Afterimage: Film, Trauma And The Holocaust

3. Shoah and the Posttraumatic Documentary after Cin

3 Shoah and the Posttraumatic Documentary after Cinema Verite WHILE NEWSREEL-TYPE films like The Death Camps traumatized the public by constructing their image tracks exclusively from atrocity footage, they failed to distinguish the genocidal aspect of the concentration camps. Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, released forty years later, focuses exclusively on the genocide, but constructs its posttraumatic discourse without a single frame of atrocity footage. What had happened in the intervening years to transform so starkly the relations between a historical trauma, the filmic evidence of that trauma, and its documentary representation? Shoah has most often been seen by critics as an exemplary representation of the Holocaust. It has also been seen by some scholars as exemplary of a recent transformation in the documentary representation of history-a transformation that has been variously identified as postrnodern, reflexive, or posttraumatic. Linda Williams, Bill Nichols, Paula Rabinowitz, and Janet Walker have separately identified Shoah as crucial to the development of what Williams has termed "the new documentary."l I agree with both of these differing contextualizations of the film-one in terms of a specific historical event, and one in terms of the more general question of the documentary representation of history . However, I would also like to suggest that neither context makes sense without the other. Shoah's significance as an intervention into the documentary representation of history cannot be separated from its confrontation with the difficult historiography of a specific limit case of historical" representation. This chapter will continue to explore the development of a meta-historical discourse in documentary film: the relations between a historical trauma and the forms of documentary used to represent it. The chapter will look at the changes in this discourse brought about by the revolution in documentary form known as cinema verite, and the possibilities engendered by this revolution for 63 Copyrighted Material 64 CHAPTER 3 the representation of the present-and in particular the representation of the witness- as an archive of the past. CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER AND CINEMA VERITE The invention and dissemination of an efficient apparatus for synchronized sound recording on location in the late 1950s made possible the development of a new form of documentary.2The ability to film events on location with synchronized sound rendered the expository mode of documentary archaic. Rather than using a voice-of-God commentary to explain silent footage, the new form was able to present sound footage that seemed to explain itself, or at least to allow spectators to perform their own interpretations. The emphasis of the new form was thus not on the representation of the past, inhering in silent archival footage, but on the creation of a kind of archive of the present. However, Chronicle of a Summer/ Chronique d'un ete-one of the first of the new documentaries, and the film for which the term cinema verite was coined (cinema truth, the term itself being a translation of the name of Dziga Vertov's Soviet newsreel, Kino-Pravda, 1922-25)-demonstrated the new form's additional potential for extending Night and Fog's innovations in the representation of historical memory. The ninety-minute Chronicle of a Summer, directed by the anthropologist Jean Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin, was an attempt to reverse what Rouch had come to regard as the colonialist rhetoric of his previous anthropological films, by turning the camera back on the colonizing nation.3 The film presented a kind of snapshot of French society in 1960, focusing on themes of happiness, work, leisure, class, alienation , race, colonialism, romance, the Algerian war, the generation gap, womanhood, and childhood (in the order presented by the film). Perhaps the fact that Morin is a Jew has something to do with the fact that memory of the Holocaust also entered into this snapshot. In one sense, this memory constitutes just another of Chronicle's many themes; the film is known as a pioneer of cinema verite, not as a significant cinematic representation of the Holocaust. (It is not mentioned in any book on Holocaust films.) I would posit, however, two significant relationships between Chronicle and the Holocaust. First, the appearance of Holocaust memory in the film may reflect not just the presence of a Jew in the director 's chair, but also the impossibility of presenting a snapshot of French Copyrighted Material Shoah and the Posttraumatic Documentary after Cinema Verite 65 society in 1960 without either confronting...