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5. Film and the Shoah: The Limits of Seeing
- State University of New York Press
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5 Film and the Shoah: The Limits ofSeeing We are made aware ofour silent and detachedglance as spectators, removed in time and place. Neither the creator of thisfilm nor his l'ielPers can assert, like the chorus in the Oresteia: "What happened next I sal!' not, neither speak it." Hartman, "The Cinema Animal" I n the winter of 1993-4, on the release of Schindler)s List, Steven Spielberg offered the fIlm free to any school that wanted to use it for the purposes of Holocaust education. He did so in the midsts of a flrestorm of controversy over the film. In its most simplified form, that controversy revolved round the tIlm's use of realist techniques-black-andwhite film, the painstaking accuracy of the sets, the desire to film on location in Poland-and the question that was usually asked was whether the HIm was fInally able to offer a representation that once and for all could "stand in" for the Holocaust itself. In effect, the debate surrounding the release of Schindler)s List was a debate over how well the film was able to produce a knowledge of the Holocaust that was adequate to the event. And for most critics, the answer was that no, the HIm was not adequate to the event, nor could it be, given its shameless use of voyeurism, gratuitous violence, and sex, not to mention Spielberg's encyclopedic use of Hollywood conventions -as if the Final Solution was not rife with voyeurism, violence, sex, and an obsessive use of convention. (For what we think of as the best response to these criticisms, see Hansen.) But most survivors (who needless to say did not speak with a single voice) suggested that they were pleased that Spielberg was able to represent on t1lm the images that had haunted them since the events themselves. Though the tIlm was not adequate to the event, they seemed to be saying, it was close enough. 103 104 Between Witness and Testimony Three of the f<)Ur films under consideration here take the imperative of knowledge seriously: Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Steven Spielberg see their role in whole or in part to lay the events of the Holocaust bare enough so that no one can say that they did not occur. In f:lCt, Resnais and Lanzmann were explicit about that purpose well before their films were shown: Resnais in the 1950s was working against a tide of silence and the active reconstruction of a French past that had little to do with the extermination of Jewish Europe; Lanzmann was battling the rising tide of French anti-Semitism of the late 1970s. Though they were responding to local political situations, the French filmmakers could be seen as reacting to Wiesel's imperative of "never shall I forget," the imperative to bring every viewer to the conclusion that the events of the Shoah were so horrible that we should endeavor never to let them occur again. Spielberg , working during the peak of what Yosefa Lishitsky calls "the Holocaust boom," may have believed that if he could only show a fragment of what the Holocaust was like, then the threat of hatreds like those that supposedly gave rise to the Final Solution could be ameliorated, if not avoided. Certainly his of1er of the film as a pedagogical tool suggests he is aware of its value in the production of knowledge of the events it depicts. It is unclear whether Roberto Benigni, whose Life is Beautiful has aroused far greater controversy than Spielberg's film, had Wiesel or the imperative to know in mind when making his movie in Italy. Certainly critics have taken him to task for not recognizing more clearly the stakes involved in producing a fantasy about the Shoah. But much of the discourse surrounding these films has missed the question of how these films obey the imperative of knowledge, and whether, in fact, any of them managed to do so. More to the point, very few writers and critics have asked whether, in the movies' failures to adequately represent the events of the Shoah, the films have presented something other than knowledge. Part of the problem resuits from seeing these films as attempts to produce testimonial evidence of the Holocaust. Certainly Lanzmann's film is only the most obvious example of filmed testimony. But if we see testimony as an attempt to render in language that which we know-if we see testimony as a narrative account of the occurrence of events, events we have experienced by bringing them to knowledge ourselves-then Resnais ', Spielberg's, and Benigni's tilms all function as testimony. They all function, at some level, as an attempt to testify to the events of the Shoah, to bring the events to knowledge for the viewers of the film. But as we've tried to suggest throughout this project, while you can arrive at knowledge -a universal position that can be understood by every speaking subject- [3.90.205.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:25 GMT) FILM AND THE SHOAH 105 something is lost from it: the encounter with the object is itself not recognizable in knowledge. The trauma of the event is covered over by the language that endeavors to speak it. What we'll argue in this chapter is that all four of the films under discussion-though sometimes in apparently different ways-avoid this problem (either in whole or in part) because they haven't been seen as vehicles for this kind of universal position. Instead, they present a limit to universal constructions-to knowledge-pointing instead to the necessarily impossible nature of a universal language (one that communicates without misunderstanding, or loss of meaning). They do so by differentiating witness and testimony, the seen and the said. If witnessing involves the recognition of the event that occurs prior to knowledge and speech, then the problem of film involves placing the viewer in the position of witness: how does the tllm allow the viewer to see what precedes knowledge, and how do the juxtaposition of sound and visual image, of convention and its opposite, of the familiar and the shockingly alien, work to produce the effect of witnessing? Alain Resnais' 1956 documentary Night and Fog offers one of the most celebrated depictions of the Shoah. In it, Resnais brings together black-and-white tile footage documenting the evolution of the Final Solution with contemporary color tllm surveying the ruins of the death camps as they fell into decay at the time of his tllming. The movement back and forth between the black-and-white and color fIlm, between the past and the present, traces an imperative of memory between the events of the Final Solution and the vantage of just over a decade later. This movement between the violent black-and-white past and the more subdued, almost serene color of the present creates a narrative tension the tllm goes on to explore : how do the actions of the past, captured on grainy documentary footage, intrude into the ruins of the present? How do these decaying symbols of horror intrude backwards into a past that already seems distant, a black-and-white past that cannot be well integrated with the color of the present? Although Resnais and the writer of the narration, Jean Cayrol, never once mention the death camps as a tool for the annihilation of the Jews-referring instead to all victims of the death camps as "deportees"the tllm's juxtaposition of past and present, present and past still makes an important statement about the Shoah. In a work made so close to the time of its object-just eleven years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Resnais' tllm already points to the chasm that irrevocably separates the present from 106 Between Witness and Testimony the trauma of this past. In addition, the juxtaposition subjectifies our own looking backwards, implicating our vision by seeing the Shoah both as a looking backwards as well as a reading in the present. Early in the tilm, the camera establishes the movement back in time by following the now overgrown rails toward a concentration camp. The camera moves slowly along the tracks while the narrator explicitly speaks of the presence of the Shoah as it intrudes on the present, as more than just a relation to the past. Today, along the same track, the sun shines. Go slowly along it, looking tor ... what? For a trace of the corpses that fCiI out of the cars when the doors were opened? Or the footprints of those first arrivals, driven toward camp at gunpoint while dogs barked, searchlights wheeled, and the incinerator flamed in the distance in one of those nocturnal settings so beloved by the Nazis? I Night and Fog makes it clear that we look in the present towards the past and that what we construct of it, what we see, comes not only from the material remains but from the position of the viewer, from our wish to see and know to what these traces refer. Although the film does not return to emphasize the way our vision and our desire implicate the historical reclaiming of the