In memory of Miep Gies, Secretary and Resistance Worker 1909–2010
Si j’avais trouvé un film existant – un film secret parce que c’était strictement interdit – tourné par un SS et montrant comment trois mille juifs, hommes, femmes, enfants, mouriaent ensemble, asphyxiés dans un chamber à gaz du crématoire II d’Auschwitz, si j’avais trouvé cela, non seulement je ne l’aurais montré cela, mais je l’aurais détruit. Je ne suis pas capable de dire pourquoi. Ca va de soi.1
– Claude Lanzmann,
‘Holocauste, la representation impossible’ Le Monde, 3 March 1994
2We have exactly 1’59” of moving images of the mass execution of Jews in Eastern Europe during World War II. Taken by a German non-commissioned naval officer, Reinhard Wiener, out for a stroll with his 8mm Kodak movie camera in the port of Liepaja, Latvia’s third city, sometime in July/August 1941, it shows members of an
Einsatzgruppe – mobile killing squad – at work. There are civilian bystanders, local Latvian militiamen and German police in attendance as well as the SS as Jewish men are offloaded from an open truck and forced to run to an open pit where they are shot. There has been, of course, argument about the authenticity of this material but its provenance is fully documented.
3It is estimated that the
Einsatzgruppen killed a man, woman or child every thirty seconds of every hour of every day for five hundred days between the summer of 1941 and the autumn of 1942; but the Nazi order forbidding photography of the murders – which was in line with a general inhibition about publicising the industry of death – was obeyed, almost to the letter. Wiener’s film antedates Himmler’s prohibition against making any form of record of the killings and it was hidden from the Nazis (see Hirsch 2004: 94).
4 It is easy to see why Himmler so ordered; the killings were not something of which the Nazis wished to boast. On 3 October 1943, for example, Himmler addressed the SS general staff in Posen and, even in such company, despite claiming that he would be ‘for once’ – ‘
einmal’ – ‘
ganz offen’ ‘totally open’ about ‘the Event’, it was only so he can say that ‘we will never speak of this openly’. In Peter Haidu’s account of this speech, Himmler argues that
He and they have been hardened by the experience of seeing ‘a hundred corpses lie side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have endured this … and in spite of that to have remained decent’ that is what has made them hard…’ The extermination of the Jews, the goal to be effectuated, is to be ‘a never-written and a never-to-be-written page of glory [
Ruhm] in SS history’. (1992: 286)
5
This Himmler describes as ‘takt’, delicacy of feeling (1992: 285); a delicacy reenforced, of course, by his direct interdiction of photography, introduced within weeks of the killing starting (but after Wiener’s footage was safely hidden by his mother back in Germany). Even the rare shame expressed by a very few bravely uncooperative Germans at having to obey the SS’s murderous orders did not often yield permanent records.
So the brief Liepaja footage, and a rather fuller collection of stills, are the only records of shootings – actual images of extreme violence. Of the processes of killing in the extermination camps – ‘
die Endlösung der Judenfrage’/‘the final solution of the Jewish problem’ – which replaced the somewhat inefficient procedures of the
Einsatzgruppen with gas chambers and crematoria, there is no photographic evidence, except for four surreptitious stills taken in Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau). For the extermination camps of Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibór, Majdanek and Belzec there are no photographs whatsoever; nor indeed traces of much of anything. As Laurence Rees says of Treblinka: ‘Put simply, there is nothing there’ (2005: 147).
6 No wonder Nazi guards taunted their prisoners that, should they survive, they would never be believed and no wonder that bearing testimony has been such a powerful concern of the survivors: ‘Not to live and to tell’ as Primo Levi put it, ‘but to live to tell’ (1961: 13).
7There is, then, a rather prosaic response to the vexed philosophical question as to the ethical viability of using archival film to represent the central horror of the Holocaust – the supposed
Bilderverbot, ban on images, as it has come to be called. The issue is actually moot. Cinematographic representation is not possible simply because there is no cinematographic evidence of the processes of mass extermination and few stills either, except for the four mentioned above. And what there is otherwise is problematic whatever its source. According to Elizabeth Cowie, ‘that the recorded “seen and heard” is not simply knowable or evidential, but requires interpretation that can become misinterpretation [and] presents a peculiarly acute dilemma for the documentary representation of the Holocaust’.
8 Cowie’s point is true, of course, of all images, but those of the Holocaust pose a ‘peculiarly acute dilemma’ because, implicitly, they are required to meet the standards of criminal evidential truth. As the Common Law has it, their authenticity must be ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. The iconicity of the photograph, however, is never sufficient in and of itself to meet this legal test.
9 The issue becomes so acute in the case of representing the Holocaust that perhaps the solution is to avoid the photographic entirely. This does not mean avoiding the documentary entirely because its compass now embraces animation. I want to suggest, in this essay, that at least one viable solution to the dilemmas of representing the Holocaust in documentary is, indeed, animation.
1. THE FIRST PROBLEM OF THE ARCHIVE: MISREPRESENTATION
10Realist factual Holocaust footage falls into three basic categories. There is a smattering – much increased by the assiduous work of film researchers in recent decades – of amateur material, taken by victims or ‘perpetrators’ (see Hirst 2003: 34).
11 This has been most tellingly recycled, for example, by Péter Forgács in a number of films to devastating effect (see Renov 2007; Fisher 2008).
12 Secondly, there is the deliberately misleading official Nazi film of the ghettos and operations around them designed either to fool the world (for example,
Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdische Siedlungsgebeit/
Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area).
