Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (review)

Susan Sontag said that 'shooting' a subject and shooting a human being (the camera and the gun) are 'congruent activities'. Libby Saxton takes this dictum seriously in her treatment of the Holocaust and the ethics of film-making and spectatorship to produce a work of immense maturity and sensitivity on the topic. She approaches some of the classic films on the Holocaust – Nuit et brouillard, Shoah, Schindler's List – and some of the heated critical debates in France in recent years about the representation of atrocity, not to take sides (as is so often the case) nor to moralise on interdictions and prohibitions, but to consider the 'ethical dynamics' of different strategies of film-making and spectatorship. She disentangles polemical pronouncements from actual works to show that, despite the apparent opposition between the antirepresentational stance of Claude Lanzmann and the belief in the historical and testimonial power of the image expressed by Jean-Luc Godard and Georges Didi-Huberman, Lanzmann's Shoah and Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma have more in common than one might think. Central to Saxton's argument is the view that responsible forms of witnessing atrocity involve making absences speak and, as Jacques Rancière says, 'mak(ing) manifest the invisible' by revealing the image's eternal gesture to an elusive elsewhere (hence the title 'haunted images'). In this sense, Lanzmann's staged incarnations of trauma through affectively-charged gestures in the present and Godard's staged encounter between cinema and suffering through a dizzying montage of images both represent, in their different ways, an ethical encounter with horror by exploring the ambivalent process of witnessing catastrophe and loss. Saxton's careful and nuanced approach also dismisses the opposition between Nuit et brouillard and Shoah (advocated largely by Lanzmann himself according to the use or non-use of the archive) to show a common concern with material traces in the present and the ethics of spectatorship. For Saxton, film becomes 'a site of ethical reflection', no matter what filmic strategy is employed, when it refuses to aestheticise the real and to trap the other within a screen of the same, and self-consciously dramatises its own blindness. Serge Daney's famous critique of 'le travelling' in Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo serves as a timely reminder of the frontier between responsible and irresponsible filming. Drawing also on Agamben's discussion of the Muselmann in the camps and, more importantly, Levinas's writing on ethics and the alterity of the 'visage', she concludes with a fascinating analysis of the face in the early films of Resnais and Marker to show how the gaze in their works is transformed from spectacle into an exchange of glances without closure. This is responsible witnessing because, in refusing the voyeuristic impulse and asserting the primacy of non-seeing, these film-makers stage film's response to history not as an alignment of the camera and the gun but as 'a series of missed encounters'. Written in lucid prose, and combining philosophical insight with brilliant film criticism, this book will be the leading statement on ways of seeing the Holocaust for years to come.