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Reviewed by:
  • Reframing Holocaust Testimony by Noah Shenker
  • Hannah Pollin-Galay
Reframing Holocaust Testimony, Noah Shenker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 268pp., hardcover $80.00, paperback $30.00, electronic version available.

Shenker’s well-researched monograph is the latest work on a topic that deserves re-examination: the creation and use of Holocaust video testimony in the so-called “era of the witness.” The global effort to film Holocaust testimony that began (roughly) in the late 1970s and peaked in the 1990s constituted a historical event in its own right, as Annette Wieviorka has argued.1 During this time, scholars such as Geoffrey Hartman,2 Lawrence Langer,3 Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub,4 and Henry Greenspan5 dedicated substantial books and book chapters to the subject. These witness-critics were oriented toward the present-day, the poetic, and the internal life of the people caught on camera. For various reasons, this psycho-poetic mode of witness-criticism became much less prominent at the start of the new millenium. Since Christopher Browning published his methodological essay Collected Memories, scholars have tended to draw discrete pieces of empirical information from these testimonies, while leaving aside analytic discussions about the recordings themselves.6 Strikingly, of late prominent scholars have mentioned these recordings almost dismissively, as foils to other testimony or documentary collections whose value they wish to highlight.7

In Reframing Holocaust Testimony, Shenker shifts the discussion around video testimony, signaling that scholars have yet to address more dimensions to these memory-making enterprises. Shenker’s most important contributions relate to two new “frames” of analysis: the cinematic decisions involved in creating these sources, what he calls “off-camera dimensions of testimony”; and the differing institutional cultures that produced, then disseminated this video material (pp. 14, 15).

The book devotes chapters to three of the leading institutions responsible for recording and archiving tens of thousands of testimonies: the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. While scholars often encounter rumors and apocrypha about the inner workings of these testimony-recording organizations, Shenker sets the record straight by digging through their internal archives and by interviewing personnel. Shenker was interested in “the methods interviewers use to engage witnesses in discussions on how [the latter] became aware of events they describe…; the kinds of narrative outlines the archive uses to attempt to structure testimonies, often into coherent, sequential units; and the degree to which subjects are given adequate space in which to assert their own agency in delivering their stories” (p. 13).

Shenker is at his best when revealing behind-the-scenes methods of sorting and curating video testimonies, practices viewers and scholars could not otherwise know. We learn, for example, that both the USHMM Oral History Branch and the Shoah Foundation developed internal rating systems for testimonies (pp. 79, 135). The USHMM designed its system to select clips suitable for museum spaces: each [End Page 306] testimony would later receive a score ranging from “Poor” to “Excellent.” Shenker observes that “with few exceptions, the most extreme experiences got the highest ratings, thus allowing planners to better organize segments that would provide pathos and dramatic punch to the exhibition narrative” (p. 79). The equation between affective display and testimonial “excellence” is fascinating. Shenker contextualizes his observation as well by pointing out that over time Museum staff shifted the burden of historical proof onto its material artifacts—hair, a train car, shoes—while survivor testimony increasingly became a tool for emotional engagement.

Shenker’s attention to film and media technology generates other insights. Fortunoff videographers, he tells us, were instructed to avoid using the zoom, in order to suggest the “purity and objectivity of the recording” (p. 28). For their program, the personal authenticity of the testimony was the priority. Shenker shows the aesthetic considerations required to make the archive’s appreciation for individual authenticity show up on the screen. The Shoah Foundation and the USHMM like-wise adopted “neutral,” static camera protocols. However, Shenker points out an instructive exception: at the end of Shoah Foundation interviews, witnesses are encouraged to share photos and material objects from their wartime experiences...

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