past, but also present us with possible new forms of neglect. For instance, we need to take into consideration how future technological incompatibilities and the reduced circulation or removal of online materials can result in new forms of forgetting in the multi-platform era. Consequently, television today functions as a contemporary agent in the performance of cultural memory of the Holocaust, by transporting and re-contextualizing memory through a network of dynamic and mediated screen practices. Films, television programmes and websites 13 in de Oorlog (13 at War), dir. Marcel Goedhart, Hein Hoffmann, and Vincent Schuurman (NPS, 2009–10) 13 in de Oorlog Homepage [accessed 28 May 2012] De Aanslag (The Assault), dir. Fons Rademakers (Cannon, 1986) De Bezetting (The Occupation), dir. Milo Anstadt (NTS, 1960–65) De Bezetting (The Occupation) (remake), dir. Rob Swanenburg (NOS, 1989–1990) Europeana Homepage [accessed 27 May 2012] EUscreen Homepage [accessed 27 May 2012] De Oorlog (The War), dir. Matthijs Cats, Gerda Jansen Hendriks, Dirk Jan Roeleven and Godfried van Run (NPS, 2009) De Oorlog Homepage [accessed 28 May 2012] Schindler’s List, dir. Steven Spielberg (Universal, 1993) The Secret Annex Online [accessed 28 May 2012] Zwartboek (Black Book), dir. Paul Verhoeven (A-film, 2006)

Notes to Chapter 8 I would like to thank Sonja de Leeuw, Eggo Müller and the editors of this volume for their valuable comments. I would also like to thank the The War and 13 at War creators for their participation in interviews. 1. Sarah Farmer, ‘Going Visual: Holocaust Representation and Historical Method’, The American Historical Review, 115 (2010), 115–22. 2. Hayden White, ‘The Modernist Event’, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, ed. by Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 17–38 (p. 20). 3. Andrew Hoskins, ‘Signs of the Holocaust: Exhibiting Memory in a Mediated Age’, Media, Culture and Society, 25 (2003), 7–22 (p. 8).

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4. Since 1 September 2010, public service broadcasters NPS, Teleac and RVU have merged in the NTR (NPS/Teleac/RVU), the Dutch public service broadcaster specializing in information, education and culture. In the Dutch public service broadcasting system, the NTR is one of the largest broadcasters with a statutory public service mission. Both series were sponsored by the project ‘Erfgoed van de Oorlog’ [‘Heritage of the War’] of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, and the V-fund, the National Fund for Freedom and Veterans Care. See: ‘About NTR’, NTR Homepage [accessed 25 May 2012]; ‘Erfgoed van de Oorlog’, Rijksoverheid Homepage [accessed 25 May 2012]; ‘V-fonds, Nationaal Fonds voor Vrijheid en Veteranenzorg’, V-fonds Homepage [accessed 25 May 2012]. 5. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 3. 6. Aleida Assmann, ‘Re-framing Memory: Between Individual and Collective Forms of Constructing the Past’, in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. by Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree, and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), pp. 35–50 (p. 39). 7. ‘Memory seems to play no role in television, commercial or otherwise (or, I am tempted to say, in postmodernism generally): nothing here haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the manner of the great moments of film.’ Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 70–71. 8. Stephen Bertman, Cultural Amnesia: America’s Future and the Crisis of Memory (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), p. 85. 9. Mimi White, ‘The Attractions of Television: Reconsidering Liveness’, in MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age, ed. by Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 75–91 (p. 79). 10. The Secret Annex Online [accessed 28 May 2012]. 11. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 124–50. 12. Gary R. Edgerton, ‘Introduction: Television as Historian: A Different Kind of History Altogether’, in Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, ed. by Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 1–16 (p. 4). 13. Aleida Assmann, ‘The Holocaust − a Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community’, in Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, ed. by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 97–117 (p. 112). 14. Jay Winter, ‘The Performance of the Past: Memory, History, Identity’, in Performing the Past, pp. 11–23 (p. 11). 15. Bill Nichols has defined documentary as representing reality, since the act of representing the reality of a subject covers a whole complex of relationships, including reporting, engaging in dialogue with, investigating, observing, interpreting and ref lecting on that subject: documentaries represent the historical world by shaping a photographic record of some aspect of the world from a distinct perspective. See Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (‌Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 12–31. 16. Historian Loe de Jong’s The Occupation provided Dutch audiences with the first national perspective on the Second World War. De Jong is the author of the standard work on the Second World War in the Netherlands, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (The Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Second World War) (’s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1969–1994) in fourteen parts. For more on The Occupation as national historiography, see amongst others: Chris Vos, Televisie en bezetting: Een onderzoek naar de documentaire verbeelding van de Tweede Wereldoorlog in Nederland (Hilversum: Verloren, 1995), pp. 76–113; Frank van Vree, ‘Televisie en de geschiedschrijving van de Tweede Wereldoorlog’, Theoretische geschiedenis 22 (1995), 1–26. 17. De Oorlog Homepage [accessed 28 May 2012]; 13 in de Oorlog Homepage [accessed 28 May 2012]. 18. Hein Hoffmann, 13 in de Oorlog: hoe kinderen de Tweede Wereldoorlog beleefden (13 at War: How

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Children Experienced the Second World War) (Amsterdam: Balans, 2010); Ad van Liempt, De Oorlog (The War) (Amsterdam: Balans, 2009). 19. Derivative products are for example newly recovered and published materials, such as the war diary of Klaartje de Zwarte-Walvisch which was discovered during the research process and published for its historical value. For students in the final grade of primary education the ‘Vroeger & Zo’ workbook to accompany the series 13 at War was created for Teleac School TV. ‘Vroeger & Zo’ is freely translated as ‘Old times and things like that’. See Klaartje de Zwarte, Alles ging aan flarden: het oorlogsdagboek van Klaartje de Zwarte-Walvisch (Amsterdam: Balans, 2009); Erik Appelman, Kristel Schets, and Willem van der Spek, Vroeger & Zo Speciaal (Teleac/NPS, 2010). 20. Source statistics: NTR. 21. See, for example Wendy Burke, ‘A Dutch Occupation: The Representation of World War Two in Films from the Netherlands 1962 to 1986’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, York St. John University, 2009). 22. Ido de Haan, ‘Failures and Mistakes: Images of Collaboration in Post-war Dutch Society’, in Collaboration with the Nazis: Public Discourse after the Holocaust, ed. by Roni Stauber (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 71–90 (p. 81). 23. Hans Blom, In de ban van goed en fout? Wetenschappelijke geschiedschrijving over de bezettingstijd in Nederland, Inaugural lecture, University of Amsterdam, 12 December 1983. 24. Hans Blom, Een kwart eeuw later: Nog altijd in de ban van goed en fout?, Valedictory lecture, University of Amsterdam, 19 April 2007. 25. Ad van Liempt, ‘Avontuur’, NTR De Oorlog Homepage , 16 December 2008 [accessed 20 May 2012]. Recent research includes: Gerard Aalders, Roof, de ontvreemding van joods bezit tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (The Hague: Sdu, 1999); Bart van der Boom, ‘We leven nog’: De stemming in bezet Nederland (Amsterdam: Boom, 2003); Chris van der Heijden, Grijs verleden: Nederland en de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam: Contact, 2001); Bert-Jan Flim, Omdat hun hart sprak: Geschiedenis van de georganiseerde hulp aan Joodse kinderen in Nederland, 1942–1945 (Kampen: Kok, 1996); Aad Jongbloed, Standort Holland, Duitse soldaten over hun oorlogstijd in Nederland (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1995); Guus Meershoek, De dienaren van het gezag: De Amsterdamse politie tijdens de bezetting (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1999); Bob Moore, Slachtoffers en overlevenden: De nazi-vervolging van de joden in Nederland (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1998); Peter Romijn, Burgemeesters in Oorlogstijd: Besturen onder Duitse bezetting (Amsterdam: Balans, 2006); Anna Timmerman, Machteloos? Ooggetuigen van de jodenvervolging (Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 2007). 26. According to De Jong, it would be unfair to audiences to feature witness statements by ex-NSB members. At this point in time, not two decades had passed since the liberation and the abhorrence of collaborators. See also Loe de Jong, Herinneringen (The Hague: Sdu, 1993). 27. The series has received criticism from Elsbeth Etty for being too hesitant in the representation of resistance heroes. Ad van Liempt has argued that this is a consequence of the series’ objective to bring lesser-known aspects of the occupation to light, as well as the strict selection process for The War, which consists of nine episodes and is therefore less exhaustive than De Jong’s The Occupation. See: Elsbeth Etty, ‘De normgevende herinnering’, NRC Handelsblad, 15 December 2009; Ad van Liempt, ‘Je moet het zo sec mogelijk presenteren’, Het Parool, 2 May 2011. 28. ‘Overlevingskansen per gemeente’, NTR De Oorlog Homepage, 2009 [accessed 28 May 2012]; Marnix Croes and Peter Tammes, Gif laten wij niet voortbestaan: Een onderzoek naar de overlevingskansen van Joden in de Nederlandse gemeenten 1940–1945 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2004). 29. See for example Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp (Oxford and New York: Berg / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2007). 30. Schelvis narrates his personal experiences in The War part 5, ‘How the Jews Disappeared from the Netherlands’, and his story is further expanded on the series’ website. Cited in ‘Onvoorstelbaar’, The War Homepage [accessed 28 May 2012], trans. by Berber Hagedoorn. 31. By comparison, see my analysis of the Peereboom family films in Péter Forgács’s The Maelstrom: Berber Hagedoorn, ‘ “Look What I Found!”: (Re)crossing Boundaries between Public/Private

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History and Biography/Autobiography in Péter Forgács’s The Maelstrom’, Studies in Documentary Film, 3.2 (2009), 177–92 (pp. 181–84). 32. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, trans. by Assenka Oksiloff (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), p. 133. 33. Historians, professionals and experts are consulted in the production process, and function as an important source of information. However, professionals are preferably not featured as ‘talking heads’. 34. Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 15. 35. On the basis of war diaries, historian Bart van der Boom (Leiden University) researches what the Dutch people thought of the fate of Jews during the occupation. See: Bart van der Boom, ‘Wij weten niets van hun lot’: Gewone Nederlanders en de Holocaust (Amsterdam: Boom, 2012). 36. Cited in ‘Hoe de Joden uit Nederland verdwenen’, De Oorlog part 5, dir. Matthijs Cats (NPS, 22 November 2009), trans. by Berber Hagedoorn. 37. Cited in ‘Hoe de Joden uit Nederland verdwenen’. 38. Ad van Liempt, personal interview (Utrecht, 9 June 2011). 39. Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 8–9. 40. Gerda Jansen Hendriks, personal interview (Hilversum, 16 May 2011). 41. Ibid. 42. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have demonstrated that the display of images and icons of the Holocaust experience without specific information about the production context may gain viewers’ sympathetic attention, but obstructs engagement with the more complex visual and historical landscape of the Holocaust. See Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, ‘Incongruous Images: “Before, During, and After” the Holocaust’, in Performing the Past, pp. 147–74 (p. 172–73). 43. E-mail from viewer (name withheld), 27 October 2009, trans. by Berber Hagedoorn. 44. Hein Hoffmann, personal interview (Hilversum, 5 October 2011). 45. Ad van Liempt, personal interview; Hein Hoffmann, personal interview. 46. Hein Hoffmann, personal interview. 47. Cited in ‘Na de Oorlog’, 13 in de Oorlog part 13, dir. Hein Hoffmann and Vincent Schuurman (NPS, 17 January 2010), trans. by Berber Hagedoorn. 48. Cited in ‘Na de Oorlog’, trans. by Berber Hagedoorn. 49. Ibid. 50. Jay Winter, ‘The Performance of the Past: Memory, History, Identity’, in Performing the Past, pp. 11–23 (p. 13). 51. Hein Hoffmann, personal interview. 52. See also Laura Rascaroli’s contribution to this volume on Harun Farocki’s Respite. 53. Hein Hoffmann, 13 in de Oorlog, p. 159. 54. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 29. 55. Andrew Hoskins, ‘The Mediatisation of Memory’, in Save As... Digital Memories, ed. by Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 27–43 (pp. 35–36). 56. ‘People do not simply “consume” images in the way in which, say, they buy a bar of chocolate. As in any reading, they assimilate them as best they can to pre-existing images and narratives.’ Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory. Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), p. 271. 57. Europeana enables people to explore the digital resources of Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. Europeana Homepage [accessed 27 May 2012]. 58. EUscreen offers free online access to videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives. EUscreen Homepage [accessed 27 May 2012].

PA RT V

v

Between Genocides

C h ap t e r 9

v

Cambodian Genocide Ethics and Aesthetics in the Cinema of Rithy Panh Annette Hamilton Over the past decade there has been renewed critical consideration of the rel­ ationship between cinema, ethics and aesthetics. A debate carried forward largely in European, especially French, scholarship, has begun to intersect with work on trauma produced in the US, especially following the publication of a series of works concerned with traumatic memory and visual culture.1 Many of these trauma-related studies are attuned to the ethical import of the formal properties of the moving image. Another key issue in North American debates over the ethics of representation in documentary cinema since the 1970s at least has been the legal, moral and ethical consequences of film-makers’ modes of interacting with their subjects and the rights of those filmed to privacy, security and dignity.2 In the European context, the debate has been informed by contemporary philosophy and addresses the ethics of the visual, the consequences of its forms, and strategies in cinematic (and photographic) representation. Can and should film bear witness to extreme violence? The ethics and epistemology of Holocaust films are core concerns of Libby Saxton’s remarkable study.3 She traces the debates around the ethics of witness and the traditional moral prohibitions on the representation of genocide, and highlights growing critical skepticism towards the idea that the Holocaust is beyond representation. If this notion is increasingly untenable, how can events at the extreme be appropriately represented? A ‘properly ethical confrontation with the event’ requires that film as a mode of historical documentation and enquiry negotiate not just the existence, but also the absence, of certain kinds of images. In the case of Holocaust representation, it is the lack of visual records depicting the ‘epicentre of the event’ which has preoccupied recent debates in France:4 the total absence of Nazi-era images showing the working gas chambers.5 The ethical and epistemological status of archival images informs the dispute between Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lanzmann, a debate which has been central to the French scholarship on the subject. Godard has argued that it is necessary and right to show even the most brutal and repellent images. In contrast, Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) was constructed in order to demonstrate that witness testimony