13 An alternative purpose of these commissions was to demonstrate the degeneration of the victims as in the footage of the Warsaw Ghetto, shot to a script discovered by Ilan Ziv.
14 Finally, there is the Allied footage of the liberation of the concentration camps.
This last is where the most disturbing pictures were made, for example, at Bergen-Belsen by the Army Film & Photographic Unit (AFPU) attached to the British 11th Armoured Division. Here are the living skeletons, the bulldozed bodies and the emotionless faces of the guards. Here is the indelible record of the consequences of otherwise unimaginable violence, the very fons et origio of our collective visual memory of the Holocaust.
To say that they are nevertheless ‘misleading’, as Hannah Arendt did in 1955 is not to deny their authenticity.
15 Despite the limitations of the photograph as evidence, these images are part of a dossier of overwhelming weight and it is a mark of serious, sinister delusion to deny their authenticity. They mislead, however, because they have been forced, in the absence of other photographs and films, to represent the whole of
die Endlösung, which they cannot do. It is as synecdoche that they fail. Concentration camps were not extermination camps where people were dispatched within hours of arrival, not starved to death; and at the moment of filming the concentration camps were not what they had been earlier. The camp system had imploded as the Reich collapsed. This is not to dispute the obscenity of these hellholes through the long years of their existence but it is to remember the context. German city after German-held city had been reduced to rubble so it is little wonder that the camps had become charnel houses, repositories for the living dead.
Hence Claude Lanzmann’s strategy in
Shoah (1985) of avoiding the liberation footage in favour of the austerity of witness statements. This was as much determined by necessity as by any self-imposed
Bilderverbot. Shoah is specifically about the extermination camps, of which there is no footage; Lanzmann’s strategy is, first and foremost, a response to this absence of imagery. He avoids what had become the somewhat regular misuse of the specific horrors of one location at a specific point in time to provide images, as ‘little more than illustrative wallpaper’ (Haggith 2005: 33)
16 for other different locations at different times.
2. THE SECOND PROBLEM OF THE ARCHIVE: PROTUBERANCE
The laudatory response to
Shoah for eschewing archival footage of any kind was in part, I believe, exactly because there was, in Britain and North America at least, a sense that by the 1980s audiences had become anaesthetised to the images, especially the liberation horrors. The images had become ‘a protuberance’ (Lebow 2008: xvii);
17 ‘Used sparingly at the time [i.e. 1945–48] to prove the existence of the camps, these images have become so widely used in film and television progammes that they are now familiar icons’ (Haggith 2005: 33).
18 Now bereft of close identification, without place and date for example, the images were being transformed from evidence into ‘wallpaper’. Such familiarity seemed to have leeched the force of these shots, and primarily they now produce distanciation, if not alienation, in the audience.
By the 1980s when Lanzmann was working, there was some justification for filmmakers to feel that using the liberation footage would be counter-productive. To take – as it might be – an average case, Alan Rosenthal, working at this time on the Holocaust episode of the PBS series
Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, felt that this footage had become ‘chaser’ material, literally a turn-off; and I, as his script-writer, certainly agreed with this. Although there was no audience research directly on the matter, that this was so had became very much a given within the industry.
Had it been remembered (which it wasn’t) some classic early mass communications research offered support for this belief. This had apparently shown, in laboratory conditions, that horrific imagery in educational films – in this case designed to inculcate dental hygiene practices – did not work if the consequences of malpractice were overstated, i.e. suggesting very serious disease and even death as a consequence of hygiene failure (see Winston 1973: 33).
19 Audiences dismissed these messages.
For Rosenthal, moreover, the camps were the most familiar part of the story we had to tell and cliché was unavoidable. Defamiliarisation – ostranenie, to use the fashionable film studies jargon of the day – was required. He suggested that we deal very briefly, say in a minute, with the extermination camps over black using a montage of voices delivering very brief witness statements. I thought this was a brilliant way of avoiding the worst emotionalism of the ‘Jews v. Nazis’ norms but it was too ‘de-familiar’ for US public television and in the event Rosenthal himself backed off.
The sequence in the finished film takes the impressionistic, overly-sentimentalised approach first seen in Jean Cayrol’s commentary, as polished by Chris Maker and spoken by an actor, in Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouilliard (Night and Fog, 1955). Witness interviews apart, with this film Resnais, in line with normal Groupe de Trente documentary practices of the time in France, established Holocaust documentary’s repertoire.
Here is perpetrator archival footage of deportations and ghettos, and the horrific Allied liberation material (the template for its misleading subsequent use as illustration of all varieties of camp). Also to be found for the first time is evocative colour cinematography of the remains of the concentration camps – at that date simply abandoned and not yet the site of tourist attention. The objection here is not to the aesthetic as such; rather it is an extreme example of what Joris Ivens called ‘exotic dirt’, images which prettify deprivation or horror (1969: 87).
20 Ivens has to be understood as saying, not that the aesthetics can be considered independently of a film as a whole – mere decoration; rather, it is that the aesthetics accurately reveal the errors of analysis conditioning the totality of the film. If prettifying images of the slums (the occasion prompting his remark) was an ‘error’, how much greater is the ‘error’ of producing prettified images of the Holocaust?
Nuit et brouillard, the pictorialism of its colour footage amplified by the poetic voice-over, was accused of aestheticising an obscenity at the time. Of course, criticism of the poeticism of the commentary falls silent ‘in the face of authorial good intentions’ (King 1981: 7).
