Afterimage: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust [1 ed.] 9781439903957, 9781592132089

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Afterimage Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust

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In the series EMERGING MEDIA: HISTORY, THEORY, NARRATIVE

edited by Daniel Bernardi

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AfteriInage Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust

JOSHUA HIRSCH

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Philadelphia Copyrighted Material

Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122 Copyright © 2004 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2004 Printed in the United States of America @Ibe paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hirsch, Joshua Francis, 1962Afterimage: film, trauma, and the Holocaust I Joshua Hirsch. p. em. - (Emerging media: history, theory, narrative) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-59213-208-1 (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 1-59213-209-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in motion pictures. 2. War films-History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PN1995.9.H53H572004 791.43'658--dc21 2 4

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To Eva, Ferencz, Imre, and Laszl6 Hirsch and to Sophia and Isaac Horwitz-Hirsch

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Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xv

1

Introduction to Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust

2

Night and Fog and the Origins of Posttraumatic Cinema

28

3

Shoah and the Posttraumatic Documentary after Cinema Verite

63

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The Pawnbroker and the Posttraumatic Flashback

85

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Istvan Szabo and Posttraumatic Autobiography

111

6

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

140

Notes

163

Works Cited

193

Index

205

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1

vii

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Preface

IF SCHOLARSHIP can never be wholly objective, writing about the Holocaust presents the historian with a limit case of scholarly implication. One of the effects of the trauma constituted by genocide and concentration camps is that it continues to thrust upon those who encounter it in the present the subjectivities assumed by or forced upon the participants in the events of the past. What reference to the Holocaust is not marked by an identification with the position of victim, perpetrator, collaborator, bystander, resister, or one of the many shades in between? My own identification with the victim position must have begun earlier than I can remember. In 1944, at the age of sixteen, my father was deported with his family from Hungary to Auschwitz. When he was liberated at Buchenwald in 1945, only one cousin remained from his extended family. No photograph remains to show that my grandparents, my uncle, and all the rest had ever existed. Their images existed only in my father's decaying memory. In fact, it was a struggle for him just to call up an image of his mother 'S face, and even then it was often the image of a photograph of her that he carried through the selection line at Auschwitz, and that a guard finally knocked from his hand. For me, these absent images received a substitution from Night and Fog, which I was shown at my synagogue as a child. The image from that film of a bulldozer pushing a pile of emaciated bodies into a mass grave became the most vivid icon with which I visualized the Holocaust. I pictured the corpses and thought, "Jews, what we are." Preparing a paper on Night and Fog for a graduate seminar, I watched the film again on videotape. When the bulldozer scene appeared, I watched it over and over, trying to repress my feelings of horror in order to record the details. In my memory of seeing the film as a child, the bulldozer was a weapon driven by a Nazi. Viewing the film again, I realized the scene was shot after the liberation, and the bulldozer was probably driven by an Allied soldier. In any case, the driver never appears in frame . Copyrighted Material

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x Preface

This book began not with a theory or argument about what might be called-but uncomfortably-"Holocaust films," but with a series of encounters with individual films that seemed to articulate in one way or another a paradox that felt familiar to me: the paradox of trying to visualize and narrate a trauma that could not be captured in an image; of trying to remember an absence; of trying to represent the unrepresentable. I suppose the process of trying to understand these films is, among other things, my attempt to work through a set of childhood experiences that might be profitably condensed as that first viewing of

Night and Fog. What was it, what is it, about these films that leads one to try to understand them better? In Night and Fog, it was not only the shock of bulldozed corpses-the shock of the visible-but also the vague sense of a present haunted by something invisible, something only suggested by a ceaselessly moving camera, or a man's voice speaking a language I did not understand, but with a tone that nevertheless conveyed not the kind of alienating authority one had come to expect from traditional historical documentaries, but instead what Fran