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could stand alone without relying on the display of images of extremity, which Lanzmann has seen as implying a perverse complicity with the act of perpetration. At the centre of the debate is the ‘pellicule maudite’, the supposed film which some believe may have been shot inside a gas chamber. Holocaust cinema has long been haunted by this ultimate moment, the events inside the closed chambers as the poison gas poured in and the prisoners died in unspeakable torment.6 In the absence of such images, as well as the scarcity of Nazi-era images showing genocidal atrocities more generally, documentary filmmakers must find alternative strategies to bear witness to the events. Lanzmann interviews survivors of the Sonderkommandos and others who are first hand witnesses. Other filmmakers combine the words of witnesses with archival images. The abundant images of the Nazi period have offered extensive scope for documentaries to supplement witness testimonies with ‘authentic’ imagery, creating an expectation that this is what a documentary about genocide will do. But in the case of some genocides, this strategy is not possible. This chapter examines a case in point: visual representations of the Cambodian ‘genocide’ and the entire period of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979), of which there is remarkably little visual record either in photography or film. Recon­ structions of the era must rely significantly on other forms of representation, and recycle repeatedly and usually out of context the few fragments of film which are available in the public archives. The chapter will consider the Khmer Rouge-related documentaries of Cambodian-born, French-educated filmmaker Rithy Panh in the light of the debates about the ethics and aesthetics of cinematic representation and the visual archive of the Holocaust outlined above.7 It will suggest that in these films, the dearth of photographic and filmic records is both highlighted and overcome by the use of artist-survivor Vann Nath, his remarkable body of oil paintings about the Tuol Sleng Interrogation Centre and his role in re-enactments of the past by both victims and perpetrators.8 The presence in the films of Vann Nath, his paintings and elements of re-staging provide the embodied authenticity on which documentary film about genocide depends. The centrality of Vann Nath’s image-making in Rithy Panh’s work, and his participation as witness and producer of dialogue with perpetrators, creates a strange ethical paradox: the closer the images and text take the viewer to an encounter with the guards and torturers, the more we are led to understand their point of view, namely, that they were themselves victims of the regime. In spite of Vann Nath’s best efforts they never conceded responsibility for their actions. This leaves a profound ethical question at the conclusion of the films: whose responsibility was it? Could the viewers of the films themselves be asked to take responsibility? Or is it, as Alvin Lim suggests, a particularly vivid example of radical contingency?9 Cambodia is generally considered a site of genocide, but the limited historical record has led to a high degree of uncertainty about the status of the many first-hand oral and written accounts which form the basis of contemporary understandings of the period. These are now very numerous, including a wide range of memoirs, some co-written with a Westerner, others written in Khmer and published in various translations. But the film record is meagre. For the entire Khmer Rouge

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era, there are probably only a little over one hundred pieces of film, some of them very short and all of them made by or at the instigation of the regime. It seems that no personally owned cameras or film survived the first days when the city people were forcibly evacuated to distant rural areas. It was not possible for people to take pictures in the labour camps and smuggle them out, because there was no ‘outside’: Cambodia was almost entirely sealed off along all its borders. There seems to have been some interaction between the south-eastern zones and Vietnam, but this did not include the transport of film or photography. In the first two years the regime made films of many key events, for example, the visits by foreign dignitaries from other socialist bloc countries such as Yugoslavia, Laos and China. Later at least one full-length professionally made and edited film was created and shown in Paris, apparently for the purpose of demonstrating that socialist Cambodia was functional and civilized but was being threatened by the Vietnamese.10 After the regime fell in 1979 still and moving images were taken by the Viet­ namese cameramen who accompanied the army invading Phnom Penh, including at the Tuol Sleng Interrogation Centre. The buildings had been hastily evacuated. Some prisoners had been executed just hours before and were found tied to the bare bedsteads. In their haste to leave, the prison officials had failed to remove thousands of files and black and white portrait photographs of prisoners. Many of the photographs had become separated from the files to which they were originally attached, making it impossible to determine the identity of many of those pictured. Banks of these photographs are still exhibited in Tuol Sleng, now the Genocide Museum, are widely shown in documentary films and appear on many websites.11

Fig. 9.1. Vann Nath looking at the portrait photos from Tuol Sleng. S-21, dir. Rithy Panh (2003). DVD capture.

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There is no film or photographic record of the later years of the Khmer Rouge regime in the countryside, at a time when famine was prevalent and thousands were dying of untreated diseases. Thus, arguably in part because of the availability of images related to them, the key sites on which memorialization and historical representation of the regime have focused have been the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the ‘Killing Fields’ at Choeung Ek, where the prisoners from Tuol Sleng were taken for execution after their torture and interrogation.12 The portrait photos from Tuol Sleng are also shown at considerable length in Rithy Panh’s Bophana (1996) and S-21 (2003), as discussed below. It is generally thought that around 1.7 million died during the four years of Khmer Rouge rule.13 In Tuol Sleng, probably around 17,000 were imprisoned and killed. Most of the rest of the victims died of starvation, overwork and lack of medical care in the distant countryside. Was this a genocide? According to the generally accepted United Nations definition of 1948, it was not. While members of ethnic minorities (the Muslim Cham, the long-settled Sino-Vietnamese, Thais and others) were certainly subject to genocidal policies, most of the victims of the regime were fellow Cambodians of Khmer ethnicity. Many were Khmer Rouge officials and cadres, purged in waves as the regime failed and sought scapegoats. They were accused of treason, of being CIA or KGB, or covert Vietnamese agents. The city people were tarnished with cosmopolitanism and colonialism, while political enemies were not regarded as ‘authentic Khmer’ by virtue of the fact that they had betrayed the revolution.14 Nevertheless the use of the term ‘genocide’ to describe the regime’s crimes has by now become widespread and internationally accepted, and I will continue to use the term here, while recognizing the legitimate debates about Cambodia’s comparability with the European Holocaust.15 By the fall of the regime in January 1979 there were very few survivors of the Tuol Sleng prison. Only seven were still alive in 1980.16 One of these, Vann Nath, a painter, became the public face of the survivors at the Genocide Museum established by the Vietnamese-led government at the former prison site. He spent many months painting images of the appalling tortures which took place there, to be displayed to a horrified national and international public. These images remain on display in the museum today, and reproductions are widely circulated and readily available on the internet. Vann Nath was asked to host meetings with distinguished foreign visitors and was sought out by filmmaker Rithy Panh. Rithy Panh’s Documentary Cinema Rithy Panh has developed a style of realist, almost ethnographic, filmmaking and has supported the creation of an ethically-based cinema in Cambodia. He is also the most internationally inf luential and widely recognised Cambodian filmmaker today.17 In addition, he has become a powerful cultural representative of those supporting memorial investigation of the Cambodian historical record. In spite of decades of international effort to bring the remaining Khmer Rouge leadership to justice, there has been only one ‘trial’, that of Kaing Guek Eav (also known as ‘Duch’), the Director of Tuol Sleng (S-21). Rithy Panh’s films, and his

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own testimony, played a significant role in the outcome.18 He has argued that mourning is not possible until ‘political responsibility for the Cambodian genocide is established’.19 His revelatory film techniques have had a powerful impact on the representation of Cambodian history and memory. Given his life experiences, it is hard to imagine that he has not been inf luenced by seminal documentary films relating to the Holocaust, such as Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998) and Lanzmann’s Shoah. However, other than a passing reference to his familiarity with Resnais’s films there is nothing in his quite extensive published writings about his filmmaking which confirms a conscious and direct connection.20 Rithy Panh left Cambodia at the age of fifteen, the only member of his family to have survived the genocide. His middle-class family had been deported to a rural village. His father, originally a primary school teacher and school inspector, had committed suicide by refusing to eat. One after another, his mother, sisters and nephews had died of hunger and exhaustion and he was forced to undertake traumatic tasks such as carrying corpses.21 Arriving in a refugee camp in Thailand, he wanted to forget. He was able to obtain residence in France where he rejected his Khmer identity, speaking only French and avoiding any link with Cambodia. Survivor’s guilt engulfed him. Later, he learned to speak Khmer again and accept what had happened. He went to film school in Paris and returned to Cambodia in 1990 after eleven years in exile, hoping to find survivors from his family and recover the remains of the dead so their souls could be reincarnated and stop wandering the earth. Tuol Sleng was by then well established as the Genocide Museum and Rithy Panh went there hoping to find a photo of his uncle. At first he felt unable to go in, but in 1991 he managed to overcome his anxieties, and began to examine the photographs and the voluminous records. It was during this research period that he met Vann Nath who was to become so central to his testimonial cinema.22 The consequences of the Khmer Rouge years have never left Rithy Panh. He has converted this traumatic residue into a dedication not only to ‘setting the record straight’ through presenting historical facts, but also to creating the conditions for testimony and experiential communication. His distinctive technical and narrative approach works through words and actions, using a dialogic strategy, where people speak to each other, or sometimes to him or another off-screen interlocutor, about events and experiences they may seldom have discussed before. He knits these testimonies to other material relating to the places and sites in which the events took place. In 1999 he published a short explanatory memoir describing his efforts to come to terms with the horrors of his own history.23 By this time he had completed Bophana, une tragédie cambodgienne (Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy, 1996) and was working on La Terre des âmes errantes (The Land of Wandering Souls), released in 2000. Around this time he was also thinking about the ethical and aesthetic challenges of the film which would follow Bophana, S-21: la machine de mort Khmère rouge (S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine), released in 2003. In this film, he wanted to challenge the absence of the word ‘genocide’ from the Paris peace accords which

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he believed symbolized ‘a refusal to allow the survivors to remember, [...] an insult to the victim’s dignity’.24 S-21 was released in 2003.25 The film immediately gained recognition at prestigious international film festivals and was exhibited in many countries outside France, although it has been much slower to garner critical acclaim in the United States.26 Academics began to explore the implications of his project. The first such writings published (in English) were largely concerned with issues of cultural hybridity and translation. For example, Sylvie Blum-Reid discusses Rithy Panh’s films in the context of Franco-Asian film and literary production. Her work locates Rithy Panh among a series of ‘diasporic’ or ‘hybrid’ creative practitioners concerned with French post-colonial history. She speaks of his work having to negotiate his ‘in-betweenness’, his position at the intersection of different traditions, and the degree of cultural loss this entails.27 History and the ethics of memory have also been the primary theme of Rithy Panh’s own published commentaries in interviews and essays. Further insight into his techniques and approaches is offered in the booklet accompanying the fourfilm French-language DVD set ‘Le Cinéma de Rithy Panh’.28 Panh describes his astonishment at finding during the late 1980s and early 1990s that the film culture of Cambodia consisted almost entirely of feature films in what he calls ‘Hindi’ cinema style, full of sentimentality. To Panh, returning from France in search of traces of the past of his destroyed family, this seemed absurd. It provided motivation to start a new kind of cinema for Cambodia, concerned with the actualities of the past and present. Panh wanted to film speech, not only the testimony of witnesses to atrocities but also the everyday speech of ordinary people. Although many scenes in his work involve forms of ‘staging’, he maintains in the commentary mentioned above that his documentaries are unscripted, and those testifying use their own words. It is rare to hear a person on the screen speak in their own voice and words in Cambodian cinema, where the practice has been to dub voices on the soundtrack. Moreover, under the Khmer Rouge, language itself came into question. A new language was created for the purposes of the revolution, a Khmerized mélange of the language of the French revolution, the Chinese cultural revolution and, finally, ancient Khmer which was able to call forth a nationalist mythology to meld with the alien rhetoric of the Khmer Rouge. Today, testimony in the language of ordinary life is a way of providing a safe space where the artificial language of domination and destruction can be overthrown.29 Erin Gleeson suggests that the thirteen films Rithy Panh has made since 1989 work to humanize people who have endured inhuman circumstances, confronting the audience with an ‘uncomfortable intimacy’ and privileging ‘ethics over aesthetics’.30 For example, long slow pans in Site 2 (1989) explore the spaces of the camps in which 180,000 Cambodian refugees were forced to live for many years. These shots gradually reveal, without aestheticizing, details of their difficult daily lives: their scant possessions and impoverished living spaces. This proximity to such traces of suffering may cause viewers discomfort. Some critics ask why Rithy Panh does not examine happier circumstances, why he focuses so relentlessly on the

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poor and suffering (including refugees, prostitutes and impoverished farmers and artists). He has responded as follows: ‘My idea is not about happiness or sadness. I work on memory. Not beauty-memory, or beauty-life, but real memory, real life’.31 Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy While there has been increasing attention to S-21, its less well-known prequel, Bophana, represents an important stage in Rithy Panh’s filmic engagement with the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. The film connects the fate of the millions consigned to the rural areas with the events that unfolded at S-21.32 Bophana relies to a degree on the familiar Western historical documentary tradition, especially in the use of iconic archival images, a narrator’s voice-over, and present-day scenes which have an illustrative function in relation to the commentary. For instance, near the beginning of the film, the narrator describes the nature of totalitarian regimes, and the film then cuts to a shot of a peaceful village where a girl cycles along the banks of a river. We are then introduced to Hout Bophana, the chief character in the film, and her ‘quiet and carefree childhood’ in Kompong town. We see the mother of Ly Sitha, ex-monk and later husband of Bophana, speaking of his childhood and youth. This is immediately followed by unidentified archival footage, showing the terrified faces of f leeing refugees. The narrator takes up the story again, presenting the viewpoint of Bophana, who was caught and raped by Lon Nol’s soldiers,33 consequently became pregnant and tried to commit suicide. The narrator explains the beginning of the purges of Khmer Rouge moderates in 1976, which resulted in the incarceration of both Bophana and her husband in Tuol Sleng. Another voice is heard, that of Im Chann, a sculptor and former prisoner, describing his own experiences of interrogation and torture. The narrator then explains how Bophana was likewise interrogated and forced to confess connections with the CIA, and to give the names of close friends and relatives. However, the film is not only a reconstruction of the fates of Bophana and Ly Sitha, but also, through the figure of Vann Nath, an enquiry into the relationship between perpetrators and victims, and the effects of their confrontation. Vann Nath is introduced walking towards the Genocide Museum with the former deputy head of security at the prison, Him Houy. This man was said to be one of the prison’s most brutal executioners.34 He left the Khmer Rouge in 1995, and confessed to having killed two thousand prisoners at S-21, although he subsequently retracted this claim. In this slow walk, and subsequently, Vann Nath frequently touches Him Houy. He places his arm quite tenderly around Him Houy’s shoulders, and pats his arm. This is a confronting and confusing intimacy. There is a complicity between them which transcends rational expectations. They enter the prison rooms, and on the walls are the scenes of torture painted by Vann Nath. Vann Nath proceeds to interrogate Him Houy as to the veracity of the scenes depicted in these paintings. The painter did not, in fact, see these scenes himself. He painted these images based on what he imagined, or what other people had told him, beginning in 1980, after

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the fall of the regime. The dialogue is as follows: Vann Nath: Come over here. [...] This picture [of a child being torn from its mother’s arms by soldiers in black Khmer Rouge clothing], it’s something that I imagined. I didn’t actually witness this scene. But this is how I imagined it when I heard the cries of the infants and their mothers. The sounds came from upstairs. Is this picture accurate? Him Houy: Yes, it is. Vann Nath: Would they struggle like that? Now, don’t just answer yes all the time. You have to be certain? Him Houy: It happened like that.

Vann Nath goes through a series of his paintings. The camera lingers on each one, while Vann Nath insists that Him Houy tells him if these are accurate images or not. One picture depicts a prisoner whose fingernails are being pulled out with pliers. Vann Nath states that he did not suffer this form of torture himself, but the victim recounted it to him, and Him Houy assures him that this is an accurate image. These scenes continue for many minutes of the film. Vann Nath’s palpable desire for confirmation from Him Houy of the paintings’ fidelity implicitly draws attention to the lack of photographic or filmic images that might serve as evidence of the crimes committed in the prison. Although Him Houy vouches for the authenticity of the paintings, the film raises questions at such junctures about the purchase of different kinds of image on the past, in a manner that resonates with the debates about Holocaust images addressed at the outset of this chapter. The implication of Vann Nath’s questions is that Him Houy witnessed the scenes evoked in the paintings, but in fact there are no sources or statements to indicate that this was the case. Him Houy is recognized as ‘the Butcher’ in Vann Nath’s memoirs, because his main duty was the execution of prisoners, mostly at the ‘Killing Fields’ of Choeung Ek. Whether or not he was also present during the sessions of torture and interrogation in Tuol Sleng is not clear. Soon, Him Houy takes over the narration and in some respects seems to appropriate the directorial role. He is shown walking down a corridor of cells, and stopping to open one. He describes how the guards patrolled the corridor and how the shackled prisoners were called, blindfolded and taken away for execution on the back of a truck. The setting shifts to Choeung Ek, the ‘Killing Field’ where the S-21 prisoners were finally dispatched and buried in enormous pits. Him Houy describes how Chief Duch encouraged him to try to kill prisoners. He speaks of how he hit the prisoners with an iron bar, under orders from Duch. Then, standing at the end of a shallow pit, he describes with gestures how the blindfolded prisoners were compelled to squat or kneel with their hands behind their backs. The camera then tracks across the fields pockmarked with pits. The film closes by returning to the image of Ly Sitha’s mother. The film, and the confessions of Him Houy, have convinced her that her son and daughter-in-law are indeed dead. The closing images consist of title cards with photographs of Ly Sitha and Bophana, and short texts. These reveal, for the first time, that both of them were ‘destroyed’ on the same day, 18 March 1977.