21 Actually, in this instance, it falls silent in the face of authorial experience – Cayrol survived Mauthausen.
22It has been claimed that ‘Alain Resnais’ film structured the commemoration of the Holocaust from the mid-1960s onward’ (Knapp 2006c: 165).
23 To an extent, this is irrefutable and the film’s effectiveness justifies Resnais’ aesthetic choices.
24 So close to the event, this was perhaps the only way to cauterise the horror sufficiently for it to be remembered. This rationalisation, though, has since long timed out, its positive effectiveness swamped by the negative reaction
Nuit et brouilliard’s successors are now deemed to produce in audiences. In fact,
Nuit et brouilliard points the way to problems which were to be exacerbated in the subsequent deployment of its repertoire.
That certainly was our thinking when we approached the
Endlösing sequence in our
Heritage film. We eschewed the horrific but otherwise followed this poeticising pattern of
Nuit et brouillard. A survivor provided – and indeed spoke – the words. In his autobiography Rosenthal describes this sequence as ‘one of the most devastating scenes in the film’ (2000: 246);
25 but for me it represents the one moment when we betrayed our desire not to make a standard ‘Jews and Nazis’ film. Elsewhere we insisted on the political dimensions of the Holocaust, the variety of its victims other than Jews, the activities of ‘the righteous’ and the efforts of the Jewish resistance. But with the camps we fell, in my view, too much into line with the by then standard procedures of what had become post-
Nuit et brouillard, dare one say it, Holocaust industry documentaries.
Yet I want to suggest that this sense of familiarity, bolstered by the constant injunction not to forget, depended as much on the enduring indelible dreadfulness of the violence depicted in the images rather than on their ubiquity. In fact, they were not ‘so widely used’; they just seemed to be. The sense of the Holocaust’s omnipresence was as much sustained by the ever growing library of written and other materials as by the documentary, anyway a somewhat marginal form.)
As pointed out above, Toby Haggith notes that the movie material had been used sparingly in the late 1940s. After a flurry of newsreel and compilations, presented as incontrovertible evidence of the horrors uncovered by the liberation of the concentration camps, the production of documentaries slowed dramatically. In the UK, Sidney Bernstein’s attempt to make a full-scale archival film of the material – under the supervision of his then business partner Alfred Hitchcock – was thwarted exactly because the images were deemed to be too abhorrent.
Between that initial wave in the late 1940s and
Nuit et brouillard in the mid1950s the material was not being much circulated. Even in 1955 the French censors hesitated over the horrors in Resnais’ film (as well as, of course, objecting to the glimpses in the archive footage which he had included of French police overseeing deportations). The film, nevertheless, was shown at Cannes and achieved instant canonical status, aided by the scandal of an official West German attempt to prevent the screening (see Resnais 1994).
26Certainly, for nearly two decades after 1955, no other documentary specifically dealing with the Holocaust was repeatedly screened enough to gain canonical status. There is more fictional representation, which had begun with
Ostatni Etap/ The Last Stage (Poland, 1946), a forgotten feature actually shot in Auschwitz and based on the director’s – Wanda Jakubowska – experience as an inmate of the camp. This, too, continued fitfully. More than a decade passed before Hollywood addressed the topic:
The Diary of Ann Frank (USA, 1959, dir. George Stephens).
27 Nevertheless, the non-fictional figures even less than the fictional in the Holocaust filmography.
28 Leaving aside general World War II compilation films, there are only a few other titles on the Holocaust specifically.
29Five years after
Nuit et brouillard, Jean Rouch, in
Chonique d’un été (
Chronicle of a Summer, 1960) provided the last component of the Holocaust film, the testimony of the witness. The mise-en-scène of this element – Marceline Loridan’s memory of being deported through the Gare de l’est in Paris – was filmed in the Gare de l’est itself, with her voicing-over shots of her walking to the station. The constructed nature of this sequence is at odds with the rest of this self-proclaimed ‘experiment in film truth’, the prototype
cinéma vérité documentary. The film is actually about ‘the strange tribe that lives in Paris’ (Morin 1985: 13),
30 not the Holocaust; and the deportation sequence is, with its voice-over technique, its most retrogressive element. In the final on-camera exchange between Rouch and his co-director Edgar Morin, they question the sequence’s authenticity – was Marceline acting, they ask?
The question of acting, though, is, in my view, of less ethical consequence than the danger of causing victims psychological damage by making them recall these traumas. Of course, the need to bear witness is a compelling reason for their willingness to subject themselves to any form of acting. Indeed, it can be therapeutic, but the possibility of uninformed consent on the part of the subject and insensitive proceedings on the part of the filmmaker are nevertheless a potential danger. Such qualms, though, did not prevent others from taking the technique and running with it. Rouch’s discovery of ‘a cinematic discourse of history without archival image to anchor it’ (Hirsch 2004: 67),
31 however, has proved too seductive to resist. (As for filming perpetrators, the therapeutic value of having them re-live their actions re-traumatising them is not at issue. Exposure is.)
Donald Brittain, a major Canadian filmmaker, would have known of
Chronique d’un été when he took Bernard Laufer, an Auschwitz survivor, back to Germany for the NFBC’s
Memorandum/Pour memoire five years after
Chronique d’un été. Memorandum expands from testimony from survivors to witness statements by their relatives as well as by surviving Nazis and other members of the German public. Although not so readily available as to be a canonised text, the film won the Silver Lion at Venice that year as best documentary. The same year, Mikhail Romm made
Obyknovennyy fashizm (
Ordinary Fascism), the opening sequence of which uses horrific images
à la Nuit et brouillard, to set the scene for an account of pre-war Nazism in terms the regime’s use of propaganda, both via high culture modes and through popular platforms to represent its militarism. It won the East German documentary prize at Leipzig in 1965.