trauma of the events themselves, it does consistently leave us with images that cannot bear witness to what happened there. In fact, one of the remarkable facets of the film is that it does not rely on the position of the eyewitness at all. No one speaks either for the living or the dead. No one leads us back through memory to reconstruct the horrors of the past, evidence of which the film presents the viewer like hammer blows. Instead, as if through an archive, Resnais leads us among the evidence , reminding us that we are the ones who are burdened to construct what happened there, follow "the same track." In so doing he reminds us that in such an act of construction, from the color of the present, that past to which that evidence came becomes irretrievably lost, and the narrative we built to take its place becomes irrevocably, troublingly, our own. Resnais' insistence is not just an etTect of the stylistic system of the film. Night and Fog makes explicit and precise reference to its own inability to construct a knowledge of the events it circumscribes even while it presses the viewer to see. As it challenges its viewers to be vigilant lest the horrors of the Shoah be repeated, Resnais' film makes it clear that the horrors themselves are beyond our reckoning, outside knowledge; we may follow the same tracks, and we may wonder about others who made their way FILM AND THE SHOAH 107 over the same terrain in the past, but we cannot see their step as it leaves "the footprint" or hear the dogs or feel the beatings. As the camera makes its way into what remains of a barracks, the narrator wonders what it is that we can actually know from these leavings of trauma: What remains of the reality of these camps-despised by those who made them, incomprehensible to those who suffered here? These wooden barracks, these beds where three people slept, these burrows where people hid, where they tlIrtively ate, and where sleep itself was perilous. No description, no picture can restore their true dimension: endless, uninterrupted fear. We would need the very mattress where scraps of food were hidden, the blanket that was fought over, the shouts and curses, the orders repeated in every tongue, the sudden appearance of the S.S., seized with desire for a spot check or for a practical joke. Of these threatened sleepers, we can only show you the shell, the shadow. At first it seems that Resnais calls for even more documentation, the "very mattress," the "blanket," objects that hold some tamiliarity. But as the list grows longer the film invokes objects that are not material, objects that cannot be recovered: the languages and words spoken and the menacing "appearance of the S.S.," "endless, uninterrupted fear." Like his earlier invocation of sights and sounds, these are things that the camera cannot capture as it draws the viewer's gaze to what survives of the camps. The material remains present us only with the "shell" in which some kernel of the event is no longer present. Resnais' sense that even the material evidence of the camps could not give us a sense of the events themselves is consistent with something Jay Cantor pointed out a decade ago: that as a filmmaker Resnais is acutely aware of the "constructedness" of the camps ("Death and the Image" 176-80). There is something ominous in the Nazi attempt to pave over the atrocity of annihilation by means of art: as Cantor points out, the film's title is derived from the phrase Nacht lmd Nebel, "a piece of Hitler's poetry" designed to provide a name, a representation, a beautiful ruse, for the disappearance of the Jews into another kind of vapor. But this perverse artisanship points toward a space beyond representation, a space beyond which the knowledge we have created of the events behind history and narrative cannot be easily contained by recognizable words or everyday objects . At one point, in what could pass for one of the film's lighter moments , Resnais shows us photos of guard towers at several of the camps, still aiming to suggest the camps' art: 108 BetJVeen Witness and Testimony A concentration camp is built like a grand hotel-you need contractors , estimates ... The camps come in many styles [at which point the photos appear with each word]: Swiss; garage; Japanese; no style. The references to styles comprise the shell, Hitler's beautiful poetry, and Resnais here tries to make us spectators in what amounts to a realty auction , effectively making us complicit in the poetical act: we have seen neighborhoods like these, mismatched architectural styles thrown together in a simulacrum of internationalism, and in making the connection between the art of the camps and the familiar fake styles of homes, we have made-in Cantor's terms-an equation. Art equals death. But the equation doesn't work as simply as this, because Resnais has pointed to something that the litany of art cannot bear. Not only does a chalet seem out of place in a series with a garage; it seems profoundly out of place as a guard tower on a death camp. As if the still photos of the towers themselves were not enough to trouble us, the phrase "no style" snaps us out of our spectatorial slumber and jars us back to what cannot be contained by the metaphors of contractors and grand hotels. For what we are shown in this photo is a thrown-together monstrosity with a corroguated tin roof posed on stilts that only barely contains its weight. And once the narrator intones "the leisurely architects plan the gates no one will enter more than once," the deal has been broken and we are on terrain no longer familiar. No style. The shadow. It becomes clear here that our memories-of neighborhoods, of hotels and contractors, of art and the place of Hitler's beautiful poetry-could not possibly be adequate to what lies beyond the images, and that while we might imagine the artifice of the guard towers and the bustle of contruction, we could hardly make our way from the representation to knowledge of the individual horrors that took place inside the camps. It is through the contemporary footage that Night and Fog shows us most clearly that the Shoah cannot be fully present within the remnants, or the artitlce, of the past; that the tile footage might capture a moment of something we might call the Holocaust, but given what we know now, and see now, it is not enough to give form to, or a knowledge of~ what happened . Thus, for Resnais, evidence-the detritus of history-cannot really account for those who suffered, cannot represent the trauma of the event except as an absent center-a "shell" or "shadow"-that the surroundings once circumscribed. The contemporary visions of the material remains of the Final Solution mark a place of memory, but the contents of such a [3.90.205.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:25 GMT) FILM AND THE SHOAH 109 memory can only be hinted at by their absence. And in fact, the contents of that memory may cut two ways. Inasmuch as the contemporary footage of the gas chambers may afford the viewer in the present a sense of ethical urgency, they may also present the opportunity for voyeurism. The narrator tells us, over contemporary glimpses of the remains of the gas chambers , that "nothing distinguished [them] from an ordinary block.... The only sign-but you have to know-is the ceiling scored by fingernails." But over contemporary glimpses of crematoria, he tells us "an incinerator can be made to look like a picture postcard. Later-today-tourists have themselves photographed in them." The present is built of such knowledges : of what we must know, and of what we refuse to know. The comfortable , colorful present is our own to do with what we will; what any spectator builds in that present is not history, not the event. The present use of the past, history, can only offer up a place marker for which an event cannot be signified or contained. In this sense, history cannot bear witness nor be redemptive since it can only point away from the particular kernel that intrudes in the present. Night and Fog does, however, present us with something that we might call redemptive, that offers up a moment of seeing between fragments of knowledge of both past and present. The juxtaposition of the black-and-white footage of the deportations and the camps with the color, contemporary images suggests a distinction between the present and the past that is effected in a dialectic, a dialectic that offers a superimposition of the event and the now of the modern viewer. The film begins with statements documenting the sources for the black-and-white images, setting up a factuality on which the film's structure depends. The implication is that without the images of the atrocities that took place in the concentration camps-without the facts that speak for the event-how would we read what we find there now? How could we know anything about that to which the remains themselves bear witness? The images of the present work, conversely, to bring the footage from the past into some form of accessibility , both as a