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The filmed interaction between Vann Nath and Him Houy seems almost casual. Only in Vann Nath’s memoir does it become clear what this encounter meant to him. For years, Vann Nath had been preoccupied with Houy, whose photograph he had seen when he defected to the Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia, under an amnesty declared in 1995. Him Houy had confessed to killing 2,000 people, but Nath was certain that he was responsible for the murders of thousands more. Only a few of the prison guards actually executed people. Yet because he had defected according to the political guidelines of the government he had gained the right to live as an ordinary citizen, and would suffer no penalties. The injustice of this was deeply felt by Nath. Part of his motivation for seeking out Him Houy was the need to understand what motivated him, and how he was able to live with the consequences of his actions. Ten years had passed since Vann Nath’s release from Tuol Sleng before he was finally able to confront Him Houy. He describes the context of their encounter as follows: In early 1996 I was asked to work with two French-Khmers who were preparing a documentary film about a female journalist killed at Tuol Sleng during the Pol Pot regime. I would probably be one of the actors. They asked me to paint two large pictures, one of my own story and another of the woman. [...] [T]hey filmed me. They asked me to give an interview during that time (p. 110–11).35

Vann Nath goes on to describe his astonishment when one day during filming one of the crew told him that Him Houy was there in the yard. His fear and terror at seeing him was overwhelming. Yet he was able to go and look him in the eye. Houy did not remember Nath at first. Nath asked him how many people he had killed. ‘Four or five’ he answered. ‘I laughed and thought that even though he had turned from a cruel young man to quite an old man, his heart and mind had not changed, as none of his words were true’ (p. 111). It was immediately after this exchange of words that Nath accompanied Houy to look at the paintings in the museum. The scene was filmed, as described above. Some of the conversation reported in Nath’s memoir was not included in the film. Nath asked Houy what happened to the little babies torn from their mothers’ arms. Houy replies ‘Uh ... we took them out to kill them’. Nath’s horror was multiplied. He had not known this. He had believed the babies were taken to an orphanage, or looked after somehow. The idea that they had been summarily murdered was intolerable. ‘This word “brutal” was too mild to describe [the guards’] cruelty’ (p. 115). He describes his feelings of overwhelming shock and terror, as if the horror was still going on in front of him. Was Houy deliberately brought to Tuol Sleng for the purpose of capturing this interaction? It is not clear from the film, or from Nath’s memoir, if this was a weird piece of serendipity or a calculated act by the filmmakers. It had a terrible effect on Nath, who says ‘I thought about the meeting with Houy all the way home. The impact on my heart could hardly be coped with’ (p. 115). Although Nath’s behaviour towards Him Houy was gentle and solicitous, the encounter affected him profoundly and left him depressed at the injustice revealed by Him Houy’s present life and condition. Later, however, when Rithy Panh was filming S-21, Vann Nath

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agreed to appear once more with Him Houy, and with others from Tuol Sleng, in order to continue the interrogation which had started during the filming of Bophana. S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine Rithy Panh’s most famous film develops the themes already established in Bophana and features the same site and some of the same ‘actors’. It is considerably longer (101 minutes rather than 60), evolves at a slower pace and presents testimonies given by victims and perpetrators as they come face-to-face with each other.36 The film opens with a long sequence showing Him Houy at home with his family. A stilted conversation takes place between him and his elderly parents about his culpability for the deaths he has caused. He argues that he had to do what he was told, declaring that he is a good man. His mother agrees. The film cuts to the exterior of Tuol Sleng. Vann Nath and Chum Mey, another former prisoner, appear. Chum Mey is returning to this site for the first time since his imprisonment and he can hardly contain his grief. After a long sequence where the two men speak of the past, Chum Mey almost inconsolable, the film introduces the former guards and prison staff, and the remaining footage is largely concerned with their reconstruction of how the prison operated. They are interrogated throughout by Vann Nath. The director himself does not appear except occasionally as a shadow at the edge of a scene, or a momentarily heard off-screen voice. Soko Phay-Vakalis highlights several ‘technical’ elements of the film which embody an ethical quality. For example, camera placement avoids mystifying and reductive images that are used purely for ‘dramatic and aesthetic effects’ and is dictated instead by an ethical stance of respect towards those filmed.37 But commentators have most frequently been preoccupied by the ethical implications of Rithy Panh’s use of techniques of re-enactment and re-staging. Each person in the film is playing a role from his past at Tuol Sleng: Khieu ‘Poev’ Ches, a guard; Nhiem Ein, the photographer; Him Houy, the Deputy Officer for Security, farmer and killer; Prakk Kahn, the torturer; Top Pheap, interrogator and typist; and Mak Thim, a doctor. Other participants include former guards and drivers. Clearly the sequence of elaborate re-enactments has been requested or suggested by the filmmakers. Often the ‘actors’ seem reluctant, silent, resistant, perhaps resentful. It is Him Houy who holds these scenes together, enthusiastically encouraging everyone to tell their stories and act out their roles. The strange connection between him and Vann Nath emerges even more strikingly than in Bophana. In these remarkable re-stagings the victims, perpetrators and director are inextricably entwined. In one extended scene former guard Khieu ‘Poev’ Ches repeats his actions exactly as in the past, showing how he exerted his power and undertook his duties. Several times he repeats actions such as opening and closing a cell door, bringing water or a food bowl to the invisible crowd tethered to the f loor, and speaking harshly to them as if they are disobeying prison rules. Although most commentary has focused on the guards and the victims, it is the director and the artist who engage most closely in projecting a sense of identification between them,

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Fig. 9.2. Guard ‘Poev’ re-enacts his instructions to the prisoners through the bars of a cell in Tuol Sleng. S-21, dir. Rithy Panh (2003). DVD capture.

creating appropriate sounds and images to evoke the otherwise unrecorded events. Deidre Boyle examines the same scenes of re-enactment, interpreting the film as primarily an ‘interrogation of the interrogators’.38 She argues that Poev the guard was able to accurately re-enact his former role because he held the memory of this past in his body. Panh has stated that the strategy of staging such re-enactments evolved out of the process of film-making. While he was shooting in Poev’s village, Poev physically demonstrated how he used to close the door of a room he was guarding. ‘I saw that his gesture was prolonging his words, and I discovered another memory existed: the memory of the body, sharper, more precise, unable to lie’.39 Boyle argues that the guard exhibits traumatic memory, which demands re-enactment for its recall. Poev, she says, is transformed from an ordinary man into a tyrannical guard before the camera as he relives through gesture the memory of a violent past that dwells in his body as much as in his mind. Jacques Rancière compares S-21 with Shoah, noting the comparable use of mimesis and gesture. But he observes that these techniques espouse opposing logics in the two films, because imitation in Shoah tries to recreate the absolute distinction between perpetrators and victims, whereas in S-21 it blurs the boundary. In S-21 the repeated gestures of Poev have a clearly cathartic value, suggesting that he has been freed from the burden of the past. In Shoah, by contrast, the gestures of Henrik Gawkowski, for instance, who used to drive death transports to the extermination camp at Treblinka, indicate continued complicity from the past to the present. According to Rancière, Rithy Panh’s film participates in a project of reconciliation,

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whereas Lanzmann’s film is made to construct a monument to the irreconcilable, or the irredeemable.40 The psychiatrist Richard Rechtman’s discussion of S-21 also draws on paradigms associated with Holocaust testimony and representation. Rechtman has worked with Khmer Rouge survivors now living in France and explores the verbal, rather than bodily, aspects of a torturer’s testimony such as Kahn’s in the film. Rechtman’s thinking is clearly linked to recent debates in Holocaust studies, although he does not focus on the ethics of representation as such. With a debt to the work of Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben,41 he posits the existence of an ‘outer limit’ beyond which it is not possible to experience the feeling of belonging to humankind. The attempt to dehumanize victims is often a feature of genocide, and a major instrument in the extermination process. The perpetrators can more easily carry out utterly repugnant and inhumane actions if the victims are not considered to be human beings. Rithy Panh’s film is a central reference point in Rechtman’s investigation. He describes Tuol Sleng as providing a ‘murderer’s utopia’, a situation in which the murderers needed to feel no guilt or remorse. Indeed in S-21 they present themselves as victims, claiming that they were not responsible for their acts and were forced to do what they did.42 The Director’s Desire These scenes of testimony, confrontation and attempted self-exculpation raise issues about the authenticity of the staged elements and the statements that accompany them. While the demonstrations in these scenes can be seen as the genuine re-enact­ ment of traumatic memory, they are also constructed insofar as they are elicited and edited for the film. While avoiding intensive stage-direction, the director creates the conditions of possibility for a certain kind of interaction. As in the opening scenes of the film showing Him Houy with his family, it is impossible to imagine that these conversations occurred entirely spontaneously. Him Houy and his family must have been asked to discuss these particular issues, even if the words were not ‘scripted’ for them. Rithy Panh has said that he uses a combination of conceptualization and accident. At the time he was preparing to film S-21 he stated: ‘It is necessary to create fair situations. That is why I hate asking questions; I put forward a problématique rather than questions.’43 Asking questions might be too directive, but working through the concept of the problématique has its own limitations in terms of possible outcomes. Panh admits that many takes were necessary for the re-enactment scenes. The guards were asked to discuss and then repeat what they did. Panh gave no direction but required multiple takes to capture key moments. During each take, the man’s gestures intensified, as if in response to the fact that he was being asked to do it again and again.44 This process of repetition illustrates how the director allowed for a variety of re-enactments to be selectively assembled in the editing phase. The viewer does not experience this aspect of the constructedness of the film, imagining that what is being shown are spontaneous responses by the film’s subjects, but the scenarios, shots and edits are designed to achieve consonance with the director’s

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viewpoint. Should the viewers be made aware of the repetition and selection underlying the film’s structure? Are the ‘actors’ being to some degree ‘coerced’ by the power of the filmmaker and the filmmaking apparatus? Rithy Panh has noted that the idea of bringing victims and perpetrators together is both seductive and difficult, requiring the avoidance of voyeurism and ‘an ethic of the image’.45 When torturers and victims interact at the actual sites of trauma, in the cells, corridors and yards of S-21, it is as if Lanzmann had been able to reunite former SS Unterscharführer Franz Suchomel with his victims at Treblinka. Like a number of Lanzmann’s interviewees, Rithy Panh’s actors repeat their own past actions in the same places. How does this affect the ethics of the re-enactment? Contra Rancière, might this not confirm the perpetrators’ complicity? These men are apparently participating in the film in order to explain their viewpoint and reject personal responsibility, yet I would suggest that their gestures have the opposite, unintended effect of convicting them. Like Vann Nath, the viewer wants them to see the evil of their actions, but nothing in the film suggests they can, or will, do so. Their refusal to take moral responsibility is no different from that of the top Khmer Rouge leaders, who have likewise refuted any suggestion that they were responsible for the catastrophes of the era. Vann Nath: Imaging the Victim Vann Nath’s paintings were created to compensate for the lack of ‘authentic’ images of the extremities of the Khmer Rouge regime. He was commissioned by the post-Khmer Rouge government to paint them for the purpose of demonstrating, within the grounds of the former prison, the brutality of a movement for which there still remained considerable support in the country. There was undoubtedly a propaganda value in this for the Vietnamese administration. Vann Nath was arrested and sent to Tuol Sleng for reasons he never understood. He was given electric shock torture and was destined for the same fate as the other prisoners but his talent as an artist saved him. Pol Pot was anxious to have his portrait painted. Vann Nath told Duch he thought he could do that. In a recent interview he described his paintings: ‘Big pictures. I had to paint the same one again and again. If they didn’t like my painting, that would have been the end of my life.’46 He painted around seven during the time he was there. Apparently they were much appreciated by their subject. Nath presented Pol Pot in his most tender and jovial aspect, his skin pink and delicate, slightly blushing. The portrait shown in S-21 closely resembles the official portraits of Kim Il Sung in North Korea. Pol Pot probably saw these portraits during a brief visit to Pyongyang, shortly before Vann Nath was asked to begin painting.47 Kim praised his visitors for ‘thoroughly smashing [...] counter-revolutionary subversion and sabotage’.48 Portraits and other images of Kim Il Sung would surely have hung in the meeting rooms and formal halls where Pol Pot and his party were received. Praise for ‘thoroughly smashing counter-revolutionary subversion’ would have been music to his ears. That is exactly what S-21 was for. The peculiar North Korean aesthetic regarding the painted image of the leader is not an accidental by-product of bad art but a decided preference for a particular

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style. The face of the subject is in close-up as if the viewer is nestling against him, as closely as a child might in its father’s arms. The skin glows with an almost ethereal light. There is no chiaroscuro, no contrast. The face and its features are modelled realistically but on a f lat plane with a compelling intimacy. Vann Nath had to capture qualities which Pol Pot himself seemed deliberately to cultivate: kindness, warmth, temperance and enthusiasm, as can be seen in many pieces of archival footage. In particular, the portrait shown in S-21 captures Pol Pot’s famous smile. This smile was described by Mey Mann, one of his old Paris comrades, as something which made others like him. It hinted at a quiet joke, a certain mischievous quality. It was a smile ‘too open to be enigmatic, too striking to be merely a mannerism’.49 Charles Meyer, one of Norodom Sihanouk’s advisors, compared it to the half-smile on the sculptures of the Gods of Angkor, a mask or a screen.50 After the regime fell, these paintings seem to have mostly disappeared. Vann Nath was then commissioned to undertake his best-known work, the oil paintings of the suffering and tortures endured by those in the prison. His paintings are arguably the most ‘shocking’ element in both Bophana and S-21. These images catch the worst savagery meted out to the inmates of S-21 and allow the viewer to ‘see’ something which otherwise is unrepresented and unimaginable. Vann Nath retrospectively provided the missing images which offer testimony to events which have no other visual record. His paintings depict blindfolded people being trucked into the compound at night, men trussed like pigs being carried on bamboo poles, babies being torn from

Fig. 9.3. Vann Nath’s painting: prisoners shackled to the f loor, the guard stands menacingly above them. S-21, dir. Rithy Panh (2003). DVD capture.