Overall, this level of usage does not suggest that Holocaust images were, in fact, being widely used in cinema documentaries during these years. The only canonical film noted in Haggith and Newman’s Holocaust and the Moving Image filmography between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s is Marcel Ophüls’ Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969) – a film not about the Holocaust, but rather about French responses to occupation and fascism. Although commissioned by French Television (ORTF), it was deemed politically too sensitive to be screened on TV. Controversy over its release as a feature provoked a crucial debate in the vexed process of France’s ‘coming to terms with the past’: or Vergangenheitsbewältigung as the Germans call it.
The potential Bilderverbot over horrific Endlösing material, already apparent by the late 1940s, would have also been sustained by the conservative norms of taste and decency which governed television whence the documentary had largely migrated by the 1960s; although Danish television (DR) screened an hour, directed by Henning Knusden, on Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, in 1967 (Mordere iblandt os/Murderers Among Us). It can be noted, contrary-wise, that The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Jack Kaufmann’s televising of William Shirer’s book and a pioneering mini-series) did not receive a network screening in the US the following year but was, instead, sold in syndication. Again, not an overwhelming number of titles.
Eventually, though, evolving standards and television’s appetite for history programmes on the two World Wars – TV’s first documentary hit, it should not be forgotten, was Henry Salamon’s archive-based Victory at Sea for NBC (1952/53) – was slowly to change this. The first Holocaust documentary after Nuit et brouillard noted in Haggith and Newman’s list is Michal Darlow’s ‘Genocide’, the twentieth episode of World at War (1974); the next is Peter Morley’s Kitty – Return to Auschwitz (1979) where the documentarist goes a step further than Brittain had done and takes Kitty Hart, a survivor, back to the camp.
Of more significance, perhaps, in creating the sense that Holocaust movies were becoming a ‘protuberance’ are the fictional representations. The Hollywood TV miniseries
Holocaust (1978) was a mega-hit in the US, and in Germany ‘its reception nearly caused mass hysteria’ (Kaes 1992: 208).
32 One in every two German adults watched it – over twenty million people. WDR got 30,000 calls and thousands of letters – these were invited with an on-screen telephone number. Discussion shows followed the transmission of each episode and ran for hours. The German language acquired ‘holocaust’ as a neologism. Even more than
La Chagrin et la pitié had been in France,
Holocaust’s transmission was a crucial event in the vexed process of
Vergangenheitsbewältigung for the Germans. In Britain, however, the series was dismissed. Dennis Potter famously began his
Sunday Times review: ‘Excuse me if I splash you with my vomit…’ He then went on to complain, with bitter cynicism, that, among many other deficiencies, the extras were all too fat (see Lawson 1994).
33Be all that as it may: by the 1980s it was widely felt that the archive’s usefulness was approaching exhaustion. The Holocaust, and especially
die Endlösing, had boxed the documentary filmmaker into a corner. The very violence depicted in the photographic record of one of history’s most violent episodes was inhibiting its representation on the screen. Representations had an aesthetising effect, which was inhibiting Holocaust image circulation. It was this rather than any philosophical
Bilderverbot which accounts for the comparative paucity of titles in the archive. A documentary filmmaker might want to ‘wound’ the audience into ‘a new, more vivid awareness of what had taken place’ (which was, for example, Lanzmann’s intention according to Stuart Liebman (2007: 61)).
34 Never-mind whether or not images do, in any meaningful way, wound; for a filmmaker with such ambitions, audience distaste and dismissal was an very much immediate problem.
3. NACH AUSCHWITZ…
This is not to say that the issues implied by the Bilderverbot debate were not of equal importance. Lanzmann certainly held passionate views on this, as demonstrated by the quote that opens this chapter. That he feels unable to say why he would destroy such images of course does not echo Himmler’s concept of ‘takt’. Rather it could be that he refers to a moral ban on using ‘perpetrator’ footage, especially that designed to demonstrate the degeneracy of the victims. In the same way, a prohibition inhibits the citation of the results of murderous ‘scientific’ medical experiments conducted in the concentration camps (see more below). To use such data as evidence makes one complicit, contaminated.
There is also the possibility that there are dangers in consuming footage of mass killings. I do not mean that screen violence begets actual violence in the straightforward manner experimental psychology has been trying, and failing, for the better part of a century to prove that it does. That exercise is tantamount to blaming the rustling of the leaves for causing the wind because imitative violence is a mark, rather than a cause of socio- or psychopathic behaviour. Rather, it is the possibility that not only was the event itself traumatic, it was so traumatic that even images of it can cause trauma vicariously, and not just to a socio- or psychopath.
Although this is, in mental health terms, an unproven hypothesis, certainly some research does suggest that, post-disaster, rescuers, carers and family of victims can vicariously suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (see McCann and Perlman 1990: 142);
35 even journalists reporting such catastrophes can (see Winston 1996).
36 Of course, none of these are viewers and the evidence for seriously ‘wounding’ effects of speech remains elusive.
On the other hand, filmmakers who have reported their own stress when working on Holocaust films will have no difficult in appreciating this possibility. In my own case, I mark down the writing of the Holocaust script for Rosenthal the saddest and most disturbing task of my life. And, as pointed out above, it is a truism of early mass communications sociology that horrific messages are counter productive for the audience. On remembering her first sight of stills from Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, aged 12, Susan Sontag recalled: ‘When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached … something went dead; something is still crying’ (1990: 20).