narrative device and as an object on which to hang the past events. For example, the film presents the contemporary image of the camera following along the rails leading into Auschwitz along with film footage of deportees in boxcars. Likewise, the camera's movement along the line of bunks in one barracks connects to footage of haunting faces peering out from the wooden racks, including the now famous picture of Elie Wiesel staring at the camera from among the other men there with him in Buchenwald. Although, as the film's narrator makes clear, this linking of the remainders of the past with the experiences of the camps does 110 Between Witness and Testimony not offer a concrete or coherent account of the individual traumas that these pieces of footage point toward, the juxtapositions do enact a distancing between what constitutes history, the "shell," and the impossible kernel that history covers over. Put another way, this juxtaposition points towards a different space altogether, an atemporal space that allows past and present to become commingled, if only fleetingly and perhaps not happily. This traumatic space, a kernel of the real that intrudes into the temporal moments represented, is presented by the juxtaposition of past and present, between black-and-white and color footage, even as the very distinction between past and present is troubled and affected by this real, traumatic ordering. Night and Fog makes it difficult to grasp what gives rise to trauma and history (Is history an effect of trauma or is trauma an effect of history?), but it does show that the two are inseparable. Although Night and Fog tells us that all we have access to is the shell of the Holocaust , its physical and epistemological remains, its temporal dimensions, it does maintain a certain connection between the shell and its kernel. That connection indicates that there is something, the events comprising the Shoah, inside the shell, what we call the Holocaust; the event is at the center of, and troubles, history. At the same time, the film affirms that we cannot retrieve the kernel that the shell once contained, that was once present but whose now broken and dispersed shards cannot be adequately brought together again. We do not have access to it. Night and Fog offers no witness testimony per se, no particular individual representing camp experience (even Wiesel is not named in the image from Buchenwald). In effect, Resnais' film acts as a witness, forcing upon the viewer an opposition between a knowledge of the Holocaustone we assume (or hope) is available through footage, evidence, historywhile pointing toward the event's resistance to knowledge, how we simultaneously know and do not know the experiences of those who suffered by means of the Nazi machinery created to destroy the Jews. The film carves out a relationship between testimony and witnessing that follows along the same lines we have developed in our discussion of history and fiction : by offering up the very real dimension of the Shoah outside of purely historical terms, Resnais shows that there is a moment of/in history that we see or feel only in terms of remainders of the event that we neither know from memory nor encounter within the context of representation, or narrative , or history. Night and Fog situates the Shoah within what on the surface looks to be a fabric supported by what we can still see today. On the other hand, Resnais' film makes it clear that the Shoah does not reside in its historical remainders, that the trauma of the event exceeds the material re- FILM AND THE SHOAH 111 mains. Put another way, Night and Fog is very aware of itself as a testimony of the Holocaust, one based on the masses of experiences rather than on a particular confrontation, an individual's traumatic renderings of those experiences . In this sense, the film subjectifies its own limits: it shows us what remains, tells us what happened here, while insisting that the real trauma of the event and the witnesses to particular atrocities are radically absent, that there is no ground on which a knowledge of the event can be laid. Although these are two paradoxical positions, two contrary notions of history and knowledge, Resnais' film holds both to be true simultaneously, that we must remember and cannot remember at the same time. These two ways of knowing become the final demand of Night and Fog, which became a major influence on how the Holocaust was represented in later years. Films that attempt to portray the Holocaust, to represent either individual experiences or the larger historical context, similarly deploy themselves along the range marked by the epistemological limits set by Night and Fog: they can emphasize the historical material as a way towards knowing the event and they can emphasize the impossibility of ever really knowing what happened. But these are not two mutually exclusive acts, though they are in dialectical tension with one another. More importantly , even in a film that attempts to align itself with only one of these acts, the other still intrudes. And the ways in which a given film works within these two acts or possibly even ignores or hides the ends of its representation, lead to the many controversies surrounding the visual representation of the Shoah. We see this in two important, but radically different , films: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Steven Spielberg's Schindler)s List. We clearly see the diftlculties of these competing notions of history and representation when we try to bring together these two very different films. The passionate debates surrounding Schindler)s List, a hugely successful and popular film, has polarized much of the thinking on Holocaust representation, especially when considered in conjunction with Lanzmann's more "historically" driven, more "factual" Shoah. But as we have seen, whether it's historical fiction or fictional history, neither film escapes the very real diHiculties of narrative emplotment, just as the USHMM and Yad Vashem are equally implicated by the need for establishing a coherent identity. Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, considered by many to be the best film made about the Holocaust, apparently otTers a "third way" to subjectity the 112 Between Witness and Testimony Shoah. Lanzmann himself has said that he did not want to use documentary footage, footage upon which Night and Fog relies. Nor did he want to tell a flctive narrative, a coherent story that might be elevated to the place of a singular rendition of the Holocaust, following the American television series Holocaust. As a way of charting what he considered a new genre, Shoah was to construct all new material, new evidence relying on witness testimony as the basis for a knowledge of the event. Beginning with Simon Srebnik's revisiting Chelmno, where as a young boy he sang folk songs to the Nazis, running errands for them as well as burning the remains of those gassed in vans, Lanzmann shows us the faces of the witnesses as they speak about what they saw. Often the most revealing moments have no words at all, just images of a survivor staring (Srebnik standing in the fleld where he exhumed bodies for burning), or a Pole sorrowfully thinking about lost friends, or an historian contemplating the medieval roots of Hitler's Final Solution. Lanzmann's camera captures the fullness of the recollection that he in turn punctuates through editing, connecting survivor recollections to Nazi officials describing the way a camp functioned or with testimony of Polish farmers who watched the deportation trains go by their flelds. In linking these varied pieces together-the words and faces of survivors, bystanders , perpetrators-Lanzmann carves out a space similar to Resnais' Night and Fog; much like Resnais' use of juxtaposing past and present to get at glimpses of the horror, Lanzmann's survey of different kinds of witnesses also constructs a space that we would call a traumatic kernel, a space that is an effect of the same tension between the horror's presence in the present and its emanation back to the origin of its memory. Lanzmann's construction of testimony follows a consistent logic, whether he interviews survivors, bystanders, or perpetrators. A given scene usually begins in the midst of a testimony, after Lanzmann has already started his questioning. Sometimes the speaker of the testimony is all we hear and see, while at other times Lanzmann prods the witness for more information. We see this fonn in particular when Lanzmann interviews Mrs. Michelsohn, a German wife of a Nazi schoolteacher at Chelmno. Lanzmann weaves together Mrs. Michelsohn's testimony with that of the Polish witnesses, and the two survivors of Chelmno, Simon Srebnik and Mordechai Podchlebnik. In the midst of his shifting from witness to witness , Lanzmann presents a scene where Michelsohn examines not only what she saw but her knowledge in the present of what she saw, points of her memory in conjunction with present imperatives to distance herself from those memories. This scene begins with Michelsohn detailing the arrival of Jews at Chelmno: [3.90.205.