Documentary Films Have Played an Important Part in Determining the Way We Construct History and Memory. in What Ways Do Documentary Films Dealing with the Holocaust Determine Contemporary Understandings of That Historical Event?
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Documentary films and their representations of the Holocaust have served not only to speak their truth of the atrocities but also to document changing paradigms of social thought concerning Holocaust truth.
Holocaust History and its documentation:
Theodor Adornos famous 1949 injunction that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric is indicative of the initial approaches of documentary to the subject matter.
The first documentary footage of the Holocaust was shot as Allied troops entered the camps of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, but this footage was archived by British Ministry of Information, wary of the political and social repercussions of such explicit imagery in a war-torn and divided Germany. These censorious tendencies, leading to what is often phrased as a voluntary and collective social amnesia have traditionally followed such culturally cataclysmic events as the Holocaust. As Todorov examines in his seminal work Facing the Extreme this cultural will to erase serves to deepen the wounds. By only allowing literal understandings of the history, and ignoring the exemplary and processed history we disseminate the consequences of the initial trauma over all the moments of existence. Subsequently both historians and documentarians have sought to redress errors and point out lacunae in the constructed narrative of the Holocaust, producing a new knowledge of history and its rhetoric . Documentary film, initially, as the self-proclaimed harbinger of historical truth, has sought to reactivate and analyse the events of the Holocaust in modally divergent ways. The development of the documentary form, however, its divergence from connoting completeness and increasing interest in displaying historical subjectivity and contradiction, signposts for the contemporary audience not only changing attitudes towards documentary but also towards the Holocaust. From initial shock, greater acceptance of the Jewish persecution, and eventual understanding of broader European and social complicity in the events of the Holocaust, the contemporary audience appreciates not only the immensity of the systematic killing but takes on an individual role in the evolving understanding and shaping of the social historical record through documentary film.
Night and Fog and The Sorrow and the Pity: Elucidating the trauma
Night and Fog (1955) by Alain Resnais is a revealing and aestheticised exploration of the Holocuast memory. The film explores issues of remembrance, responsibility and history through its edifying use of archival footage. Resnais structures the documentary with fourteen brief colour segments showing Auschwitz in 1955 interrupted by thirteen black and white newsreels, photographs and other visual documents. The effect on the audience here, particularly of the films йpoque, is to provocatively prod them into locating, both in memory and place, the atrocities and, to comprehend their memories of the event. Until Resnais film, these documents had not been released publicly, and the foregrounding of footage with, then, present-day images of Auschwitz reinforces for the audience the visual confrontation with the atrocity. These contemplative qualities are enforced by both the chilling remoteness of the score, written by German composer Hanns Eisler and Jean Cayrols narrative text . These three elements: the score, the narration and the contrast between colour and black-and-white footage serve to heighten the confrontation with the horrors of what is being addressed. The matter-of-fact, delivery of the narration by actor Michel Bouquet, Resnais directed him to speak in an unaffected tone, and the score, where “the more violent the images the gentler is the music,” evoke irony but most importantly force focus upon the image. The film takes on an elegiac purpose in this, and whilst it is ostensibly a work of documentary it is, in my opinion, also a carefully ordered work of art. The documentarys cogency with dramatic convention, slowly building a revelation of the horrors, and its understanding
Along with the evidentiary images the film uses, the narrations own final ideological message serves to make the connection between past and present implicit:
The devices of the Nazis are out of date. Nine million dead haunt this landscape. Who is on the lookout from this strange tower to warn us of the coming of new executioners
Somewhere among us, there are lucky Kapos, reinstated officers and unknown informers. There are those who refused to believe this, or believed it only from time to time. And there are those of us who sincerely look upon the ruins today as if the old concentration camp monster were dead and buried beneath them. (Night and Fog)
The narration is more than a call to arms, a jolt to the collective memory. The film is an apt social commentary on the broader issues of the crimes of humanity and those who stand on the sidelines. In this way, Resnais purpose, self-admittedly an indirect attack on the French involvement in conflicts in Algeria and Indochina, becomes broadly understood. The film is very much symptomatic of the 1950s. For the contemporary audience, the lack of any extensive reference to the specifically ethnic nature of the genocide is indicative of a reluctance to see the deportations as unique, individual narratives, a tendency that would later be countered in Shoah. The word Jewish for instance is mentioned only once in the narration when the narrator counts Stern, a Jewish student from Amsterdam (Night and Fog). Similarly, censorship by the French authorities forced Resnais to edit a scene showing a gendarme-manned control tower in Pithiviers, covering up his uniform. The aforementioned quotation also highlights the social divides in France, the second front of the war, those lucky Kapos, reinstated officers (Night and Fog) who escaped direct exposure for their complicity in both Resnais documentary and the 1950s.
Marcel Ophuls encyclopaedic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1971) stands as a key counter-myth to the sophistries of a united, subjugated France, and to that of sole Nazi blame for the Holocaust. Expanding on Resnais Night and Fog Ophuls achievement is to debunk errors in historical remembrance and evince broader understanding of the conflict. The film was commissioned by German and Swiss television and whilst it was broadcast in Germany, Switzerland, Holland and the United States in 1969, notoriously, the French ORTF would oppose its screening until 1981. The film, thus, for todays audience, marks an individual moment