37 It is, then, an implicit duty of care – that no harm be done to the viewer – which is what goes without saying.
But there is, of course, more to it than that. A person seeking to represent the Holocaust – filmmaker, novelist, journalist, artist of any kind – even if they are completely careless of the potentially harmful impact of their work, cannot, supposedly, hope to explain, much less capture, the experience of the Holocaust, however much vicarious trauma they might, or might not, inflict. ‘There really is no word or means to capture the totality of the event’ in Elie Wiesel’s opinion (1985).
38 For some, it is beyond not only words and the realistic image, it is beyond imagination. ‘
Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu screiben ist babarisch’: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarous’, as Theodor Adorno famously put it in an aphorism, possibly coined as a response to the very greatest of Holocaust poems, Paul Celan’s
Todesfuge/Death Fugue of 1947. The remark, though, has been commonly applied to more than poetry. Any attempt at representation – especially in popular mass media – is, if not barbaric, then certainly suspect because inadequate.
39The impossibility of representing the Holocaust is now something a received opinion, a strand in the ‘tendency to privilege that cataclysmic event’ (Lebow 2008: xvii); a compelling, if black, justification for the rhetoric of Jewish exceptionalism. Yet if other horrors and outrages, catastrophes and massacres, other genocides and cleansings continue to pile up (as Walter Benjamin imagined them doing at the feet of the Angel of History) – and they do, then the very claim of exceptionalism must be discarded.
And, I would suggest, with that goes the assertion that
die Endlösung cannot be explained or effectively represented. For example, the particularly heinous behaviour of the doctors conducting murderous experiments in the camps can be explained in terms of public health. The victims were, literally, vermin in their eyes, a public health hazard which the Nazi medics had convinced themselves was in line with their general untoward medical responsibilities. Killing the mentally deficient, the disabled, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Roma, the Ruthenes and the Jews, and so on, brought an added benefit in the name of increasing scientific knowledge (see Lifton 1986).
40 On the general point, Saul Friedlander, a major pillar in Holocaust Studies asserts, briskly: ‘The extermination of the Jews of Europe is as accessible to both representation and interpretation as any other historical event’ (1992b: 2).
41 But, as with any other event, there are boundaries, limits – as he also points out. Nevertheless the existence of the myriad of texts and artifacts across the whole gamut of expressive modes – from
Todesfuge to
Shoah – attest to the correctness of Friedlander’s assertion.
Todesfuge alone rescues poetry from the Holocaust.
42In sum, while there are issues involved in representing the Holocaust, it can be done and there is no overriding basis for a moral
Bilderverbot. Lanzmann’s strategy, for example, answers the problem of the contamination of the archive by ignoring it; and the result is the almost unanimous positive reception of his film. ‘There is near unanimity that
Shoah is a masterpiece’ (Bathrick 2008: 10).
43
Rarely has any film received the unqualified praise widely accorded Shoah (‘brilliant’ is a starting point for most comments), let alone a film about the Holocaust with the many pitfalls and tempting misdirections surrounding that subject. (Lang 2008: 76)
4. IS MORALITY A QUESTION OF HELICOPTER SHOTS?
The response to
Shoah repaid Lanzmann for his years of effort, which had included being physically attacked by the family of a Nazi war criminal, which put him in hospital for eight days (see Liebman 2007: 63). The received opinion of
Shoah nevertheless can be challenged. Lanzmann arguably has not actually solved the ‘peculiarly acute dilemma’ of the Holocaust documentary – not remotely.
His ethics as a filmmaker remain questionable. He is, it should not be forgotten, a journalist and his effectiveness as such speaks to certain ruthlessness: ‘His is a direct, investigative, even combative strategy … His style is aggressive, he takes no prisoners, lets no one off the hook’ (Lebow 2008: 29). This is, in my view, just fine when he entraps, with or without a hidden camera, unrepentant Nazis or exposes the systemic anti-Semitism of contemporary Poles with faux naïf questioning. That speaks to the time-honoured journalistic imperative of ‘afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted’. For me, this is not the unethical behaviour of a documentarist but rather the admirable, legitimate inventiveness of the investigative journalist uncovering something I, and society, needs to know.
This is most emphatically not true of two of his interviews with survivors. In one, at Chelmno, where the killing began in mobile gas chambers on 7 December 1941, a day that should, indeed, as President Roosevelt said in another connection, ‘live in infamy’, Lanzmann allows a dozen or so elderly Poles to confront, indeed surround, Simon Sribnik, cheerfully detailing for Lanzmann how the Jews were killed. Sribnik is one of only two survivors of the camp and the Poles discuss him, whom they remember as a 13-year-old in leg-irons kept alive to sing for the entertainment of the SS, in the third person; as if he were a lost pet dog returned at last. They profess themselves to be delighted to see him. He stands uneasy and mute amongst them. Why does Lanzmann do this? Certainly not to gain information from Sribnik who says nothing. And it cannot be that he thought Sribnik’s presence would encourage the Poles to, in effect, confess their complicity. No, this is a set-up worthy of a crass and reckless Reality Television producer seeking cheap sensation.