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Fig. 9.4. Vann Nath remembers as he paints the blindfolded prisoners entering Tuol Sleng. S-21, dir. Rithy Panh (2003). DVD capture.

their mothers’ arms to be smashed against walls or piked on cutlasses, men having their fingernails torn out or their nipples removed, being subjected to water tortures or whipped.51 However, the fact that many of the paintings were created from his imagination, that is, that he was not a direct witness, caused much comment and controversy especially when Bophana was released.52 It is noteworthy that the only paintings shown and discussed in S-21 are those which represent scenes which Vann Nath had personally experienced: Pol Pot’s portrait, the line of prisoners being taken into S-21, the prisoners lying on the f loor upstairs, shackled so tightly together that they can hardly move. Following the lengthy sequence outside the Tuol Sleng buildings, the film places Vann Nath at the centre of the narrative. The scene shifts between Nath and his painting of the prisoners’ arrival at S-21. Lim discusses the way in which the camera recreates a visual memory of that day, contrasting the gentle brush strokes on the canvas with the brutality of the scene. He argues that this translation of private memory into public medium is an example of the crystallization of what Gilles Deleuze has called the time-image.53 Thus in the film a series of staged and doubly mediated encounters with the past permit the mobilization into collective memory of private experiences in this necropolitical regime.54 Rithy Panh’s use of the paintings of Vann Nath raises again the question of representing the unrepresentable. Although most commentary on the film has high­lighted the remarkable interactions between victims and perpetrators, their physical re-enactments and verbal testimonies, Vann Nath’s paintings offer an

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essential visual supplement that is otherwise unavailable due to the lack of filmed or photo­g raphed images. Images of extreme violence, whether a painting (viewed directly or filmically remediated), a photograph or a clip of archival film, require a particular form of recognition from the viewer. Faced with such images, the viewer may enter the role of victim in masochistic identification. There is a limit to this, though. At some point the masochistic position, pity for the victim which is a kind of self-pity, can turn into its opposite, even into a sadistic identification with the torturers. This is the perilous paradox of viewing atrocity images. In her analysis of the mixed reception of films and photographs of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in Britain and the United States, Janina Struk draws attention to the capacity of such images to discourage identification with the victims.55 By contrast, S-21 negotiates the risk that the viewer may start to identify with the perpetrators. The former guards, interrogators and torturers who seem to have no shame or guilt, even to enjoy the opportunity to re-create on camera their brutalities, place the viewer in an ambivalent position. Is the viewer meant to try to understand the torturers? To see their point of view? Rithy Panh’s films invite this shift in perspective at several points, largely through Vann Nath, who stands as a substitute for the directorial consciousness, and perhaps even that of the viewer. Vann Nath wants to understand how these perpetrators, who seem like ordinary men, could act in such inhuman ways. Yet no matter how hard he tries to obtain from them some sign of sorrow or pity for the victims, he fails. Like the former Nazis in Shoah, they had reasons for acting as they did, and they try, quite patiently and carefully, to explain exactly what was required of them, and their sense that there was no alternative. Vann Nath, at certain points, simply shakes his head. Have the claims of morality, ethics and justice been somehow outmanoeuvred? The ambiguity of the outcome is deeply disturbing, ref lecting the reality of a decade of failed efforts since the film was made to achieve any kind of restitutive justice in Cambodia in spite of intense international efforts. The filming technique used in S-21 creates a sequence of highly complex tensions and a suspenseful distanciation which prompts the viewer to occupy a sequence of unstable positions, one moment a victim, one moment a guard, and the next a torturer coldly describing his practices. The use of Vann Nath’s paintings provides a focus for the verbal descriptions and physical re-enactments, creating moments of revelation which are equally unsettling, as in the long scenes where he points out where he was shackled in the upstairs prison room, and asks the guards to explain their brutality. As Saxton points out, many films depicting the Holocaust ‘progressively undermine any clear or stable distinction between ethics and aesthetics’.56 Where does the cinema of Rithy Panh stand with regard to these issues? Thus far, there has been a broad consensus in critical reactions to his films. It is likely that the facts of his background — as a Cambodian who f led the Khmer Rouge — have contributed to the positive response from Western viewers. Yet there has been a tendency to gloss over the ethically more ambiguous dimensions of his approach, such as the time and space he gives to perpetrator testimony and the implications of

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his amalgamation of fiction and documentary. In the construction of Cambodia’s history under the Khmer Rouge, the line between documentary and fiction becomes particularly blurred. Feature films such as The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984) and the recent, highly praised Cambodian film Lost Loves (directed by Chhay Bora and written by Kauv Sotheary, 2010) tell stories centred on real individuals through reconstructions and classical narrative cinematic techniques. Documentaries are obliged to use re-enactment and testimony to fill in the gaps in the visual record. This creates a hybrid cinema which destabilizes subject-object position of filmmaker, actors and viewers. Rithy Panh has consistently articulated an ethical vision which goes far beyond the cinematic as such. His films implicate their viewers, yet, as in Shoah and Night and Fog, there are elisions and blind spots, posing important questions about the visualization of images of extremity and the ethics of documentary cinema. Films Bophana, une tragédie cambodgienne (Bophana: A Cambodian tragedy), dir. Rithy Panh (1996) Duch, le maître des forges de l’enfer (Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell), dir. Rithy Panh (2011) Histoire(s) du cinéma, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1988–1998) The Killing Fields, dir. Roland Joffé (1984) Lost Loves, dir. Chhay Bora (2010) Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), dir. Alain Resnais (1955) Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (1985) Site 2, dir. Rithy Panh (1989) S-21: la machine de mort Khmère rouge (S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine), dir. Rithy Panh (2003) La Terre des âmes errantes (The Land of Wandering Souls), dir. Rithy Panh (2000). Uncle Rithy, dir. Jean-Marie Barbe (2008)

Notes to Chapter 9 1. Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), Ann E. Kaplan, Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004) as well as The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, Visual Culture, ed. by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (London: Wallf lower, 2007). 2. See, for example, Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers and Ethical Challenges in Their Work, ed. by Pat Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi, and Mridu Chandra (American University: Center for Social Media, School of Communication, 2012). 3. Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London: Wallf lower, 2008). 4. Ibid., p. 2. 5. The extensive photographic record of the camps is discussed in Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London: I. B. Taurus, 2011). Photographs were taken inside the camps for propaganda purposes but inmates were also able to furnish images through Resistance networks to the outside world. Struk’s work amplifies with more detail (pp. 113–14) the treatment of the four photographs taken by the Sonderkommando members at Birkenau in Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. by Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 [2003]). Nevertheless it remains the case that no images exist of the final horror inside the gas chambers. 6. See Saxton, Haunted Images, pp. 46–67 and 76–79 as well as Barry Langford, ‘ “You Cannot Look At This”: Thresholds of Unrepresentability in Holocaust Film’, Journal of Holocaust Education, 8.3 (1999), 23–40.

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7. Since this chapter was completed, a third film by Rithy Panh on the Khmer Rouge has been made and shown in limited venues, although it has not had a commercial release. Entitled Duch, le maître des forges de l’enfer (Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell) it consists of an extensive interview with ‘Duch’, the commander of the S-21 detention and interrogation centre, who explains his career and his actions in his own words, intercut with re-enactment scenes drawn from the previous films. The director refrains from any personal commentary and demands that the audience makes its own judgments. The three films thus form an interrelated trilogy, although each raises different issues. 8. The paintings of Vann Nath could be compared in some respects with the work of David Olère who documented his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz in painting and drawing, although the context in which the work was produced was significantly different. See David Olère, L’Oeil du Témoin / The Eyes of a Witness (New York: The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989) as well as David Olère and Alexandre Olère, Witness: Images of Auschwitz (Texas: D. and F. Scott Publishing Inc., 1998). 9. Alvin Lim, ‘Reassembling Memory: Rithy Panh’s “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” ’, in The New Violent Cartography: Geo-Analysis after the Aesthetic Turn, ed. by Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 118–33. 10. The author of this chapter is undertaking a study of documentary footage created during the Khmer Rouge era. The propaganda film was apparently made during the visit of a Yugoslav press delegation in 1978 by journalist Nikola Vitorivic, and released in Yugoslavia under the title Kampuciya 1978. Parts of it were shown on French television in the late 1970s and this broadcast is held at the Bophana Archives in Phnom Penh with commentary in French and Khmer. The film is held at the French National Audiovisual Institute where it can be viewed for a fee. Recently (27 May 2011) short extracts of the film appeared on Youtube at under the title Kampuchea — 1978.01.av1 and 02.avi [accessed 2 April 2012]. 11. A search on Google Images shows countless examples, including reproductions of Vann Nath’s paintings. 12. Judy Ledgerwood, ‘The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative’, Museum Anthropology, 21.2 (1997), 82–98; Paul Williams, ‘Witnessing Genocide: Vigilance and Remem­ brance at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 18.2 (2004), 234–54. 13. Estimates vary widely. Many were killed during the civil war period (1970–75) both in military action and as a result of US bombing. During the Khmer Rouge period, the fairly accurate records of the number killed in Tuol Sleng prison were not duplicated for the many similar prisons across the country. The vast majority of deaths occurred in the countryside and were not counted. In the period immediately after the fall of the Khmer Rouge countless thousands perished trying to escape across the Thai border. Rudolph J. Rummel provides complex calculations which suggest that from a 1970 population of 7,100,000 up to 2,400,000 had died by 1979 (33%). See Rudolph J. Rummel, Statistics of Democide (Charlottesville, VA, Centre for National Security Law, University of Virginia and Rutgers University: Transaction Publishers, 1997). 14. François Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1978); Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (Yale: Yale University Press, 1996), and Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial, and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2007). 15. The tendency to elide one genocide into another and treat them as equivalent has been violently repudiated in several quarters. For example Elie Wiesel asserts that ‘Those who talk about “Auschwitz in Asia” and the “Cambodian holocaust” do not know what they are talking about’. See his From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), p. 133. Patrick Raszelenberg explicitly compares Cambodia with the European Holocaust, pointing out that Cambodia ‘both invites and defies comparison’. See his ‘The Khmers Rouges and the “Final Solution” ’, History and Memory, 11.2 (1999), 62–93 (p. 62). Alan S. Rosenbaum includes papers putting both sides of the argument, including a comparison by Ben Kiernan of genocides under Hitler and Pol Pot and in Africa. See his Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, 3rd edn (Boulder: Westview Press, 2009).

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16. A photograph of the seven survivors is included in Vann Nath’s memoir A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1998), between p. 14 and p. 15. Chum Mey, who appears in Rithy Panh’s film S-21, is at the far left. Im Chann the sculptor is standing next to Nath. He appears brief ly and provides a voice-over in Bophana. None of the other survivors has appeared in any documentary film to my knowledge. The circumstances of their survival are not discussed in Nath’s memoir. 17. He has received many awards and accolades over recent years. A retrospective of his films, with associated talks and publications, is being considered for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2013/14 (Che Hui-Yang, New York, personal communication). 18. The trial of Kaing Guek Eav (‘Duch’) was completed on 26 July 2010. He was given a thirtyfive-year sentence, later reduced to seventeen years, for crimes against humanity. He appealed but on 2 February 2012 an Upper Court of the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal rejected his appeal and his sentence was extended to life imprisonment. The remaining four leaders (Nuon Chea (‘Brother No 2’), Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith) were indicted in September 2010 and have been in detention since then. Their trial formally commenced on 27 June 2011, although there have been numerous delays and there is still no sign of resolution. 19. Rithy Panh, ‘Cambodia: A Wound that Will not Heal’, UNESCO Courier, December 1999, 30–32 (p. 32). See also his ‘Je suis un arpenteur de memoires’, Cahiers du cinéma, 587.14 (2004), 14–17 (p. 14). 20. [accessed 1 November 2011]. Rithy Panh describes his interest in Marguerite Duras who wrote the screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour. ‘Having just emerged myself from genocide, Alain Resnais’ work on Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour really moved me. Resnais was the filmmaker who made me realize that filmmaking is a tool of expression I could use to express my own story’. My thanks to Axel Bangert for locating this reference. 21. Rith Panh recalls these experiences in a personal interview with Erin Gleeson, reported in Erin Gleeson ‘The Presence of the Past: Rithy Panh’, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet, 38.4 (2009), 271–73 (p. 271). 22. Vann Nath sadly died in 2011 of kidney disease. His book of memoirs, A Cambodian Prison Portrait, is not widely available. Several obituaries give an outline of his extraordinary life and contributions. See, for example, Tom Fawthrop, ‘Vann Nath Obituary’, The Guardian, 5 September 2011 [accessed 21 October 2011]. 23. Panh, ‘Cambodia’. He refers to his condition as a spiritual wound, and feared that the same tragic story would repeat itself. He felt unable to accept that it was right to be alive (p. 30). 24. Ibid., p. 31. 25. Rithy Panh personally presented the film at its première in May 2003 at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the Prix François Chalais. The film also won the award for best documentary at the Chicago International Film Festival, the European Film Awards and the Valladolid International Film Festival, as well as numerous other prizes and awards around the world. Since that time it has become required viewing in many school and university courses and widely available on DVD. 26. Panivong Norindr, ‘The Sounds of Everyday Life in Rithy Panh’s Documentaries’, French Forum, 35.2–3 (2010), 181–90. 27. Sylvie Blum-Reid, East West Encounters: Franco-Asian Cinema and Literature (London: Wallf lower, 2003). Blum-Reid treats Rithy Panh as an exilic film-maker, stressing the issue of hybrid identity. Subsequent writers see him primarily as a Cambodian, down-playing the impact of his education and experience in France in order to stress his authenticity as a Khmer. Vann Nath referred to him as a ‘Franco-Khmer’ and does not seem to have felt particularly close to him. 28. The set includes Site 2 (1989), Bophana, La Terre des âmes errantes and S-21 (Éditions Montparnasse, n.d.). Rithy Panh’s ‘La Parole filmée. Pour vaincre le terreur’ is based on his interventions in the seminar of J.-F. Chevrier, Ensb-a, 31 May and 11 October 2000. The text was also published in Communications, 71 (2001), 373–94.

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29. Language is complex in Rithy Panh’s films. Subtitling is not always nuanced and meanings are easily lost. Several films have been released only in French, without English subtitles. 30. Gleeson, ‘The Presence of the Past’, pp. 271–72. 31. Cited in ibid., p. 272. 32. A made-for-television production, Bophana is available only in the French-language version. 33. General Lon Nol and his co-conspirators supported the US involvement in Vietnam and engineered a military coup which overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk, then Head of State. 34. His name is spelled ‘Huy’ in some documents and references. Spellings of Khmer words in English are often inconsistent. 35. One of these pictures, specifically requested by Rithy Panh for the film, shows a line of prisoners in manacles and blindfolds being led into the Tuol Sleng prison. In S-21 Vann Nath is shown adding defining lines to this painting while speaking of his own experiences, as discussed by Alvin Lim, ‘Reassembling Memory: Rithy Panh’s “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” ’, in The New Violent Cartography: Geo-Analysis after the Aesthetic Turn, ed. by Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 118–33. 36. Rithy Panh and Christine Chaumeau published a long text in French to accompany the film’s release, La Machine khmère rouge: Monti Santésok S-21 (Paris: Flammarion, 2009). 37. Soko Phay-Vakalis, ‘Le Témoignage filmique comme oeuvre de sépulture. Sur Rithy Panh’, Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle, special issue, Écrire l’éxtrême. La littérature et l’art face aux crimes de masse, June-July 2006, 168–77 (pp. 170–71). 38. Deidre Boyle, ‘Shattering Silence: Traumatic Memory and Reenactment in Rithy Panh’s “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” ’, Framework, 50.1–2 (2009), 95–106 (p. 96). 39. N. N., ‘Interview with Rithy Panh’, First Run Features Website, [n.d.] [accessed 18 October 2011]. 40. Jacques Rancière, ‘L’Irreprésentable en question: entretien avec Jacques Rancière’, Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle, special issue, Écrire L’éxtrême. La littérature et l’art face aux crimes de masse, JuneJuly 2006, 232–43 (pp. 237–38). 41. Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 1958 [1947]); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999 [1998]). 42. Richard Rechtman, ‘The Survivor’s Paradox: Psychological Consequences of the Khmer Rouge Rhetoric of Extermination’, Anthropology and Medicine, 13 (2006), 1–11 (pp. 3 and 4). 43. Panh, ‘La Parole filmée’, p. 17. 44. This is stated by Rithy Panh in a documentary about him, Uncle Rithy (dir. Jean-Marie Barbe, 2009). 45. Cited in Boyle, ‘Shattering Silence’, p. 97 from Leslie Camhi, ‘The Banal Faces of Khmer Rouge Evil’, New York Times, 16 May 2004. 46. Christiane Amanpour, ‘Survivor Recalls Horror of Cambodia Genocide’, CNN World, 7 April 2008 [accessed 20 October 2011]. 47. In September 1977 a period of drastically rising tension between Pol Pot’s regime and the Vietnamese government resulted in a border incursion by Khmer Rouge troops in the eastern zone. China tried to broker a resolution but Pol Pot was resistant. Around 1 October Pol Pot f lew to Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, and was received by President Kim Il Sung with great generosity. Kim was outspoken in his support of Cambodia. 48. Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2006), p. 377. 49. Philip Short Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare (London: John Murray, 2005), p. 44. 50. Charles Meyer, Derrière le sourire Khmer (Paris: Plon, 1971), p. 3. 51. See the obituary at [accessed 15 November 2011]. 52. I have not been able to find any written accounts referring to this critical reception, although Rithy Panh’s sensitivities to criticism are often referred to in personal communications from people involved in contemporary film circles within Cambodia. 53. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005 [1985]); Lim, ‘Reassembling Memory’.

