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  • The Warsaw Ghetto
  • Peter Whitehead

This short essay was originally written for the Time Out publication, 1000 Films to Change Your Life (London: Time Out, 2006). It appeared under the title "Unforgettable, Unforgivable."

The University Cinema Club met in the Cambridge Arts Cinema to watch in de pen dent films. In 1960, an evening of "political" documentary films included footage shot inside the Warsaw Ghetto.1 An official state film, well photographed, well edited, aimed at conveying a simple enough message: this is what happened when we built an impenetrable concrete wall around the Jewish quarter of the city and starved a thousand or more inhabitants to death. It shows their degradation and their dying. This is what it looked like. Or at least, up until a point: in the film, there's not a single shot of a Nazi soldier. "Necessarily" absent, the invisible authors of this atrocity are safely hidden behind the camera. Afterwards, I collapsed emotionally, had difficulty staving off a breakdown. There was one particular image a cameraman had dwelt on as if he found it especially powerful, significant, plangent with the true "meaning" of the film: a skinny young girl in rags, alone, filthy dirty, digging with a stick in the mud, looking for food. The soundtrack a dispassionate description of her odd behaviour. The images woke me with violent nightmares (reminding me of those of Thomas De Quincey). They would sear into my daylight mind as I worked in the Cavendish laboratory, a student crystallographer assisting Crick and Watson unravelling the structure of DNA using X-rays and crystals. A few years later I would give up a science career, went to the Slade School of Art to study film.

Soon after seeing the Nazi film I'd seen Rashomon and the two films seemed to merge in my mind, a painfully bitter cold fusion.2 I'd discovered [End Page 401] I couldn't entice a single reading of the ghetto film which would offer me detachment from its inhuman truths; the planned state-sanctioned murder, the hatred; rape. And something else was haunting me, my inability to "enter into" the state of mind of the cameraman. I thought of him continuously. In watching the film I must be inside his head, behind his eyes. I wasn't able to feel the necessary death-in-life detachment without which he could not stand there, camera on tripod, focussing the lens, changing to close up. Oops, film finished, pop in a new one. Or later, more hidden gods, lab technicians deciding what were the "best" settings to convey their message. For me it was not film, not celluloid passing through a projector, I had no "persona" with which to protect myself. I had been there. It was a young girl, the girl next door at the point of starvation digging in stinking mud for food. I'd discovered a "flaw" in myself. Through some quirk in my own fatherless upbringing, my personal myth, I would never see film with the detachment "necessary" to make "objective" documentary or "convincing" fiction films. "No darling, bend over more, push your bottom out, push the stick in the mud with a slower rhythm. Perfect. Print! Y'looked lovely sweetheart!" Was it possible that all film was rape? Of the "subjects" and audience? For me, irreparably wounded by the ghetto film, it was.

Arriving at the Slade on a painting scholarship I discovered a nascent film department, a Bolex camera idle on a shelf. Within a month I'd made a documentary film of the sculpture students; sticky fingers, mud, plaster, moulds of dismembered bodies. Within six months I was a newsreel cameraman for Italian TV; filmed Aldo Moro in London with our Prime Minister. Moro soon to be assassinated by university students.3 Within seven years I'd made a film in America about a documentary film-maker (myself) who decides to film an act of assassination at a peace rally as the ultimate act of protest. I was inside the university during the student rebellion, filmed the police violence, wounded students, ambulances. I gave a guy $75 for a gun; I knew whom I must kill: a...

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