What he does with Abraham Bomba is even worse. Bomba, who was detailed to cut women’s hair at Auschwitz as they waited to be gassed, is taken to a barber’s shop in Tel Aviv where he pretends to cut a man’s hair while Lanzmann grills him in excruciating detail as to how he performed this task. After nearly 15 minutes of this meaningless snipping accompanied by increasingly horrendous memories, Bomba, with a furtive glance at the camera, falls silent, broken. Lanzmann’s response is to badger him. ‘You have to’, he tells Bomba, cajoling him eventually into continuing. My reaction is Potter’s reaction to the mini-series Holocaust. Lanzmann’s ‘You have to…’ is a blatant and outrageous lie. It is the last thing the man has to do. Rather, the imperative to have Bomba re-live the horror is Lanzmann’s. He needs it for his film; whether Bomba, palpably distressed, needs to be (or run the risk of being) re-traumised is, to be charitable, an open question.
The justification for documenting trauma for an audience is to preserve memory and gain the experience of history; but this can only be done if the bearing of witness is therapeutic for the traumatised. It is hard to see how this was the case with either Sribnik or Bomba. These scenes are, in my opinion, as egregious examples of morally reprehensible behaviour as Flaherty’s endangering of the Aran Islanders physically in the climactic storm sequence of
Man of Aran (1934). That Lanzmann can then equate Bomba’s distress, which he has engineered, with his own situation as a filmmaker is a final (dis)grace note: ‘There was a fantastic tension for him and for me’ (Lanzmann 1990b: 156).
45 To claim his distress is equivalent to a survivor’s borders, for me, on the obscene.
Lanzmann’s ethical lapses are, unfortunately, of an all too familiar kind but one does not have to buy into Holocaust exceptionalism to find them particularly offensive and irresponsible in this context. Not that he is without scruples. He recognises the possibility that there are things he should not be doing but – I confess I find this bizarre – these have to do with what he calls ‘artistic’ transgressions; an aerial shot, for example. To use an aerial shot in Shoah would be, apparently, to cross a moral boundary line. He thus, he reports, voiced strong objection to his cameraman’s suggestion that they should get a helicopter shot of Chelmno to help the audience follow the geographic details of the interviews. ‘This’, says Lanzmann firmly, ‘would have been a crime. A moral and an artistic crime’ (1990b: 153).
This strident desire to distance himself from any charge of pictorialist indulgence is of a piece with Grierson’s ‘man against the sky’ v. ‘man in the bowels of the earth’ rhetoric (see Grierson 1979: 64).
46 For Lanzmann, as for Grierson, the pictorial has to be avoided because it undercuts seriousness of purpose: cf ‘exotic dirt’. The irony is that Lanzmann, like Grierson, fails to avoid this ‘error’. The Griersonian archive is replete with exoticised images of slum, factory and mine; and
Shoah, despite being prosaically shot, is nevertheless not so journalistic as to avoid the seductions of image-making. The film’s 566 minutes
47 are sustained by many misty and mystic forestscapes, rutted tracks and, above all, trains – especially the evocative contemporary Polish steam trains, the romance of steam becoming repulsive in this context. Lanzmann is enough of a filmmaker to write
finis to his film with this image.
48 Lanzmann’s poetic shots, overall, are less effective in
Shoah than those in, say,
Nuit et brouillard; but that is only because Resnais is so much the greater filmmaker. Lanzmann was not really as hostile to the aesthetic as has been claimed and so Simone de Beauvoir was not wrong to talk of
Shoah’s ‘beauty and horror’ in her review for
Le Monde in 1985 (in Liebman 2007: 4). Raye Farr finds the landscapes ‘starkly beautiful’ (2005: 161).
49 Nor is Liebman out of order (although clearly over the top) to see
Shoah’s opening sequence in which Simon Sribnik, is filmed being romantically punted down the Narwa river singing a Polish folk song as ‘haunting’: ‘The simple images are imbued with an astonishing, almost mythic density as Sribnik, a modern incarnation of Orpheus crossing the River Styx, appears to call the dead back to life’ (2007: 80). So much for anti-aesthetism.
In sum, then, Lanzmann, even as he demonstrates that the Holocaust can be represented, shows how flawed such representation is. As I have said, he only saves himself from the contaminations of the archive by ignoring it; but the viability of his personal Bilderverbot is compromised by his unethical proceedings. Ostranenie eludes him. As Alisa Lebow suggests: ‘after nine-and-half obsessive hours, one realises that no amount of questioning will ever satisfy our unquenchable thirst for answers’ (2008: 29).
My point, though, is not merely to criticise Shoah. Yes, Lanzmann’s ethical faults are his alone. His manipulations and interventionism, though, are sanctioned by mainstream practice and the rest of these failings are not Lanzmann’s, not Shoah’s alone, either. Shoah, in effect, sums up the strategies available for the realist Holocaust documentary and, one way or another, finds them wanting. These failings, plus the inevitable fetishising of surface which is the realistic image’s doom, come with the territory. So, is this the end of the matter? Is the Holocaust, after all, beyond the documentary’s reach?
5. ‘BY INDIRECTION SEEK DIRECTIONS OUT’
I think not. Shoah does not mark an end point for the Holocaust documentary – not even for the use of realist images. There is, after all, more to be done than simply ‘wounding’ the audience into remembering. Of course, implied in the remembering is a subsumed objective: we remember to prevent recurrence. Prevention, however, requires the analysis of cause, which goes beyond remembering only to grieve. This objective is not necessarily best served by wounding memory, standing alone as despotised tragedy. A rhetoric which suggests the scope and horror of the Shoah cannot be comprehended as human disaster can obstruct analysis of it as an historical phenomenon. Given the freight that the realist image of the Holocaust has acquired, approaching the material with a more direct preventative analytic agenda requires avoiding the established tropes – the protuberant repertoire which begins with Nuit et brouillard. Doing so leads the filmmaker to other modes of representation, one that bring a necessary degree of ostraninie.