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54. Lim’s penetrating analysis concludes with the suggestion that from a viewpoint of radical contingency life has no ontological priority over death, and indeed life has no ontological necessity at all. S-21, the place and the film, thus function as signifier of this absolute existential contingency. The ethics of this position warrant deeper discussion than can be presented here. 55. Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, pp. 124–49. 56. Saxton, Haunted Images, p. 120.

C h ap t e r 10

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The Afterlife of Images: Rwanda Piotr Cieplak and Emma Wilson In Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters, Libby Saxton writes that ‘one of the perennial ethical problems which has preoccupied commentators on the visual arts and culture is what it means to view images of other people’s pain’.1 She sets out her aim to explore ‘how films negotiate the asymmetrical power relations between those watching and those suffering, and the political hierarchies consolidated by mainstream Western news discourse’.2 In this chapter, in order to respond to questions about the meanings and uses of images of the pain of others, we consider the evidential status of photography and film relating to genocide. We are interested in the circumstances of the capture of images of pain, the issues of exposure, proof, power and protection enmeshed therein, which are rendered particularly acute when the moment of death is held on film. Further, we are concerned with the afterlife of such images, with their continued insistence in the world, and with their involvement in legal, memorial and ethical reckoning. Our interest in the specificity of lens-based media and their power in the context of genocide inspires our comparative moves between Rwanda in 1994 and the Holocaust in Europe. Our main case study is Juan Reina’s Iseta: Behind the Roadblock (Vivid Productions, 2008), a documentary about the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, a BBC cameraman, Nick Hughes, recorded a short clip of people being killed in the street in Kigali. Despite a considerable aggregate of images related to the Rwandan genocide, this piece of footage remains the only existing record of the actual killings conducted during the three months of genocidal campaign.3 The moment of death is almost always absent from visual representation of the event — mediated through its anticipation or aftermath. Iseta documents Hughes’s return to Rwanda ten years later, in an attempt to identify the anonymous victims from his footage and to use it to name and prosecute the perpetrators. The unique status of this footage of killings from Rwanda, and the questions about evidence it raises, opens a new perspective on debates in the last decade of Holocaust scholarship on the privileged nature of lens-based images snatched from the real. Such debates have focused on the ‘missing reel’ or ‘pellicule maudite’ that would show images of gassings in the extermination camps, and, most importantly for our argument here, on the four photographic images that deal directly with extermination, shot by a member of the Sonderkommando.

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In discussing images from Rwanda and images from the Holocaust, we by no means imply a direct comparability of event or context. Rather, we suggest that the issues of the capture of other people’s pain, and especially the moment of their death, which arise from Nick Hughes’s work in Rwanda, and which are explored and exposed in Iseta, have moment and relevance for ongoing ref lection on lensbased representation of genocide, on the capture, circulation and use of images. Our discussion follows an agenda of belated, and continued, analysis. Iseta, made fourteen years after the genocide, and Nick Hughes’s capture of footage, offers a perspective on the afterlife of his images and on their material functions. We aim to look at Hughes’s images and Iseta in their own right. Yet we also aim to question the ways in which these subsequent, devastating events and the evidential possibilities addressed in their representation, cast light on rightly unceasing reckoning with Holocaust representation. This is not to render functional this material from Rwanda, but to question how contact can be made across time and across contexts in a move towards a renewed sensitivity and ethical openness. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze writes about time and memory, that ‘[d]epending on the nature of the recollection [...], we have to jump into a particular circle. [...] [T]hese regions [...] appear to succeed each other. But they succeed each other only from the point of view of former presents’.4 We take the events of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign in Rwanda as two such former presents. We jump between these regions, and show them shadowing one another virtually, without implying that they succeed each other temporally or in historical or political consequence. Further, our present, and the changing status of lens-based media, has a bearing on our concern with these two striated, aligned regions of past. After the digital turn, the indexical status of the photographic image, its apparent capacity to capture events as they happen, is brought newly into question. In The Virtual Life of Film, D. N. Rodowick, whilst examining the disappearance of a photographic ontology, illustrates strongly the pursued illusions about an image’s relation to reality that are carried from analogue across into digital media. As he writes: Although digital processes have produced many fascinating stylistic innovations, there is a strong sense in which what counts intuitively as an ‘image’ has changed very little for Western cultures for several centuries. Indeed, there is much to be learned from the fact that ‘photographic’ realism remains the Holy Grail of digital imaging. If the digital is such a revolutionary process of image making, why is its technological and aesthetic goal to become perceptually indiscernible from an earlier mode of image production?5

What digital brings, perhaps, is a renewed awareness that photographic realism is produced, as much as captured, and that notions of imprint, index and record are not matters of fact merely but integral to the affect surrounding lens-based media. They are its punctum, indeed. Critical discussion of documentary has long acknowledged the illusions inherent in any unquestioning faith in the grafting of the real onto the photographic plate. Bill Nichols defines the principle of documentary as an assurance, a guarantee that ‘its sounds and images bear an indexical relation to the historical world’.6 At the

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same time, it is not the concrete and set nature of this expectation that provides the main point of interest here. Rather, it is the potential for its reinterpretation and its existence under many different guises that generates attention and affect. In The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary, John Corner acknow­ ledges ‘a widely recognized and problematic duality in documentary work — its character as both artifice and as evidence’.7 This ‘duality’ is crucial in considering the use of archival footage that is at once a piece of historical evidence, and a representational device, employed in the conveyance of a particular agenda. Rodowick cites Stanley Cavell: ‘Part of the strangeness of photographs, according to Cavell, is that “we are not accustomed to seeing things that are invisible, or not present to us, not present with us; or we are not accustomed to acknowledging that we do (except in dreams). Yet this seems, ontologically, to be what is happening when we look at a photograph: we see things that are not present” ’.8 We consider here momentary images, imprints of acts that their perpetrators aimed always to withhold from representation. We see things that are now invisible and which were always screened from view. Despite their aura of evidence, these images embody this temporal and affective paradox, intensified by the presence of death. We aim to bear this in mind as we look at the afterlife of indexical images, the desires and fears projected onto them,9 and the charged, changing status they hold. Iseta: Behind the Roadblock In the audiovisual archive at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, one piece of material stands out from all the others: a short film clip of relatively low quality, part of exhibit 467 (96–3).10 As far as most researchers are concerned, this clip is the only existing visual record of the actual killings that took place in Rwanda in 1994.11 The clip was captured by Nick Hughes.12 In ‘Exhibit 467: Genocide Through a Camera Lens’, he recounts the circumstances under which the footage was shot, from the top of the French School in Kigali: Belgian paratroopers were there, which made it a relatively secure place from which to observe. [...] Through the sights on the rocket launcher, the soldier could see people being killed on the other side of the valley. [...] At this point I was a bit short of charged batteries and tapes for my camera [...] I could see groups of people walking up and down a dirt road and I could see piles of bodies. [...] I turned my camera away to look at other activity on the road. By the time I panned back to the first spot, two or three men had been brought out and killed. [...] When I focused my camera the second time, I could see two women among one pile of bodies. [...] Both women were kneeling. One was begging, arms outstretched. Nonchalantly, the killers would come over and beat the men who were dying in front of these two women, then stroll away. [...] The woman on the ground pleaded for about 20 minutes. I could not film the whole thing because I was concerned about my batteries and tape. [...] Finally, a man came across the street and hit one woman on the head with such force that he broke the stick he was using. She fell back. She put her arm up to ward off the blow, and he must have broken it. The second blow hit her on the side of her head and neck.13

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Hughes goes on to tell us that the women were eventually killed with ‘severe blows’, and that he managed to catch that on tape. He wonders how it was possible that — in the light of the large number of bodies strewn around Kigali — he and other journalists did not see and record more killings.14 Hughes’s footage is unique in that it breaks with the usual representational characteristic of film and news portrayals of the Rwandan genocide: lack of direct access to the event itself, and its killings, and reliance on its anticipation or aftermath. In other words, in almost all portrayals the representation of the event of genocide rests somewhere outside of what is actually shown. As Michael Dorland writes, ‘genocides always take place off-screen’.15 More specifically, Alexandre Dauge-Roth observes: A look at the most significant documentaries on the [Rwandan] genocide turns up ten or so filmed sequences that recur showing piles of bodies by the side of the road or by roadblocks — images taken at the beginning of the genocide — or hundreds of cadavers piled up and decomposing in churches, stadiums, or hospitals, if not f loating in rivers — images taking (sic) towards the end of the genocide or in the areas captured by the RPF.16

The uniqueness of the clip recorded by Hughes opens up a number of questions about the evidential status of lens-based images in relation to genocide. It encourages a figurative and theoretical engagement, but it also allows for a pragmatic (and specific) consideration of what can be done with a piece of footage and how its usability depends on a variety of external factors, such as the temporal distance between the event and its representation, the place of exhibition, and the different functions that footage like this can have for different individuals and groups of people. These issues are addressed directly in Juan Reina’s documentary, Iseta: Behind the Roadblock, which makes Hughes and the images he shot its subjects. Ref lection on Hughes’s images, and the subsequent opening of their meanings and afterlife in Iseta, inspires here a new return to images from Auschwitz and an account of their evidential and affective resonance. Iseta follows Hughes on his return to Kigali, years after the genocide, with an objective to find the perpetrators and identify the victims recorded by his camera in 1994. Hughes is a well-known figure in the field of documenting the Rwandan genocide on film. In addition to recording the already-mentioned clip, he also covered the civil war in the country from 1990, directed the first fictionalized feature about the genocide, 100 Days (Hughes, 2001), and has a history of collaboration with the Rwanda Cinema Centre and its founder Eric Kabera.17 Hughes does not disguise the fact that the experience of the genocide had a profound impact on him. This impact sometimes manifests itself in the form of personal reproach. In an interview, he says: I think the boundaries [of reporting] should be reasonably well kept. As a journalist or a cameraman you shouldn’t get too involved because you lose your objectivity [...] But Rwanda was different. Genocide is different [...] This was an event when you had to put your profession to one side and act as a human being. It was not something just to be reported on.18

It is important to note, however, that despite this deeply personal involvement,

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Hughes remains realistically aware of what could and could not have been done on the individual level. In thinking responsibility more fully, he evokes the international community’s apathy in the face of the genocide as well as the more damning role of France in the event.19 Iseta, like many other documentaries on Rwanda, was made by a white Westerner — Reina is Spanish/Finnish. Yet the film departs from the usually reductive approach adopted by a passive observer. It offers a view of a person both directly and indirectly involved in the event.20 It is the use (and possession) of archival footage that allows for this mixture. Iseta problematizes different uses of images. In particular it questions the creation and recording of memory and the implications of these processes. It juxtaposes personal and collective aspects of witnessing and experiencing the genocide, potentially confusing (or manipulating) notions of chronology. These issues, and most acutely that of the personal and collective aspects of witnessing, we also see bearing resonance in the context of images from Auschwitz. Iseta is a combination of a particular, personal investigation and a more general portrait of the genocide. It opens with Hughes saying: ‘family by family, road by road, roadblock by roadblock, people were being exterminated.’ Soon after that, we are shown an extract from the 1994 footage of the killings which ends with a cut to a Rwandan woman watching it on a laptop screen and, shaking her head in pain and disbelief, asking: ‘Who filmed this?’ As the film unfolds, we realize that the question and the answer are far more complex than they might at first appear. This complexity will not so much concern the authorship of the material but rather the questioning of the right to use it as a piece of evidence and as a space for different incarnations of memory of the same event to converge. Dauge-Roth writes about Iseta: Juan Reina and Eric Kabera filmed this powerful journey through which Hughes aims to personalize the anonymous victims he filmed from a distance by immersing himself in the intimacy of their stories and families in order to conjure these ghostly presences who have haunted him since 1994.21

Yet, the intimate character of this revisiting of Rwanda, Hughes’s memory and images, do not put him outside of the collective experience. He is a unique witness, privileged by the possession of the visual material and by his presence, albeit remote, near the scene of the slaughter. But he is also aware that without placing the footage within its historical and personal context, the piece of film will never do what Hughes expects it to do. In Iseta, Hughes tries to find out who the people he filmed more than ten years ago were and what happened to them. But the investigative aspect of this quest is simultaneous with a questioning of whether what has become an iconic image of a distant massacre can go beyond the usual function of such images and be used as an actual piece of evidence. Hughes (with Reina and Kabera) finds the street from the footage and starts asking the inhabitants about what they can remember from 1994. Soon he establishes the names of the women and the man killed in the clip — Tatiane, Justine and Gabriel.22 Tatiane died with her baby. The footage is shown to a number of people and meets with mixed reactions. Interviews with

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survivors, family members and perpetrators released from prison are interwoven with Hughes talking to the camera about what it was like for him in 1994 and offering his opinions about what they have found out so far. We are also shown some archival footage that, together with the commentary, provides facts and background information about the genocide. As the film progresses, it transpires that two of Tatiane’s children managed to survive the genocide. Towards the end of the film, we are told that they are now living in Hughes’s care in Kenya. The last segment of Iseta takes place at a Gacaca court hearing which questions a number of suspects, trying to determine whether they participated in this particular attack.23 The session is a result of many interviews with neighbours and survivors from the Kigali street, who had all come together to watch and re-watch the footage, to try to recognize and remember the killers. The film closes with a statement from Hughes: ‘anybody who was in Rwanda, anybody who has come after and was touched by the genocide is a lesser human being. You cannot have any experience of the genocide without being reduced.’ Hughes’s personal, often strong, opinions are in constant negotiation with the rest of the film’s narrative. They often inf luence the very way the material is presented and organized. This comes through very powerfully in the way Hughes’s footage of the killing and other archival material is used and represented. While the footage of the killings has a certain independence, and while it drives the film forward, other archival clips have a more subordinate role. They are used to explain some of the events from 1994 and provide historical context for the genocide.24 They are also used as visual confirmations of Hughes’s statements about the past. In this sense, they are used selectively and to lend authority and narrative sequence (which, in itself, is not a challenge to their veracity). In New Documentary, Stella Bruzzi observes that The fundamental issue of documentary film is the way in which we are invited to access the ‘document’ or ‘record’ through representation or interpretation, to the extent that a piece of archive material becomes a mutable rather than fixed point of reference.25

