Afterimage: Film, Trauma And The Holocaust

Preface

Preface IF SCHOLARSHIP can never be wholly objective, writing about the Holocaust presents the historian with a limit case of scholarly implication . One of the effects of the trauma constituted by genocide and concentration camps is that it continues to thrust upon those who encounter it in the present the subjectivities assumed by or forced upon the participants in the events of the past. What reference to the Holocaust is not marked by an identification with the position of victim, perpetrator , collaborator, bystander, resister, or one of the many shades in between? My own identification with the victim position must have begun earlier than I can remember. In 1944, at the age of sixteen, my father was deported with his family from Hungary to Auschwitz. When he was liberated at Buchenwald in 1945, only one cousin remained from his extended family. No photograph remains to show that my grandparents, my uncle, and all the rest had ever existed. Their images existed only in my father's decaying memory. In fact, it was a struggle for him just to call up an image of his mother'Sface, and even then it was often the image of a photograph of her that he carried through the selection line at Auschwitz, and that a guard finally knocked from his hand. For me, these absent images received a substitution from Night and Fog, which I was shown at my synagogue as a child. The image from that film of a bulldozer pushing a pile of emaciated bodies into a mass grave became the most vivid icon with which I visualized the Holocaust. I pictured the corpses and thought, "Jews, what we are." Preparing a paper on Night and Fog for a graduate seminar, I watched the film again on videotape. When the bulldozer scene appeared, I watched it over and over, trying to repress my feelings of horror in order to record the details . In my memory of seeing the film as a child, the bulldozer was a weapon driven by a Nazi. Viewing the film again, I realized the scene was shot after the liberation, and the bulldozer was probably driven by an Allied soldier. In any case, the driver never appears in frame. ix Copyrighted Material x Preface This book began not with a theory or argument about what might be called-but uncomfortably-"Holocaust films," but with a series of encounters with individual films that seemed to articulate in one way or another a paradox that felt familiar to me: the paradox of trying to visualize and narrate a trauma that could not be captured in an image; of trying to remember an absence; of trying to represent the unrepresentable . I suppose the process of trying to understand these films is, among other things, my attempt to work through a set of childhood experiences that might be profitably condensed as that first viewing of Night and Fog. What was it, what is it, about these films that leads one to try to understand them better? In Night and Fog, it was not only the shock of bulldozed corpses-the shock of the visible-but also the vague sense of a present haunted by something invisible, something only suggested by a ceaselessly moving camera, or a man's voice speaking a language I did not understand, but with a tone that nevertheless conveyed not the kind of alienating authority one had come to expect from traditional historical documentaries, but instead what Fran<;ois Truffaut called a "terrifying gentleness." 1 The melancholy moving camera of Night and Fog returns with a vengeance in Shoah, driven along seemingly endless tracks toward and around the sites of death camps and rail lines. The camera is constantly moving in Istvan Szab6's 25 Fireman Street as well, restlessly weaving its way through the characters' dreams of loss. In other films it is the characters who cannot stop moving, while the camera follows: Marceline, who can only recount her memories while walking alone through the streets of Paris in the documentary Chronicle of a Summer; Sol, trapped by his memories, wandering all night through the streets of New York in The Pawnbroker; Anni, in Szab6's Father, speaking of the difficulty of a Hungarian Jewish identity after the Holocaust, while walking along the Danube in Budapest w here Jews were shot in 1944.2 There are the trains: deportation trains in archival footage in Night and Fog; old trains trundling through Poland for what seems like hours of screen time in Shoah; a New York City subway in ThePawnbroker leading to a flashback of a fictional deportation train; indeed, the whole story of Love Film revolves around a train voyage that triggers the protagonist 's memories. Copyrighted Material Preface xi Often there are faces, held in long close-ups, speaking or trying to speak, struggling to reconcile language and memory-faces like canvases where the traces of memory and forgetting collide. I will argue that these films and moments can lead us to a posttraumatic cinema, a cinema that not only represents traumatic historical events, but also attempts to embody and reproduce the trauma for the spectator through its form of narration. Behind this argument, however, lies a more basic concern with a question of Holocaust memory:that it is essential for Western societies-those that lived through the events and were directly affected by them-to encounter the Holocaust in the deepest possible sense, to attempt to admit the Holocaust into their historical consciousness, whatever that encounter or admission might mean or whatever meaning it might shatter.3This is less a concern with