Like far too many others, Joram ten Brink, a scion of European Jewry, has his own family Holocaust saga, which was more fully discovered by him in the 1980s when examining his grandmother’s papers. That generation of his family were protected, like the Franks in Amsterdam, by being hidden by a neighbour in her attic. As his name indicates, ten Brink’s ancestors were a well-established northern Dutch family. In fact, they had lived there for more than three centuries. Yet it was not simply that he wished to commemorate the righteousness of the family’s neighbours. His motivation was more immediately pressing. In the late 1980s Le Pen’s anti-immigrant rhetoric in France was buying him considerable political support; ten Brink, appalled by this, was moved to recall his family’s story as an indication of where such glib easy intolerance of the ‘other’ led.
In the film he made for Dutch television in 1989,
Jacoba, he reconstructed his grandmother’s story. In order to achieve a degree of
ostraninie, he cast the descendants of his family’s rescuer – the eponymous Jacoba – as his family. Jacoba’s grandchildren, Christians, played ten Brink’s grandmother, grandfather, father and great uncle, Jews. In other regards, too, he was at pains to reveal the past in the present as a way of drawing attention to intolerance as a contemporary clear and present danger. For example, he was deliberately not meticulous in the period detail of his reconstructions.
50 I would argue, because of these defamiliarisations,
Jacoba’s hegemonic intention is achieved.
Other approaches to achieve ostraninie are also possible. The archives themselves are not static, limited to overused images. In fact, they have been growing through the accretion of witness statements and the recovery of material such as home movies, not least (but not only) via access to sources and people long contained behind the Iron Curtain. In the hands of Péter Forgács, say, this work of recovery is no mere matter of uncovering further illicit images of the Holocaust, which can then be used as a way of ‘wounding’ us into paying attention. In his films, which deal with 1939–45, images of the Holocaust are rare, overt images of violence rarer yet. They come to us, as with, for example, footage of a Jewish work camp taken by an inmate, in circumstances that defy explanation (Az örvény/Free Fall, 1996) (see Fisher 2008: 244).
What really matters, though, is the very domestic familiarity of the activities being filmed, which produces an effect of unbearable poignancy and doom – without a trace of explicit horror and without the danger of exposing or retraumatising survivors. Paradoxically, Forgács films de-familiarise through the display of the familiar. Any need for a
Bilderverbot is avoided – the subjects are, almost all, past our care; clearances, we are assured, have been obtained from the living, those who hold the original material. He exploits, not his subjects, but us, creating what he calls ‘the tension of double knowledge. […] To do this I needed to mobilise the viewer’s existing historical knowledge but put it to a different end’; Forgács ‘wounds’ us into understanding by getting us ‘to see the overall banalities of life during wartime’ (Macdonald 2005: 314, 317).
51Repeatedly, the effect is devastating. Footage of a Dutch Jewish family, the Peereboms, packing, as if for a holiday, becomes an image of impending disaster. We know, and Forgács re-enforces that knowledge by detailing the items they are being allowed to take, and what their destination, Auschwitz, portends (
A Malestrom/The Maelstrom, 1997). All images become images of doom, no matter their actual subject content. The context – the catastrophe inflicted on European middle-class life in the mid-twentieth century – dominates their meaning. The War and the Holocaust suffuse every frame. One longs to shout at the figures on the screen, as children by tradition are encouraged to shout at actors being threatened by a theatrical villain at an old-fashioned English Christmas pantomime: ‘look behind you, look behind you!’
Ostranenie is not a consequence of happenstance, Forgács being merely a skilled – if not just consistently lucky – film researcher. He burrows, as he put it,
beneath the surface of the home movies and amateur films I have access to, not because I want to patronize these films or see them merely as examples of some idea but because they reveal a level of history that is unrecorded in other kind of cinema. (In MacDonald 2005: 299)
Although a scrupulous historian as regards provenance and identifications, Forgács’s practice is not otherwise bound by the protocols of the archivist. He is, in a way, no respecter of the integrity of original material. He reworks the archive, primarily through use of titles and tinting, with music, by manipulation of film running speeds and introduction of stop frames and occasional voice-over reciting legal ordinances and the like. The result is that ‘these rescued images are imbued with uncanny historical resonances through a stunning display of Forgács’s editorial élan’ (Renov 2007: 21), augmented over twenty years and thirty films by composer Tibor Szemzo’s music.
Forgács thereby prevents the footage being received as unmediated ‘evidence’ because of these interventions. He prevents them from misleading us, as, say, Frederic Wiseman’s observationalism misleads through a spurious implied transparency. After all, beyond the accident of its survival, the material, however quotidian the events it depicts, is inevitably partial, untypical, as limited in view in its way as is the liberation footage. The home-movie archive represents the catastrophe inflicted on European life in the mid-twentieth century seen through the eyes of the economically privileged middle class who could afford the expensive hobby of home-moviemaking. We are, assuredly, not watching a species of surveillance camera. The amateur cameraman Max Peerebom might have shot a wild sea in peacetime but he did not intend it to be a presaging metaphor of the war that we know was soon to engulf the world on the screen. Forgács does that.
With Forgács and ten Brink, we are still in the realm of the realist image, still trapped on the surface, despite the deep resonances they create. There is, though, another totally non-realistic technique to consider.
Silence is an animated film and is therefore as different from
Shoah, say, as any film on the Holocaust could be. For one thing it lasts only eleven minutes – and it is an animation. As Orly Yadin who co-produced and co-directed it with Sylvie Bringas, has pointed out: ‘It contains no archival images of the Holocaust no shots of the locations where these events took place, and yet it is a documentary and a true story’ (2005: 168).