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:25 GMT) FILM AND THE SHOAH 113 Mrs. Michelson: The Jews came in trucks, and later there was a narrow -gauge railway that they arrived on. They were packed tightly in the trucks, or in the cars [...] Lots of women and children. Men too, but most of them were old. The strongest were put in work details . They walked with chains on their legs. [...] These weren't killed right away. That was done later. I don't know what became of them. They didn't survive, anyway. Lanzmann: Two of them did. Mich: Only two. Lanz: They were in chains1 Mich: On the legs.... Lanz: Could people speak to them1 Mich: No, that was impossible. No one dared. Lanz: No one dared. Why1 Was it dangerous1 Mich: Yes, there were guards. Anyway, people wanted nothing to do with all that. Do you see1 Gets on your nerves, seeing that every day. You can't force a whole village to watch such distress! When the Jews arrived, when they were pushed into the church or castle ... And all the screams! It was frightful! Depressing. Day after day, the same spectacle! It was terrible. A sad sight. They screamed. They knew what was happening. At first the Jews thought they were going to be deloused. But they soon understood. Their screams grew wilder and wilder. Horritying screams. Screams of terror! Because they knew what was happening to them. Lanz: Do you know how many Jews were exterminated there1 Mich: Four something. Four hundred thousand, forty thousand. Lanz: Four hundred thousand. Mich: Four hundred thousand, yes. I knew it had a four in it. Sad, sad, sad! (Lanzmann 92-4) Lanzmann's intrusion into Michelsohn's narrative, "Two of them did," referring to Srebnik and Podchlebnik, who we have seen just prior to this clip, tears apart the seamless fabric that her testimony attempts to create: Lanzmann reveals to her that there are nvo survivors, implicitly placing her story into the context of a present in which what she says might be questioned . From this interruption, Lanzmann pushes her to speak about the 114 Between Witness and Testimony public nature of the treatment of Jews in Chelmno, drawing her into places where her narrative can't cohere: "there were guards. Anyway, people wanted nothing to do with all that. Do you see? Gets on your nerves, seeing that every day." Michelsohn's disjunction between not being allowed to speak to the work details ("No one dared") and not wanting to ("Gets on your nerves") offers a switch in discursive position, what Lyotard would call a shift in phrase regimens, Michelsohn's inability to recapture the tangible moment of trauma. At the same time, the tension between being present and seeing Jews marching through town chained ("Gets on your nerves, seeing that every day") and a disavowal of seeing ("No one dared") presents Lanzmann with the impossibility of grounding history securely in the story of this one witness, bringing back the need tor circumscribing the event through the juxtaposition of witnesses. Perhaps the most telling example of the impasse between seeing and saying comes in Lanzmann's secretly taped interview with Franz Suchomel , an SS UnterscharfUhrer who guarded prisoners at Treblinka. Lanzmann: Can you please describe, very precisely, your first impression of Treblinka? Very precisely. It's very important. Suchomel: My first impression of Treblinka, and that of some of the other men, was catastrophic. For we had not been told how and what ... that people were being killed there. They hadn't told us. Lanz: You didn't know? Such: No! Lanz: Incredible! Such: But true. I didn't want to go. That was proved at my trial. I was told: "Mr. Suchomel, there are big workshops there for tailors and shoemakers, and you'll be guarding them." Lanz: But you knew it was a camp? Such: Yes. We were told: "The Fiihrer ordered a resettlement program . It's an order from the FUhrer." Understand? Lanz: Resettlement program. Such: Resettlement program. No one ever spoke of killing. Lanz: I understand. Mr. Suchomel, we're not discussing you, only Treblinka. You are a very important eyewitness, and you can explain what Treblinka was. Such: But don't usc my name. FILM AND THE SHOAH 115 Lanz: No, I promised. All right, you arrived at Treblinka. (53-4) The implicit deception in Lanzmann's move towards the end of this passage , "we're not discussing you, only Treblinka," concludes with the explicit deception of promising not to use Suchomel's name. This whole scene is filmed with a hidden camera with frequent cuts to technicians in the van outside Suchomel's apartment trying to maintain a clear signal. Lanzmann includes not just Suchomel's testimony, but also the lengths he goes through to get it. Like his interview with Mrs. Michelsohn, Lanzmann keeps the present/presence of the memory in question both in his own interrogations, and by subjectitying the process of testitying. Perhaps the most controversial segment of Lanzmann's film is his interview with a survivor living in Tel Aviv. Abraham Bomba was moved to a work detail by the Nazis because he said he could cut hair. He was immediately placed inside the anteroom of one of Treblinka's gas chambers and, along with other barbers, removed the hair of those about to be gassed. In what some have called an act of cruelty, Lanzmann conducts the interview with Bomba in a Tel Aviv storefront barber shop, and as we see customers and barbers move about in the background, Bomba is cutting the hair of a middle-aged man. As the interview goes on, Lanzmann's questions become more and more aggressive, and Bomba-perhaps fending off the images that dart by his eyes-tries to divert Lanzmann's attention by talking about other, more abstract issues. Lanzmann: But I asked you and you didn't answer. What was your impression the first time you saw these naked women arriving [in the gas chamber to be shaved] with their children? What did you feel? Bomba: I tell you something. To have a feeling about that . . . [Pauses]. It was very hard to feel anything ... A friend of mine worked as a barber-he was a good barber in my hometown-when his wife and his sister came into the gas chamber. ... I can't. It's too horrible. Please. Lanz: We have to do it. You know it. Bomba: I won't be able to do it. Lanz: You have to do it. I know it's very hard. I know and apologize. Bomba: Don't make me go on please. Lanz: Please. We must go on. 116 Between Witness and Testimony Bomba: I told you today it's going to be very hard. They were taking that in bags and transporting it to Germany. Lanz: Okay, go ahead. What was his answer when his wife and sister came? Bomba: They tried to talk to him and the husband of his sister. They could not tell them this was the last time they stay alive, because behind them was the German Nazis, SS men, and they knew that if they said a word, not only the wife and the woman, who were dead already, but also they would share the same thing with them. In a way, they tried to do the best for them, with a second longer, a minute longer, just to hug them and kiss them, because they knew they would never see them again. (117) This scene is punctuated by silences, as Bomba tries to collect himself in the face of what could only seem like torture. As customers come and go in the background, Lanzmann's persistence is matched only by Bomba's fortitude. In his construction of new acts of testimony, although not structurally different from his predecessors, Lanzmann gets at the traumatic space created by Night and Fog. But more important than this, Lanzmann does more than reconstruct the past through the words of its witnesses. He also shows how the event of the Shoah remains active in the lives of victim, bystander, and perpetrator alike. What you see in the ferocious battle over Bomba's memories in this section of the film is not the disintegration of the present in the face of the past, for it is only partly the horritying memory of his friend's encounter with his sister and wife that brings the barber to fall apart. What is all the more horritying here is the memory's disruption of the present: Bomba's present, and Lanzmann's, but perhaps more importantly, the viewer's. Like the impossible juxtaposition of past and present in Night and Fog, in which a space of trauma is opened neither on the ground of the past of the filmmaker 's present but in the viewer's moment of seeing, here the disruption of Bomba's present through Lanzmann's ruthless interjection of the past is effected through the eye of the camera. It is the viewer who is horrified here. But what does the viewer see? Not the terrible scene that passed before the barber's eyes, or the eyes of his friend, but the persistence of the traumatic kernel whose object is lost: Bomba's insistence, "Don't make me go on. Please." Lanzmann shows how the events comprising the Shoah persist, how the feelings of the wife of a Nazi schoolteacher at Chclmno still reflect Nazi racial attitudes or how some Poles think their lives are better without Jews or the anxiety and fear a survivor feels upon coming back to Berlin. And they persist in the viewer's unease, at the end of the film's first part, when she realizes that the truck the camera has been fc)llowing bears the insignia of the [3.90.205.