The use of other archival footage (often also captured by Hughes) to support his statements is a confirmation that it is Hughes who is our guide, our point of access to the story but also to the genocide. He, together with the footage he shot in 1994, is the instigator of the search we see in the film. His relationship with the past is at issue here as the film looks at memory — personal and collective — and its expression through the acknowledgement of mediated subjectivity. The use of the footage of the killings, unlike the use of the other clips, is never conveniently versatile or opportunistic. Its use in the film is much more fixed. It is played repeatedly and there are numerous scenes where Rwandans are shown the clip in order to identify the place and people in it. Its centrality to Iseta, and perhaps to the visual representation of the genocide more generally, lies not only in what it shows, but also in the way it is and can be used. Bernard Stiegler writes that ‘it is necessary to distinguish between testimony and evidence, testimony and exhibit, testimony and clue’.26 The call for such a distinction, in our view, does not imply the impossibility of testimonial material

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having multiple applications. It does, however, encourage contemplation of the way the material is used and in what context. In Iseta, this matter pertains to questions about the role of origin and ownership in determining what the clip is capable of doing.27 Hughes seems to have a relatively clear idea about what he expects from his trip and from the images he is bringing with him. When he and his team finally establish that one of the women killed in the street is Justine, he goes to speak to her sister, Rosalie. Once she, Hughes and a translator sit down to talk, Rosalie — visibly uncomfortable and reserved — does not provide any information before making her own enquiries. Firmly, she asks Hughes what he wants from her. What does he expect and why is he even there? He, in turn, explains how the video has become one of the most famous, iconic images of the genocide, how it has been seen around the world and yet how it remains anonymous, the people in it nameless and unidentified. Hughes would like to know who were the people that died, and that killed. He says that ‘it would be good to have a face that explains the suffering’. Even though it is not explicitly clear at the beginning whether the knowledge sought by Hughes is for himself, for the audience of Iseta, or for the relatives of the victims, he seems convinced that the footage he shot can expand its usefulness beyond the purpose it has served thus far. This conviction echoes Stiegler’s proposition which distinguishes between evidence and testimony. The idea of justice, of using the clip as a piece of actual evidence, a means to establish the facts of the crime, becomes entangled with the issues about proof, veracity, affect and the pain of others. One of the trends of external representation of African conf lict, suffering and atrocity is its overwhelmingly unbalanced focus on victims rather than perpetrators. Right next to this stands the issue of anonymity. One of the reasons for the display of distant suffering in the West comes from the fact that most of the time the subject of representation is anonymous and stands in for a type of person rather than being an individual herself or himself, as Susan Sontag has pointed out in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) and Judith Butler in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009). Hughes’s desire to furnish the distant figure kneeling in the road with a face,28 with individuality, can also be seen as a way of connecting his footage with other images, of making it more complete, compensating for its technical shortcomings and placing it within a broader framework of memory. These considerations, requirements and demands lead toward a more general shift in the function of the footage. They pluck it out from the realm of the creation of memory for people who had not experienced the event themselves and place it within a tangible network of actual — if belated — reference. It is important to remember that Hughes is bringing the footage back to Rwanda so it can be used for some or all of the purposes listed above. This is significant because the dynamic usually works in reverse. Images taken in Rwanda and in Africa in general rarely filter back to the places from which they originated.29 On the other hand, Iseta is being recorded on the back of this return. It has been screened in Rwanda, but it would be hard to assess the impact of these screenings.

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In the course of the filmed investigation to identify the people involved in the incident around which Iseta revolves, Hughes and his crew visit a number of neighbours and relatives connected to the event. Sometimes they only film conversations between these people, without the explicit involvement of the interviewer. This, beyond driving the narrative forward, acts as a comment on the way the same visual stimulus can have different effects on different viewers. Despite the fact that Hughes captured this intimate moment, the moment of someone’s death, his access to what it means, or can mean, is limited by his lack of knowledge and experience, in a way by his not being Rwandan. To him it is a different kind of memory. The neighbours and relatives — even the perpetrators — recall situations from before the genocide as well as circumstances in which they and the protagonists of the recording found themselves before and after that day. They remind themselves and each other of particular events and of the characteristics of the people that died. This network of reference is no more accessible to Hughes — the author of the images that spark its operation — than it is to us, the viewers. In 1994, Hughes was on the other side, so to speak, protected by soldiers, white, and in possession of a press ID card. The existence of the footage he recorded and the way in which others saw the event, provide an interesting comment on perspective or remembering. At one point we see Hughes talking to Alfred, a genocide survivor from the street shown in the footage of the killings. In this conversation, the clip’s functions as a record of reality and as a piece of historical/legal evidence are brought together by the physical, geographical space they share, but also by the different perspectives from which Hughes and Alfred experienced the event. The footage is used to work out the exact spot where the killing took place, where Hughes and Alfred now converse. But there is a notable shift in perspective. The images become a platform onto which different aspects of memory of the same event can be projected. The scene focuses on the death of Gabriel. Alfred can remember an astonishing amount of detail and he shares it in front of the camera. It is not clear whether he has been shown the footage beforehand or whether he is working exclusively from what he can remember. He tells Hughes how just before dying, Gabriel — down on his knees — raised his hands to the sky and said: ‘Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.’ Alfred makes the gesture himself, followed by a cut to the piece of footage where we can see Gabriel doing it as well. This has a powerful effect. We are not sure whether it is the visual evidence that validates the memory or perhaps the other way round. Alfred’s reenactment somehow feels more powerful, more tangible, more real. But why should it? After all, Hughes’s footage is a record of actuality, of the present of death, while what we see within the narrative of Iseta is nothing but a reenactment of a gesture we have already seen. On the other hand, we are visually closer to Alfred, because of the way the scene is filmed. There is little between him and us, the viewers. He is also a relatively familiar figure within the narrative of the film. We have been introduced to him and we have heard him speak before he performs the gesture. Hughes’s footage, in contrast, is shot from very far away and is of low quality. In it, Gabriel is a very distant figure; treetops obscure our vision. It is mostly because of what Alfred does that we pay close attention to Gabriel’s actions.

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But even on a more basic level the footage can only be used in the way Hughes wants to use it with the help of surviving Rwandans. They are necessary in the process of recognition. Their memory of the event is necessary to make Hughes, as the person who shot the footage, a witness in the fullest sense. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Dori Laub writes that ‘a witness is a witness to the truth of what happens during an event’.30 Thus the fact of seeing and capturing the footage does not make Hughes a witness. As we have already seen, until he returns to Rwanda, his witnessing is based on showing others a distant, anonymous atrocity. It relates to the genocide as a whole rather than to the particular event captured by his camera. He can only become a witness with the aid of other witnesses who will help him to piece the story together. Shoshana Felman writes that To testify is thus not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit the narrative, to others: to take responsibility — in speech — for history or for the truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the personal, in having general (nonpersonal) validity and consequences.31

It could be argued that this commitment is realized in Hughes’s search for the actual people from the clip. The ‘general (nonpersonal) validity and consequences’ are only achieved through particularity. They do not come from the images standing as an iconic symbol of the Rwandan genocide, but from the footage’s ability to exist as a tangible piece of evidence in a court of law. Hughes’s footage in Iseta is often used very pragmatically, just as Hughes wanted it to be, with viewers relying on physical characteristics to work out the killers’ identity. The process culminates at a Gacaca hearing where the clip is watched once more by most of the people involved in the search, including the suspects. They try to use its function as a record of reality to prove their innocence (one of them points out the difference between his physical aspect and that of the killer shown in the film). It is also now that we see the complete scene of the killing. Hughes’s camera lingers for some time after the murder has been committed. The Gacaca trial goes around in circles and is largely inconclusive. It is punctuated with shots of Hughes visibly disappointed with the uncertain outcome of the confrontation. It is not until Iseta’s closing captions that we are told that at least one of the perpetrators has been convicted thanks to the recording. The role of the footage in the conviction of other suspects is left unexplained, ambiguous. Iseta offers a complex reckoning with the afterlife of Hughes’s footage. As our reading implies, the indexical status of the recorded photographic images remains critically important. The fact that this footage is the only document offering a record of killings in the context of the genocidal campaign in Rwanda is of crucial significance. This is identified in the prominence given to that footage within Iseta itself and within critical discussions of lens-based representation of genocide, our own included. The importance of the evidential status of the footage is confirmed perhaps most overtly in the late recognition that at least one of the perpetrators was convicted. If Iseta is driven in part by this move towards justice, the folds of the film, its

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returning scenarios, suggest that more than justice alone is at stake. The capture of the images is critical and at the same time it is not enough. Any approach to proof, evidence or truth of testimony to genocidal acts and their effects is only found or felt in a much more painstaking process of retrieval, contextualization, and restitution of particularity and context. The imprint of the actions alone, effected by a cameraman from the West, is merely one small part of a broader mechanism and mourning. It is an irony that a documentary film, Iseta, should itself effectively, even if unintentionally, relativize the status and import of the document on which it centres. Auschwitz-Birkenau, August 1944 The process of retrieval and contextualization, as identified in Iseta, has, as we have foreshadowed, live connections with the afterlife of Holocaust images. This film from Rwanda, and its pursued questioning of evidence and affect, brings to the fore a wider set of concerns about genocide images. Most relevant are the questions that have arisen about the four photographs taken by a member of the Sonderkommando now known only as Alex, in and around Crematorium V at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944. As Saxton argues, moving on from the issue of the ‘pellicule maudite’: ‘An alternative barometer of the anxieties aroused by these missing or imaginary images is the ongoing debate in French scholarship about the real images displayed in the “Mémoires des camps” exhibition.’32 These were the four images taken by Alex and discussed by Georges Didi-Huberman in his inf luential volume Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Two images show the cremation of gassed bodies. The third shows naked women driven towards the gas chamber. The figures are spectral, illusory, terrifyingly alive and vulnerable, so close to death. The perspective has slipped sideways in this third image and it has foundered further in the fourth where all trace of human presence is obliterated. We see only the branches of birch trees against the sky, the rest of the scene swallowed in darkness. Seen sequentially the images illustrate a course towards a limit of representation. Their evidentiary status is strident yet they appear dramatically inadequate for the subject they hold and for the human effigies, dead and near death, they return to our gaze. As Saxton explains, Didi-Huberman’s attention to these images is part of a broader aim ‘to redress what he perceives as a persistent neglect of the documentary and testimonial value of photographic traces’.33 In line with our argument about Iseta’s perspective on Hughes’s footage, Saxton shows Didi-Huberman affirming the status of the images as ‘ “instants” or “vestiges” of veracity’ and not the whole truth.34 Yet in their fragmentary state they still hold political and ethical significance: ‘Didi-Huberman argues further that the Sonderkommando members’ “act of resistance” challenges discourses of “invisibility” of the kind popularized by readings of Shoah, as well as the concomitant notions that the Holocaust remains “unspeakable”, “unimaginable” and “unrepresentable” ’.35 As Saxton argues: ‘His analyses of these photographs cumulatively mount a powerful defence of the

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photograph’s capacity to grant us visual access to historical violence, which acquires particular significance in the context of the Nazis’ attempt to conceal and destroy the traces of their crimes.’36 Taking up this debate, Nicholas Chare in Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation places particular emphasis on the material dimension of the photographs as imprinted objects. As he writes: ‘the photographs, in their stubborn materiality, are difficult to reconcile with claims that the Holocaust is beyond representation.’37 Beyond this materiality, Chare also stresses that DidiHuberman ‘sees the four photographs taken by Alex as invitations to imagine’.38 He continues: ‘They have the capacity to vehicle the feel of events.’39 Chare argues further that Didi-Huberman ‘returns to Alex the danger of his endeavour’.40 This reading emerges out of the darkness of the photographs, the recognition that concealment within what Didi-Huberman identifies as a gas chamber was the condition of possibility of their capture. Didi-Huberman, and Chare in his wake, offer exceptionally vivid engagements with the images and their emotional field. Yet Chare is wary too of interpretation and exegesis. While the darkness in the images offers a clue to the position of the photographer, it also effectively opens the images to ruptured or failed representation. These images are taken from a visibly impaired angle of vision. Their visual quality, and hence their denotative power, is poor, much like Hughes’s footage hampered by his distance from the events recorded, and the possible mortal danger he courted in taking his film. Chare recognizes, feelingly: These pictures can be given the appearance of coherence. This is precisely what Didi-Huberman does, and what also occurs here. They can be named, shaped, made into some thing. They can be filled. Yet a part of the darkness will always resist this desire to contour it. It remains rather that out of which contour arises, bordering all interpretations yet resisting being delimited by them. Shape momentarily disappears in this darkness.41

Comparison of the Sonderkommando images and the footage Hughes captured in Rwanda requires on one level a rehearsal of differences. Much has been made in this chapter so far of Hughes’s position as cameraman external to the events. Witnessing has been seen to take place only with the involvement of the kinship network and community of the victims in Rwanda. The position of Alex, and the taking of the images at Auschwitz, is still more complex. As a member of the Sonderkommando he was within the system to whose processes his images testify. While his situation was different to some degree from that of the inmates his images show, the images themselves and the conditions of their existence depend on his proximity to the gas chamber, to the pain and death of others, and to his own extermination. His distance, as worker in the crematorium, allowed the almost impossible act of taking the images, yet his position as witness to Nazi crimes ensured his erasure, and the eradication of difference between worker and inmate. Very few of the Sonderkommando members survived the Holocaust. The images wrested from this death-bearing proximity speak of a wish to testify beyond death, from a position where, symbolically and effectively, the photographer was himself condemned to the fate he represented. The status of Alex’s images in this regard

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might be compared to that of the writings known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz.42 We are reminded starkly that Alex cannot, like Hughes, return to the site of his imaging and engage in the memory work testimony requires. His act of witnessing, his access to the events he imaged, necessitated his future annihilation. Despite the efforts of historians and critics it has also not yet proved possible even to restore to Alex his full name or his individual identity (more has been pieced together about the authors of the Scrolls of Auschwitz). Iseta in its contrasting restoration of identity, reminds us of these vistas of unknowing, of invisibility and anonymity. Alex himself remains unknown. His subjectivity is reduced to an angle of vision and a human act of resistance, of political courage. What remains of him is his faith in the evidential status of the photographic image and his mission to make that image available to the future. These images offer in this sense an imprint of the acts they record and to which they testify, but still more crucially they offer proof of a consciousness witnessing the events and recognizing the infinite value of this material evidence for the future. Alex is reduced to an angle of vision. He leaves four fragile imprints documenting unimaginable acts, four moments of being, his contestatory being in relation to the acts his camera records. The camera mediates between self and scene, offering evidence of someone seeing, a stark impression, indelibly captured, of a vision in the world. To know these images is to know of Alex nothing but this extraordinary ethical consciousness. Iseta pierces us with late-coming knowledge not only of Hughes’s ongoing thought about Rwanda but also of the prior existence of individuals, Tatiane, Justine and Gabriel, whose slaughter we view. Of the living and dead in Alex’s images nothing is known. A part of the rapture and appeal of Iseta comes in the naming of the victims at the roadblock and the restoration of particularity. This memory work and act of commemoration is not possible in the context of the images captured by Alex. Such acts of recognition have been important in the Holocaust context. A comparable impulse to name and render individual the slaughtered underpins a project such as Serge Klarsfeld’s monumental project, Mémorial des enfants juifs déportés de France (French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial), collecting together names and images of French children who died in the Holocaust. Sylvie Lindeperg has argued that Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) functioned symbolically for orphans of the deportation by revealing death and initiating an act of mourning. She suggests that family members may seek to see their mother’s hair, their father’s bones, the face of murdered loved ones.43 The images Alex captured do not yield any direct integration into family or communal history. Their pathos is further deepened if we consider that they show images of someone’s mother, someone’s lover, near death and now dead. Juxtaposition of these images with Iseta draws attention to the thick affective layers surrounding images of the pain of known and unknown others. These layers are not held in the image as such but brought to it. Imagining around Alex’s images restores a sense at once of how little they hold and of how much speculation they invite. These images have been instrumentalized, as Saxton has shown, in debates about whether representation of genocide is possible, about whether events exceed

