Afterimage: Film, Trauma And The Holocaust

5. Istvan Szabo and Posttraumatic Autobiography

5 Istvan Szabo and Posttraumatic Autobiography IN THE previous chapter, I argued that a film need not be a documentary in order to document historical trauma. Hiroshima, mon amour and The Pawnbroker experimented with the use of posttraumatic narration to register historical trauma in fiction, expanding the techniques of posttraumatic narration through the semiotic flexibility of the fiction film. Istvan Szabo, Hungary's most successful filmmaker of the past four decades, subsequently extended the possibilities for registering historical trauma in the fiction film through the genre of autobiographical fiction. In an informal trilogy composed of his second, third, and fourth features, Szabo built on Resnais's experiments in posttraumatic narration to recall and record his own witnessing of historical trauma-both his personal losses as a Hungarian Jew growing up under Nazism and then communism, and the collective losses of his city, his country, his generation, and his fellow Jews. Father, Love Film, and 25 Fireman Street combine the figurative power of the posttraumatic fictional narration that Resnais initiated-the image of the present as a signifier of the past, the flashback, the film-withinthe -film-with a testimonial power related, after a fashion, to that of the Wiener film: the urge to reproduce and disseminate an image of historical reality. Documentary footage like the Wiener film mechanically records and reproduces real images of historical events, but is severely limited by the historical possibilities of filming under extreme conditions . The autobiographical fiction film renders both less and more than documentary footage. Its recording and reproduction of the historical image is mediated by memory, fictionalization, and reenactment; but, at the same time, the autobiographical fiction film transcends the limitations of documentary filming, penetrating a broader range of historical realities-from the public realm of the crowd, to the intimate realm of the family, to the imaginary realm of memories, fantasies, and dreams. Copyrighted Material 111 112 CHAPTER 5 I want to make a distinction, however, between, on the one hand, films written and directed by witnesses, and on the other hand, films based on written accounts-diaries, memoirs, or autobiographical novels-that are adapted to film by nonwitnesses. Adaptations are more common, partly because their division of labor is better suited to the structure of mainstream film industries. There are a limited number of Holocaust survivors who are in a position to write and direct mainstream films, and who are willing to make autobiographical ones and able to get them financed and distributed. Some examples of successful adaptations of autobiographical Holocaust works by nonsurvivor filmmakers are The Diary of Anne Frank (United States, 1959), The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Italy, 1971), and Europa, Europa (Germany/ France, 1991).1 In the subgenre to which Szab6's trilogy belongs, however, the memories of witnesses are articulated not only by the content of the films narrowly defined but also by their style and their form of narration. This subgenre therefore raises a question of historical representation not raised by adaptations. How can the mental language of traumatic historical memory be translated into the concrete, audiovisual language of cinema? How can witnessing become film? This is not to say that nonwitnesses may not grapple with similar questions of film language in representing traumatic historical memory, as did Alain Resnais and the makers of The Pawnbroker. In the case of the autobiographical film, however, the question of translation assumes a particular form, insofar as it focuses on an individual person: the witness/ filmmaker. Indeed, Szab6's trilogy is significant not only because of its particular translation of one witness's experience of recent Hungarian history into a fascinating form of cinema, but also because of its demonstration of autobiography-and the figure of the autobiographer-as a highly productive site for the examination of a set of questions of historical representation . Looking at the trilogy simply as a text, we might say that it could have been produced by any author, individual or collective. But looking at it as a symbolic act grounded in cultural history, we cannot escape the fact that it was produced by a particular Hungarian Jew. The subgenre of autobiographical Holocaust films and videos began to congeal in the early 1980s, through a small group of mostly low-budget European, American, and Israeli fictional works, as well as documentaries.2 These works receive little attention in the two existing Copyrighted Material Istvan Szab6 and Posttraumatic Autobiography 113 books on...