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:25 GMT) FILM AND THE SHOAH 117 company whose vans were used to destroy the Jews of Chelmno. Though Lanzmann makes use of live eyewitness testimonies where Resnais did not, the result is chillingly similar: we do not glimpse history. Instead the language of the witnesses re-invokes the trauma into the now. Each of these individuals experiences-and sees-something in Lanzmann's interview, something that exceeds mere recollection; and as Lanzmann pursues his testimony , the viewer herself sees what lies beyond it. There are times in Shoah when Lanzmann does violate his stated commitment to using only new testimony. When introducing the deportation of the Jews in Grab0w to the camp at Chelmno, Lanzmann reads a letter written by the rabbi of the Grabow synagogue to friends in Lodz. Lanzmann stands in front of what remains of the synagogue at Grabow and reads the letter from Rabbi Jacob Schulmann explaining that he has just heard of the gassing and shooting of Jews being brought to Chelmno. Lanzmann concludes by telling us that three weeks after sending this letter Rabbi Schulmann and all the other Jews in Grabow were sent to Chelmno and immediately gassed. On the surface, the use of Schulmann's letter seems no different from the testimony of those who Lanzmann interviews. It is not tile footage nor is it a third- or fourth-hand account. In addition, it is delivered by Lanzmann in the real time of the film, not as a document reproduced by the camera that we in turn read. It also exists in between Lanzmann's own interrogations: as in other interviews, the scene begins and ends with Lanzmann's presence. However, none of these points can dismiss the fact that these are words of a dead man, one, more importantly, who very shortly after was killed in the death camp about which he is warning his friends. As a way of constituting evidence, this is no different from Resnais' inclusion of the picture of Wiesel at Buchenwald. More precisely, Lanzmann's use of the words of witnesses does not offer more authenticity than the form that Resnais chose. Very soon, all of the interviewees will themselves be dead, and their recorded words and experience will have the same limits, the same distance from the event, that Schulmann's letter has. Put another way, at this moment in Shoah Lanzmann places himself in the position to offer testimony, where his own position as speaker enunciates the words of Rabbi Schulmann. We are not witnesses to Schulmann's testimony ; what we see is Lanzmann's represention of Schulmann. This is not a criticism of Lanzmann's use of the letter; rather, we want to suggest that it shows the limits of offering up the position of the witness from which others might see. In fact, it shows how Lanzmann may have different priorities in what he includes in his film, but the same structure is at work as in Night and Fog: he works to produce a space that localizes the traumatic kernel of the event as an effect of the narrative and images. 118 Between Witness and Testimony It might seem odd to say that Shoah is not a film about testimony, but that's precisely what we're arguing here. What makes Shoah work as a film has nothing to do with questions of history, if we think of history as providing knowledge of events. Shoah opens a space beyond history, providing images and voices of people whose stories we hear and whose experiences we see in the hearing rather than in the image called up by their language. If Shoah is about anything, it is about "space," what Michel de Certeau distinguishes from place or location: while Lanzmann provides images and situations that are palpably present-the fields into which Simon Srebnik walks, or the pathways on which the gas vans travelled fifty years ago; the gas vans whose similarity to cigarette trucks in Israel gives Michael Podchlebnik barely a pause-they indicate a location that is impossible to find on any map of the camps. If space is "produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, ... and make it function in polyvalent ways" by "actions of historical subjects" (de Certeau 117-8), then Shoah is saturated not so much by place (the fields, the forests, the interiors of buildings and the architecture of the camps and ghettos, and the constant, noisy presence of the trains) as it is by a no-place, a terrain of horrifYing experience that even Lanzmann's most persistent questioning of witnessesand even Lanzmann's testimonial position itself~can only indicate. Simon Srebnik's words punctuate the very beginning and end of the film's first half: he says, walking through the fields outside Chelmno where bodies were burned by the thousands, No one can recreate what happened here. Impossible. And no one can understand it. Even I, here, now. I can't believe I'm here. Always . When they burned two thousand peoplc-Jews-every day, it was just as peaceful. No one shouted. Everyone went about his work. It was silent. Peaceful. Just as it is now. (6) He concludes this way: "I dreamed that if I survive, I'll be the only one left in the world, not another soul. Just me. One. Only me left in the world if I get out of here" (103). This is a space traversed by a thousand locations, a thousand possible feelings. But what is represented to the viewer is merely testimony. What the viewer sees is a space of trauma. "Impossible .... Just me. One." Lanzmann's film is, finally, fictive. He has produced a film that implicates the viewer, that makes us a part of his own story to find out what happened, to see a survivor's return to Poland, to watch his face as he points to where the bodies were buried at Chelmno only to be later dug up and burned. To say that Lanzmann's film doesn't FILM AND THE SHOAH 119 have the structure of tlction would be to say that it is extra-discursive, that, like the hair on display at Auschwitz, it is a physical remainder unmediated by its constructedness. Even a tllm as generically different from Shoah and Night and Fog as Steven Spielberg's Schindler)s List localizes a space for the trauma of the Shoah, the possibilities of witnessing, in the same way. Spielberg's tllm emphasizes a tlctive rendering of that space while the others emphasize an historical , but equally fictive, representation. For both, it is the linking of an image in a sequence that cannot itself present the image as anything but image (as representation) that prioritizes witnessing over testimony. The viewer, as witness, is left unable to place the tlctive image into the historical series-her memory (itself a narrative representation) of events that bear some resemblance to what she tries desperately to recognize-and is left instead with what resides inside (or beyond) the kernel. Critics have attacked Schindler)s List for the way it manipulates testimony to "please" its audience. Sara Horowitz argues that people's positive reaction to Schindler)s List is tantamount to a disregard for the truth, that acclaim for Schindler)s List is "an acceptance of the tllm's truth claims, indeed an acceptance of the tllm as a discourse of the real" (119). By linking historical fact with truth or with a "discourse of the real," Horowitz forces us out of the realm of representation permanently: tllm and literature-any rendering whatsoever of trauma-must be read and readable only at the level of a knowledge or testimony. Such a precise rendering of the Holocaust would in fact prevent even Lanzmann from constructing his tllm. The real of discourse is not simply a content of history or a series of reportings . The real of discourse situates the trauma that the historical fabric covers over. In this regard, what connects Lanzmann to Spielberg is their admitted attempt to situate the viewer in the place of seeing something beyond just documentation. Lanzmann edits his tllm for precisely this effect. He does not simply give the product of unedited tllming. In fact, he retllms some sections years after he shot the original footage in order to give a coherence to his tllm, to give us something of the discourse of the real that an unedited recording could not do. So Horowitz's attack on Schindler)s List for what it represents beyond the historical record must equally fall on Shoah as well as Night and Fog. Lanzmann's comments about Schindler)s List ignore this tlctive component to his own Shoah (see Hartman 130). 