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representation or bring visual, or any, media to their limits. As Iseta has explored, one driving motivation in the capture and replay of photographic images is the search for proof, evidence that can be used in a court of law, in the example from Rwanda specifically, a Gacaca court. One part of the retrospective processing of Hughes’s footage relates to the brute usefulness of the images in providing graphic evidence. Alex’s images, poured over by scholars sixty or more years after the events they depict, have no direct bearing on the legal and political processing of the genocide against the Jews. Rather, they initiate new thinking about representation and affect. If the provision of evidence is critical for Hughes, and the film moves to maintain that at least one perpetrator has been convicted as a result of the use of the footage, the emotive force of the film may be felt less as a result of this act of justice than as a result of Hughes’s human and humanitarian act in adopting Tatiane’s surviving children. Here it is not what the image has captured but the fact of Hughes’s presence as a witness at that moment that changes his relation to Rwanda and which encourages this different act of protection and homage. The visual quality of both Alex’s images and Nick Hughes’s footage is impaired, Alex’s through his angle of vision and Hughes’s in his distance from the events. In both cases the mortal danger posed by the capture of the images is underlined by their f leeting, impoverished quality. They are the more precious as we register the terror and urgency impelling their taking. It is instinctively correct to write, and to believe, that these images are important indexically, in their imprint of genocidal acts. Yet focus on indexicality and the image as evidence alone is far from adequate. Iseta in its retrospective exploration of Hughes’s footage, shows the ways in which the force and sense of the clip taken by Hughes is felt only in its recontextualization, in its afterlife, its return to Rwanda, its replay in the cradle of the family, community and grassroots legal system. And even then, wishes for the footage as evidence, as source, as agent of redemption outstrip what it can literally achieve. The footage, really imprinted, acquires in part the phantasmal or spectral status of the ‘pellicule maudite’. This footage appears to guarantee the power of the indexical image. Yet its aura, its impossible appeal, is heightened through projections onto it, and through wishes and imagining. The acts of the genocidal campaign, the affect they summon, massively outbalance and override the capacities of visual representation. This is not to undermine the importance of visual representation and its testimonial evidence, but to acknowledge that the moment of imprint is simply a point of initiation in a long afterlife of processing, thought, and pursuit of knowledge. One part of the afterlife of Hughes’s footage, and of its use in Iseta, which we have attempted to explore here, is its involvement with other images of the pain of others. Our sense is that the example of Iseta draws into focus the critical importance of questioning context and the politics of looking. Yet the film shows too how far the indexical image is always not enough, how far the lament, memory work, and unfinished grief this recognition entails is ongoing and unfolding through new regions of the present.

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Films 100 Days, dir. Nick Hughes (2001) Iseta: Behind the Roadblock, dir. Juan Reina (2008) Kigali, des images contre un massacre (Images against a Massacre), dir. Jean-Christophe Klotz (2006) Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), dir. Alain Resnais (1955) Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (1985)

Notes to Chapter 10 1. Libby Saxton, ‘Ethics, Spectatorship and the Spectacle of Suffering’, in Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton, Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 62–76 (p. 63). 2. Downing and Saxton, Film and Ethics, p. 64. 3. Anne Chaon, ‘Who Failed in Rwanda, Journalists or the Media?’, in The Media and The Rwandan Genocide, ed. by Allan Thompson (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto; Kampala: Fountain Publishers; Ottawa, Cairo, Dakar, Montevideo, Nairobi, New Delhi and Singapore: International Development Research Centre, 2007), pp. 160–66 (p. 163). 4. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005 [1985]), p. 96. 5. D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 11. 6. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 27. 7. John Corner, The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 2. 8. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, pp. 63–64; the quotation is taken from Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 18. 9. Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London: Wallf lower, 2008). 10. ‘Exhibit 467’ refers to a compilation of video material, approximately one hour and eight minutes in duration, submitted as an exhibit at the trial of Georges Rutaganda (case reference number: ICTR 96–3). It is a collection of video recordings documenting the situation in Rwanda in 1994. Hughes’s footage of the killings is included amongst them; it lasts for approximately ten minutes. 11. Chaon, ‘Who Failed in Rwanda?’, p. 163. By the only existing visual record of the killings, we mean the moment of murder rather than images of corpses — the aftermath of the act. Nick Hughes seems to suggest that someone else might have filmed a shooting in 1994 (in ‘Exhibit 467: Genocide through a Camera Lens’, in The Media and The Rwandan Genocide, ed. by Thompson, pp. 231–34 (p. 231)), but these recordings, if they exist, do not seem to be available. 12. The clip can be seen here: [accessed 1 November 2012]. 13. Hughes, ‘Exhibit 467’, p. 232. 14. Hughes, ‘Exhibit 467’, p. 233. 15. Michael Dorland, ‘PG — Parental Guidance or Portrayal of Genocide: the Comparative Depiction of Mass Murder in Contemporary Cinema’, in The Media and The Rwandan Genocide, ed. by Thompson, pp. 417–32 (p. 417). 16. Alexandre Dauge-Roth, Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History (Lanham and Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010), p. 222. 17. Eric Kabera is one of the most prolific and successful Rwandan filmmakers and producers. The founder and director of the Rwandan Cinema Centre and the Rwanda Film Festival, he is a friend of Hughes’s. His involvement in Iseta was considerable; he facilitated many of the

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meetings and interviews shown in the film and participated in some of them (he appears on screen several times). A degree of personal involvement, going beyond the regular role of the producer, is evident here. 18. Nick Hughes, interview with Piotr Cieplak, 14 May 2007. 19. Nick Hughes, interview with Cieplak. 20. Another documentary that achieves a similar combination of perspectives is Jean-Christophe Klotz’s Kigali: des images contre un massacre (Images against a Massacre) (2006). 21. Dauge-Roth, Writing and Filming the Genocide, p. 223. 22. The audience does not learn the surnames of the protagonists of Iseta. 23. Gacaca courts are grassroots institutions of the justice system in Rwanda. They have been brought back by the government to deal with the overwhelming backlog of genocide-related trials. They take place within local communities, and are allowed to deal only with particular types of cases. For detailed discussions and explanations see: Arthur Molenaar, Gacaca: Grassroots Justice after Genocide: The Key to Reconciliation in Rwanda? (Leiden: African Studies Centre, 2005) and Phil Clark, The Gacaca Courts and Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice Without Lawyers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 24. We do not have the space in this chapter to go into a detailed discussion of the mode of operation of the other pieces of archival footage, but it is worth mentioning that they are often used to visually confirm what Hughes is saying. His voice often carries over from the present of the narrative to the past of the images. This use creates an interesting play with chronology in Iseta, which is compelling to explore in the context of the theories of the operation of time in film put forward by Gilles Deleuze. 25. Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 17. 26. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. by Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 92. 27. As far as we are aware Hughes’s production company Vivid Features — based in Kenya — holds the copyright to this particular piece of footage and other material filmed by Hughes from the Rwandan genocide. 28. In order to do this, photographs are brought forward by some relatives. 29. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994). 30. Dori Laub, ‘An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 75–92 (p. 80). 31. Shoshana Felman, ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, in Felman and Laub, Testimony, pp. 204–83 (p. 204). 32. Saxton, Haunted Images, p. 56. 33. Saxton, Haunted Images, p. 57. 34. Saxton, Haunted Images, p. 57. 35. Saxton, Haunted Images, p. 57. 36. Saxton, Haunted Images, p. 58. Saxton’s account moves on to discuss Godard’s position on photographic imaging and the archive and Claude Lanzmann’s refusal of archival images in Shoah (1985). Her account raises important questions about how far the image of atrocity may shield us from the real rather than showing it to us. This issue might be pursued very interestingly with relation to Nick Hughes’s footage and Iseta, but it is beyond our remit here. 37. Nicholas Chare, Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), p. 80. 38. Chare, Auschwitz and Afterimages, p. 81. 39. Chare, Auschwitz and Afterimages, p. 81. 40. Chare, Auschwitz and Afterimages, p. 142. 41. Chare, Auschwitz and Afterimages, p. 143. 42. See Chare’s Auschwitz and Afterimages for a rich discussion of the Scrolls and their place in reckoning with the history and materiality of the Holocaust. 43. Sylvie Lindeperg, ‘Nuit et brouillard’: un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), p. 241.

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INDEX ❖ 13 at War 18–19, 149–51, 156–61, 164–65, 167 n. 19 online game 151, 157, 161–63 website 161–62 100 Days 194 Accoyer, Bernard 38 Adorno, Theodor 92, 99, 114 Affinati, Eraldo 21 n. 29 ‘After Jedwabne’ 133, 139, 144 Agamben, Giorgio 17, 85, 88, 89, 92, 181 Aldrich, Robert 101 Altman, Rick 127 n. 15 Amen 126 n. 3 Amman, Jurg 114 ‘...And Europe Will be Stunned’ 134, 144 Andersen, Thom 69 Anderson, Mark 139 Anne Frank: The After-Diary 39 Antelme, Robert 76 Apt Pupil 119, 120 Arendt, Hannah 64, 88, 92–93, 94 Army of Crime 99, 104 Arnold, Agnieszka 139 Assassination 142–43 The Assault 151 Assmann, Aleida 149–50 At Mussolini’s Court 32 Aufderheide, Pat 186 n. 2 Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ 27, 30–31, 32, 115 The Authentic Trial of Carl Emmanuel Jung 69 Avatar 124 Avisar, Ilan 114, 125 Band of Brothers 115–16 Barbash, Uri 133, 137 Barbe, Jean-Marie 189 n. 44 Baron, Lawrence 119, 128 n. 35 Bartana, Yael 18, 134, 142–44 Bartov, Omer 29 Basinger, Jeanine 101, 110 n. 7 Battlestar: Galactica 124 Baudrillard, Jean 85 Bauman, Zygmunt 92, 122 Belpoliti, Marco 10–13, 15 Benigni, Roberto 105 Benjamin, Walter 6, 66, 69, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81 Bennett, Jill 136

Bensoussan, Georges 29 Berlusconi, Silvio 34 Bernard-Donals, Michael 126 n. 4 Betlejewski, Rafał 18, 133, 139–42, 144 Beyond Borders 34 Bilozir, Igor 14 Birth Certificate 134 Black Book 102, 151 Blake Nelson, Tim 117, 121, 126 n. 3 Blatty, William Peter 119 Blom, Hans 152 Błoński, Jan 133 Blum-Reid, Sylvie 175, 188 n. 27 Boder, David 46 Bojarska, Katarzyna 139–40 Bophana 173, 174, 176–79, 183, 184, 188 nn. 16 & 28, 189 n. 32 Bophana, Hout 176, 177 Bora, Chhay 186 Border Street 134 Bousquet, René 38, 67 The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas 126 n. 3 Boyle, Deidre 180 Bradley, F. H. 78 Bradshaw, Peter 105 Breslauer, Rudolf 7, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 160, 164 Britain Invaded 31 Brooks, Mel 105 Browning, Christopher 29, 31, 92, 116 Brunner, Aloïs 68 Bruzzi, Stella 196 Brynych, Zbynek 100 Buñuel, Luis 69 Burleigh, Michael 31, 115, 127 n. 5 ‘Burning Barn’ 133, 146 n. 35–36 Butler, Judith 197 Calef, Nissim 76 Cameron, James 124 Capra, Frank 115 Captain America: The First Avenger 117–18 Carrie 104 Carter, Jimmy 48 Castellari, Enzo 104 Cat People (1942 original and 1982 remake) 111 n. 18 Cavell, Stanley 193 Cayrol, Jean 92, 94 Cesarani, David 31

224

Index

Chandra, Mridu 186 n. 2 Chann, Im 176, 188 n. 16 Chaon, Anne 204 nn. 3 & 11 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Chare, Nicholas 201, 205 n. 42 Charman, Terry 31 Chaumeau, Christine 189 n. 36 Chicken Run 116–17 Children of Men 124 Chirac, Jacques 38 Ches, Khieu ‘Poev’ 179, 180 Ciano, Galeazzo 35 Clark, Phil 205 n. 23 Clouzot, Henri-Georges 96 n. 15, 103 Coates, Paul 135 Conrad, Joseph 76, 78 Cooper, Merian 107 Coriolanus 129 n. 43 Corner, John 193 Corrigan, Timothy 73, 74 Costa-Gavras 126 n. 3 Costello, Matthew J. 127 n. 16 Cuarón, Alfonso 124 Czierniaków, Adam 8 Daney, Serge 17, 84–85, 92, 94–95 Dauge-Roth, Alexandre 194, 195 Dawidowicz, Lucy 7 Dayan, Daniel 25 The Decalogue 134 De Gasperi 35 De Gasperi, Alcide 35 Dean, Martin 29 Defiance 99, 104, 126 n. 3 Delbo, Charlotte 76 Deleuze, Gilles 79, 184, 192, 205 n. 24 Derrida, Jacques 49 Des Pres, Terrence 99 Desbois, Patrick 27–30 Deutscher, Isaac 139 The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) 99, 113 The Diary of Anne Frank (2008–09) 38–39 Di Segni, Riccardo 26 Didi-Huberman, Georges 6–7, 8, 9, 17, 19, 70, 186 n. 5, 200–01 Dirty Dozen 101 Dorland, Michael 194 Downfall 102 Downing, Lisa 204 n. 2 Drancy Avenir 16, 66–70, 76–80 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 138 The Drowned and the Saved 88 Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell 187 n. 7 Dunkirk 30 Duras, Marguerite 76, 188 n. 20

Eav, Kaing Guek (‘Duch’) 173–74, 177, 182, 187 n. 7, 188 n. 18 Edda 35 Eichmann, Adolf 93 Ein, Nhiem 179 Einsatzgruppen 29–30 Elek, Judit 128 n. 29 Elsaesser, Thomas 71, 72–73, 74 Enemy at the Door 31 Epstein, Simon 37 Escape from Sobibor 110 n. 3, 117 Etty, Elsbeth 167 n. 27 The Exorcist 118, 119 Exorcist: Dominion 119–20, 123, 127–28 n. 22 Exorcist: The Beginning 127–28 n. 22 F For Fake 69 Fanon, Frantz 92 Falk, Feliks 133, 137–38 Farge, Arlette 70 Farocki, Harun 5, 7, 16, 66–75, 77, 78, 79, 81 Feinstein, Stephen 66 Felman, Shoshana 140, 199 Ferguson, Niall 31 Ferida, Luisa 35–36 Ferrario, Davide 10–15 Fiennes, Ralph 129 n. 43 Filipowicz, Halina 144 A Film Unfinished 7–10 Fink, Ida 133, 137 Finkelstein, Norman 122, 127 n. 6 Fisichella, Rino 26 The Flight of the Innocent 34 Flinker, Mosche 153 Ford, Aleksander 134 Foucault, Michel 88, 115 The Four Minute Mile 30 Frank, Anne 16, 25, 38–39 Frank, David A. 119, 122 Frank, Otto 149 Friedkin, William 118, 119 Friedlander, Saul 127 n. 19 Frodon, Jean-Michel 69 From the Racial Laws to the Shoah 33 Funny Games 17, 85–90, 92, 94 Gawkowski, Henrik 180 Geljzer, Richard 126 n. 4 Gemmeker, Albert 7, 67, 72, 75 Gerlach, Christian 31 Ghignino, Angela 34 Gies, Miep 149 Gilbert, Adrian 31 Giordana, Marco Tullio 16, 35 Gitelman, Zvi 132 Głowacka, Dorota 144

