Afterimage: Film, Trauma And The Holocaust

6. Postmodernism, the Second Generation, and Cross-Cultural Posttraumatic Cinema

6 Postmodernism, the Second Generation, and Cross-Cultural Posttraumatic Cinema SHOAH WAS arguably the culmination of the modernist, posttraumatic cinema on which the book has focused thus far. It may have felt like the end of the line for Holocaust cinema, but of course it wasn't. The phenomenal success of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) launched the dissemination of an unprecedented quantity of films, television programs, and other media about the Holocaust, including the massive database of survivor oral histories collected by Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, and three Academy Award winners for Best Documentary : The Long Way Home (1997), The Last Days (1998), and Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000). What has become of posttraumatic cinema under these conditions, particularly since the cultural modernism that supplied posttraumatic cinema with so much of its form between 1955 and 1985 has become increasingly displaced or absorbed by postmodern culture, of which the profusion of Holocaust images since Schindler's List may itself be a symptom? If postmodern films present the Holocaust less as a reality (like realist films) or a memory (like posttraumatic films) than as a collection of recycled images, where does this leave the project of posttraumatic cinema? As the reality of images increasingly dominates all other forms of reality, can images still be said to repeat a trauma that originated in historical reality? This chapter will examine two relatively recent works representing historical trauma in a postmodern vein: Schindler's List and History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige. This pairing crosses a series of boundaries , however (in good postmodern fashion), that require preliminary discussion. First is the boundary between documentary and fiction film, mapped in this book as the boundary between the first four chapters, which deal primarily with documentary, and the fifth and sixth, dealing with fiction. Just as this boundary in the book is marked by a discus140 Copyrighted Material Cross-Cultural Posttraumatic Cinema 141 sion of Hiroshima, mon amour, which contains and interrogates the distinction between the two forms, so this final chapter on postmodernism will renew the documentary/ fiction question, in a way that is consistent with postmodernism's further weakening of the distinction between them. Not only is Schindler's List essentially a fiction film and History and Memory essentially nonfiction, but each work, like Hiroshima, mon amour, contains contradictory elements. Schindler's List is a fiction based on fact, but concludes with a nonfiction segment showing Schindlerjuden (Jews saved by Schindler) placing stones on Schindler's grave in Israel, accompanied by the actors who played them in the film. History and Memory, on the other hand, is a nonfiction work that contains some fictionalized and reenacted segments. Second is the distinction between what Hal Foster has called reactionary and resistant postmodernisms. Foster argues that reactionary postmodern works repudiate the critical energies of modernism and celebrate the status quo; I will argue that Schindler's List belongs in this category. History and Memory, on the other hand, I identify as a resistant postmodern work that does not depart from modernism so much as it extends the movement's critical energies in an altered form, while repudiating certain of its elitist postwar developments.1 A third distinction can be mapped onto this second: the distinction between film and videotape. Film has often been identified as a key medium of reactionary postmodernism, most notably by Fredric Jameson .2 Certainly the relatively high expense of film-Schindler's List reportedly cost $23 million (not high in Hollywood terms, but astronomical in relation to History and Memory)-tends to make it more useful for those with an economic stake in the status quo.3 Moreover, the technology of film projection may have a tendency to draw spectators toward fantasy and away from critique. Videotapes like History and Memory, on the other hand, can be produced much more cheaply; tape thus tends to be the medium of choice for marginalized groups. Tape-with its "coldness," omnipresence, and ease of quotation through dubbingmay be an even more inherently postmodern medium than film. It is fitting, then, that we turn to videotape for the first time here in this final chapter. The fourth boundary crossed in this chapter may be the most difficult for some historians of the Holocaust to accept: History and Memory is not about the Holocaust, but rather the internment of Japanese Americans Copyrighted Material 142 CHAPTER 6...