120 Between Witness and Testimony This is not to suggest that historical veracity is not important. But veracity is itself an historical privileging: to be history, any historical accounting of events (and the order it supposes) must place factuality in the position of truth, must elide the witness and what she sees but cannot account for with the testimony. Film, most especially, is about the problems of eliding these two poles. Witnessing and testitying can both be represented in film. And the pedagogical implications of the Holocaust as that which must be taught so it will not happen again, requires both poles to be present and effectively placed in relation with one another. History as history does not itself produce witnessing. But the aesthetic representation does, and it effectively gives witnessing priority of place over the testimony. Mausis an example of a text that has been attacked as testimony. But as we tried to suggest, Maus foregrounds witnessing-it subjectifies the witnessto examine the underside of history, the no-place of memory that resides at the heart of the shell of history and of testimony. A moment in Schindler's List when this fictive rendering of witness (and the radical particularity of the act of witnessing) occurs is that at which Itzhak Stern recognizes that Schindler is buying each prisoner on the list from Amon Goeth. When Stern recognizes that Schindler is paying for each name, he pauses and says: "The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf." At this moment, Stern posits the problematic concern of the film as a whole: we are hearing the story of those who are named-those whose names have known referents-as distinguished from the structurally infinite list that surrounds the fixed one at the center. Put another way, the list compiled by Schindler and Stern identifies those for whom there is a narrative, those who will survive to testity to the gulf on the outer edges of the list, where the trauma of identification resides, where those who are not named reside. This moment in the film (one that figurally reverses the metaphor of kernel and husk, inside and outside) shows an awareness of the relation between the gulf and the list, a relation that defines the movement from witnessing to testimony, from being unnamed to being named. In such a reading, it is a mistake to consider the tllm solely in terms of the names on the list, as a group with definition in the face of the rest that lack definition. For Schindler's List is just as much, perhaps even more, about those who do not make the list, those who are not recorded or defined or known. And it is this making of the list that suggests a distinction between testimony and witnessing: whereas the list itself functions as testimony, as narratives that can be told, the gulf that surrounds it presents a locus of the witness, where there is no adequate narrative or knowledge. [3.90.205.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:25 GMT) FILM AND THE SHOAH 121 Adorno's now overquoted and later revised comment that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz provokes a similar question to such moments in Schindler's List, a question about the nature of representation: Not just what should and should not be represented but rather what is represented within any representation, what is the "barbarity" that is included in any attempt at holding onto, defining, or even speaking about something that is beyond the possibility of language, that occupies the place of Lyotard's differend. It is in this context that Adorno defines the nature of what he terms negative dialectics: If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true-if it is to be true today, in any case-it must also be a thinking against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims. (Adorno, Negative Dialectic 365) Adorno's negative dialectics show us something significant about what we might call an ethics of representation. To prioritize the "extremity that eludes the concept" offers more than simply a recognition of that which is outside knowledge, or that which lacks an idiom within discourse; Adorno ask us to consider a beyond knowledge that knowledge covers over or tries to drown out, a beyond that is the underside of representation. It is this beyond to epistemology-a beyond to consistency-that offers a way into representations of the Holocaust as more than narrative, as more than any given testimony can elicit. One way of localizing this beyond to knowledge is, as we've suggested , in the relation between witnessing and testimony. By considering the position of witnessing over the position of testifying, we understand testimony as a means towards witnessing rather than as a means towards knowledge. This distinction between witnessing and testimony also offers a way into the debate on Spielberg's Schindler's List. The responses in the Village Voice a few years ago illustrate the difficulty that many have with the narrative of Schindler's List, its story that speaks from the position of an ambiguous Christian savior and a Nazi perpetrator as a way of constituting a notion of survivors. But what struck us most about this discussion was the insistence by some-Art Spiegelman and Ken Jacobs particularlyof considering the film solely in terms of testimony, as representing a knowledge of the Holocaust, and thus, more dangerously, as potentially 122 Between Witness and Testimony the knowledge of the Holocaust. Now we agree that the knowledge that Schindler)s List constructs about the events it depicts is ultimately limited, in the way that Saul Freidlander and others use this term, as a limit to the possibility of representing trauma. The narrative of the 61m marks a limit to what we can and can't know about the Holocaust, what we can and can't question. But Schindler)s List is more than a film that only constructs a narrative that fc)lIows Schindler and Goeth, Stern and the 1100 Schindler Jews. While narrating this one story, the film is marked by moments that exceed the narrative, moments of the gulf that go beyond the limit of representation , moments where other stories-other endings-are evoked. To take the narrative as the primary vehicle of the film-something that Spielberg himself often does-is to miss the beyond of epistemology that the film more importantly invokes, is to focus on the music of the SS over the screams of their victims. In this sense, it is to miss the act of witnessing around which the very testimony of the film circles. Perhaps the most obvious example of a moment of witnessing within the act of narration occurs when Schindler observes the purging of the Krakow ghetto. In this scene, Spielberg's camera focuses on a little girl as she makes her way through the rounding up and killing of Jewish families. The girl's coat is colorized a reddish pink until she hides under a bed and the color is gone and the camera shifts to a wider view of the destruction . This mark of color, a staining of the black-and-white diegesis, marks a cut in the narrative of the film, a moment of enunciation that in turn demands punctuation. Such a cinematic insertion places us square in the middle of the gaze by positioning the audience between Schindler's seeing and the coat while suspending understanding: at this moment neither Schindler nor the audience has a knowledge of the coat or the girl. The color itself marks an excess to what the narrative holds, marks a point outside of the diegesis and thus outside discourse. But this position of seeing-of being caught by the gaze while gazing, of being seen by the 61m itself-is invoked again when the film repeats the colorization of the girl's coat as her body is exhumed for burning as the Nazis attempt to erase the evidence of the ghetto's extermination. It is in the repetition of the colorization that the anamorphic image is completed, that we recognize what we see, what we saw as we recognize Schindler's recognition. But what precisely have we recognized? What story has the film told us? The film itself doesn't say at this point. It demands a testimony rather than oHers one. It is retroactive moments like the colorized coat that the narrative ruptures-a moment of the real-and that situates knowledge diHerently in Schindler)s List. Even as the film tells its story, there are repeated in- FILM ANI) THE SHOAH 123 stances of that which is beyond the narrative. Another such moment occurs as the women are being reloaded onto the train in Auschwitz. In the midst of their salvation, one woman looks back to see families being led down into another shower facility. Her gaze moves to the smokestack at the top of the building and the smoke billowing out. At this moment the film posits those outside of the we of the "Schindler Jews," those who are in the gulf outside of the list. In addition, the relation between those walking down into the gas chamber and the ashes moving out of the crematoria is punctuated by the earlier moment of the ash t:llling onto Krakow as Goeth burns the victims of the ghetto's extermination. In such repetitions there is a movement that exceeds the particular narrative substantiations, where there can be no "we" or "I" to construct knowledge. The tilm's conclusion-the much reviled sequence that begins with Schindler's departure from the camp (filmed in black and white) and ends with the placing of stones on Schindler's tombstone in