52 Animation obviously can serve to achieve
ostranenie and overcome the over-familiar, the protuberant.
53 It can also illustrate, concretise a
mentalité.
54 The question arises, though, ‘is it a documentary?’ to use the title of her article.
This question counter-balances Lanzmann’s claim that Shoah is not a documentary because ‘scenes in it are staged and rehearsed’ (1990b: 295). Lanzmann raises a sterile definitional issue that would seem to be grounded in the usual journalistic ignorance of documentary aesthetics and history (see Farr 2005: 162). Seemingly seduced by Direct Cinema’s dogme, Lanzmann appears to be taking a view of documentary which denies legitimacy to anything but the observational in its Direct Cinema mode. Remembering Nanook of the North (1922), we need not be detained by this. And Yadin’s doubts about the documentary status of Silence need not detain us either. Shoah and Silence are both documentaries.
Documentary film has always embraced the possibility of reconstructing images to match testimony. In Nanook of the North, Flaherty not only conspired with Allakarialuk to capture on film typical Inuit activities. The more dramatic incidents actually illustrate testimony – the walrus-hunt he learned about from an Inuit called Omarolluk; the impossible sledding across the pack-ice, the seal-hunt and the race to the deserted igloo happened to an Inuit called Comock (or Koomak) whom Flaherty met in 1912. These Inuit and others provided Flaherty with the prior witness essential to preserving the documentary value of reconstructed material.
On the basis of this precedent, can animation be a legitimate technique to illustrate the reconstruction of prior witness? Certainly it has been an albeit rare but not unknown strategy from Windsor McKay’s fact-based animation,
The Sinking of the Lusitania in 1916 on. So why should a soundtrack of the memoire of Tana Ross, who survived the war in Therienstadt, hidden from the Germans by her grandmother, not provide the testimony to vouchsafe
Silence’s documentary value? I would claim this is a legitimate documentary soundtrack and illustrating it by animation a legitimate documentary strategy.
Illustrating the memoire posed a particularly vexed problem not unlike that facing Art Spiegelman when grappling with representing his father’s experience as a survivor. Spiegelman, reflecting a 1980s sense of exhaustion with the
Nuit et brouillard approach, felt he needed to avoid ‘some kind of odd plea for sympathy or “Remember the Six Million”’ (quoted in Huyssen 2001: 34).
55 In his hands,
ostranenie took the form of a comic book with predator Nazi cats exterminating Jewish mice (
Maus, 1986). ‘I resist’, said Spiegelman, ‘becoming the Elie Wiesel of the comic book’ (in Huyssen 2001: 28). This is not just an issue of
Bilderverbot. Yadin and Bringas had early decided to avoid the horrific drawn image, just as Spiegleman did; or others, notably Lanzmann, did in eschewing the horrendous photographic one (see Lingford and Webb 2005: 173).
56 Nor was the problem lack of archive.
57 The real difficulty was that Ross was not simply recalling what had happened. She was concerned to share a question, one that had haunted her emotionally for fifty years. Could her family in unoccupied Sweden have rescued her as others with Swedish relatives had been rescued? It was this suppressed idea in her mind which demanded representation:
I was not interested in filming yet another interview with a survivor talking about events she experienced at a much younger age. So, I kept on saying no to the idea of making a film. Tana, however, was persistent. She was determined to end her silence, but didn’t want to face an audience herself. (Yadin 2005: 168)
(Which – given, say, the Bomba interview in Shoah – is entirely understandable on her part, just as one can understand her contrary pressing imperative to bear witness.)
Yadin counts among the advantages of the animation the fact that it involves no journalistic subterfuge of transparency, no voyeurism and, positively, of course it allows the visualisation of what she calls the ‘unreachable’. Moreover, because of its history as a technique for children’s film, an animation on so serious a subject as the Holocaust automatically de-familiarises its subject matter. Silence seizes this possibility. Yadin and Bringas worked with two animators. One, Ruth Lingford used a stark black and white woodcut style for the camp half of the film; the other, Tim Webb, drew a colourful children’s cartoon for the Swedish half. Tana Ross, born in 1940 in Berlin and liberated as a five-year old, is among the youngest of Holocaust survivors. Her insight is of the very young child. The infant’s perspective is a different order to that of other survivors’, even other somewhat older young witnesses’, testimony. Animation brilliantly allows the filmmakers to visualise her infantile memory of the nightmare.
Silence has moments of blinding illumination. That the Nazis justified their bestiality by treating the existence of their victims as a species of health hazard is summed up in seconds as scurrying black figures morph into insects being swept up by an enormous broom.
58 A child’s traumatised horror of all adults is captured when a uniformed Swedish railway man morphs into a menacing armed SS man and back again.
Silence, indeed, makes the Holocaust new and it does so at no moral or ethical cost. It also allows us to understand a child’s sense of betrayal by her own people. Yadin writes, as a provocation: ‘Animation can be the most honest form of documentary filmmaking.’ I do not believe this is just a provocation.
Silence demonstrates its truth. That is why I think it is amongst the most telling Holocaust films.
There is one simple answer to the problem of illustrating die Endlösing. Not that it cannot be done, but that, as Forgács, ten Brink, Yadin and Bringas demonstrate, it must be done by obeying Hamlet’s injunction ‘by indirection seek directions out’. Ca va de soi.
NOTES
I wish to thank Alisa Lebow her help in preparing this chapter.