Index The Gleaners and I 69 Gleeson, Erin 175, 188 n. 21 Godard, Jean-Luc 5, 8, 30, 76, 77, 103, 170–71, 174, 205 n. 36 Goedhart, Marcel 156, 158, 159, 160, 161 Gold, Jack 110 n. 3, 117 Goldhagen, Daniel 116 Goyer, David S. 119 The Great Escape 116 The Great History 32 Greengrass, Paul 123 The Grey Zone 117, 121, 126 n. 3 Gross, Jan 132–33, 139 Grossman, Elwira 144 Grunberg, Slawomir 139 Guédiguian, Robert 99 Guerin, Frances 186 n. 1 Guns of Navarone 101

Hughes, Nick 19, 191–205 Hunt, Eric 57 Husson, Edouard 29 Hutton, Brian 101

Hadlow, Janice 24 Haggith, Toby 68 Hallas, Roger 186 n. 1 Handel, George Frideric 86 Haneke, Michael 5, 17, 84–96 Hanoun, Marcel 69 Hansen, Miriam 127 n. 10 Harlin, Renny 127–28 n. 22 Harvey, Lilian 103 Hauser, Christoph 27 The Heart in the Well 34 Heart of Darkness 78 Here and Elsewhere 69 Herman, Mark 126 n. 3 Hersonski, Yael 7–10 Het Klokhuis 156 Heydrich, Reinhard 155 Hidden 88 Hiroshima, mon amour 79, 188 n. 20 Hirsch, Joshua 68, 186 n. 1 Hirsch, Marianne 110 n. 15, 168 n. 42 Hirschbiegel, Oliver 102 Histoire(s) du cinéma 5, 8, 30, 76, 77, 174 History Is Us 32 Hitchcock, Alfred 103 Hitler: A Film From Germany 69 Hitler’s Britain 31–32 Hoffmann, Hein 151, 156–57, 158, 159, 160, 161 Holocaust (TV) 2–3, 33, 48, 99, 113, 114 Holy Week 134 Hooper, Tobe 106 Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean 150 Horowitz, Sara 110 n. 15 Horstmann, Anja 21 n. 16 Hoskins, Andrew 148, 164 Hostel 121 Houy, Him 176–79, 181

Jameson, Fredric 128 n. 33 Jan Van Pelt, Robert 31 Jansen Hendriks, Gerda 155 Jaszi, Peter 186 n. 2 Joanna 133, 137–38 Joffé, Roland 186 John Paul II 26 Johnston, James 36 Johnston, Joe 117 Jong, Loe de 150–52, 166 n. 16, 167 nn. 26 & 27 Joubert, Annekie 25–26 Judt, Tony 10, 14 Jules et Jim 34 Just Beyond This Forest 134

I, Justice 100 ‘I Miss You, Jew’ 133, 141–42 I Remember Anne Frank 38–39 Icard, Romain 29 If This is a Man 12 Images against a Massacre 205 n. 20 In Mission for Mussolini 32 Inglourious Basterds 17, 98–111, 118 Ingrao, Christian 28, 29 Ioanid, Radu 29 Iseta 7, 19, 191–205 Island at War 31 It Happened Here 31

Kabera, Eric 194, 195, 204–05 n. 17 Kafka, Franz 76 Kahn, Prakk 179, 181 Kampuciya 1978: 187 n. 10 Kaplan, Ann E. 186 n. 1 Kapo 84 Kapsi, André 38 Karlson, Phil 106 Karski, Jan 140 Katyn 104, 121, 125, 129 nn. 45 & 46 Katz, Elihu 25 Kearney, Richard 66, 78 Keep Away From the Window 138, 146 n. 16 Kellner, Douglas 129 n. 41 Kerner, Aaron 111 n. 19, 120, 153 Kershaw, Ian 31 Kiernan, Ben 187 n. 14 Kiesłowski, Krzysztof 134 The Killing Fields 186 Kim Il Sung 182, 189 n. 47 King Kong 107 King, Stephen 119

225

226

Index

Klarsfeld, Serge 202 Kleiman, Jo 149 Klotz, Jean-Christophe 205 n. 20 Kofman, Gil 1–5 Kolski, Jan Jakub 138, 146 n. 16 Kowalczyk, Józef 26 Kracauer, Siegfried 70 Krakowski, Shmuel 133 Kushner, Tony 47 La Résistance 36–37 LaCapra, Dominick 121–22, 126 n. 4, 140 Laignel-Lavastine, Alexandra 29 The Land of Wandering Souls 174, 188 n. 28 Land Without Bread 69 Landsberg, Alison 123, 129 n. 40, 135 Landscape After Battle 138 Langford, Barry 127 nn. 11, 18 & 21, 186 n. 6 Lanzmann, Claude 6, 8, 29, 30, 66, 76, 83 n. 44, 99, 113, 121, 140, 170–71, 174, 180–81, 182, 205 n. 36 The Last Days of the Big Lie 57 The Last Mussolini 32 Laub, Dori 48, 137, 140, 199 Ledgerwood, Judy 187 n. 12 The Legacy of Jedwabne 139 Les Bienveillantes 28, 99 Lesiewicz, Witold 126 n. 1 Letter from Siberia 69 Levi, Primo 10–15, 88, 181 Levy, Daniel 46/47, 49 Liempt, Ad van 150–52, 154, 157, 167 n. 27 Life is Beautiful 99, 105 Lim, Alvin 171, 184, 189 n. 35, 190 n. 54 Lindeperg, Sylvie 71, 202 Linder, Max 103 Lipecka, Zofia 133, 139, 141 Littell, Jonathan 28, 99 Łomnicki, Jan 134 The Long Journey 68 Long Night 134 Lord, Peter 116 Los Angeles Plays Itself 69 Lost Loves 186 Lucet, Elise 28 Lumière brothers 76 Lyotard, Jean-François 70, 114 Magneto: Testament 122 Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander 128 n. 36 Man of Marble 13 Man with a Movie Camera 69 Mandelbaum, Jacques 78 Mandelsohn, Daniel 105, 108 Mann, Mey 183 Maria Josè 35 Marker, Chris 69

Mattäus, Jürgen 29 Maus 99 Mazierska, Ewa 134, 139 The Memory of Justice 69 The Memory Thief 1–5 The Merchant of Venice 76 Mey, Chum 179, 188 n. 16 Meyer, Charles 183 Michlic, Joanna B. 133, 139, 142 Middleton, Jason 128 n. 28 Mieli, Paolo 26 Miller, Claude 99 Miłosz, Czesław 146 n. 18 The Miner’s Strike 30 Mitterrand in Vichy 36–38 Mitterrand, François 37–38 Moati, Serge 36 Molenaar, Arthur 205 n. 23 Morris, Errol 69 Munk, Andrzej 126 n. 1 Muller, Annette 76 Mussolini Between War and Peace 32 Mussolini, Benito 32, 35 Mussolini. The Last Truth 32 Mussolini’s Men 32 Mussolini’s Secret 32 Mysteries of Nazism II 32 Nancy, Hugues 37 Nasfeter, Janusz 134 Nath, Vann 19, 171, 173, 174, 176–79, 182–85, 187 nn. 8 & 11, 188 nn. 16, 22 & 27, 189 n. 35 The Nazis: A Warning from History 115 Neame, Ronald 100 Neighbours 139 Nekanda-Trepka, Judyta 141–42 Newman, Joanna 68 Nichols, Bill 192 Night and Fog 5–6, 68, 69, 71, 82 nn. 4 & 18, 84, 92, 94, 99, 114, 174, 186, 188 n. 20, 202 Nightmares 142–43 Norindr, Panivong 188 n. 26 Novick, Peter 127 n. 6 The Occupation 150, 152, 155, 166 n. 16, 167 n. 27 The Odessa File 100 Olère, David 187 n. 8 Olivier, Laurence 115 Olla, Roberto 26 Ophüls, Marcel 16, 69 The Origins of Totalitarianism 88 Orsini, Umberto 11 Pabst, Georg Wilhelm 103, 107 Pakula, Alan J. 117 Palatucci, Giovanni 34

Index des Pallières, Arnaud 16, 66–70, 76–80 de Palma, Brian 104 Panh, Rithy 3, 19, 170–90 Park, Nick 116 The Passenger: opera 112, 114 film 126 n. 1 Passenger from Cabin 45: 126 n. 1 The Passion of Joan of Arc 138 Péan, Pierre 38 Pearce, Andy 127 n. 6 Perec, Georges 76 Perlasca 26, 39 Perlasca, Giorgio 34 Pétain, Philippe 37 Phay-Vakalis, Soko 179 Pheap, Top 179 The Pianist 18, 99, 126 n. 3, 133, 135–37, 140, 144 Picart, Caroline 119, 122 Playing for Time 33 Podchlebnik, Mordechai 128 n. 25 Pohl, Dieter 31 Pol Pot 182, 183, 184, 189 n. 47 Polanski, Roman 18, 126 n. 3, 133, 135–36 Pollack, Sidney 106 Pollock, Griselda 6, 17 Polonsky, Antony 133, 139, 142 Ponchaud, François 187 n. 14 Pontecorvo, Gillo 84–85 Posmysz, Zofia 126 n. 1 Potok, Chaim 128 n. 38 Pountney, David 112 Postwar 10 Poznanski, Renée 68 Prazan, Michaël 29–30 Primo Levi’s Journey 10–15 The Producers 105 The Promise 128 n. 38 Pulp Fiction 106 Rademakers, Fons 151 Radok, Alfréd 68 Rancière, Jacques 67, 78, 180–81, 182 Randell, Karen 128–29 n. 39 Raszelenberg, Patrick 187 n. 15 The Raven 96 n. 15, 103 Rechtman, Richard 181 Rees, Laurence 115 Reina, Juan 7, 19, 191–205 The Relief of Belsen 36 Remnants of Auschwitz 88 Resnais, Alain 5–6, 68, 69, 71, 79, 82 n. 4, 84, 92, 94, 114, 174, 188 n. 20, 202 Respite 5, 7, 16, 66–81 Riefenstahl, Leni 103, 107 Riva, Emmanuelle 84

227

Rivette, Jacques 84 Roberts, Andrew 31 Rodowick, D. N. 192, 193 Rose, Sven-Erik 70 Rosenbaum, Alan S. 187 n. 15 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 105 Rosenfeld, Gavriel 31–32 Roth, Eli 121 Rousset, David 86, 88, 93–94 Różewicz, Stanisław 134 Rummel, Rudolph J. 187 n. 13 Rupnow, Dirk 8 S-21: 173, 174–75, 176, 178–81, 182, 183, 184, 185, 188 n. 28, 189 n. 35, 190 n. 54 Sabotage 103 Samson 134 Saving Private Ryan 115 Saxton, Libby 170, 185, 191, 200, 202, 205 n. 36 Scarface 104 Schelvis, Jules 153, 155, 167 n. 27 Schelvis, Rachel 155 Schindler’s List 2, 16, 17, 18, 49, 62 n. 20, 99, 101, 110 n. 5, 113, 114, 117, 118, 124, 160 Schrader, Paul 119, 111 n. 18, 127–28 n. 22 Schuurman, Vincent 158, 169, 160, 161 Sebald, W. G. 11 A Secret 99 Segre, Liliana 33 Setkiewicz, Piotr 31 Seweryn, Andrzej 139/40 Sex and the City 99 Shapiro, Paul 28 Shephard, Ben 36 Shirer, William L. 127 n. 5 Shoah 6, 66, 83 n. 44, 99, 113, 114, 140, 170–71, 174, 180–81, 185, 186, 200, 205 n. 36 The Shoah by Bullets 16, 27–30 Shohat, Ella 205 n. 29 Short, Philip 189 nn. 48 & 49 Sierakowski, Sławomir 143 Silverman, Kaja 70–71, 74, 76, 77 Silverman, Max 6 Singer, Barnett 37 Singer, Bryan 119, 122 Site 2: 175, 188 n. 28 Sitha, Ly 176, 177 Snyder, Timothy 121, 143 Solchany, Jean 28 Sontag, Susan 197 Sophie’s Choice: film 117 novel 119 The Sorrow and the Pity 82 n. 18 Sotheary, Kauv 186 Spiegelman, Art 99

228

Index

Spielberg, Steven 2, 49, 57, 99, 101, 113, 115, 116, 123–24, 160 Spitzer, Leo 110 n. 15, 168 n. 42 Spring 1941: 133, 136–37, 144 Srebnik, Simon 66, 128 n. 25 Stalag 17: 116 Stam, Robert 205 n. 29 Steinbach, Settela 72, 77, 160, 164 Steiner, George 114 Stevens, George 8, 39, 99, 113 Stiegler, Bernard 85, 196, 197 Stone, Oliver 123 Strobl, Gerwin 31 Struk, Janina 185, 186 n. 5 Sturges, John 116 Styron, William 119 Suchomel, Franz 182 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen 16, 69 Sznaider, Natan 47, 49 Szpilman, Władysław 133, 135–36 Tarantino, Quentin 17, 98–111, 118 Tarkovsky, Andrej 79 Tebaldi, Renata 86 Terminator: Salvation 124 Terracina, Guido 26 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 106 Theresienstadt 71 Thim, Mak 179 The Thin Blue Line 69 Thompson, J. Lee 101 Toporski, Basia 52 To Speak the Unspeakable: The Message of Elie Wiesel 128 n. 29 Tourneur, Jacques 111 n. 18 The Train Leaving the Station 76 Trip, Rob 152 The Truce 10–11 The Unborn 119, 120, 123 Uncle Rithy 189 n. 44 United 93: 123 Van der Boom, Bart 153, 168 n. 35 Valenti, Osvaldo 35–36 Varda, Agnès 69 Veil, Simone 28 Verhoeven, Paul 102, 151 Vertov, Dziga 69 Vice, Sue 8 Victor Emmanuel III 35

Virilio, Paul 85 Vlock, Laurel 48 Wade, Lisa 156, 160 Wajda, Andrzej 13–14, 104, 120, 125, 129 nn. 45 & 46, 134, 138 Walking Tall 106 The Wall 33 Wall and Tower 142–43 Wallenberg 33 Walters, Ben 106, 107, 108 The War 18–19, 149–57, 164–65, 167 nn. 27 & 30 website 155 War and Remembrance 33 The War is Over 34 War of the Worlds 123–24, 129 n. 41 Warsaw Ghetto 7 Wasersztajn, Szmul 140 Weinberg, Mieczysław 112 Weiner Rudof, Joanne 48 Welles, Orson 69, 76 Wheatley, Catherine 95 n. 6 Where Eagles Dare 101 The White Hell of Piz Palü 103 The White Ribbon 17, 85, 89–92 Why We Fight 115 Wiedemann, Ans 34 Wiedemann, Nini 34 Wiesel, Elie 121, 128 n. 29, 187 n. 15 Wievorka, Annette 46 Wild Blood 16, 35–36 Wilder, Billy 116 Williams, Paul 187 n. 12 The Winds of War 33 Winter, Jay 159 The World at War 115 World Trade Center 123 Wormmeester, Loes 157 X-Men franchise 117, 122–23 The Yakuza 106 Young, James 47 Zelizer, Barbie 3, 6 Zimbardo, Philip 96 n. 19 Zorn, John 86 de Zwarte-Walvisch, Klaartje 154 Zwick, Edward 99, 126 n. 3 Żylińska, Joanna 132, 136, 144