a cemetery in Jerusalem (filmed in color)-provides another instance of this problem. Many critics take Spielberg to task for this scene because of its overindulgence (though there are exceptions; see Ken Jacobs in Hoberman) and because it brings narrative closure to a series of events that defY it (see Bartov). Those who react positively to this scene suggest, among other things, that seeing the surviving Schindlerjuden paired with the actors who portrayed them gives viewers a way to identifY historical events with their representation , etTectively closing the gap of verisimilitude and linking forever what they saw on the screen with historical truth. But this is just our point: the film works against this impulse at closure, in part because it puts the viewer in the position of seeing the remnant-what occupies the gulf and remains unnamed-when what the viewer may want is a representation of the name (be it Schindler, or Eretz Israel, or the descendants of Schindlerjuden living in diaspora who outnumber the Jews who remain in Poland). The tinal scene of the film, in fact, is not the laying of the rose upon Schindler's tomb at all; it is a silent panning shot in black and ,vhite of fragments of tombstones laid as paving stones on the road leading from the Plaszow camp. Though the film seems to end with testimony-the memory-making of the survivors, and the seamless transition from Czechoslovakia in 1945 to independent Israel in the 1990s (with "Jerusalem the Golden" sung in Hebrew in the American cut of the film )-and the names that can be connected to individual lives in a series, it in fact concludes with what cannot be named: the metonymic marker of those who did not survive, the devastated trace of a European Jewish civilization that has literally been trod underfoot. This is what the viewer sees to close the film, the sign of the remainder , and it has the drect of voiding the names we might provide for 124 Between Witness and Testimony the film in the name of memory by drawing our attention to that which exceeds the name: those whose names have been lost. Like the sigh of relief we feel as the women from Schindlers' factory have been snatched from the maw of Auschwitz at the last minute, it catches in our throats as the camera pulls away and briefly shows us the stream of those who have been unloaded from trains (probably from Hungary) and moved directly down into the gas chambers never to be seen again. Returning to Adorno's comment about the music of the SS over the screams of their victims, we see the problems of defining a narrative-of making sense-of the impossibility of trauma, of screams. By reading the film solely in terms of its testimony, we miss the moments of seeing, the moments of witnessing. Such a perverse vision of the Holocaust-as a knowledge that we can see and know and speak and understand-rejects the real epistemological significance of a representation like Schindler)s List, a representation that consistently points toward the inconsistency of knowledge itself In this way, Schindler)s List is founded on an epistemology of the impasse, on that which cannot be expressed by the historical or the factual since it is the impasse that must be narrated over as cause of knowledge, as cuts into the symbolic or historical, as responses to an irresolvable question of identity. Schindler)s List places the viewer in the position of having to recognize the ends of knowledge itselt~ of seeing the misperception necessary for understanding and thus questions the very foundations from which testimony is spoken, not in terms of historical fact, but in terms of the inability to represent trauma as trauma. Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, even more than Speilberg's Schindler)s List, calls into question the accepted relationship between witness and testimony. Like Spielberg's film, Life is Beautiful's commercial success is only outdistanced by the varied and vehement critical responses to its "use" of the Holocaust, its testimony that Benigni himself has termed a fable. The most extreme responses consider the end to testimony to be a knowledge of the event, the "what" of Benigni's testimony. Where they disagree, however, is on what this "what" should be: those that consider the film uplifting and passionate, responses that appear in the majority of the popular press who see the film as triumphant; and those that find it an abominable misuse of history, best represented by David Denby, who in his two-installment review in The New Yorker labels the film a form of Holocaust denial. But Life is Beautiful presents us with [3.90.205.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:25 GMT) FILM AND THE SHOAH 125 a test case: here we have a film whose status as a representation of the Holocaust is under serious scrutiny, and whose narrative-the story of a father trying desperately to keep his child from seeing the horror of the camp by enacting a "game," the object of which is to survive-is so prominent as to divert viewers' and critics' attention from the ways in which the narrative's failure is due to the structure of the film's status as testimony. What we would argue is that the film does indeed fail. But it fails in the same way that Spielberg's (and Lanzmann's and Resnais') did: in creating a narrative space with which to contain the testimonies that build the historical matter of the film, Benigni has also (and in his case perhaps inadvertently) opened up a space through which the viewer herself witnesses the underside-in de Certeau's terms, the no-place-of history and of representation. Nearly all the critical readings of Benigni's film focus on the story it tells, and nearly all say something similar about the relation between witness and testimony and the pedagogical ends through which we connect them. In each case there's an insistence that witnessing and testimony are the same, that what we see is the trauma of the event: that to speak about trauma, to testify, is not an act of translation or representation but rather a tightly wound knot that makes the two points indistinguishable. The end of testimony becomes to witness, the end of witness is to testify. These readings of the film judge it based on how the critic feels about the kind of testimony it represents as an adequate or inadequate representation of the trauma. This elision of witness and testimony is not surprising, since Life is Beautiful makes just such a claim in its framing of the movie's central story, a claim also embedded in survivor narratives like those of Primo Levi. But unlike Levi's testimony, it is unclear whose story we are hearing, whose witnessing we are being drawn into. At the very beginning of the American release , a narrator introduces what is to follow: "This is a simple story .. ./but not an easy one to tell./Like a fable, there is sorrow .. ./and, like a fable, it is full of wonder and happiness." The narrator's simile, that his story is "like a fable," a phrase he repeats in separating sorrow from happiness, gets at the difficulty of telling this "simple" story. However, the narrator returns one more time, at the very end of the film, where we find out that he is Giosue, and that what we have seen is his own story: "This is my story./This is the sacrifice my father made./This was his gift to me." In this final contextualization , the film solves the initial problem of telling the story: once we know the name of the speaker, the difficulty of the story disappears, witness and testimony are seemingly bound together by the narrative position of the child survivor. Benigni's addition of the final voice-over allows the film 126 Between Witness and Testimony to rest upon what Giosue saw, in a similar way to Levi's own narrative representation . And it is this final position-that what we have seen is this boy's story and that it is a story of Holocaust survival-that irks Denby and that other critics find redemptive. Life is Beautiful's final contextualization through the voice-over only suggests one end of reading witness and testimony, the end that Levi deemphasizes in his own testimony. Ignoring tex now the politics of Benigni 's reediting of the tilm to include this voice-over, the tilm casts what resides in between the two voice-overs contradictorily: initially, in terms it acknowledges are inadequate, "This is a simple story .. ./but not an easy one to tell"; and finally as an equation between testimony and witness, "This is my story." In its own insistence on a particular rendering of trauma, Benigni's text tells us something about both pedagogical ends of traumatic representation by offering a cont1uence of seeing and knowing that the form of his text resists. It is, in effect, an insisted elision of witness and testimony that continually breaks down as his opening remarks prefigure: this is indeed "not an easy one to tell." The initial voice-over's insistence that this is a difficult story to tell comes out in the comparison to a fable: "Like a fable, there is sorrow .. ./ and, like a