forgetting or revisionism than a concern that we never adequately admitted the Holocaust in the first place, that the initial encounter with concentration camps and genocide was characterized by a moment of shock, only to be followed by a long period of denial-denial not of the facts (though the facts have been denied often enough as well) but of their existential significance.In recent years, the subject of the Holocaust has become almost ubiquitous in both mass culture and scholarship. Whether this phenomenon represents a significant encounter with the Holocaust is another question, but insofar as a struggle between denial and admission has taken place since the war, these films, I argue, have been important participants in that struggle. This book does not attempt to survey the totality of the relationship between the Holocaust and the cinema, to catalogue the variety of Holocaust narratives or images in film, or to analyze contemporary media debates about Holocaust films (hereupon without quotes). Rather, it focuses on a particular set of questions that can be traced back to the moment in history when the cinema confronted genocide. It asks what particular problems the Holocaust has posed for the cinematic representation of history, and what particular opportunities the cinema has afforded for the representation of the Holocaust. And it explores the way this confrontation played out in a small number of paradigmatic documentary and fiction films, films that straddled the boundary between avant-garde and mainstream cinema, and that used the cultural techniques of modernism as a way of provoking a posttraumatic historical consciousness of the Holocaust. Copyrighted Material xii Preface A different approach to historical films-one that has played a significant role in debates about Holocaust films, but will figure here only marginally-focuses on their historical content narrowly defined, rather than on the broader questions of form that concern me here. By historical content, I mean that aspect of form that concerns the historical events and themes represented in films, in isolation from questions of cinematic representation itself. Considerations of content have been significant in much writing on Holocaust films insofar as questions of historical accuracy, revisionism, and denial have assumed tremendous moral weight in the historical consciousness of the Holocaust. While such considerations are necessary, however, they are not sufficient to address the less obvious ways in which films mediate historical consciousnesswhat Hayden White has called "the content of the form."4 Any text that addresses "the Holocaust" assumes a definition of that term, and thus enters into the debates about that definition. The term was used by Jews after the war to refer to the distinct Nazi effort to exterminate them, at a time when the distinctiveness of that effort was not well understood by the public. Because of my own identity and knowledge, most of the films emphasized here focus on the Jewish experience-most important among them, Shoah, The Pawnbroker, and the three films by Istvan Szab6. While I believe it is necessary to continue to struggle for a historical consciousness of the distinctive nature of "the Final Solution of the Jewish Question," however, I also think it is necessary to remember that Jews, Communists, Soviet POWs, Poles, resisters, Gypsies, gay men, the "disabled," criminals, Jehovah's Witnesses , and others were thrown together by the common trauma of the Nazi camps. For me, it is necessary to avoid either of two traps: the anti-Jewish trap of denying the specificity of "the Final Solution," and the trap of allowing the memory of "the Final Solution" to isolate Jews from non-Jews and their own traumatic histories.5 Night and Fog-a film written by a non-Jewish resister, with a leftist rather than a Jewish point of view on the camps, but which was nonetheless crucial to the subsequent development not only of posttraumatic cinema in general but also of the Jewish cinematic consciousness of the Holocaust-demonstrates the inextricable linkage of historical subjectivities in this cinematic history . This linkage extends further in Hiroshima, mon amour, which binds two distinct traumatic histories within two "theaters" of a single war, and which, without touching on the Holocaust, was also crucial to the Copyrighted Material Preface xiii subsequent development of Holocaust films. In the final chapter, this notion of the linkage of historical subjectivities will be emphasized to an even greater degree, as I will conclude with a discussion of History and Memory:For Akiko and Takashige, which is not about the Holocaust, but rather the internment of Japanese Americans in the United States during the Second World War. There are difficulties inherent in any attempt to do scholarship on the Holocaust. Is there not a terrible contradiction in using academic rhetoric to write about the genocidal death and brutalization of human beings? Should a scholarly work advocating posttraumatic narration not practice what it preaches, and attempt a posttraumatic form of scholarship? What would such a form of scholarship look like? I considered making such an attempt here, but gave up the idea, unsure that the answer to the above question is yes, and faced, at any rate, with the adequate challenge of writing a "normal" book on the dissonant relationship between the "magic" of the movies and the horror of history. Copyrighted Material Copyrighted Material ...