Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust
By Annette Insdorf
From 3rd Edition-- (cont'd from page 1)
One of the dangers inherent in my argument, however, is the assumption
that the Holocaust “belongs” to - or is the domain of - one set of victims
more than another. Does the Holocaust belong to the survivors? To those
who were killed during World War II? To those who died in concentration
camps or ghettos? To the Jews who were the main targets of the Nazis?
To all Jews today? Some individuals claim the Holocaust as a personal
tragedy. Many Jews claim it as a religious one. And then there are those
who had no direct experience of the holocaust but feel transformed by
learning of its cruelty and mass indifference - as well as of resistance
and survival.
And to whom do the dead “belong”? The ending of JUST A GIGOLO (1979),
an otherwise negligible British film, presents a chilling image of appropriation:
a bumbling young man (David Bowie) with no interest in politics is accidentally
killed in a street fight between a Nazi group and its adversaries. The
Nazi leader (David Hemmings, who also directed the film) takes the corpse,
dresses it in the brown-shirted uniform of the SA, and has the young
“hero” displayed and buried as a Nazi. How many of the dead are likewise
unable to defend themselves from the post-factum appropriation of groups
who claim the Holocaust as theirs?
The Holocaust is often exploited by those who simply have access to
the media. The only versions of Nazi persecution that we see in film
are the few that have made it to the screen, and often this is less
a question of choice, quality, or logic than of chance: the commercial
exigencies of film make it a dubious form for communicating the truth
of World War II, given box-office dependence on sex, violence, a simple
plot, easy laughs, and so on. Nevertheless, it is primarily through
motion pictures that the mass audience knows - and will continue to
learn - about the Nazi era and its victims. Whenever I show NIGHT AND
FOG in my courses, students are shocked and profoundly moved, for it
is generally their first encounter with the palpable images of Auschwitz.
The cinema thus fulfills the function articulated by film theorist Siegfried
Kracauer about thirty years ago. In his “Theory of Film: The Redemption
of Physical Reality,” the morally vigorous German critic recounted the
myth of the Gorgon Medusa,
whose face, with its huge teeth and protruding tongue, was so horrible
that the sheer sight of it turned men and beasts into stone. When Athena
instigated Perseus to slay the monster, she therefore warned him never
to look at the face itself but only at its mirror reflection in the
polished shield she had given him. Following her advice, Perseus cut
off Medusa’s head with the sickle which Hermes had contributed to his
equipment.
The moral of the myth is, of course, that we do not, and cannot, see
actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear; and that
we shall know what they look like only by watching images of them which
reproduce their true appearance... the reflection of happenings which
would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life. The film screen
is Athena’s polished shield.
Kracauer’s analogy is particularly apt for films that show or reconstruct
scenes of ghettos, deportation, and extermination. However, his argument
includes the belief that “these images have nothing in common with the
artist’s imaginative rendering of an unseen dread but are in the nature
of mirror reflections.” To merely show the savage surfaces of Auschwitz
might not lead to much beyond a numbing of response. One of the purposes
of my book, “Indelible Shadows,” is to see how filmmakers apply their
art in shaping history into a heightened form of communication.
Kracauer understood “that the images on the shield or screen are a means
to an end; they are to enable - or by extension, induce - the spectator
to behead the horror they mirror.” But we are bound to raise the same
question as Kracauer: do such films serve the purpose? His conclusion
was that the mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves,
beckoning the spectator,
to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of
things too dreadful to be beheld in reality. In experiencing... the
litter of tortured human bodies in the films made of the Nazi concentration
camps, we redeem horror from its invisibility behind the veils of panic
and imagination.
In fifty years, the average person will probably not be drawn to source
material like archival footage from the camps, or the Warsaw Ghetto
diaries of Emanuel Rindelblum or Janusz Korczak. Knowledge of the Holocaust
might be filtered through the fictions of the television program HOLOCAUST
and William Styron’s SOPHIE’S CHOICE. This places a special burden on
the filmmaker who is trying to illuminate rather than exploit the Holocaust
- and on the film critic with a stake in historical truth. As Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr. warned, “fiction films do live as much by cumulative
dramatic convention as they do by fidelity to fact, and addiction to
stereotypes dilutes their value as historical evidence.” Does this mean
that more first person accounts by survivors must be filmed before they
die? Certainly, but even survivors’ accounts can provide only a segment
of the truth; many of the most courageous victims perished. Each individual
story is a sorely needed (and often dramatically rich) piece of the
puzzle. Other pieces might never be found. For example, how many of
the six million Jews died not as passive victims but as active opponents
of the Third Reich?
The issue of anti-Semitism is a case in point: it was not born with
the Holocaust. As Bernard Henri-Lévy demonstrates in “The Testament
of God,” Jews have always constituted a threat to national authority.
Throughout history, they have embodied perpetual resistance to oppression,
from ancient Egypt to contemporary Russia. As thinkers ready to transform
governments and structures of life, many Jews represent subversion -
in the most resilient and constructive sense of the word. It is not
hard to understand why some ideologues of the Argentine military dictatorship
singled out three Jews in their verbal assault of Jacobo Timerman (as
described in his book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number):
Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy
the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to
destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because
he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space.
It is significant that this scene comes not from a German concentration
camp but from an Argentine prison in the 1970s.
It might appear facile and cheap to compare the destruction of European
Jewry with other attempts at genocide. After all, there is no comparison
to the rabid persecution of individuals who were a respected and assimilated
part of European life, especially after it become strategically unsound
for trains to transport concentration camp inmates rather than the soldiers
and ammunition needed for battle. Nevertheless, the impulse behind Nazism
- if not the massive scale of its realization - has been shared by other
peoples and nations. This has taken the form of synagogue bombings in
Paris, marches in Skokie, or witch hunts in Argentina.
As long as there are people like Professor Faurisson in France who proclaim
in print that the gas chambers did not exist, there must be active resistance
by those who know they did exist. The luxury of forgetfulness is not
possible, because the Holocaust is neither a closed chapter nor an isolated
event. As Alain Resnais explained to me about his film, NIGHT AND FOG,
“The constant idea was to not make a monument to the dead, turned to
the past. If this existed, it could happen again; it exists now in another
form.” Films not only commemorate the dead but illuminate the price
to be paid for unquestioned obedience to governmental authority. In
recognizing our ability to identify with characters, whether Jewish,
German, kapo, or Communist, we move one step closer to guarding against
that which permitted the Holocaust to develop - indifference. Perhaps
the beam cast by film projectors can pierce the continuing willed blindness.
Annette Insdorf is Director of Undergraduate Film Studies
at Columbia University, where she holds the title of Professor as well
as Chair of the Doctoral Program in Film Theatre.
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Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust
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Articles:
Introduction
Producing Your Own Film Festival
Independent Jewish Film in America
Sephardic Cinema
Israeli Cinema
Film & The Holocaust
The SFJFF In Moscow