table, it is tilll of wonder and happiness." This "like" quality to the film-that there are some actions or some elements that take it out of the realm of the fabular, elements that have nothing to do with its happiness or its sorrow-suggests that what fc)llows is inadequate to the experience, that the fabular form itself won't get at its story. The fIlm's statement of formal inadequacy stems from the kernel within the narrative itself We catch a glimpse of it when Guido, carrying his sleeping son, is walking in the mist, having "taken a wrong turn" in the concentration camp trying to find his barracks. In the tog, he comes across a distorted pile of corpses. He stops in the tog before the bodies can become distinct and then slowly backs away, deliberately keeping Giosue's back to the scene. This moment of Guido seeing has no witness. The sleeping child's back is to the bodies and there is no evidence that the game fiction is broken for him the next day. Interestingly, this scene punctuates the tlIm retroactively. As the tlIm begins and the first voice-over is heard ("This is a difficult story to tell ..."), we see a man holding a child walking through tog, the same scene leading up to the corpses. Now we have no context for this at the outset, just the initial voice-over. But to bring forward this scene above all others, the only scene where we see Guido bear witness to what happens to those selected, is signifIcant. This is the only moment of seeing in the entire film, but it is embedded in a FILM AND THE SHOAH 127 narrative that otherwise refuses to show such acts of seeing. In this sense, the opening voice-over and its respective images subjectify the diHiculty of telling such a story at the outset, punctuating the then unknown narrator's own comments about how difficult it is to tell this story with a clear tie to the one real moment of seeing in the film. It is this one moment of witness , that one kernel of traumatic encounter, that the tabular form of the film cannot bear. The narrative itself continues to circle around the kernel that the "like" dimension marks. In the first half of the film, Guido almost magically shapes the world around him through a series of coincidental encounters with his future wife, Dora. He courts her by giving agency to such coincidences, showing himself to possess the ability to make keys fall out of the heavens or strangers to obey his most idiosyncratic wishes. Guido is "like" a magician; he seemingly has special powers. Importantly, the film never shows any recognition by others of Guido's "like"-ness, though, that there is anything else there except for magic, at least not until the scenes in the concentration camp. Of course, we see how Guido is able to fabricate his magic, but Dora does not, nor does Giosue, nor does anyone else except for the silent faces in the concentration camp of those who observe Guido's constructing the game fiction fIX his son. Throughout the entire story, the lack of narrator presence in the body of the film allows us to ignore the thorny questions of witnessing since we don't even know who's telling the story until the very end; it defers its knowledge until then. And the film itself follows this tactic throughout its development. We don't know that Guido is a Jew until about a third of a way through the film when he remarks about painting "Jewish Waiter" on his chest in response to his uncle's fear of rising antiSemitism after his horse has been defaced with Nazi symbols and the words "Jewish Horse." In fact, even when Guido is giving his "lecture" on the new race laws in the guise of a fascist official at Dora's school, pointing out his ears, belly button, and "muscular" features, we don't know he's Jewish. One's identity as a Jew was not necessal'ily the defining part of one's identity, especially in Italy, where Jews otten completely assimilated into Italian culture. But there's a dissonance between Guido's obliviousness to his own Jewishness and the constant reminders of Jewish persecution that Benigni invokes: the anti-Semitic graffiti, the store signs forbidding Jews from entering, the harassment by officials. The film takes pains to show the rise of anti-Semitism around Guido. But at the same time, in order for the romance of the story to develop, Guido and his immediate family cannot actually see it. All we see of what Guido or his son 128 Between Witness and Testimony or even Dora sees is wrapped in the one scene in the fog. And at the very end of the film, when there is a chance to remark about Guido's murder or even the Holocaust more broadly, Benigni chooses not to show us recognition . The film closes down emphasizing not a moment of witness (which we never see in the eyes of the child) but with a denial of witnessing, an identification with the constructed narrative as a means of survival. This totalizing fiction is possible only with the denial of the moment of seeing, of the witness. But there is an odd sort of awareness of this in the very form of the film. In fact, the film itself ends with a freezing of the final scene of Giosue and his mother; the only way the film can prevent a movement back to the horror is to stop the film. We don't get to see Giosuc find out about his father's murder, to recognize the limits of the fiction that his father had preserved for him. Instead, after the voice-over finishes the camera remains focused on Dora and her son embracing, with Giosue telling her about winning the contest: "A thousand points to laugh like crazy about! We came in first! We're taking the tank home! We won!" The only evidence of GiosuC's own recognition is in the telling of the story, which itself breaks down considering the reporting of things that Giosue could not in fact have seen. The elevation of a particular testimony to cover over all possible renditions of a traumatic encounter is the final end of a certain view of pedagogy . Shoshana felman, for example, describes the experience of such moments of intrusion, a moment of witness, in her own classroom when teaching a seminar on trauma, a moment of witness that results in a similar "need" to speak in her students and herself. But for Felman, these moments require a working through, a move inevitably arbitrated by the discourse of the teacher, where the teacher's question is about "how to contain [the crisis], how much crisis [the class can] sustain" (Felman 54). Such a claim puts the teacher in the position of knowing what the limits of trauma are for each one of her particular students. Such a universalizing of trauma already misses or forecloses the particular horror. This is not to say that Felman's class did not encounter something, did not experience a moment of witnessing. But it does turn its back on the moment of seeing, and the disruption it causes, in favor of knowledge and of identity. This is precisely what Life is Beautiful does in its rendering of the Holocaust, especially in the version with the added voice-over narration. What makes [3.90.205.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:25 GMT) FILM AND THE SHOAH 129 Life is Beautiful so palatable, so consumable, is the way in which it "reintegrates " the crisis of the Holocaust within a "transformed trame of meaning ," a family narrative that binds the child together with a loss that is seemingly forever deferred. In the end, though Spielberg's film has been accused of doing exactly the same thing, Schindler's List is more cannily willing to offer up moments in which the traumatic kernel, glimpsed at once by characters and by the audience but which cannot be reintegrated into knowledge by either, is left merely to be seen. Resnais and Lanzmann, in trying to obey the demands of history, nonetheless recognize that despite their best intentions, the didactic nature of their films-their status as testimony-rests on a foundation of that which cannot be told but only seen. For Primo Levi and other survivors, the pedagogical end of their testimony rests not in covering over their traumatic encounters with memory or fiction. Rather, their texts suggest that the end of teaching rests in the traumatic kernel itself~ in prioritizing the moment of witness over that of the specifics of testimony. Both Benigni and Felman begin by stressing the unrepresentable, that which f<:mn cannot hold or the falsity of that which has been given to us as knowable. Both end by foreclosing the witness's encounter in a fiction that might be more livable but that ultimately denies the insistence of trauma. Notes 1. Selections from Jean Cayrol's text to Night and Fog are taken from the published version rather than from the sketchy subtitles. See Jean Cayrol's "Night and Fog" in Film: Book 2 Films of Peace and War. Ed. Robert Hughes (Grove Press: New York, 1962): 234~55. 2. The complete text of Shoah can be found in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: An Oral History o/the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). We have included the page numbers from this edition fix ease of reference. ...